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Punishment can serve as a form of communication: People use punishment to express information to its recipients and interpret punishment between third parties as having communicative content. Prior work on the expressive function of punishment has primarily investigated the capacity of punishment in general to communicate a single type of message – e.g., that the punished behavior violated an important norm. The present work expands this framework by testing whether different types of punishment communicate different messages. We distinguish between person-oriented punishments, which seek to harm the recipient, and action-oriented punishments, which seek to undo a harmful action. We show that people interpret action-oriented punishments, compared to person-oriented punishments, to indicate that the recipient will change for the better (Study 1). The communicative theory can explain this finding if people understand action-oriented punishment to send a message that is more effective than person-oriented punishment at causing such a change. Supporting this explanation, inferences about future behavior track the recipients' beliefs about the punishment they received, rather than the punisher's intentions or the actual punishment imposed (Study 2). Indeed, when actual recipients of a person-oriented punishment believed they received an action-oriented punishment and vice versa, predictions of future behavior tracked the recipients' beliefs rather than reality, and judgments about what the recipients learned from the punishments mediated this effect (Study 3). Together, these studies demonstrate that laypeople think different types of punishment send different messages to recipients and that these messages are differentially effective at bringing about behavioral changes.
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Cooperation, domination: Twin functions of third‐party punishment
Abstract Rules serve many important functions in society. One such function is to codify, and make public and enforceable, a society's desired prescriptions and proscriptions. This codification means that rules come with predefined punishments administered by third parties. We argue that when we look at how third parties punish rule violations, we see that rules and their punishments often serve dual functions. They support and help to maintain cooperation as it is usually theorized, but they also facilitate the domination of marginalized others. We begin by reviewing literature on rules and third‐party punishment, arguing that a great deal of punishment research has neglected to consider the unique power of codified rules. We also argue that by focusing on codified rules, it becomes clear that the enforcement of such rules via third‐party punishment is often used to exert control, punish retributively, and oppress outgroup members. By challenging idealized theory of rules as facilitators of social harmony, we highlight their role in satisfying personal punishment motives, and facilitating discrimination in a way that is uniquely justifiable to those who enforce them.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2313957
- PAR ID:
- 10538140
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Social and Personality Psychology Compass
- Volume:
- 18
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 1751-9004
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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