Data from: Why hate the good guy? Antisocial punishment of high cooperators is greater 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.