The moral costs of nastiness

We introduce two variants of the one-shot joy-of-destruction minigame (mini-JOD). Two players are endowed with the same amount of money. They simultaneously decide whether or not to reduce the other player s payoff at an own cost. In one treatment there was a probability that nature would destroy the opponent s money anyway. We test whether this feature reduces the moral costs of nastiness, and find that destruction rates rise significantly, despite the absence of strategic reasons.