Keeping Words Outweighs Keeping Fair: Third-Party Pun-ishment Prioritizes Dishonesty over Unfairness

Previous research primarily focused on the effects of violating one single norm, often neglecting the scenario where multiple norms coexist, let alone understanding whether different norm violations are of the same priority in third-party punishment. To answer this question, this study introduced scenarios in which one norm was breached while another was upheld and generalized the findings to both directions of norm violation, i.e., self-serving and altruistic.

Utilizing a modified Trust Game paradigm, participants were made to observe interactions between trustees and trustors, manipulating both honesty (the alignment between proposed and actual distributions) and fairness (the outcomes of distributions). The results demonstrated that in the self-serving and altruistic directions, scenarios featuring fairness yet violating honesty elicited harsher punishments from third parties compared to those involving honesty yet violating fairness.