Littering: There are limits to “an eye for an eye”

Many of us reprimand norm violators. But with more extreme violations our reluctance to retaliate also gets higher, researchers show in an article published in Nature Communications.
The researchers staged small violations (littering a coffee cup) and large violations (littering a coffee cup and bag of trash) at train stations and recorded how travellers responded in more than 800 trials. The implicit assumption was that bystanders would react more strongly if more garbage was littered. However, the size of the violation did not affect the likelihood that the litterer would be reprimanded – nor did it affect the intensity of the reprimand (News Item University of Innsbruck, 3 November 2016).
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