Reacting to Wrongdoers-Victims, Intentionality and Partner Management

We explore two types of behavioural strategies that individuals use to manage their social partners in response to undesirable behaviour. These strategies are Partner Control rewarding and punishing behaviour, and Partner Choice selecting preferred social partners and avoiding the others. Past work has shown that Partner Control and Partner Choice are functionally distinct but this research has not investigated whether people use different strategies to address different types of undesirable behaviour. In particular, we focus on violations of Harm and Purity (from Moral Foundations Theory). Using a selection of Harm and Purity vignettes, across two preregistered studies we test how different violations result in a preference for one Partner Management strategy over the other, based on the signals people infer from these actions, while exploring the role of theoretically relevant demographic measures (political orientation, Relational Mobility, urban vs rural residence). We find that Harm violations are more likely to lead to Partner Control and Purity violations are more likely to lead to Partner Choice, particularly when impurity gives strong character-based signals. By appealing to these contrasting strategies, we propose a functional account of why people differ in their sensitivity to moral purity, especially victimless wrongs. We theorised that these individual differences may be explained by the tightness of social groups and how much opportunity they provide for Partner Choice, although our preliminary evidence does not yet support this. Introduction Suppose you learn that one of your friends has broken into someone's house in order to steal their property. Or suppose that you discover a different friend frantically searching through the trash, and when asked to explain why, he gleefully says it is to find a stranger s̓ discarded underwear. Assuming that you find each of these actions to be in some way morally questionable, how would you expect to react to each friend? One reaction to a moral violation is to seek retribution by punishing the perpetrator, another is to avoid them, no longer including them in the social group and instead seeking out others for joint tasks, partnerships and social group membership. These two strategies for social partner management have been formalised as Partner Control and Partner Choice respectively (Bull and Rice 1991; Campennì and Schino 2014; Noë 2006). Partner Control and Partner Choice are mechanisms to bolster cooperation between social partners. Partner Control is characteristically reactive; an agent modulates a partner's behaviour by directly rewarding cooperation through reciprocity or punishing undesirable behaviour to prevent its recurrence. Partner Choice, on the other hand, involves selecting or deselecting partners based on evaluations of their past behaviour; agents signal their willingness to cooperate in an attempt to outcompete each other for selection in a biological market so they can benefit from increased social partnership and joint cooperation (Barclay 2016; Martin et al. 2019). These two mechanisms are functionally distinct. While engaging in Partner Choice people are focussed on the intentions of the agent, whereas when people are engaging in Partner Control they are more likely to react to outcomes even when they are not necessarily intended (Barclay and Raihani 2016; Martin et al. 2019; Martin and Cushman 2015). In other words, when engaging in Partner Control the focus is on consequential outcomes but when engaging in Partner Choice the focus is on the character and intentions of the social partner. These strategies may not be entirely