Children favor punishment over restoration

Why do people punish selfish behavior? Are they motivated to punish perpetrators of selfishness (retribution) or to compensate the victims of selfishness (restoration)? Developmental data can provide important insight into these questions by revealing whether punishment of selfishness is more retributive or restorative when it first emerges. Across two studies, we examined costly third-party intervention in 6- to 9-year-olds. In Study 1, children learned about a selfish actor who refused to share with a recipient. Children then chose to (1) punish the selfish actor by rejecting their payoff (retribution); (2) compensate the victim of selfishness by equalizing payoffs between the perpetrator and victim (restoration); or (3) do nothing. We found that children were more likely to punish than compensate in response to selfishness, suggesting that intervention in this context is more retributive than restorative. In Study 2, we tested third-party intervention in the face of generosity which, like selfishness, can lead to unequal outcomes. As in Study 1, children in this context could reject unequal payoffs, thereby depriving the recipient of the advantageous payoff but having no effect on the actor. Children could also use compensation in this context, equalizing the payoffs between actor and recipient. We found that children did not punish inequality that stemmed from generosity, suggesting that the retributive punishment in Study 1 was specifically targeting selfishness rather than inequality more generally. These results contribute to the debate on the function of third-party punishment in humans, suggesting that retributive motives toward selfish transgressors are privileged during ontogeny.