................................................................................................................................ iii Chapter One Introduction .......................................................................................................1 Chapter Two Legal History of Capital Punishment from Furman (1972) to McKoy (1990).......................................................

Previous findings on punishment have focused on environments in which the outcomes are known with certainty. In this paper, we conduct experiments to investigate how punishment affects cooperation in a two-person stochastic prisoner’s dilemma environment where each person can decide whether or not to cooperate and the outcomes of alternative strategies are specified probabilistically. In partic...

This study examined the prevalence, predictors, and outcomes of spanking and verbal punishment in 2,573 low-income White, African American, and Mexican American toddlers at ages 1, 2, and 3. Both spanking and verbal punishment varied by maternal race/ethnicity. Child fussiness at age 1 predicted spanking and verbal punishment at all 3 ages. Cross-lagged path analyses indicated that spanking (bu...

Neurodevelopmental evidence suggests that children's main decision-making strategy is to avoid options likely to induce punishment. However, the cognitive and affective factors contributing to children's avoidance to high punishment frequency remain unknown. The present study explored psychophysiological, cognitive, and metacognitive processes associated with sensitivity to punishment frequency...

Carpenter and Matthews (2009) examine the cooperation norms determining people's punishment behavior in a social-dilemma game. Their ndings are striking: absolute norms outperform the relative norms commonly regarded as the determinants of punishment. Using multiple punishment stages and self-contained episodes of interaction, we disentangle the e ects of retaliation and norm-related punishment...

This paper provides a comparative statics analysis of punishment in public-good experiments. We vary systematically the effectiveness of punishment, that is, the factor by which punishment reduces the punished player’s income, and we find that contributions to the public good increase monotonically in effectiveness. High effectiveness leads to near complete contribution rates and welfare improv...

The social welfare provided by cooperation depends on the enforcement of social norms. Determining blameworthiness and assigning a deserved punishment are two cognitive cornerstones of norm enforcement. Although prior work has implicated the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in norm-based judgments, the relative contribution of this region to blameworthiness and punishment decisions remain...

This paper experimentally investigates the effects of a costly punishment option on cooperation and social welfare in long, finitely repeated public good contribution games. In a perfect monitoring environment, increasing the severity of the potential punishment monotonically increases both contributions and the average net payoffs of subjects. In a more realistic imperfect monitoring environme...

While empirical evidence highlights the importance of punishment for cooperation in collective action, it remains disputed how responsible sanctions targeted predominantly at uncooperative subjects can evolve. Punishment is costly; in order to spread it typically requires local interactions, voluntary participation, or rewards. Moreover, theory and experiments indicate that some subjects abuse ...