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）的广泛存在，即对表现出亲社会行为（prosocial behavior）的个体实施惩罚。我们的研究证据来源于在全球16个具有可比性的受试群体中开展的公共品博弈实验（public goods experiments）。不过，这类惩罚存在显著的跨社会异质性：部分受试群体对高贡献者与低贡献者的惩罚力度不相上下，而另一些仅会惩罚低贡献者；在部分受试群体中，反社会惩罚的强度足以抵消惩罚机制对合作的增进效应。我们还发现，一国公民合作规范的薄弱程度与法治水平的不足，是反社会惩罚程度的重要预测变量。研究结果表明，唯有辅以强有力的合作社会规范，惩罚机制方能产生社会层面的正向效益。