It also may not add a necessary new incentive to some decent old ones, and it creates a perverse financial motivation for employees at corporations.
However trivial the crime and perverse its motivations, this bit of petty larceny had enormous consequences: for the teen-ager's future, for the history of Christianity and Western philosophy, and for the layout of your local Barnes & Noble superstore.
The important finding of our experiment, however, is that whatever the motivation for perverse punishment is, it is not influenced by between-group competition.
"Iago's motivations are perverse, self-contradictory, and complicated enough to have defied the efforts of generations of critics to unpick them - does he do what he does because he wants a pay rise, because he thinks Othello has slept with his wife, because he is in love with Othello himself?
Many possible motivations for perverse punishment have been identified in the literature (for an overview, see Gächter and Herrmann 2009).
Our experiment cannot exclude other motivations for perverse punishment, such as concerns for dominance or a preference for higher relative payoffs.
Economic motivation has created a perverse and underground marketplace where children are bought and sold as slaves.
