Fig. 1: Prevalence of different types of punishment responses in daily life.

a Participants’ endorsement of motivations to engage in various types of punishment, based on k = 1236 daily assessments. Four items assessed motivations to punish offenders via physical confrontation (“I felt like physically intervening to stop the offender.”), verbal confrontation (“I felt like yelling at or arguing with the offender.”), gossip (“I felt like sharing negative information about the offender to others.”), and exclusion (“I felt like excluding the offender from my social interactions in the future.”). Boxplot whiskers indicate the minimum (1) and maximum (5) values observed, box bounds indicate the first quartile (equal to 1 for physical and verbal confrontation; equal to 2 for gossip and exclusion) and third quartile (equal to 3 for physical confrontation; equal to 4 for other types of punishment motivations), and horizontal lines indicate the median. Error bars represent standard deviations from the mean. b Percentages of violations in k = 1236 daily assessments and c in k = 879 follow-up assessments to which participants responded with each type of punishment behavior. Bars represent the percentage of assessments where participants responded “Yes” to items measuring confrontation (“I confronted the offender about his/her behavior.”; daily: 35.4%, follow-up: 24.9%), gossip (“I told someone else about this behavior when the offender was absent.”; daily: 44.1%, follow-up: 45.4%), and avoidance (“I avoided social contact with the offender.”; daily: 34.8%, follow-up: 27.9%). Results are based on Generalized Estimating Equations models with punishment type (confrontation, gossip, and social avoidance) as a factor and punishment behavior as the outcome (daily: Wald χ²(2) = 27.64, p < 0.001; follow-up: Wald χ²(2) = 145.81, p < 0.001). Planned contrasts were performed, without adjustments for multiple comparisons. All tests were two-sided. ***indicates p values ≤ 0.001. Source data are provided as a Source data file.