Is It All About Retribution? The Flexibility of Punishment Goals

Abstract

Current literature suggests that laypeople's punishment is primarily driven by retributive reasons (i.e., to give offender their just deserts) rather than utilitarian purposes such as special prevention (i.e., to prevent recidivism of the offender) or general prevention (i.e., to prevent the imitation of the crime by others). One explanation for this may be that individuals tend to focus on salient cues while ignoring others when making a decision and critically, generally pay relatively little attention to secondary or long-term effects of their decision-making. This suggests that people's punishment goals may be subject to the information salient about the crime situation. Specifically, individuals may only pursue utilitarian goals with their punishment, if aspects related to such long-term consequences of punishment are salient (such as information about the offender or the broad circumstances surrounding the crime). To examine this, we manipulated the salience of different aspects in a scenario describing a crime. In two preregistered experiments, participants were asked to choose from (Experiment 1, N = 291) or rate the appropriateness of (Experiment 2, N = 366) different reactions to the crime; these reactions were pretested for the degree to which they served each of the punishment goals: retribution, special prevention, and general prevention. As hypothesized, we found that participants' punishment goals were associated with the salience of specific aspects of the scenario describing the crime situation. This extends on research suggesting that laypeople's punishment goals are malleable and may depend on the research design employed by a particular study.

The motivational basis of third-party punishment in children

“…In fact, there is plenty of evidence relating people’s behavioral responses to moral violations (e.g., punishment) to various emotions such as anger, outrage, and moral disgust [ 44 , 45 ]. Importantly, recent research suggests that retribution is rather concerned with the crime itself, whereas utilitarian motives (e.g., special prevention or general prevention) are more strongly linked to concerns about the offender or the community the offense occurred in [ 15 ]. Therefore, one could speculate whether different emotional responses to the perceived offense may be related to different punishment motives.…”

“…However, more recent research suggests that the ubiquity of this “people as retributivists” position may, at least partially, be limited to certain methodological aspects of the research [ 14 , 15 ]. Similarly, experiments studying punishment behavior in economic games revealed that punishment behavior is motivated by both retribution and special prevention [ 16 , 17 ].…”

Direct punishment and indirect reputation-based tactics to intervene against offences

“…General deterrence involves a desire to prevent future offences, not only from the same perpetrator, but also from third parties (i.e. any potential perpetrators) [72,86]. Gossip can help achieve general deterrence by allowing people to coordinate with third parties and recruit punishment from them [82,87], lowering the otherwise high costs of uncoordinated direct punishment (see also [88][89][90]).…”

Direct Punishment and Indirect Reputation-Based Tactics to Intervene Against Offenses

“…Compared to other intervention tactics, gossip thus appears better suited to achieve general deterrence goals and it can be used as a sanction against norm violations (for a discussion of distinctions between punishment and sanctions, see 54,73). General deterrence involves a desire to prevent future offenses, not only from the same perpetrator, but also from third parties (i.e., any potential perpetrators) (71,85).…”