To Punish or Not to Punish? Modeling Indifference Curves for Social Punishment in Female Population

This paper studies how people incur in cost to punish norm violators, what is known as social punishment. Specifically, in a laboratory experiment, we widely varied both the cost and the impact of punishing to model the indifference curve reflecting the decision to punish or not to punish. Given the gender differences reported in literature, we studied only women, and we used chocolates as tokens to avoid the direct valuation of money. We found that the indifference curve follows a sigmoid shape. By defining the area under the curve as the propensity to socially punish, we found that impulsivity has an effect on punishment propensity, but contrary to previous studies, this is not a direct effect. Instead, it is primarily modulated by contextual variables, like anger towards the violator and subjective value of the tokens. Our results suggest that the decision to punish or not to punish can suddenly change direction, depending on the interaction between individual traits, contextual factors, and the cost-to-impact ratio of punishment