When choosing social partners, people prefer good cooperators (all else equal). Given this preference, anyone wishing to be chosen can either increase their own cooperation to become more desirable, or suppress others’ cooperation to make them less desirable. Previous research shows that very cooperative people sometimes get punished (“antisocial punishment”) or criticized (“do-gooder derogation”) in many cultures. Here we use a public goods game with punishment to test whether antisocial punishment is used as a means of competing to be chosen by suppressing others’ cooperation. As predicted, there was more antisocial punishment when participants were competing to be chosen for a subsequent cooperative task (a Trust Game) than without a subsequent task. This difference in antisocial punishment cannot be explained by differences in contributions, moralistic punishment, or confusion. This suggests that antisocial punishment is a social strategy that low cooperators use to avoid looking bad when high cooperators escalate cooperation.
data_for_Supplementary_Material_antisocialpunishment
This file includes the data for Aleta Pleasant & Pat Barclay's "Why hate the good guy? Antisocial punishment of high cooperators is higher when people compete to be chosen". The Excel file includes one worksheet describing the variables, and another worksheet with the actual data. Please note that the data include both individual data and averages for each group of 4. In other words, every fifth row or sixth row is not an individual, but a group total. This is clearly labeled in column B ("group") as either a 0 (individual data) or a 1 (group average). When analyzing the data, you must either exclude the rows for individual data (to analyze group averages) or exclude the rows for group data (to analyze individual data); otherwise you will double count. The data also include participants in the Markets Condition who did not play a public goods game but were "Observers" (i.e., Trustors in a Trust Game)... these are identified as 1's in column G (Observer), and they provided no data on contributions or punishment because they did not play the public goods game.
data_PleasantBarclay_antisocialpunishment_PsychologicalScience.xlsx
Supplementary Material for Pleasant & Barclay antisocial punishment: instructions, questionnaires, supplementary analysis
This Supplementary Online Material for Aleta Pleasant and Pat Barclay's article in Psychological Science "Why hate the good guy? Antisocial punishment of high cooperators is higher when people compete to be chosen". This file includes instructions to participants, comprehension questions, post-experimental questionnaires, and a supplementary analysis that categorizes punishers into people who did not punish, did moralistic punishment only, did antisocial punishment only, or did both moralistic and antisocial punishment.
SupplementaryMaterial_PleasantBarclay_antisocialpunishment_PsychologicalScience.docx
