Choosy Moral Punishers

Clavien, Christine; Tanner, Colby J.; Clement, Fabrice; Chapuisat, Michel

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0039002

Scientific article

English

Choosy Moral Punishers

Contributors

Clavien, Christine

; Tanner, Colby J.; Clement, Fabrice; Chapuisat, Michel

Published in

PloS one, vol. 7, no. 6, e39002

Publication date

2012

Abstract

The punishment of social misconduct is a powerful mechanism for stabilizing high levels of cooperation among unrelated individuals. It is regularly assumed that humans have a universal disposition to punish social norm violators, which is sometimes labelled “universal structure of human morality” or “pure aversion to social betrayal”. Here we present evidence that, contrary to this hypothesis, the propensity to punish a moral norm violator varies among participants with different career trajectories. In anonymous real-life conditions, future teachers punished a talented but immoral young violinist: they voted against her in an important music competition when they had been informed of her previous blatant misconduct toward fellow violin students. In contrast, future police officers and high school students did not punish. This variation among socio-professional categories indicates that the punishment of norm violators is not entirely explained by an aversion to social betrayal. We suggest that context specificity plays an important role in normative behaviour; people seem inclined to enforce social norms only in situations that are familiar, relevant for their social category, and possibly strategically advantageous.

Keywords

Moral motivation
Punishment, Norm enforcement

UNIGE affiliation entities

Not a UNIGE publication

Citation (ISO format)

CLAVIEN, Christine et al. Choosy Moral Punishers. In: PloS one, 2012, vol. 7, n° 6, p. e39002. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0039002

Article (Published version)

CC BY

Supplemental data

CC BY

Identifiers

PID : unige:74758
DOI : 10.1371/journal.pone.0039002
PMID : 22720012

Additional URL for this publication

http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0039002

Journal ISSN

1932-6203

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10/08/2015 15:15:00

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14/03/2023 23:34:14

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31/10/2024 01:06:10

Choosy Moral Punishers

Contributors

Published in

Publication date

Abstract

Keywords

UNIGE affiliation entities

Citation (ISO format)

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Additional URL for this publication

Journal ISSN

Technical informations

Creation

First validation

Update

Status update

Last indexation