Voluntary sanctioning is the key to understanding the emergence of social order (Fehr and Fischbacher, 2003, 2004). Although second-party punishment, such as rejection of an unfair offer by the second player in ultimatum games, has received much attention, third-party punishment, which is sanctioning by a third party, has just started to receive attention. Recent research on second-party punishment has found that intention has a huge impact on punishment. Even if the outcomes are identical, a player who produced an unfair outcome is punished more if he had an unfair intention (Falk, Fehr and Fischbacher, 2003). The current study extends this finding to see if third-party punishment occurs only when a player had an unfair intention.
In this laboratory experiment there were two conditions: Intention and no-intention. The game was a third-party punishment game involving three subjects - allocator, recipient, and observer (third party). Only the observer was a real participant, the other two players did not actually exist. An allocator divided 800 yen (US$8) between himself and a recipient, who could not reject the offer. The allocator did not have a completely free hand, and was given only two allocation options by the computer. In the intention condition, Option X could give 80% of the total to himself and 20% to a recipient, and Option Y could give 50% to himself and 50% to a recipient. In the no-intention condition, Options X and Y were identical: to give 80% to himself and 20% to a recipient. In both conditions, the observer was told that an allocator had chosen Option X. Then, the observer (a real subject) was given 250 yen and decided how much out of 250 yen she wants to pay to subtract money from the allocator. Twice as much money as paid by the observer was subtracted from the allocator's earnings. After making decisions, participants answered a post-experimental questionnaire.
The results showed that there was no significant difference in the levels of punishment between conditions. In both conditions, participants paid significant amounts for punishment. Analysis of responses to the post-experimental questionnaire revealed that intention had an effect on punishment opposite to what we expected. The more participants thought that an allocator did not have an unfair intention, the more they subtracted because they thought that the outcome did not reflect an allocator's true wish (i.e., a fair allocation). These results suggest that there may be differing effects of intention on third-party punishment than on second-party punishment.