Punishment goals in classroom interventions: An attributional approach.

Abstract

Individuals’ punishment goals depend on the perceived cause of the misbehavior. However, a corresponding attributional model of punishment goals has only been studied in legal domains—but was largely ignored in others, such as the educational domain, in which student misbehavior is a main stressor for both teachers and students. Thus, we investigated teachers’ punishment goals in classroom settings depending on their attribution of student misbehavior. Specifically, we asked laypeople (Experiment 1), pre-service teachers (Experiment 2), and in-service teachers (Experiment 3) to read several versions of a scenario describing a student destroying the belongings of another student. Using a 2 × 2 within-subjects design, we manipulated the stability (stable vs. unstable) and controllability (controllable vs. uncontrollable) of the cause of the misbehavior. Results show that the support of retribution as a punishment goal in classroom interventions is largely independent of the perceived cause of the misbehavior. By contrast, the support of special prevention (preventing future misbehavior by the offending student) and general prevention (preventing future misbehavior by other students) is primarily subject to the perceived controllability of the misbehavior. Overall, this shows that models of punishment behavior developed in other domains cannot simply be applied to teachers’ classroom intervention strategies.

The motivational basis of third-party punishment in children

“…Such conflicts may arise due to differences between the expected (i.e., derived from one's own perspective on punishment and its goals) and actually pursued objectives of punishment by authorities (e.g., teachers or parents). Indeed, recent research has shown that teachers intend to achieve preventive goals (rather than retribution) in various situations of student misbehavior [29]. The present research investigates whether children themselves also consider punishment a legitimate means to prevent future misbehavior and, thus, may reveal inherent differences between children's and teacher's perspectives on the purposes of punishment.…”

“…Instead, an approach from behavioral economics [31] was chosen, that is, an adaptation of the economic game sketched above that was recently introduced to study punishment motives of adults [16,32]. For the present research, we modified this game to (a) make it comprehensible for children and (b) to differentiate between special prevention and general prevention as two distinct motives for punishment [5,7,14,29,33]. In this paradigm, participants observed another person (the offender) maximizing their own payoff (i.e., coins in a game) by acting unfairly towards another person.…”

Downstream Consequences of Post-Transgression Responses: A Motive-Attribution Framework

“…Third, punishment can also be rooted in prosocial motives, that is, carried out with the goal to benefit and educate the transgressor or to improve their relationship with the victim and within the larger community. For instance, parents may punish for the sake of advancing their child’s moral compass; teachers punish students’ norm violations to establish normative consensus in the classroom ( Reyna & Weiner, 2001 ; Twardawski et al, 2020 ); and even the criminal justice system claims to punish offenders for the sake of reforming and reintegrating them into the community (e.g., Rothman, 1971 ). According to Fitness and Peterson (2008) , punishment is also the dominant response in marital transgressions, even healthy and durable ones.…”

Is It All About Retribution? The Flexibility of Punishment Goals

“…In other words, adopting a utilitarian principle necessitates one to attempt to predict the future, for instance, by determining a punishment's capacity to prevent transgressions in the future. Utilitarian punishment can further be differentiated into special prevention and general prevention (Goodwin & Benforado, 2015;Keller et al, 2010;Rucker, Polifroni, Tetlock, & Scott, 2004;Tetlock, 2002;Twardawski, Hilbig, & Thielmann, 2020). Special preventive punishment is primarily concerned with the offenders themselves, by attempting to prevent future recidivism through rehabilitative measures or incapacitation (Keller et al, 2010), whereas general preventive punishment is primarily concerned with other members of the society that might have been informed of the offense and, therefore, may imitate the misbehavior if it goes unpunished (Goodwin & Benforado, 2015).…”