Although most people profess that ordinary criminals should not be tortured, US incarceration practices routinely inflict severe physical and mental trauma. What explains this discrepancy? We explored the factors that determine whether people consider various forms of punishment permissible or impermissible. We find that permissibility judgments are generally not based on perceptions of how much suffering a punishment causes, but instead on how aversive we find the actions associated with enacting the punishment. Across three studies this pattern of results consistently holds when judging which forms of punishments are appropriate or inappropriate for others. We identify only one condition in which people reject punishments based on suffering: When judging which forms of punishment would be appropriate for them to personally receive. In sum, the forms of punishment that ordinary people condemn may not be those that cause excessive suffering, but rather those that are most unpleasant to administer.
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