Punishment as Communication

Abstract

Punishment is traditionally modelled 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 behaviour. Yet, while this model 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 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.

Parental Influence on Child and Adolescent Physical Activity Level: A Meta-Analysis

“…Similarly, it has been argued in the literature that negative parental influence, such as punishment or negative feedback, can be perceived as constructive criticism [ 35 , 62 ]. Adolescents are more likely to perceive this than children as they are more cognitively mature and thus can understand the motivation behind the criticism [ 35 ].…”

Metarepresentation, trust, and “unleashed expression”

“…Yet the rewards and punishment that humans tend to produce are actually inefficient for this goal. That is, they do not incentivise the target behaviour well, contrary to the intuitive model (Cushman, Sarin, & Ho, 2022;Ho, Cushman, Littman, & Austerweil, 2019). The way people punish also includes an important expressive dimension (ibid.).…”

Not revenge, but change is sweet: Experimental evidence of how offender change and punishment play independent roles in victims' sense of justice

“…Communicative punishment theories suggest that punishment communicates to the offender disapproval of their original behaviour (see e.g., Boon & Yoshimura, 2020;Cushman et al, 2019;Duff, 2001;Funk & McGeer, in press). Punishers expect offenders to interpret punishment as a communicative act (Sarin et al, 2021).…”

“…Psychologists as well as philosophers often refer to punishment as communication (Boon & Yoshimura, 2020;Cushman et al, 2019;Duff, 2001;Feinberg, 1965;Funk et al, 2014;Funk & McGeer, in press). Punishers choose the punishment that they think is more likely to make the offender understand their communicative intent (Sarin et al, 2021).…”

“…While this suggests that punishment has empowering effects for victims, the role of offender change in this process is less clear. Communicative theories of punishment (e.g., Cushman et al, 2019) suggest that punishment that taught the offender a lesson effectively reached one of its primary goals. Moreover, influencing others' attitudes and behaviour has been suggested to be the exercise of power (Turner, 2005).…”