The impact of redistribution on prosocial punishment

The willingness to engage in costly punishment of free-riders (prosocial punishment) is crucial to foster group cooperation and to understand public goods provision. However, addressing this second-order social dilemma is costly for both individuals and groups. While prosocial punishment is common across societies, its motivations remain unclear. Scholars suggest that people resist inequitable outcomes and willingly bear costs to sanction free-riders, seeking a fairer distribution of payoffs. However, inequality aversion cannot be experimentally manipulated, making causal assessment difficult. This study tests a key implication of fairness-driven arguments: if inequality aversion drives prosocial punishment, individuals should punish less when redistribution occurs, as equality concerns would be satisfied. We conducted a pre-registered 2x2 between-subjects lab experiment (N=320), where participants completed a Social Value Orientation (SVO) task and played a one-shot Public Goods Game (PGG) with a Punishment Stage. We manipulated endowment inequality and the presence of redistributive taxation. Pre-registered analyses show that (1) inequality aversion does not predict prosocial punishment; (2) punishment levels do not significantly differ across treatments. However, exploratory results suggest that under high inequality, redistribution affects punishment depending on others’ wealth. This implies inequality aversion may trigger prosocial punishment at extreme inequality levels, while remaining punishment likely stems from negative reciprocity.