Outsourcing punishment to karma: Thinking about karma reduces the punishment of transgressors

Punishment and the threat thereof can enforce social norms by deterring inappropriate behaviours and future misdeeds, but enacting punishment can be costly. As a result, individuals may prefer to outsource costly punishment to others and cultural institutions. We propose that shared beliefs about supernatural punishment, might contribute to minimizing the costs of interpersonal punishment by allowing people to outsource this punishment to supernatural entities. We specifically test in a pre-registered experiment (N = 1603 American and Singaporean adults) whether thinking about karma (a supernatural force that punishes misdeeds) reduces punishment. Results confirm that being prompted to consider karma reduces inclinations to punish selfishness in a Third Party Punishment Game. These findings suggest that karma beliefs may have played a role in the cultural evolution of human cooperation by reducing the costs of human norm enforcement while maintaining incentives for prosocial behaviour through the threat of supernatural punishment.