A study into what researchers are calling the 'Justine effect' has found that being the person who contributes most to your team - can cost you if your team loses.
According to the study in PloS One, the researchers split up a pool of 118 people into ten groups of about twelve people.
The two groups that only had eleven players were given one 'virtual' player to balance them out.
They then played six rounds of the Public Good Game, a game designed to test cooperative play, and then another six rounds of the Public Goods Game with punishment.
The interesting thing was, when it came to the losing teams when punishments were in play, the individuals who did the most to help their teams were also the ones who were most likely to get punished, generally by the people who contributed least.
"No economical or evolutionary interpretation of this data can be accepted (nor excluded) without additional assumptions.
"The most likely interpretation is based on the biased envy: the malicious player punishes his counterpart more when he finds him less similar to himself.
"As he has no avenue to acquire additional information, the contribution level is the only feature available to him to assess (dis)similarity of a co-player," the researchers wrote.
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