Data from: Why hate the good guy? Antisocial punishment of high cooperators is higher when people compete to be chosen

When choosing social partners, people prefer good cooperators (all else equal). Given this preference, anyone wishing to be chosen can either increase their own cooperation to become more desirable, or suppress others’ cooperation to make them less desirable. Previous research shows that very cooperative people sometimes get punished (“antisocial punishment”) or criticized (“do-gooder derogation”) in many cultures. Here we use a public goods game with punishment to test whether antisocial punishment is used as a means of competing to be chosen by suppressing others’ cooperation. As predicted, there was more antisocial punishment when participants were competing to be chosen for a subsequent cooperative task (a Trust Game) than without a subsequent task. This difference in antisocial punishment cannot be explained by differences in contributions, moralistic punishment, or confusion. This suggests that antisocial punishment is a social strategy that low cooperators use to avoid looking bad when high cooperators escalate cooperation.

在社交伙伴的选择过程中，人们在其他条件均等的前提下，更青睐合作表现优异的个体。基于这一选择偏好，任何期望获得选中资格的个体，既可通过提升自身合作水平以增强自身吸引力，也可通过抑制他人的合作表现来降低其竞争力。既往研究表明，在诸多文化中，合作性极强的个体有时会遭遇惩罚（即反社会惩罚（antisocial punishment））或非议（即伪善者贬损（do-gooder derogation））。本研究采用带有惩罚机制的公共品博弈（public goods game）范式，检验反社会惩罚是否可作为一种通过抑制他人合作表现来争夺被选资格的社交策略。实验结果与预期相符：当参与者需要竞争后续合作任务（信任博弈（Trust Game））的参与资格时，其实施的反社会惩罚行为显著多于无后续任务的对照组。该类反社会惩罚的组间差异，无法通过贡献水平差异、道德性惩罚行为差异或认知混淆加以解释。这一结果表明，反社会惩罚是低合作水平个体在高合作水平个体提升合作表现时，用以避免自身显得逊色的一种社交策略。