People punish for social acceptance

Interesting experimental sociology item that I found at Science Daily. Sociologist Christine Horne, author of The Rewards of Punishment: A Relational Theory of Norm Enforcement, found experimentally that people is much more likely to scold a bad-spoken kid when they were in company of the right people, like a group of like-minded friends, than when among people who may not support that stance.

Apparently people do that not just because such like-minded allies would back them but specially because expressing such shared views will gain them the respect and admiration of those allies.

This is interesting because it offers an unusual insight on how traditional views hold sway in closely knit societies, like those of prehistory and even modern less impersonal ones, and how social consensus is created, kept and also eventually broken.
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