Judgments in a hurry: Time pressure affects how judges assess unfairly shared losses and unfairly shared gains

Human society has evolved to allow third parties-the court system, parents or other societal arbitrators-to punish norm violators and compensate victims. Few studies explore the effect of stress or time pressure on a third-party judge. Under time pressure, people will likely show a more instinctual reaction or judgment style. We investigated third-party punishment and compensation within the context of unfairly shared losses and gains in a dictator game under time pressure. Our results show that under no time pressure, participants were inclined to punish dictators who unfairly split windfall gains; however, participants chose to compensate victims more than punish the norm-violating dictators in the context of unfairly shared losses. With added time pressure, third-parties were disposed to inflict punishment upon the dictator in both the gain and loss contexts-punishment became the action of choice. Our results shed light on the way observed behavior and stress affect social cognition and decision making in the context of altruistic social interventions and the enforcement of social norms.