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. 2023 Aug 30;290(2005):20230916.
doi: 10.1098/rspb.2023.0916. Epub 2023 Aug 30.

Third-party punishers who express emotions are trusted more

Tom R Kupfer  1 , Joshua M Tybur  2
Affiliations

Third-party punishers who express emotions are trusted more

Tom R Kupfer et al. Proc Biol Sci. .

Abstract

Third party punishment (TPP) is thought to be crucial to the evolution and maintenance of human cooperation. However, this type of punishment is often not rewarded, perhaps because punishers' underlying motives are unclear. We propose that the expression of moral emotions could solve this problem by advertising such motives. In each of three experiments (n = 1711), a third-party punishment game was followed by a trust game. Third parties expressed anger or disgust instead of, or in addition to, financial punishment. Results showed that third parties who expressed these emotions were trusted more than those who didn't express (Experiment 1), and more than those who financially punished (Experiment 2). Moreover, third parties who expressed while financially punishing were trusted more than those who punished without expressing (Experiment 3). Findings suggest that emotion expression might play a role in the evolution and maintenance of cooperation by facilitating TPP.

Keywords: anger; cooperation; disgust; emotion expression; third party punishment; trust.

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Conflict of interest statement

We declare we have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Average amount (in cents) allocated by trustors to third parties who expressed anger, disgust or no expression, in response to a selfish dictator (Experiment 1). Shaded areas of violin plots represent smoothed density of raw data. Points and error bars represent means and 95% confidence intervals, respectively.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Average amount (in cents) allocated by trustors to third parties who did or did not express anger, express disgust or financially punish, in response to a selfish dictator (Experiment 2). Shaded areas of violin plots represent smoothed density of raw data. Points and error bars represent means and 95% confidence intervals, respectively.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Average amount (in cents) allocated by trustors to third parties who expressed (anger or disgust, collapsed) or not while financially punishing or not, in response to a selfish dictator (Experiment 3). Shaded areas of violin plots represent smoothed density of raw data. Points and error bars represent means and 95% confidence intervals, respectively.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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