Paul A.M. Van Lange

Bettina Rockenbach

Toshio Yamagishi

One of the key scientific challenges is the puzzle of human cooperation. Why do people cooperate? Why do people help strangers, even sometimes at a major cost to themselves? Why do people want to punish others who violate norms and undermine collective interests? Reward and punishment is a classic theme in research on social dilemmas. More recently, it has received considerable attention from scientists working in various disciplines such as economics, neuroscience, and psychology. We know now that reward and punishment can promote cooperation in so-called public good dilemmas, where people need to decide how much from their personal resources to contribute to the public good. Clearly, enjoying the contributions of others while not contributing is tempting. Punishment (and reward) are effective in reducing free-riding. Yet the recent explosion of research has also triggered many questions. For example, who can reward and punish most effectively? Is punishment effective in any culture? What are the emotions that accompany reward and punishment? Even if reward and punishment are effective, are they also efficient -- knowing that rewards and punishment are costly to administer? How can sanctioning systems best organized to be reduce free-riding? The chapters in this book, the first in a series on human cooperation, explore the workings of reward and punishment, how they should be organized, and their functions in society, thereby providing a synthesis of the psychology, economics, and neuroscience of human cooperation.

Reward and Punishment in Social Dilemmas

Social influences are all around us. We devote considerable time to friends and family. This book focuses on illustrating the benefits and costs of bridging social psychology with other fields of psychology, including cognitive, developmental, and personality psychology, as well as other disciplines such as biology, neurosciences, or economics.

Benefits of Transdisciplinary Approaches

Bridging Social Psychology

Joseph P. Forgas

Lee Jussim

Ever since Plato’s ‘Republic’ was written over two thousand years ago, one of the main concerns of social philosophy and later empirical social science was to understand the moral nature of human beings. The faculty to think and act in terms of overarching moral values is as much a defining hallmark of our species as is our intelligence, so homo moralis is no less an appropriate term to describe humans as homo sapiens. This volume makes a case for the pivotal role of social psychology as the core discipline for studying morality. The book is divided into four parts. First, the role of social psychological processes in moral values and judgments is discussed, followed by an analysis of the role of morality in interpersonal processes. The sometimes paradoxical, ironic effects of moral beliefs are described next, and in the final section the role of morality in collective and group behavior is considered. This book will be of interest to students and researchers in the social and behavioral sciences concerned with moral behavior, as well as professionals and practitioners in clinical, counseling, organizational, marketing and educational psychology where issues of ethics and morality are of importance.

Paul A.M. Van Lange

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