Abstract:

Punishment serves as a vital tool for maintaining cooperative social groups, by enforcing norms and deterring transgressions. However, many people are reluctant to act as punishers themselves due to potential risks of punishment and social norms against antisocial behavior. To fill this need for punishment, many societies have culturally evolved institutions that take on punishment roles, such as culturally-transmitted beliefs that supernatural beings reward and punish human behavior. Our study tested how thinking about karma – a cosmic force that ensures wrongdoers eventually face bad outcomes– affects people’s willingness to enact third party punishment. In a pre-registered cross-cultural experiment (N=1,603 American and Singaporean adults), we randomly assigned participants to think, or not think, about karma while playing a Third Party Punishment Game. Thinking about karma significantly reduced punishment, and this effect generalized across samples from both the United States and Singapore and was not moderated by participants’ level of belief in karma. These findings extend previous findings that believers outsource punishment to morally-concerned gods, and suggest that a variety of different morally concerned supernatural entities may have played a role in the cultural evolution of human cooperation, by reducing the costs of human norm enforcement while maintaining incentives for prosocial behavior.

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Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=cKEF8yAAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao; Website: https://www.cindelwhite.com/