Abstract

People use sanctioning behaviours differently according to what they believe and want to achieve, according to the context and to the situation. We need to understand the motivations for different forms of punishment in order to explain why sanctions and incentives have different effects on human behaviour. In this work we propose a theoretical model of three distinct kinds of punishing behaviours, trying to isolate the defining features of revenge, punishment and sanction and differentiating them in terms of the kind of cognitive influencing they rely upon.