Third-Party Retaliation and the Psychology of Deterrence: Mapping the Psychological Mechanisms that Regulate Retaliation on Behalf of Others.

摘要

The results of our three-year project can be summarized as follows: People seem quite hesitant to punish strangers who have harmed other strangers. In most of the laboratory experiments we conducted, and in the real world, people retaliate on behalf of themselves and their friends because such harms make them angry (and, in the case of punishment on behalf of friends, because they experience empathy for their friends who have been victimized). In the real world, the welfare trade-off measure appears to be useful for predicting when people will intervene on behalf of a victim; it might turn out to be less useful for predicting third-party punishment under laboratory conditions in which the harms that can be manipulated experimentally, and the kinds of retaliation that can be imposed on others, are necessarily mild for ethical reasons. We conducted six experiments and two non-correlational field studies, and are developing a theoretical paper.