“Measuring the distribution of spitefulness”—link

http://​​www.plosone.org/​​article/​​info:doi/​​10.1371/​​journal.pone.0041812

Here is a rather curious paper describing psychology researchers’ attempts to investigate “spitefulness”—I think they define spitefulness roughly as “hurting others without any benefit to oneself”. References the Stanford Prison Experiment. Concludes, more or less, that some people are spiteful, sometimes.

I have many reservations about the methodology used in this experiment (main one: not sure if the entire process really reflects any real-world motivations, and hence results might not mean much), but I thought it might be of interest to people on this site. Also, of the 30-odd references cited at the end of the paper some sound rather interesting and many are available online.