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The Value of Vengeance and the Demand for Deterrence
Humans will incur costs to punish others who violate social norms. Theories of justice highlight 2 motives for punishment: a forward-looking deterrence of future norm violations and a backward-looking retributive desire to harm. Previous studies of costly punishment have not isolated how much people...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
American Psychological Association
2014
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4242077/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25285429 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000018 |
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author | Crockett, Molly J. Özdemir, Yagiz Fehr, Ernst |
author_facet | Crockett, Molly J. Özdemir, Yagiz Fehr, Ernst |
author_sort | Crockett, Molly J. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Humans will incur costs to punish others who violate social norms. Theories of justice highlight 2 motives for punishment: a forward-looking deterrence of future norm violations and a backward-looking retributive desire to harm. Previous studies of costly punishment have not isolated how much people are willing to pay for retribution alone, because typically punishment both inflicts damage (satisfying the retributive motive) and communicates a norm violation (satisfying the deterrence motive). Here, we isolated retributive motives by examining how much people will invest in punishment when the punished individual will never learn about the punishment. Such “hidden” punishment cannot deter future norm violations but was nevertheless frequently used by both 2nd-party victims and 3rd-party observers of norm violations, indicating that retributive motives drive punishment decisions independently from deterrence goals. While self-reports of deterrence motives correlated with deterrence-related punishment behavior, self-reports of retributive motives did not correlate with retributive punishment behavior. Our findings reveal a preference for pure retribution that can lead to punishment without any social benefits. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4242077 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2014 |
publisher | American Psychological Association |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-42420772014-11-24 The Value of Vengeance and the Demand for Deterrence Crockett, Molly J. Özdemir, Yagiz Fehr, Ernst J Exp Psychol Gen Articles Humans will incur costs to punish others who violate social norms. Theories of justice highlight 2 motives for punishment: a forward-looking deterrence of future norm violations and a backward-looking retributive desire to harm. Previous studies of costly punishment have not isolated how much people are willing to pay for retribution alone, because typically punishment both inflicts damage (satisfying the retributive motive) and communicates a norm violation (satisfying the deterrence motive). Here, we isolated retributive motives by examining how much people will invest in punishment when the punished individual will never learn about the punishment. Such “hidden” punishment cannot deter future norm violations but was nevertheless frequently used by both 2nd-party victims and 3rd-party observers of norm violations, indicating that retributive motives drive punishment decisions independently from deterrence goals. While self-reports of deterrence motives correlated with deterrence-related punishment behavior, self-reports of retributive motives did not correlate with retributive punishment behavior. Our findings reveal a preference for pure retribution that can lead to punishment without any social benefits. American Psychological Association 2014-10-06 2014-12 /pmc/articles/PMC4242077/ /pubmed/25285429 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000018 Text en © 2014 The Author(s) http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This article has been published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Copyright for this article is retained by the author(s). Author(s) grant(s) the American Psychological Association the exclusive right to publish the article and identify itself as the original publisher. |
spellingShingle | Articles Crockett, Molly J. Özdemir, Yagiz Fehr, Ernst The Value of Vengeance and the Demand for Deterrence |
title | The Value of Vengeance and the Demand for Deterrence |
title_full | The Value of Vengeance and the Demand for Deterrence |
title_fullStr | The Value of Vengeance and the Demand for Deterrence |
title_full_unstemmed | The Value of Vengeance and the Demand for Deterrence |
title_short | The Value of Vengeance and the Demand for Deterrence |
title_sort | value of vengeance and the demand for deterrence |
topic | Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4242077/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25285429 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000018 |
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