Data from: Antisocial punishment across societies

We document the widespread existence of antisocial punishment, that is, the sanctioning of people who behave prosocially. Our evidence comes from public goods experiments that we conducted in 16 comparable participant pools around the world. However, there is a huge cross-societal variation. Some participant pools punished the high contributors as much as they punished the low contributors, whereas in others people only punished low contributors. In some participant pools, antisocial punishment was strong enough to remove the cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment. We also show that weak norms of civic cooperation and the weakness of the rule of law in a country are significant predictors of antisocial punishment. Our results show that punishment opportunities are socially beneficial only if complemented by strong social norms of cooperation.本研究证实了反社会惩罚（antisocial punishment）的普遍存在——即对做出亲社会行为的个体施加惩罚的行为。本研究的证据来自于在全球16个具有可比性的受试者群体中开展的公共物品博弈实验。然而，不同社会间存在巨大差异：部分受试者群体对高贡献者与低贡献者的惩罚力度不相上下，而其余群体则仅会惩罚低贡献者；在部分受试者群体中，反社会惩罚的强度足以完全抵消惩罚所带来的合作增进效应。本研究同时发现，一国公民合作规范薄弱与法治水平低下，是反社会惩罚发生的显著预测因子。研究结果表明，唯有辅以强有力的社会合作规范，惩罚机制方能产生社会层面的正向效益。