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Many aspects of human social behavior are likely to be shaped by punishment, threats of punishment, and avoidance of punishment. However, surprisingly little is known about the psychological mechanisms underpinning these influences. The goal of the research presented in this thesis was to investigate how basic reinforcement-based learning processes contribute to adaptive social behavior. To this end, we investigated how human behavior is shaped by punishment and threats of punishment in simple laboratory models aimed at capturing essential aspects of the social world. In order to probe the mechanisms underlying overt behavior, we tested the capacity of simple computational models to describe human behavior.