![Sample our Behavioral Sciences journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110801/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Behavioral-Sciences.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Third-party punishment occurs when a perpetrator of a transgression is punished by another person who was not directly affected by the transgression (i.e. a third-party). Given gratitude’s demonstrated ability to enhance both cooperation and the value people place on future-rewards, its capacity to increase third-party punishment – a phenomenon theorised to increase future cooperative behaviour – was investigated. In two experiments, participants were randomly assigned to experience one of three emotional states (i.e. gratitude, happiness, or neutrality) prior to making decisions about how much of a previous financial endowment they would spend to punish a person who transgressed against another at differing degrees within the context of a dictator game. As expected, punishment expenditures decreased for all participants as a dictator’s decision became fairer. Of primary interest, however, participants who felt grateful, as compared to those who felt neutral or happy, engaged in significantly more third-party punishment across dictator splits that were not altruistic in nature.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Although the use of contrast analyses was planned a priori, and reflects our usual analytical approach in studies on gratitude that utilise both a neutral and happiness control (e.g. Bartlett & DeSteno, Citation2006; DeSteno et al., Citation2014), additional evidence that gratitude elevates punishment compared to a neutral affective state can come from direct comparisons between these two conditions. In Study 1, a t-test shows the difference between the gratitude and neutral conditions to approach the standard level of significance (p = .058). In Study 2, which uses a larger sample size with a power analysis based on the effect size for the contrast obtained in Study 1, the difference between the gratitude and neutral conditions is significant (p = .035). Combining these two findings in a mini-meta analysis using Stouffer’s procedure confirms a reliable difference in punishment for grateful vs. neutral participants (p = .016). Note that the power analyses used to determine the sample size in both studies utilised an effect size based on contrast analyses as opposed to an omnibus test, as this was planned analytic tack.