Punishment Decisions Research Articles

Attribution Bias, Blame, and Strategic Confusion in Punishment Decisions

Disentangling effort and luck is critical when judging performance. In a principal-agent experiment, we demonstrate that principals' judgments of agent effort are biased by luck, despite perfectly observing the agent's effort. This can erode the power of incentives to stimulate effort when there is noise in the process. As such, we explore two potential solutions to this outcome bias -- control over irrelevant information about luck, and outsourcing judgment to independent third parties. We find that both are ineffective. When principals have control over information about luck, they do not avoid the information that biases their judgment. In contrast, when agents have control over the principal's information about luck, agents strategically manipulate principals' to minimize their punishments. We also find that independent third parties are just as biased as principals. These findings indicate that may be more widespread and pernicious than previously understood. They also suggest that cannot be driven solely by disappointment nor by distributional preferences. Instead, we hypothesize that luck directly affects beliefs about agents even though effort is perfectly observed. We elicit the beliefs of third parties and principals and find that lucky agents are believed to exert more effort in general than identical, unlucky agents.

Social influence on third-party punishment: An experiment

We study the effect of social influence on agents’ decisions to engage in costly decentralized third-party punishment. In a laboratory experiment, participants play a modified Dictator game with third-party punishment and we elicit punishment decisions both in isolation and after providing information about peers’ average punishment. Results show that social influence is a major driver of third-party punishment: after receiving information on peers’ average punishment, participants revise initial punishment choices and seek conformity. Social influence effects are stronger when peers punished more than the individual punisher and conformity implies revising punishment upward. Adding to the information on peers’ punishment the possibility for other participants to sanction or reward with an emoticon the choices of the individual punisher does not change results. Our findings contrast with the predictions of major theories of social preferences and are only explained by special cases of models incorporating aversion to norm-breaking.

Solitary Confinement as Punishment: Examining In-Prison Sanctioning Disparities

Drawing on prior sentencing and prison scholarship, this study examines the use of solitary confinement as a form of punishment. Specifically, it assesses whether, given a prison infraction, minority inmates—and young, male, minority inmates in particular—are more likely to be placed in solitary and to be placed in it for longer durations. Multilevel regression analyses of state prison data suggest little support for the hypothesis that minority males, or young minority, males, are sanctioned more harshly than other inmates. The analyses identify, however, that males are more likely than females to be placed in solitary as a form of disciplinary punishment and that younger females are more likely to be placed in it than older females. The findings highlight that age and sex may interact to influence punishment decisions and raise questions about the precise roles of race and ethnicity in affecting punishment decisions. Implications of the findings for theory, research, and policy are discussed.

Conditional Punishment in England

A large body of literature has shown that peer-to-peer punishment is effective in enforcing cooperation norms in dilemmas. Kamei [2014, Economics Letters 124, pp.199-202] provides experimental evidence on the prevalence of heterogeneous conditional punishment types by conducting an experiment with a strategy method in the United States. This note reports a replication experiment using subjects in England. As consistent with Kamei (2014), the experiment indicates that people’s punishment decisions are on average positively proportional to the others’ punishment toward the target. However, it also indicates interesting cross-country differences in the distribution of human conditional punishment types.

Punishment within Prison: An Examination of the Influences of Prison Officials’ Decisions to Remove Sentencing Credits

Despite considerable research directed toward understanding the factors that affect punishment decision-making leading to imprisonment, few studies have examined the influences of punishment decisions within prisons. Punishment decisions made within prisons can affect an individual's liberty during their imprisonment and/or the timing of their release from prison if the punishment results in the loss of sentencing credits or influences parole decision-making. Moreover, if punishment disparities result from these decisions, then some offender groups may endure a greater loss of liberty relative to others. In this study, we examine the factors that influence prison officials’ decisions to remove sentencing credits in response to prison rule violations. Analysis of collected data from a Midwestern state prison system reveal that prison officials are primarily influenced by the seriousness and type of the rule violation, along with an inmate's violation history. Other relevant factors include those proximately connected to an inmate's risk of subsequent misbehavior such as gang membership and those that are linked to practical consequences and constraints associated with the organizational environment and particular inmates such as the proportion of their sentence an inmate has served and whether an inmate has mental health problems.

The Political Roots of Racial Tracking in American Criminal Justice. By Nina M. Moore. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 406 pp. $30.99 paperback.

The Political Roots of Racial Tracking in American Criminal Justice. By Nina M. Moore. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 406 pp. $30.99 paperback.In April 2016, Black Lives Matter (BLM) protesters clashed with Bill Clinton over his role in the passage of the 1994 Crime Bill and Hillary Clinton's use of the term super predators to describe the involvement of black youth in criminal offenses. Demonstrators sought to highlight how policymakers and the general public construct narratives and social policies that fuel misperceptions, thereby deepening racial inequality in criminal justice practices throughout the United States. Political pundits largely glossed over the substance of protester concerns because the crime bill did not explicitly target specific racial groups. To address the essence of the BLM critique would require a theory of the policy process that explains racial inequality in criminal justice experiences. Nina Moore's book, The Political Roots of Racial Tracking in American Criminal Justice, provides such a policy process framework.Moore examines the mechanisms that give rise to racial disparities in the criminal justice system and explains why these inequities persist despite considerable national attention to issues of fairness and justice. Her book makes two arguments. First, Moore argues that there are two racially distinct modes of criminal law enforcement in the United States: one white and one black. She contends that racial tracking in the criminal justice system must be evaluated sequentially, from initial contact with police officers to differences in plea negotiations with prosecutors, both of which culminate in racialized differences in pretrial court decisions and prison experiences.The second argument advanced by Moore is that racial tracking in criminal justice persists precisely because policymakers and the American public allow different modalities of law enforcement, even when stark differences in applications of justice contravene constitutional rights to due process and equal protection. She presents a basic principles policy process that anchors empirical insights and disagreements in the study of policymaking with commonalities expressed in varied policy perspectives. By drawing on six policy process axioms-principles that focus on politics, systems, opportunities, multidimensionality, power players, and problemprocess kinship-Moore articulates a seventh maxim, the public origins principle, that fully integrates these perspectives to produce a theory of racial tracking in criminal justice.This is an impressive piece of socio-legal scholarship. Five empirical chapters thoroughly enumerate and rigorously evaluate how colorblind Supreme Court decisions, public opinion polls, political party politics, and congressional agendas impede racial equality in criminal justice. Moore critically analyzes twenty-three Sixth Amendment cases affecting the right to counsel, eighteen Fifth Amendment cases, and twenty of the most noted capital punishment decisions. In each instance, she shows how the Court's reasoning and decision-making process represents a longstanding use of colorblind jurisprudence that is not localized to any one decision or to a handful of cases; instead, her work uncovers how the Court systematically legitimates persistent racial inequalities in law enforcement methods.Professor Moore also presents an in-depth analysis of public opinions on racial progress, criminal victimization, and criminal justice policy in America. …

Human punishment is not primarily motivated by inequality.

Previous theorizing about punishment has suggested that humans desire to punish inequality per se. However, the research supporting such an interpretation contains important methodological confounds. The main objective of the current experiment was to remove those confounds in order to test whether generating inequality per se is punished. Participants were recruited from an online market to take part in a wealth-alteration game with an ostensible second player. The participants were given an option to deduct from the other player’s payment as punishment for their behavior during the game. The results suggest that human punishment does not appear to be motivated by inequality per se, as inequality that was generated without inflicting costs on others was not reliably punished. Instead, punishment seems to respond primarily to the infliction of costs, with inequality only becoming relevant as a secondary input for punishment decisions. The theoretical significance of this finding is discussed in the context of its possible adaptive value.

Politics in Punishment: the Effect of the State Attorney Election Cycle on Conviction and Sentencing Outcomes in Florida

While a considerable amount of research recognizes a link between politics and criminal justice administration and policy, minimal literature is concerned with the impact of election cycles on punishment outcomes. Recent studies find incarceration is used as a tool for gaining political power. Therefore, the election period, especially when the incumbent faces opposition, could have a substantial effect on sentencing outcomes. Previous research has examined this phenomenon on a national and state level, but has rarely considered local political influences on elections. In this study, we examine the effect of local state attorney elections on punitiveness in punishment decisions, specifically through filing rates, conviction rates, prison admission rates, and average prison sentence lengths. As it is well established that criminal justice sanctions disproportionately affect minorities, we also examine the potential amplification of this disparity during the election cycle. A fixed-effects panel design was used to assess the effect of the State Attorney election periods in Florida and the presence of an electoral opponent on conviction and sentencing outcomes from 1995 to 2010. The results lend partial support to the hypothesis that the election cycle affects criminal justice outcomes.

The hot-versus-cold effect in a punishment game: a multi-round experimental study

We conduct a multi-round experiment on a punishment game using both the strategy method and the direct-response method. In the game, the sender may make decisions that are either favorable or unfavorable to the receiver, whereas the receiver may reward the favorable decision and/or punish the unfavorable decision. The hot-versus-cold effect is observed in both sender behaviors and receiver behaviors. Under the strategy method, the senders more often adopt decisions that are favorable to the receivers, whereas the receivers impose punishment more frequently than under the direct-response method. We suggest that in the multi-round experiment, the strategic value of punishment dominates the taste for punishment from the perspective of the receiver. According to our explanation based on mental accounting, the utility of imposing punishment is higher under the strategy method than under the direct-response method. Hence, the receiver is more likely to make punishment decisions. This difference in receiver behaviors prompts the sender to make receiver-favorable decisions more frequently under the strategy method.

The Impact of Sleep Restriction on Contributions and Punishment: First Evidence

We implement a one-week partial sleep restriction protocol to investigate the effect of sleep deprivation on joint production in a standard voluntary contributions mechanism (VCM) experiment. Additionally, the effect of sleep restriction on an individual's likelihood of sending costly peer punishment is examined. Actigraphy sleep monitoring watches are used to validate that our random assignment to sleep restricted (SR) and well-rested (WR) conditions generates significant differences in both objective nightly sleep duration and subject sleepiness. Using multiple measures of sleep restriction, and non-parametric as well as regression analysis, we find that when punishment is not available, sleep restriction does not affect the contributions made to joint production. When punishment is available, we find weak evidence that SR subjects contribute more than WR subjects, but there is no evidence that SR and WR subjects differ in the amount they punish others. However, we also find that SR subject contributions are significantly more sensitive to the introduction of peer punishment. SR subject punishment decisions may also be more sensitive to the deviation of their contributions from other group members' contributions and more sensitive to having received punishment themselves. Our results have implications for understanding how the norm enforcement availability may differentially impact individuals depending on their current sleep state.

A Cross-Cultural Study of Punishment Beliefs and Decisions.

The current research examined cultural similarities and differences in punishment beliefs and decisions. Participants were European Americans ( N = 50), Chinese Americans ( N = 57), and Chinese in Mainland China ( N = 50). The Functions of Punishment Questionnaire was used to measure participants' beliefs about the retributive or deterrent functions of punishment and a scenario method was used to measure the extent to which punishment decisions were driven by individuals' concerns for retribution or deterrence. The results indicated that, contrary to the hypothesis that the retributive function would be emphasized by individualistic groups and the deterrent function by collectivistic groups, Mainland Chinese participants had a stronger belief in retribution and a weaker belief in deterrence than did European and Chinese Americans. The results also indicated that retribution played a bigger role in punishment decisions for Chinese than for the other two groups, but the importance of the deterrence function in punishment decisions did not differ across the three groups. Finally, the correlation between interdependence orientation and the belief in retribution was positive for Chinese but negative for European Americans. Taken together, the findings provided little evidence that collectivists are more deterrence-oriented and individualists more retribution-oriented.

This Isn’t the Free Will Worth Looking For

According to previous research, threatening people’s belief in free will may undermine moral judgments and behavior. Four studies tested this claim. Study 1 used a Velten technique to threaten people’s belief in free will and found no effects on moral behavior, judgments of blame, and punishment decisions. Study 2 used six different threats to free will and failed to find effects on judgments of blame and wrongness. Study 3 found no effects on moral judgment when manipulating general free will beliefs but found strong effects when manipulating the perceived choice capacity of the judged agent. Study 4 used pretested narratives that varied agents’ apparent free will and found that perceived choice capacity mediated the relationship between free will and blame. These results suggest that people’s general beliefs about whether free will exists have no impact on moral judgments but specific judgments about the agent’s choice capacity do.

The Impact of the Rape/Sexual Assault Statutory Aggravating Factor on Death Sentencing Decision Making in Capital Murder Trials in North Carolina (1977–2009): A Propensity Score Matching Approach

It was not too many decades ago that rape was a crime for which the death penalty was a permissible punishment in the United States, particularly in death penalty states in the South. Relatedly, historical and contemporary death penalty research almost always focuses on the role of the race of the defendant and, more recently, the race of the victim and defendant–victim racial dyads as being relevant factors in death penalty decision making. As such, the current study employs data from official court records for the population of capital trials (n = 954) in the state of North Carolina (1977–2009) to evaluate the effect of the rape/sexual assault statutory aggravating factor on jurors’ decision to recommend the death penalty. Results suggest that cases in which rape is an aggravating factor had a significantly greater odds of receiving a death penalty recommendation, and these results are robust after also considering the independent effects of defendant–victim racial dyads, even following the application of propensity score matching to equate cases on a host of defendant and victim characteristics, legal and extralegal confounders, and case characteristics. Study limitations and implications are discussed.

Parsing the Behavioral and Brain Mechanisms of Third-Party Punishment.

The evolved capacity for third-party punishment is considered crucial to the emergence and maintenance of elaborate human social organization and is central to the modern provision of fairness and justice within society. Although it is well established that the mental state of the offender and the severity of the harm he caused are the two primary predictors of punishment decisions, the precise cognitive and brain mechanisms by which these distinct components are evaluated and integrated into a punishment decision are poorly understood. Using fMRI, here we implement a novel experimental design to functionally dissociate the mechanisms underlying evaluation, integration, and decision that were conflated in previous studies of third-party punishment. Behaviorally, the punishment decision is primarily defined by a superadditive interaction between harm and mental state, with subjects weighing the interaction factor more than the single factors of harm and mental state. On a neural level, evaluation of harms engaged brain areas associated with affective and somatosensory processing, whereas mental state evaluation primarily recruited circuitry involved in mentalization. Harm and mental state evaluations are integrated in medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate structures, with the amygdala acting as a pivotal hub of the interaction between harm and mental state. This integrated information is used by the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex at the time of the decision to assign an appropriate punishment through a distributed coding system. Together, these findings provide a blueprint of the brain mechanisms by which neutral third parties render punishment decisions. Punishment undergirds large-scale cooperation and helps dispense criminal justice. Yet it is currently unknown precisely how people assess the mental states of offenders, evaluate the harms they caused, and integrate those two components into a single punishment decision. Using a new design, we isolated these three processes, identifying the distinct brain systems and activities that enable each. Additional findings suggest that the amygdala plays a crucial role in mediating the interaction of mental state and harm information, whereas the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex plays a crucial, final-stage role, both in integrating mental state and harm information and in selecting a suitable punishment amount. These findings deepen our understanding of how punishment decisions are made, which may someday help to improve them.

Initial views from the Digital Panopticon: Reconstructing Penal Outcomes in the 1790s

The criminal justice system of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England has been likened to a corridor of connected rooms or stage sets. At each stage in the judicial process—from detection and apprehension through to trial, sentencing, and punishment—decisions were made that might remove the accused from the system entirely, or propel that person further along the process into a number of possible outcomes. That decision making (including the identity of the decision makers and the criteria upon which their decisions were based) has been the subject of much historical study. Less attention has been given to the individual experiences—the singular journeys—of the accused through this labyrinthine process. This is in large part because of the inherent evidential and methodological difficulties of reconstructing judicial pathways and the wider criminal lives of offenders. As Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker note, the archives of criminal justice were created to manage the bureaucracy of prosecution and punishment, not to reveal the criminal's navigation of that system. Tracing an individual offender's journey through the judicial process (and that person's life beyond) therefore entails piecing together fragments spread almost randomly across hundreds of thousands of pages.

From Spontaneous Cooperation to Spontaneous Punishment: Distinguishing the Underlying Motives Driving Spontaneous Behavior in First and Second Order Public Goods

Recent findings indicate that individuals use prosocial options as default in social dilemmas and specifically first order public goods. In two studies, we test whether this spontaneous cooperation effect generalizes to second order public goods in the form of punishment behavior in one-shot and iterated public goods, and investigate the underlying motivations. In line with spontaneous cooperation, quick punishment is larger than slow punishment. Negative affect moderates this spontaneous punishment effect in one-shot public goods, in that punishment decisions are more quickly taken by persons that are more upset about the contribution behavior of their group members. Unlike spontaneous cooperation, spontaneous punishment is not driven by dispositional prosociality, but by situational high contributions. A significant three-way interaction in an overall-analysis indicates that the spontaneous punishment effect is mainly driven by above-average, highly upset contributors.

The modulating effects of brain stimulation on emotion regulation and decision-making

It has been reported that brain stimulation such as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) can modulate a variety of cognitions and emotions in humans. rTMS and tDCS studies provide strong possibilities of applications in the manipulation of emotion regulation and decision-making in humans. We searched the literature by using keywords “rTMS,” “tDCS,” “emotion regulation,” and “decision-making” on PubMed ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed ). Based on the search results, we reviewed studies on emotion regulation and decision-making using rTMS and tDCS modulations. Regarding emotion regulation, rTMS can influence both attentional and affective aspects of emotion regulation. tDCS studies for emotion regulation included diverse topics such as physiological arousal, social exclusion, mathematics anxiety, emotional reactions to pain stimuli, negative affect, momentary ruminative self-referent thoughts, and autonomic reactions to affective pictures. Decision-making studies have reported rTMS effects related to emotion such as delay-discounting tasks, food choice, and moral judgment. These studies have also investigated cognitive functions such as visuospatial attention, perception, object identification, spatial-working memory, visuomotor skills, task, and blameworthiness and punishment decisions. In tDCS studies for decision-making, it has increasingly been reported that tDCS influences moral judgment, risk-taking behaviors, choice modulation, delay discounting, maladaptive and perceptual decision-making, probabilistic guessing, perception of space and time, dual-task performance, model-based learning, addiction, food craving, sunk-cost effect, exploration-exploitation trade-offs and cognitive impulse control. rTMS and tDCS have been shown to modulate behaviors relevant to emotion regulation and decision-making. The results of these numerous studies can be applied to clinical populations, and demonstrate that rTMS and tDCS may have many beneficial implications to those who have emotion regulation deficiencies.

The Death Penalty & the Dignity Clauses

“The question now to be faced is whether American society has reached a point where abolition is not dependent on a successful grass roots movement in particular jurisdictions, but is demanded by the Eighth Amendment.” Justice Thurgood Marshall posed this question in 1972, in his concurring opinion in the landmark case of Furman v. Georgia, which halted executions nationwide. Four years later, in Gregg v. Georgia, a majority of the Supreme Court answered this question in the negative. Now, forty years after Gregg, the question is being asked once more. But this time seems different. That is because, for the first time in our Nation’s history, the answer is likely to be yes. The Supreme Court, with Justice Kennedy at its helm, is poised to declare the death penalty unconstitutional. No matter what the Court’s answer, one thing is certain: dignity will figure prominently in its decision. Dignity’s doctrinal significance has been much discussed in recent years, thanks in large part to the Supreme Court’s watershed decisions in U.S. v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges, which struck down laws prohibiting same-sex marriage as a deprivation of same-sex couples’ dignity under the Fourteenth Amendment. Few, however, have examined dignity as a unifying principle under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments, which have long shared a commitment to dignity, and under the Court’s LGBT rights and death penalty jurisprudence, in particular, which give substance to this commitment. That is the aim of this Article. This Article suggests that dignity embodies three primary concerns — liberty, equality, and life. The triumph of LGBT rights under the Fourteenth Amendment and the persistence of the death penalty under the Eighth Amendment expose a tension in dignity doctrine: the most basic aspect of dignity (life) receives the least protection under the law. Because dignity doctrine demands liberty and equality for LGBT people, it must also demand an end to the death penalty. If dignity means anything, it must mean this. In anticipation of the Court’s invalidation of the death penalty on dignity grounds, this Article offers a framework to guide the Court, drawn from federal and state supreme court death penalty decisions new and old, statistics detailing the death penalty’s record decline in recent years, and the Court’s recent LGBT rights jurisprudence. It also responds to several likely counterarguments and considers abolition’s important implications for dignity doctrine under the Eighth Amendment and beyond.

Genetic essentialist biases, stigma, and lack of mitigating impact on punishment decisions

Genetic essentialist biases, stigma, and lack of mitigating impact on punishment decisions

Costly third-party interventions: The role of incidental anger and attention focus in punishment of the perpetrator and compensation of the victim

Costly third-party interventions have been regarded as hallmarks of moral behavior, because they are unlikely to be motivated by self-interest. This research investigated the cognitive and emotional processes underlying two types of costly third-party interventions by manipulating incidental emotions and attention focus. In Study 1, we investigated the effect of incidental anger on third-party punishment decisions. Study 2 addressed the effect of incidental anger on third-party compensation decisions. In both studies, participants were induced to either an angry or neutral emotion and then had to wait or were distracted before engaging in third-party interventions. In Study 1, angry participants punished highly unequal distributions significantly more than those in the neutral emotion condition. In Study 2, angry participants compensated highly unfair distributions significantly less than those in a neutral emotion. In both studies, the effect of incidental anger was only significant in the wait, not the distraction condition. Study 3 again focused on third-party compensation decisions. Participants were induced to either a self-focused anger or an other-focused anger emotion, and attention focus (wait, distraction) was manipulated experimentally. Those in the other-focused anger condition compensated significantly more than participants in the self-focused anger condition. These results indicate that (self-focused) incidental anger led to antagonistic responses. Incidental anger was only associated with higher third-party compensation when it included a focus on a suffering other. For incidental emotions to bias subsequent decisions requires attentional resources.