Can Intergroup Collective Sanctions Increase Cooperation? Experimental Approach

When members of one group encounter a norm violation committed by a member of another group, this antisocial behavior is often handled by picking a random member of the community to which the perpetrator belongs and by applying sanctions to him/her. Despite its prevalence, this kind of third-party sanctioning is puzzling. Sanctioning for norm violations is a public good, so there is always a temptation to free-ride, hoping that someone else will enforce the norm. From a moral perspective, too, collective sanctions are puzzling as they are not actually aimed at a guilty person. Nevertheless, in real intergroup conflicts, collective sanctions are widely used. Functionalists suggest that groups resort to collective sanctions because this increases the degree of cooperation between them. This effect is achieved by the delegation of (peer) punishment from outgroup to ingroup members. This study tests whether collective sanctions applied by outgroup members result in higher intergroup cooperation, and whether the introduction of collective sanctions increases the amount of ingroup punishment. The results demonstrate that neither of these two functionalist arguments come true: participants avoid using collective sanctions against outgroups, and the amount of ingroup (third-party) punishment is no higher under the intergroup collective sanctions regime