While much research shows that people punish free-riders, recent studies find evidence that people also engage in antisocial punishment. That is, they sometimes punish those who contribute generously to collective actions. Such sanctioning is puzzling because generous individuals increase the welfare of all group members. When and why are such individuals punished? In this paper, we propose that descriptive norms are part of the explanation. People may sanction those whose behavior is atypical - even when that behavior benefits the group. We test our theory with a laboratory experiment. We examine the effect of descriptive norms on sanctioning of generous and stingy deviants and find that descriptive norms encourage antisocial punishment, but not punishment of free-riders.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 12. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 19 February 2025.
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#4,076,526
of 34,318,950 outputs
Outputs from Social Science Research
#473
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Outputs of similar age
#27,759
of 244,889 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Social Science Research
#2
of 17 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 34,318,950 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done well and is in the 88th percentile: it's in the top 25% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 1,734 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 21.9. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 72% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 244,889 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done well, scoring higher than 88% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 17 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 88% of its contemporaries.
