Third-party punishment is regarded as an altruistic act, as it helps foster cooperation, trust, and fairness in social groups. However, punishment can also indicate anger and potential threat, and recent studies highlighted the ambiguity of punishment as a signal of cooperative intent. We aimed to go beyond the highly abstract and decontextualized settings typically employed in economic games to better understand how punishment and punishers are perceived in interdependent real-world situations.
Therefore, we created and validated 24 written everyday-life-scenarios and, in each of them, manipulated the type of transgression/punishment between perpetrator and victim/punisher (corporal, psychological, property-oriented; Experiment 1), the severity of punishment (weak, strong; Experiment 2) and the hierarchy between punisher and perpetrator (punisher higher or equal in rank; Experiment 3). After each scenario, participants rated the punishment's adequacy and the punisher's warmth, competence, and suitability as an interaction partner, whether as a friend or team leader. Results indicated the preference of punishments aligned with the type of transgression, weaker punishments, and punishers equal in rank to the perpetrator. Across all experiments, third parties engaging in psychological punishment were preferred and preferentially chosen as potential interaction partners. Our findings support the notion that punishment is a delicate issue, and reveal interpersonal and contextual factors that contribute to its evaluation as a useful strategy.