The Cognitive Underpinnings of Counter-Reaction: Revenge, Punishment and Sanction

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 under-stand the motivations for different forms of punishment in order to explain why sanctions and incentives have different effects on human behaviour. Aim of this work is to propose a cognitive model of three distinct kinds of punishing behaviours, differentiated in terms of the defining cognitive patterns.