Reward, punishment, and prosocial behavior: Recent developments and implications

Highlights

• Both reward and punishment can promote prosocial behavior but are costly to enact.

• Reward is less costly than punishment to implement when prosociality is rare.

• Decisions to reward and punish are driven by different emotions and motives.

• How reward and punishment operate under noise is important to address.

Abstract

Reward and punishment change the payoff structures of social interactions and therefore can potentially play a role in promoting prosocial behavior. Yet, there are boundary conditions for them to be effective. We review recent work that addresses the conditions under which rewards and punishment can enhance prosocial behavior, the proximate and ultimate mechanisms for individuals’ rewarding and punishing decisions, and the reputational and behavioral consequences of reward and punishment under noise. The reviewed evidence points to the importance of more field research on how reward and punishment can promote prosocial behavior in real-world settings. We also highlight the need to integrate different methodologies to better examine the effects of reward and punishment on prosocial behavior.

Introduction

Prosocial behavior refers to a broad category of behaviors (e.g. helping, volunteering, charitable donation, and cooperative behavior) that are generally beneficial to others but often at a personal cost to the actor [1]. Prosocial behavior is critical for interpersonal relationships, groups, and societies at large to function well. For instance, engaging in prosocial behavior can enhance the actor's well-being [2,3], can improve employees' performance in organizational settings [4], and is critical to solve global social dilemmas, such as climate change and mitigating pandemics [5,6]. Researchers across different disciplines have examined the antecedents of prosocial behavior. In particular, reward and punishment have been identified as two major structural solutions that change the payoffs of different courses of actions and thus can promote prosocial behavior [7,8].

Reward and punishment are both temporarily costly actions that result in an immediate benefit or cost for the rewarded or punished target, respectively. Reward is typically targeted at prosocial actors, whereas punishment is more often leveled at free riders in social interactions [8, 9, 10]. Early research focused mainly on whether reward and punishment can increase prosocial behavior, often in laboratory experiments using social dilemma paradigms (e.g. public goods game; see Figure 1 for illustrations) [11,12], and a large-scale meta-analysis indicated that reward and punishment have similar-sized positive effects on prosocial behavior [7]. Yet, a closer examination of existing studies shows mixed evidence [10,13], suggesting that there might be boundary conditions for reward and punishment to be effective.

In this review, we summarize recent developments pertaining to three major questions (see Figure 2 for an overview): (a) do reward and punishment promote prosocial behavior and, if so, when? (b) why and when are people willing to reward or punish? (c) what are the reputational and behavioral consequences of reward and punishment under noise? We end by discussing the implications of these developments for future research.