Incentivized punishers and moralistic offenders destabilize cooperation

Punishment is classically theorized to be essential for the evolution of cooperation in human societies and is the primary means by which states attempt to directly reduce crime. Yet, empirically, punishment is often ineffective at bringing about its desired changes in behavior. In this talk, I describe a series of papers from my lab that investigate moral motivation and signaling dynamics between punishers and offenders that reduce the effectiveness of punishment and destabilize cooperation. These studies draw on economic games, secondary analyses of crime, and vignette study methods, and are conducted with participants from general and criminalized populations. I then revisit the question of why we punish, whether it ever makes sense, and what our alternatives are.