Punishment, Psychology Of

Features of the Offense and the Offender

In western European cultures, the court has to consider a person's behavior culpably deviant to make punishment (by the state) an acceptable reaction. Hence, whether the community punishes people for their behavior depends on one hand on what the community regards as deviant and, on the other hand, on how the community perceives and interprets the antecedents and circumstances of this behavior.

A widely used research method to analyze the influence of features of the offender and the offense on moral judgment is the vignette technique: respondents read short descriptions of offenses and assign sentences to the hypothetical offenders. By systematically varying the features of the described offense, the court can assess their specific and combined influences on punishment. The main problem of this kind of research is the difficulty of measuring punishment severity in an unequivocal manner that is comprehensible for lay people. Furthermore, nothing but opinions are assessed; one cannot be sure they would also be expressed in daily life.

With respect to judicial decisions, the influence of case-specific features can also be investigated by analyzing sentencing decisions. Although this has the advantage that real decisions are analyzed, this method has to face the problem of controlling the variability in the cases that different judges and jurors have to decide on.

Of the variety of features that researchers have investigated using the vignette technique, several variables seem to influence the assigned punishment: First, aspects of intentionality and controllability of the offensive behavior influence the attribution of blame and are thus related to the harshness of punishment. Second, demands for punishment increase with the severity of damage done to the victim and are higher for perpetrators who have prior criminal records. These and the general pattern of results indicate that lay people in general do take legal criteria into account. However, psychological research has also revealed that aspects such as gender, race, and attractiveness of the persons involved, or harshness of the sentence demanded by the prosecutor, which should be irrelevant from a legal point of view, can influence the judgment process. This is true especially if people are not sufficiently motivated, or unable to process available information in a systematic and rational way, or if they are unaware of possible biasing influences, such as mood or implicitly activated stereotypes. A further variable that is of psychological interest is the similarity between the offender and the judging person. From the psychoanalytically based scapegoat hypothesis, one can hypothesize that similarity should increase the harshness of punishment. However, empirical research suggests that similarity leads to more lenient reactions (similarityleniency hypothesis), a bias that is compatible with the social psychological notion of in-group favoritism.

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