Keeping Words Outweighs Keeping Fair: Third-Party Pun-ishment Prioritizes Dishonesty over Unfairness

Third-party punishment is crucial in maintaining social norms. Previous research primarily focused on the effects of violating one single norm, often neglecting the scenario where multiple norms coexist, let alone understanding whether different norm violations are of the same priority in third-party punishment. To answer this question, this study introduced scenarios in which one norm was breached while another was upheld and generalized the findings to both directions of norm violation, i.e., self-serving and altruistic. Utilizing a modified Trust Game paradigm, participants were made to observe interactions between trustees and trustors, manipulating both honesty (the alignment between proposed and actual distributions) and fairness (the outcomes of distributions). The results demonstrated that in the self-serving and altruistic directions, scenarios featuring fairness yet violating honesty elicited harsher punishments from third parties compared to those involving honesty yet violating fairness. In addition, regardless of the direction of violations, violations of honesty norms consistently resulted in third-party punishments, whereas violations of fairness norms only triggered penalties in the self-serving direction. These findings indicated that third parties exhibit lower tolerance for violation of the honesty norm than for fairness norm, highlighting a priority on honesty over fairness norm violation in punitive decisions.

第三方惩罚（third-party punishment）在维系社会规范体系中发挥着关键作用。过往研究多聚焦于单一规范违反所产生的效应，往往忽略了多规范共存的场景，更遑论探究在第三方惩罚情境中，不同规范违反行为是否具备同等优先级。为解答这一问题，本研究设置了一类场景：其中一项规范被违反，而另一项规范得到遵守，并将研究结论推广至两类规范违反方向，即利己型与利他型。本研究采用改良版信任博弈（Trust Game）范式，让被试观看信任者（trustor）与受托者（trustee）的互动过程，同时对诚实性（即提议分配与实际分配的一致性）与公平性（即分配结果的公平性）两个变量进行操控。研究结果显示：无论在利己型还是利他型违反方向下，相较于诚实性得到遵守但公平性被违反的场景，公平性得到保障但诚实性被违反的场景会引发第三方施加更严厉的惩罚。此外，无论违反方向如何，违反诚实性规范的行为总会触发第三方惩罚；而违反公平性规范的行为仅在利己型违反方向下才会引发惩罚。上述结果表明，相较于公平性规范违反行为，第三方对诚实性规范违反行为的容忍度更低，凸显出在惩罚决策中，人们优先将诚实性规范违反置于公平性规范违反之上。