Abstract
Crime and punishment are usually connected. An agent intentionally causes harm, other people find out, and they punish the agent in response. We investigated whether people care about the integrity of this causal chain. Across seven experiments, participants (total N = 1,709) rated the acceptability of punishing agents for one crime when the agents had committed a different crime. Overall, participants generally approved of such wayward punishment. They endorsed it more strongly than punishing totally innocent agents, though they often approved of punishing agents for their correct crimes more strongly. Participants sometimes supported wayward punishment when wrongdoers were punished for a different kind of crime than the one committed, and they supported several different kinds of wayward punishments. Together the findings show that people often tolerate breaks in the causal chain between crime and punishment.
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Data Availability
Preregistration links, materials, and data for all experiments are available online (https://osf.io/eaps7/).
Code availability
The code is available at the same OSF link.
Notes
In using “wayward punishment” as shorthand for instances where a criminal is inadvertently punished for the wrong crime, we do not mean to imply this kind of punishment involves wayward causation which arises when a person’s actions fulfill their goals but not in the way the person intended (e.g., a gunshot intended to kill someone misses but scares wild pigs which then trample that person to death; Davidson, 1973).
This is a high rate of exclusions, but as noted above the results come out the same with all participants included (see Supplemental Materials). In this experiment, inclusion required participants to pass two attention checks, one with two multiple choice options and the other with four (i.e., odds of passing by guessing are 1 in 8, ~13%). Many exclusions likely resulted because the two-option question was ambiguously worded. It asked “In the scenario you just read, the protagonist was punished for a crime. Did the protagonist commit the specific crime they were punished for?” However, participants may have interpreted it as referring to crimes at the type-level rather than the token-level. For example, when the vandals were punished for one another’s crimes, many participants may have answered “yes” because each was punished for the correct type of crime (i.e., vandalism).
As with previous experiment, this experiment and the next have high exclusion rates. In this experiment and in Experiment 4, inclusion required participants to pass three attention checks which each offered 4 multiple choice options (i.e., odds of passing by guessing are 1 in 64 chance, <2%). The exclusion rate may have been high because some questions asked about details that participants could easily forget, even if they had attentively read the vignettes (e.g., questions about which color spray-paint a certain vandal had been punished for). Consistent with this explanation, the results came out the same in analyses that included all participants (see the Supplemental Material).
In Experiment S2 (Supplemental Materials), we found that approval of wayward punishment is stronger when it is for a crime similar to the one committed. But that experiment used less tightly controlled scenarios where support for wayward punishment was relatively weak, perhaps because it allowed the true culprit of the punished crime to get away.
Our preregistration specified that we would recruit 220 (prior to exclusions). However, an error led us to collect data from 346 participants.
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Research was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada awarded to J.T. and O.F.
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Van de Vondervoort, J.W., Baaj, L., Turri, J. et al. People accept breaks in the causal chain between crime and punishment. Mem Cogn (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-024-01528-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-024-01528-5