Effects of Perceived Responsibility, Injury Severity, and Injury Target on Discipline Severity

Shao, Ruodan; Perlow, Richard

doi:10.1080/08959280903400184

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 57 publications

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“…This core intuition is shared by people from more than 50 countries (Eriksson et al, 2021). People also choose harsher, more severe punishments for more wrong or harmful actions (Shao & Perlow, 2009;Buckholtz et al, 2015;Ginther et al, 2016;Heffner & FeldmanHall, 2019;Sznycer & Patrick, 2020). People's intuitive sense of the relative seriousness of different transgressions is correlated with the relative severity of punishments assigned to these transgressions in both modern and ancient legal codes (Sznycer & Patrick, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

What people learn from punishment: joint inference of wrongness and punisher’s motivations from observation of punitive choices

Radkani

Saxe

2023

Preprint

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Punishment is a cost imposed on a target, in response to an undesirable action. Yet choosing to punish also reveals information about the authority’s own motives and values. We propose that observers jointly infer the wrongness of the action and the authority’s motivations. Using hypothetical scenarios in unfamiliar societies, we experimentally manipulated observers’ prior beliefs and measured human observers’ inferences after observing punishment. These inferences were recapitulated in a formal model that inverts an intuitive causal model of authorities who make rational choices about punishment by weighing its costs and benefits (i.e. utilities). An essential component of this model, driving these inferences, is that legitimate authorities consider the utility of a proportional response to harmful actions, which depends on the balance between the wrongness of the act and the severity of the punishment.

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