The influence of social bonds, emotions and personality on punishment attitudes.

Abstract

From an evolutionary point of view, different emotions such as jealousy and attitudes of trust seem to have influenced close and affective bonds, and cooperative behaviors respectively, both of them key pillars that contribute to guaranteeing, at different levels, the maintenance of the social bonds that form human groups. However, although punishment attitudes have been widely used in the analysis of the evolution of cooperation, they does not seem very relevant to explain cooperation and, therefore, the motivations that induce punishment attitudes remains unclear. In this study, carried out on 174 participants, questionnaires and economic games were combined, the former to try to know aspects of the participants’ personality that may affect their interpersonal relationships, and the latter to try to induce different emotions and punishment behaviors, which allow us to advance to know more about the factors that promote these punishing attitudes. The results of the study provide different information about the emotions that are generated when presenting an unfavorable situation for the individual in different types of relationships, about how these induced emotions are related to each other and to different types of personality, and about what effect all these combinations may have to cause punishing attitudes. We try to test the hypothesis that punishment will depend on the type of relationship, which generates different emotional levels that, together with individuals' personality, will explain the different levels of punishment.