Punishment as communication

Abstract

Punishment is traditionally modeled as a “constructed incentive”. Specifically, the person who punishes is constructing a set of incentives that will motivate the person being punished to change her behavior. This model spans moral psychology, behavioral economics, artificial intelligence and comparative psychology. Yet, while it captures something important about the logic of punishment, it also misses important contours of how humans punish and how they learn from punishment. We argue that, in addition to understanding punishment as a form of incentive, we must also understand it as a form of communication. According to the constructed incentive model, a person learns from punishment the way she learns from other negative events: by trying to avoid the state or action that elicited it. In contrast, according to the communication model, a person can learn from punishment by attempting to infer the punisher’s communicative intent. Meanwhile, the punisher can choose punishments that are maximally informative given the learner’s likely inferential stance. This coordinated communicative reasoning enables faster and more accurate learning during punishment and provides a better fit to empirical data on how people actually punish and learn from punishment.

Direct and indirect punishment of norm violations in daily life

“…To illustrate, direct punishment strategies, which are overt and involve physical or verbal confrontation of offenders, are risky 20,21 , because they expose one to retaliation 22 . At the same time, direct punishment can swiftly remove threats and effectively adjust offenders' behavior 5,23 whether by physically deterring offenders or by verbally communicating disapproval and condemnation to them 24 .…”

“…While prior experimental work has typically studied costly punishment (i.e., economic sanctioning) in interactions between strangers, we instead capture a broader range of high-and lowcost punishment responses to norm violations occurring within various relationships. To do so, we measure direct (i.e., physical and verbal confrontation) and indirect (i.e., gossip and exclusion/ avoidance) responses to norm violations, which can be used to impose material and/or reputational costs on offenders-be it through physical aggression, verbal communication, reputation manipulation, and/or the withdrawal of social benefits 21,24,34,40 . Further, we assess both motivations to punish (i.e., what people felt like doing) and punishment behaviors (i.e., what people actually did) 41,42 .…”

Punishment is Organized around Principles of Communicative Inference

“…Together with other recent findings (Cushman, Sarin, & Ho, 2019;Funk, McGeer, Gollwitzer, 2014;Ho et al, 2017;Ho et al, 2019;Molnar, Chaudhry, Loewestein, 2020) it suggests that punishment is structured not only to modify the behavior of social partners by its incentive value, but also to be understood and interpreted as a form of communication. Identifying the levers of what makes punishments effective will lead to better insight into the structure and function of punishment, as well as illuminate how punishment can be leveraged to facilitate the learning social and moral norms in humans.…”

“…Thus, we suggest that at least between humans, punishment may be designed not only to construct an incentive, but also to convey a message. In keeping with this possibility, we suggest that punishment is designed to be interpreted as a form of communication (Cushman, Sarin, & Ho, 2019). This involves a sort of meeting-of-the-minds between the punisher and the recipient: The recipient not only responds to the experienced incentives of punishment but also its implied message, and so the punisher designs the punishment appropriately.…”

Navigating between punishment, avoidance, and instruction: The form and function of responses to moral violations varies across adult and child transgressors

“…Punishment signals the condemnation of a transgressor's action, and thus regulates interpersonal relationships and enforces social norms (Cushman et al, 2019;Ho et al, 2019;Kriss et al, 2016). Thus, punishment can benefit individuals and groups by encouraging future prosocial behavior (Boyd et al, 2003;dos Santos & Wedekind, 2015;Marlowe & Berbesque, 2008) and deterring future harm to oneself (Delton & Krasnow, 2017;Krasnow et al, 2012Krasnow et al, , 2016.…”