The three faces of desire are, in a nutshell, that desires are motivating, that satisfying desires is usually pleasurable, and that desires determine what will count as rewards and punishments. Schroeder's view of how these knit together goes like this. Pleasure and displeasure are a result of desires so cannot be what desire consists in. We can desire without being motivated and vice-versa; th...

Understanding how neural processes involved in punishing and rewarding others are altered by group membership and personality traits is critical in order to gain a better understanding of how socially important phenomena such as racial and group biases develop. Participants in an fMRI study (n = 48) gave rewards (money) or punishments (electroshocks) to in-group or out-group members. The result...

Teaching with evaluative feedback involves expectations about how a learner will interpret rewards and punishments. We formalize two hypotheses of how a teacher implicitly expects a learner to interpret feedback – a reward-maximizing model based on standard reinforcement learning and an action-feedback model based on research on communicative intent – and describe a virtual animal-training task...

A common finding across many cultures has been that religious people behave more prosocially than less (or non-) religious people. Numerous priming studies have demonstrated that the activation of religious concepts via implicit and explicit cues (e.g., 'God,' 'salvation,' among many others) increases prosociality in religious people. However, the factors underlying such findings are less clear...

Research has suggested that reduced working memory capacity plays a key role in disinhibited patterns of behavior associated with externalizing psychopathology. In this study, participants (N = 365) completed 2 versions of a go/no-go mixed-incentive learning task that differed in the relative frequency of monetary rewards and punishments for correct and incorrect active-approach responses, resp...

Research on distributive justice indicates that preschool-age children take issues of equity and merit into account when distributing desirable items, but that they often prefer to see desirable items allocated equally in third-party tasks. By contrast, less is known about the development of retributive justice. In a study with 4-10-year-old children (n = 123) and adults (n = 93), we directly c...

Research on distributive justice indicates that preschool-age children take issues of equity and merit into account when distributing desirable items, but that they often prefer to see desirable items allocated equally in third-party tasks. By contrast, less is known about the development of retributive justice. In a study with 4-10-year-old children (n = 123) and adults (n = 93), we directly c...

The strength of organizational norms often depends on consistent reciprocity, i.e., regular and expected rewards for good behavior and punishments for bad behavior. Varying reactions by direct recipients and third-party observers, however, present the potential for unmet expectations and organizational inconsistency. This paper suggests that these kinds of problems are not only common but predi...

This paper develops a novel positive model of informal contracting in which rewards and punishments are not determined by an ex ante optimal plan but instead express the ex post moral sentiments of the arbitrating party. We consider a subjective performance evaluation problem in which a principal can privately assess the contribution of an agent to the welfare of a broader group. In the absence...

Norms represent what ought to be done, and their fulfillment can be seen as benefiting the overall system, society or organisation. However, individual agent goals (desire) may conflict with system norms. If a decision to comply with a norm is determined exclusively by an agent or, conversely, if norms are rigidly enforced, then system performance may be degraded, and individual agent goals may...