It is often assumed that people engage in costly punishment of third parties for prosocial reasons. In this study, we examined to what extent people engage in costly punishment of third parties in response to a perceived punishment threat rather than due to prosocial reasons. Using a modified...

Antisocial punishment - punishment of pro-social cooperators - has shown to be detrimental for the efficiency of informal punishment mechanisms in public goods games. The motives behind antisocial punishment acts are not yet well understood. This article shows that inequality aversion predicts...