Informal Punishment Research Articles

Internal and external drivers for compliance with the COVID-19 preventive measures in Slovenia: The view from general deterrence and protection motivation.

The emergence of a pandemic is usually accompanied by different measures–economic, social, preventive, and (self)protective. In the case of the COVID-19, several preventive measures were formally enforced by state authorities in the majority of countries worldwide. Thus, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the intertwining of formal and informal social control could be observed. Hence, in this study a cross-sectional design was chosen to explore the issue in Slovenia. To the best of our knowledge, this research is the first in the current literature to empirically test the general deterrence theory in pandemic circumstances (as external factors predicting individuals’ compliance with the COVID-19 preventive measures). The results suggest an important role of informal punishment, with perceived informal severity being the only statistically significant factor from the general deterrence theory. In contrast to external factors, internal factors play a significantly greater role in promoting people’s self-protective behavior in pandemic circumstances. During the unknown, the uncertain and delicate situations with which people have no previous experience, both personal beliefs about the effectiveness of measures and perceived self-efficacy are more important than fear of formal sanctions.

To Condemn Is Not to Punish: An Experiment on Hypocrisy

Hypocrisy is the act of claiming moral standards to which one’s own behavior does not conform. Instances of hypocrisy, such as the supposedly green furnishing group IKEA’s selling of furniture made from illegally felled wood, are frequently reported in the media. In a controlled and incentivized experiment, we investigate how observers rate different types of hypocritical behavior and if this judgment also translates into punishment. Results show that observers do, indeed, condemn hypocritical behavior strongly. The aversion to deceptive behavior is, in fact, so strong that even purely self-deceptive behavior is regarded as blameworthy. Observers who score high in the moral identity test have particularly strong reactions to acts of hypocrisy. The moral condemnation of hypocritical behavior, however, fails to produce a proportional amount of punishment. Punishment seems to be driven more by the violation of the norm of fair distribution than by moral pretense. From the viewpoint of positive retributivism, it is problematic if neither formal nor informal punishment follows moral condemnation.

Selecting among Acquitted Defendants: Procedural Choice versus Selective Compensation

Being charged with a crime often results in social stigma even if the defendant has been cleared of the charges. For instance, an employer may anticipate that a criminal's expected productivity is lower than an average person's, or a landlord may anticipate problems when letting a house to a criminal. Since the proportion of criminals even among acquitted defendants is larger than that among the general population, defendants will earn lower wages and pay higher rent even after acquittal. In a recent paper, Daughety and Reinganum (2014) show that the Scottish Verdict, in which juries can, based on the strength of the evidence, acquit defendants either as 'not guilty' or as 'not proven', delivers a more precise signal to society on the defendant's true guilt than the standard rule, and thus implies that truly innocent defendants are less likely to be stigmatised. Based on this result, Daughety and Reinganum (2016, henceforth DR) analyse two different ways of implementing the Scottish verdict within the U.S. criminal justice system, one in which defendants can decide between being adjudicated under the standard rule and under the Scottish verdict, and another one in which juries may award compensation to acquitted defendants if the evidence against them is particularly weak (selective compensation). They _nd that, although only innocent defendants are better off under the Scottish verdict, even guilty defendants would opt for it in order to imitate the innocents. Furthermore, selective compensation permits less accurate informal punishment than the Scottish verdict (unless prosecutors are not held responsible for compensation) but might be better implementable in practice. In the following, I will discuss three ways of extending DR's analysis: allowing for risk-averse defendants, considering the social cost of informal punishment even of truly guilty defendants, and the protection of a defendant's privacy as an alternative means of avoiding informal punishment of truly innocent defendants.

Coordination in Teams: A Real Effort-Task Experiment with Informal Punishment

This paper reports the results from a real-effort team production experiment, where best performers can impose either tacit or explicit sanctions on their less-performing partners. The behavior of the best performer in the team differs from one condition to another. When explicit sanctions are not allowed, good performers reduce their effort in response to the advantageous difference in scores; when they can impose sanctions, their change in effort is no longer related to the difference in scores. To some extent, a mechanism of explicit sanctions allows good performers to focus on their own performance. Not sanctioning an opponent who under-performs, what we refer to as forgiveness, prompts the latter to improve his performance, but applying the sanction has a stronger effect.

Inequality aversion and antisocial punishment

Antisocial punishment—punishment of pro-social cooperators—has shown to be detrimental for the efficiency of informal punishment mechanisms in public goods games. The motives behind antisocial punishment acts are not yet well understood. This article shows that inequality aversion predicts antisocial punishment in public goods games with punishment. The model by Fehr and Schmidt (Q J Econ 114(3): 817–868, 1999) allows to derive conditions under which antisocial punishment occurs. With data from three studies on public goods games with punishment I evaluate the predictions. A majority of the observed antisocial punishment acts are not compatible with inequality aversion. These results suggest that the desire to equalize payoffs is not a major determinant of antisocial punishment.

Individual heterogeneity and costly punishment: a volunteer's dilemma

Social control and the enforcement of social norms glue a society together. It has been shown theoretically and empirically that informal punishment of wrongdoers fosters cooperation in human groups. Most of this research has focused on voluntary and uncoordinated punishment carried out by individual group members. However, as punishment is costly, it is an open question as to why humans engage in the punishment of wrongdoers even in one-time-only encounters. While evolved punitive preferences have been advocated as proximate explanations for such behaviour, the strategic nature of the punishment situation has remained underexplored. It has been suggested to conceive of the punishment situation as a volunteer's dilemma (VOD), where only one individual's action is necessary and sufficient to punish the wrongdoer. Here, we show experimentally that implementing the punishment situation as a VOD sustains cooperation in an environment where punishers and non-punishers coexist. Moreover, we show that punishment-cost heterogeneity allows individuals to tacitly agree on only the strongest group member carrying out the punishment, thereby increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of social norm enforcement. Our results corroborate that costly peer punishment can be explained without assuming punitive preferences and show that centralized sanctioning institutions can emerge from arbitrary individual differences.

Freezing Out the Mexican Cops: Bullying as Discrimination at the Police Workplace in Mexico City

In recent years, bullying problems in public security or defense institutions have been studied. Such problems are associated with high stress situations, a large workload and pressure in hierarchical organisms that base their success on a rigid system of asymmetric power and authoritarian leadership style. The aim of the current study is to investigate (in-depth interviews and ethnographic work) the patterns of the victims’ subjective cultural perception of a particular type of bullying called freezing out in the Mexico City police forces and the victim´s strategies to avoid it, taking into account their ranks within the structure of the police organization. The key research question is the following: How is the bullying experience called “freezing out” culturally perceived by self-identified targets and how do the victims cope with it? In freezing, the superior officer simply leaves his subordinate without specific instructions (it is not isolation). This could manifest itself as a type of informal punishment or as a desire to exclude the individual from the institution´s work production, temporarily or permanently. The present paper is a case study that analyzes the cultural perception of freezing as social discrimination in the Mexican police force.

Ubiquity and efficiency of restrictions on informal punishment rights

Over-punishment often occurs in anonymous peer-to-peer punishment in public goods game experiments where punishment is free for all. We report a public goods game experiment in which a condition where punishment rights were restricted to one other player per player yielded higher total welfare than a condition with unrestricted punishment. In the restricted punishment condition, there was much less punishment but high levels of cooperation were achieved nonetheless. This indicates that it may be beneficial to groups to restrict punishment rights. In a second study we presented respondents from many different countries with three scenarios constituting everyday social dilemmas of various kinds. Across countries, respondents tended to judge it as inappropriate for most involved parties to punish selfish individuals in the scenarios. Typically, only one party was judged to have the right to punish. Whereas much prior work has considered punishment as a public good that needs to be encouraged, these findings suggest that informal norms about sanctions tend to constrain punishment to certain individuals. Such norms may serve the function to harness the positive effects of punishment while containing the negative effects, and we suggest that they are likely to arise from learning.

Differences in Perceived Levels of Informal Punishments for Noncompliance and Rewards for Compliance: A Comparison of Japanese and American Workers

The current article integrates differential association/social learning theory into Grasmick's extended deterrence theory to propose that rational actors, in deciding whether or not to comply with workplace rules, should be expected to consider not only costs of noncompliance but also rewards of compliance. The cultural differences in perceived levels of informal punishment threats of shame and embarrassment for the rule violations and informal rewards of pride and praise for the rule conformity are then examined in merged samples of employees in Japanese and U.S. hospitals. Consistent with the prediction, these punishment threats and rewards are perceived to be higher and lower, respectively, among Japanese employees than among Americans.

Social Capital in Constitutional Law: The Case of Religious Norm Enforcement Through Prayer at Public Occasions

Distinguishing private action from government action is the first question of constitutional law. The distinction blurs most when the government and private actors jointly cause harm. Not surprisingly, then, the Supreme Court's cases in this gray area have been inconsistent. For example, state court enforcement of a private racially restrictive covenant is government action, but agency placement of a child in a home where the child is abused is private action. The ad hoc nature of these decisions reflects a reluctance to fully embrace joint government-private causation of constitutional harm: Without a limiting principle, doing so would threaten to convert all private action into government action. The concept of 'social capital' provides a needed limiting principle. Social capital is the value that lies in one's network of relationships. Specifically, social capital creates value through enforceable trust: That is, members of a community trust that other members will follow certain norms of behavior, and that trust is enforced by a threat of informal punishment (e.g., ostracism) for violating the community's norms. Constitutional law ought to recognize that government action can interact with private norms (created by enforceable trust) and, in doing so, burden constitutional values. This Article argues that the government violates the Constitution when a private group improperly uses government power or property to enforce the group's social capital. Through enforceable trust, social capital leads to predictable behavior - adherence to group norms. When government regulates in an area with strong social capital, that government action might also have predictable effects. The Supreme Court already holds the government responsible for the predictable effects of mandatory disclosure laws on unpopular groups, that is, groups whose beliefs or behavior violate prevailing norms. When the government requires an unpopular group to disclose its members, and disclosure will likely lead to threats and harassment against the members, the disclosure law violates the First Amendment. This Article extends the lessons of social capital to the case of private prayer at public occasions. Consider a private prayer recited at a public high school football game. If all in attendance are at liberty to object to or abstain from the prayer, the prayer would not violate current Establishment Clause doctrine. Yet, objecting to the prayer may violate local norms of religious belief or practice, opening a person to harassment and retaliation, just as the disclosure law did to members of unpopular groups. The religious objector falls into a gap in Establishment Clause protection, and this Article proposes a legal test to close the gap.

The Rationality of Sexual Offending: Testing a Deterrence/Rational Choice Conception of Sexual Assault

Using a combination of hypothetical scenarios and survey-type questions, this study investigates the effect of the context of the offense, formal sanctions, informal sanctions, and moral beliefs on self-reported projections to commit sexual assault. Male college students read and responded to five scenarios each describing a hypothetical sexual assault by a male. Respondents were asked to estimate the certainty of formal and informal punishment for the scenario male, the extent to which they believed the male's actions were morally wrong, and the likelihood that they would do what the male did under the same circumstances. We found that projections to commit sexual assault were affected by two circumstances of the incident, the likelihood that the male would be formally sanctioned (dismissed from the university or arrested) and the respondent's moral beliefs. The significant deterrent effect observed for formal sanction threats was not invariant, however. The fear of formal sanctions had no effect when respondents were inhibited by their moral evaluation of the incident. The deterrent effect of formal sanction threats did not vary by the level of social censure for the scenario male's actions. The implications of these finding for previous and subsequent deterrence research are discussed.

Immunity and Subsequent Informal Punishment

Immunity and Subsequent Informal Punishment