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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.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available July 1, 2026
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Legal theorists have argued that incarceration and alternative sanctions are incommensurable – that is, beyond some crime severity threshold, replacing incarceration with alternative sanctions can never yield a sentence that people will view as appropriate (Kahan, 1996). To test whether laypeople hold this view, we elicited lay judgments about appropriate sentences for four common types of federal crimes in two different conditions: One in which participants could impose only a term of imprisonment and another in which they could impose imprisonment along with alternative sanctions. Laypeople imposed significantly less imprisonment in the latter condition and significant quantities of alternative, non-carceral sanctions. Consistent with the view that imprisonment is commensurable with other sanctions, and particularly with restraint-based sanctions, laypeople substituted supervised release almost one-for-one for imprisonment. In addition, they increased imprisonment and supervised release at similar rates as crime severity increased. Next, using individual-level sentencing data from similar cases in the federal courts, we found that judges’ sentencing decisions showed similar relationships between crime severity and both imprisonment and supervised release. However, laypeople imposed dramatically larger fines and more hours of community service than did federal judges, and laypeople tied the use of these alternative sanctions more directly to crime severity. These findings suggest that federal judges do not view fines and community service as commensurable with incarceration. As a result, current criminal sentencing practices deviate from community views by placing excessive emphasis on incarceration and paying insufficient attention to alternative sanctions.more » « lessFree, publicly-accessible full text available August 1, 2025