Reflexive or reflective? Group bias in third-party punishment in Chinese and Western cultures

Third-party punishment (TPP) is critical for promoting cooperation and maintaining societal stability by deterring norm violations. Research has shown that TPP is influenced by ingroup bias, whereby people punish outgroup norm violators more severely than ingroups. The current study examined the social-cognitive mechanisms of the ingroup bias in TPP using a dual-process framework from a cross-cultural perspective. We asked whether people from different cultures were predisposed to ingroup bias, and whether this bias would change through reflection. To investigate this issue, we conducted five experiments employing economic games in Chinese and Western adults (total n = 1300) and a single-paper meta-analysis. Participants observed that ingroup and outgroup members allocated resources unfairly, and then decided how much money to deduct as punishment toward allocators in the reflexive or reflective modes (by manipulating response time constraint or cognitive load). Across a range of experimental designs, results provided converging evidence that Chinese and Western participants both exhibited ingroup favoritism in the reflexive mode, but behaved differently in the reflective mode: Chinese participants remained punishing ingroups less than outgroups, although they felt guilty and spent longer time dealing with ingroup violations; by contrast, ingroup favoritism decreased in the Western sample, especially among high group identifiers. These findings suggest that ingroup favoritism during TPP is reflexive and culturally universal, but it is manifested in different ways to meet specific cultural expectations when punishers make decisions in the reflective mode. This study thus deepens our understanding of how and why TPP is group-biased.