Get the Message

Abstract

Results from three studies demonstrate that victims’ justice-related satisfaction with punishment is influenced by the kind of feedback they receive from offenders after punishment. In contrast to previous studies that found a discrepancy between anticipated and experienced satisfaction from punishment (Carlsmith, Wilson, & Gilbert, 2008), participants were able to accurately predict their satisfaction when made aware of the presence or absence of offender feedback acknowledging the victim’s intent to punish. Results also indicate that victims were most satisfied when offender feedback not only acknowledged the victim’s intent to punish but also indicated a positive moral change in the offender’s attitude toward wrongdoing. These findings indicate that punishment per se is neither satisfying nor dissatisfying but that it is crucial to take its communicative functions and its effects on the offender into account. Implications for psychological and philosophical theories on punishment motives as well as implications for justice procedures are discussed.

Keywords

retribution punishment communication satisfaction justice

People who have been treated unfairly often want to punish the person who has wronged them. Psychologists know that the desire to punish and to restore justice is remarkably strong. It can often run counter to people’s self-interest (Lerner & Clayton, 2011). For instance, people punish even when it is costly to do so and when there is no immediate benefit for them (see McCullough, Kurzban, & Tabak, 2013, for a review). Moreover, this desire to punish is not linked to cathartic motives such as releasing built-up aggression (Bushman, Baumeister, & Phillips, 2001). Instead, recent findings suggest that people even punish when they know that punishment will not improve their mood (e.g., when they have taken a bogus mood-freezing pill, see Gollwitzer & Bushman, 2012).

What is less known about the psychology of punishment, however, is what happens after people have actually punished. Can punishment have positive affective consequences? And when exactly are victims satisfied with punishment? The present set of studies aimed to examine what makes punishment satisfying for victims. This question is important and interesting in itself, but in addition, it can provide psychological insight into people’s underlying punishment goals. Do victims simply want to make the transgressors suffer for their crimes? Do they want to give them their “just deserts?” Or is punishment a means to some further end, such as expressing condemnation or preventing future harm? Studying what gives victims satisfaction from punishment is also relevant for legal scholars. Research identifying when punishment leads to psychological closure and a sense of restored justice can potentially aid policy makers in shaping justice procedures to better address victims’ needs, so far as this is deemed a legitimate goal of the justice process (Robinson & Darley, 1995).

Affective Consequences of Punishment: Paradoxical or Not?

Studies that have focused specifically on the affective consequences of punishment deliver a somewhat mixed picture as to whether punishment is satisfying or not. Some behavioral studies suggest that punishment can have “paradoxical consequences” insofar as punishment is not as satisfying as people expect it to be (Carlsmith et al., 2008). In these studies, participants were either assigned to a punishment, no punishment, or a forecaster condition. That is, participants either had the opportunity to punish the defector in an economic game or not and indicated how they felt, or they were asked to imagine punishing the defector (or not) and forecasted how they would feel. First, participants in the forecasted punishment condition indicated more satisfaction than participants in the no punishment condition. The finding that participants anticipate satisfaction from imposing a sanction on a defecting partner, even when costly to them, is in line with a neuroimaging study that found activation in the dorsal striatum, which is part of a neural network that plays a critical role in predicting future rewards as a result of goal-directed behavior and decision-making (de Quervain et al., 2004).

Second, and more important for the present purpose, Carlsmith and colleagues (2008) found that participants who punished were actually less satisfied than those who did not punish and also ruminated more about the wrongdoer. Crucially, none of the participants expected this lack of satisfaction; they inaccurately expected that getting back at the offender would be satisfying.

A different set of studies showed that punishment can have positive affective effects on punishers when feedback from offenders indicates acknowledgment of the victim’s intent to punish (Gollwitzer & Denzler, 2009; Gollwitzer, Meder, & Schmitt, 2011). In these studies, participants engaged in a cooperative task with an ostensible partner, after which each player was asked how they wanted to split a bonus between them. The ostensible partner always suggested a selfishly unfair distribution, and participants were given the opportunity to punish their partner’s behavior (by assigning an unpleasant task). After punishment, participants either received feedback from their partner indicating understanding that the bad treatment was punishment for their previous egoistic behavior (e.g., “ . . . well, maybe that’s the price I have to pay for making such an unfair distribution proposal”), or participants received the feedback that the partner had no idea why he or she had to do the unpleasant task (e.g., “ . . . what a bummer! don’t know why I have to do this”; see Gollwitzer & Denzler, 2009). Participants were more satisfied after punishment when they received the first kind of feedback (Gollwitzer et al., 2011). These findings indicate that punishment can be satisfying when offenders recognize and acknowledge the victim’s intent to punish. In addition, they suggest that it is not the punishment alone that gives punishers satisfaction.

Revisiting the findings reported by Carlsmith and colleagues (2008), it is important to note that “paradoxical consequences” of punishment were found in studies that did not include any feedback from the offender. When participants decided to punish, they only knew that the transgressor was punished, but they did not know how the transgressor reacted to it. If, however, a particular kind of feedback from the offender was necessary to make punishment satisfying (as findings from Gollwitzer and colleagues suggest) and to end rumination about the wrongdoer, it might not be surprising that participants experienced “paradoxical consequences” when no feedback was provided, especially of the relevant kind.

While Gollwitzer and colleagues have highlighted the message aspect of punishment (i.e., victims want offenders to know that they are being punished), studies to date have not fully explored what it is about offender feedback that ultimately brings satisfaction to victims. In addition, these studies did not include any forecast conditions that could speak to the question raised by Carlsmith and colleagues as to whether participants are able to predict how offender feedback will affect their satisfaction with punishment.

The three studies presented here aim to fill this gap and to pursue a number of related goals. In general, we examine how victims react to varying offender feedbacks following punishment. More specifically, we study whether victims anticipate that offender feedback that acknowledges the victim’s intent to punish will make a difference to how satisfied they feel after punishing. In addition, we aim to identify the specific aspects of offender feedback that make punishment satisfying for the victim. In particular, we study whether punishment is more satisfying when offenders signal a change in moral attitude toward their wrongdoing in addition to simply acknowledging the victim’s intent to punish.

Punishment Is (More Than) Sending a Message

To study the role of offender feedback on victims’ satisfaction with punishment, we draw on philosophical and psychological punishment theories that conceptualize punishment as an act of communication between the punisher and the offender. According to one influential view, punishment is only justified so far as it serves to express society’s condemnation of the criminal act to affirm communal values and to legitimize the authority of the law (Feinberg, 1965). Moreover, such condemnation must be communicated, not just to citizens at large, but to the particular offender as well (Duff, 2001; Markel, 2011). This philosophical account presupposes that people should regard punishment as having a communicative function, as conveying a condemnatory message to offenders, for instance “this is how wrong what you did was” (Nozick, 1981, p. 370).

Psychological research provides some support for this normative view, showing that communication does play a role in how people conceptualize the function of punishment. For instance, Wenzel and Thielmann (2006) observed that when people frame transgressions as an attack on community values, punishment is “called for as a communication to the offender and the wider community that aims to reaffirm the importance of those values” (p. 466, see also Durkheim, 1893/1964; Vidmar, 2001). The communicative function of punishment is also salient in the context of second-party punishment (where victims themselves, rather than some neutral third party, deliver the punishment). For instance, in a questionnaire study that asked participants why they decided to take revenge,¹ the majority of respondents chose the answer “I wanted to make it clear to the perpetrator that I will not allow anybody to walk all over me” (Crombag, Rassin, & Horselenberg, 2003, p. 340; emphasis added).² In addition, as outlined above, punishment has been found to be satisfying for the victim only when the offender knew that bad treatment was punishment for a previous act (Gollwitzer et al., 2011).

However, some philosophers argue that the communication of censure is not in itself a sufficient justification for punishment. In their view, punishment can only be justified if it has, in addition, an educative function: Punishment should seek to educate offenders as to the wrongness of their acts and thereby produce a transformation in their own attitudes going forward (Hampton, 1984; Morris, 1981). This idea finds support in the writings of Adam Smith (1759/1869), who noted the multifaceted quality of punishment:

To bring him back to a more just sense of what he owes us, and of the wrong that he has done to us, is frequently the principal end posed in our revenge, which is always imperfect when it cannot accomplish this. (p. 139)

Smith further suggests that the normative view that punishment should be educative is naturally supported by our psychological proclivities.

Supporting Smith’s view, a number of psychologists do see a link between punishment and the goal of changing the transgressor’s attitude. For Miller (2001), educating the offender is one of the most powerful goals that people have when they are treated disrespectfully and feel a sense of injustice. This observation is reflected in the fact that people commonly refer to punishment as “teaching somebody a lesson,” that is, they talk about punishment as if it could make offenders recognize the error of their ways and so mend their offensive attitudes and behavior. Fritz Heider (1958) likewise theorized that “resentment is a wish to produce a change in the underlying belief-attitude structure of the attacker, and revenge is the means of realizing this wish” (p. 267). Research results for revenge in close relationships show that a majority of people decide to retaliate to evoke a desired change in their partner (Boon, Deveau, & Alibhai, 2009).

All in all, the communicative function of punishment seems to be important for a number of partially interconnected reasons: reaffirming communal values, asserting the legitimate authority of the law, censuring the offender, and effecting a change in the offender’s blameworthy attitudes and/or behavior (i.e., education). In the present set of studies, we aimed to investigate how the offender-directed dimensions of censure and education are related to victim satisfaction in the context of second-party punishment. Is it important for victims simply to communicate condemnation to the offender, or do they hope to re-educate and effect a change in moral attitude in the offender? And how does a manipulation of these possible outcomes affect victims’ satisfaction with punishment?

The Present Research

The present set of studies looked at punishers’ reactions to different kinds of feedback they receive from the offender to examine the link between punishment and victim satisfaction. Study 1 aimed to reconcile previous findings that punishment is “paradoxically” unexpectedly dissatisfying (Carlsmith et al., 2008) with findings that show how punishment can be satisfying when its communicative aspect is highlighted (Gollwitzer & Denzler, 2009; Gollwitzer et al., 2011). We hypothesized that the “paradoxical consequences” previously found would disappear if the transgressor reacts to the message that punishment sends. That is, we expected to replicate previous results that victims who decide to punish and receive feedback from the offender acknowledging the victim’s intent to punish would be more satisfied than people who punish and do not receive such feedback. In addition, we tested whether people could accurately predict this result.

Studies 2a and 2b aimed to examine in more detail the type of feedback that makes punishing satisfying. We tested whether offender feedback is relevant to victims’ satisfaction only so far as it shows that the offender understands that the victim’s response is punishment (hereafter a type of feedback we call offender acknowledgment), or whether victims are more satisfied when offenders react to punishment in a specific way, that is, with an expressed change in moral attitude toward their wrongdoing (hereafter a type of feedback we call moral change).

Study 1

The goal of Study 1 was to examine in more detail the link between victim satisfaction from punishment and mere offender acknowledgment. To study the effect of offender acknowledgment on predicted and actual satisfaction from punishment, the experimental design of Study 1 included two actual punishment conditions (one with offender acknowledgment and one without) and two forecast conditions, where participants had no opportunity to punish but merely predicted how satisfying it would be to punish (again, one with offender acknowledgment and one without), along with a control condition without any punishment. We wanted to test two hypotheses. First, we expected that punishment with offender acknowledgment would leave victims more satisfied than punishment without such acknowledgment. Second, we predicted that people would be able to predict this effect if prompted specifically to imagine getting offender acknowledgment versus not getting it. That is, we hypothesized that in the forecast condition with offender acknowledgment participants would (accurately) expect to feel more satisfied than in the forecast condition without such acknowledgment.

Method

Procedure

The method was adapted from Gollwitzer and colleagues (2011, Study 3). Participants came to the lab believing they were participating in a study that would test a new computer system for virtual interactions. Each participant was virtually paired with an ostensible partner sitting in another room and instructed to work together on an anagram task. Participants and their ostensible partners were asked to solve individually as many anagrams as possible within 2 min. For each anagram correctly solved, the team received two tickets for a raffle (there were 10 prizes worth 15€ each). After the game, participants and their ostensible partner were asked to make a recommendation about how the team bonus should be allocated. Ostensible partners always solved only two anagrams more than the participant, but allocated the bonus unfairly (i.e., they recommended 90% of the tickets for themselves and only 10% for the participants; cf. Gollwitzer et al., 2011). Because participants allocated the raffle tickets more equally (see “Results” section), the final averaged allocation was always unfair.

At this point, participants received a message from the computer that they would get substantially fewer raffle tickets than their partner. Punishment was operationalized by giving participants the opportunity to deduct raffle tickets from their partners (without giving them the chance to gain any raffle tickets themselves). Participants in the punishment conditions actually had the possibility of deducting raffle tickets from their partners. Participants in the forecast conditions were asked to imagine they had the possibility of deducting raffle tickets from their partners. Participants in the control condition were not given any opportunity, either actually or imaginatively, to punish. As in Carlsmith et al. (2008), punishment was costly, that is, participants were told that they would need to give up one of their own raffle tickets to deduct four tickets from their partner. If participants indicated that they did not want to reduce their partner’s raffle tickets in the punishment conditions, or would not want to reduce their partner’s raffle tickets in the forecast conditions, they could simply click “next.”

Feedback manipulation

People in the punishment and forecast conditions received the second experimental manipulation. In the actual punishment conditions, participants either got offender acknowledgment feedback from their partner (“Your decision to subtract my raffle tickets has probably something to do with my distribution. It was unfair, I know”), or they received no such feedback from their partner. Departing from Carlsmith and colleagues (2008), participants in the forecast conditions were explicitly told to imagine either receiving offender acknowledgment feedback from their partner (using the same wording as in the actual feedback condition), or receiving no feedback. All in all, the study consisted of five conditions that were manipulated between subjects: punishment with offender acknowledgment feedback, punishment without feedback, imagined punishment with offender acknowledgment feedback, imagined punishment without feedback, and no punishment/no feedback.

Dependent measure

At the end of the study, participants filled out a questionnaire probing their explicit justice-related satisfaction with the situation. Participants were asked to rate their agreement with 12 items (1 = not at all, 5 = very much). Items included “I think that everybody got what they deserved,” “I feel OK about the way things turned out,” “I wonder if I should have acted differently [reversely coded],” “I think that someone still got to pay [reversely coded],” and the order was randomized (Cronbach’s α = .81; for a complete list of items, see the appendix). Participants in the forecast conditions filled out the same items but used them to indicate how they would feel after punishment.

Participants

Students (N = 196) were recruited in classes and on campus for a study on “problem solving in cooperation situations.” Thirty-nine participants were in the control condition, the remaining 157 were either in the punishment or forecast conditions. Thirty-five participants in the punishment and forecast conditions (22%) decided not to punish their partners and were, therefore, not included in the data analyses. If participants explicitly mentioned during the experiment that they doubted the existence of their partners (e.g., because they had already taken part in previous experiments in which participants were deceived about ostensible partners, n = 28, 14%), their data were also removed.³ Last, participants from the no punishment/no feedback condition were not included in the analyses.⁴ In the following, we will focus on the four remaining conditions (two punishment and two forecast conditions). The final sample consisted of 103 students (73% female) between the ages of 18 and 33 years (M_age = 23.2, SD_age = 2.8).

Results

Preliminary analyses

Participants solved on average 10.4 anagrams (SD = 4.1). On average, they recommended keeping 43% (SD = 6.9%, max = 50%) of the tickets for themselves. Those who had the opportunity to punish their partners paid, on average, 23.8% (SD = 40%) of their bonus to do so. Satisfaction after punishment, the dependent variable, was uncorrelated (rs ≤ .13, ps ≥ .18) with sex, age, the number of anagrams solved, the number of tickets participants recommended keeping for themselves, the number of raffle tickets invested (i.e., the magnitude of punishment), and the final outcome. In addition, none of these variables differed reliably between the experimental conditions (ps ≥ .20). Therefore, these variables will not be discussed further.

Main analysis

There was a significant effect of the experimental conditions on participants’ satisfaction scores, F(3, 99) = 4.00, p = .010, η² = .11. Planned contrasts were used to test our hypotheses that (a) punishment leads to more satisfaction when offender acknowledgment feedback is provided and that (b) forecasted satisfaction is higher when participants imagine receiving such feedback from the offender than when they imagine receiving no such feedback from the offender.

The first contrast tested the punishment with offender acknowledgment feedback condition against the punishment without feedback condition (contrast weights were as follows: punishment with offender acknowledgment feedback = 1, punishment without feedback = −1, forecast with offender acknowledgment feedback = 0, forecast without feedback = 0). As expected, this contrast was significant, t(99) = 2.49, p = .015, d = 0.94. Satisfaction after actual punishment was higher when the punisher received offender acknowledgment feedback (M = 3.49, SD = 0.56) than when she or he did not receive such feedback (M = 2.98, SD = 0.53). This finding replicates previous findings that offender acknowledgment feedback matters when it comes to feeling satisfied after punishing.

The second contrast tested the imagined punishment with offender acknowledgment feedback condition against the imagined punishment without feedback (contrast weights were as follows: forecast with offender acknowledgment feedback = 1, forecast without feedback = −1, punishment with offender acknowledgment feedback = 0, punishment without feedback = 0). As predicted, this contrast was significant, t(99) = 2.17, p = .033, d = 0.52. Forecasted satisfaction after imagined punishment was higher when participants imagined offender acknowledgment feedback (M = 3.25, SD = 0.68) than when they imagined receiving no such feedback (M = 2.90, SD = 0.71). In other words, when the effect of punishment was brought to people’s attention, they could predict that punishment without offender acknowledgment feedback would be less satisfying.

Discussion

Previous findings (Carlsmith et al., 2008; Gollwitzer et al., 2011) have demonstrated that simply “getting even” without receiving any feedback from the offender does not bring satisfaction. In line with these studies, findings from Study 1 suggest that people seem to want a reaction from the offender that acknowledges the victim’s intent to punish. Adding to previous research, our results on forecasted satisfaction suggest that people are aware of the importance that offender acknowledgment feedback has on affective consequences of punishment, and that people can make accurate predictions about how satisfying such punishment will be when this feature is highlighted. This suggests that the “paradoxical consequences” of punishment found in previous studies that did not include any feedback conditions (Carlsmith et al., 2008) may not be so paradoxical after all.

In addition, the justice-related satisfaction scale we used to measure punishers’ satisfaction highlights that victims who do not receive any offender feedback are not only less satisfied, they are also less likely to indicate that “everybody got what they deserved.” In the real world, such a lack of feedback could have serious consequences. If victims do not receive offender feedback, they might aim for harsher or additional punishment, which again could leave them unsatisfied absent offender feedback. In other words, there is a potential “ratcheting-up” effect that pure (or “just deserts”) “retributivists” should be on guard against (for a discussion, see McGeer, 2013).

Findings from Study 1 demonstrate that punishers are aware that offender acknowledgment feedback is important to them. Yet, while Study 1 manipulated the presence or absence of such feedback, it did not address what it was about this acknowledgment that made punishment satisfying. Were punishers satisfied with punishment when it included such feedback merely because they received assurance that offenders understood they were being punished for their wrongdoing, or because offenders seemed to be affected by the punishment in a specific way? Study 2 was designed to address this question.

Study 2a

Previous findings highlight that people use punishment to send a message to the perpetrator (e.g., Boon et al., 2009; Crombag et al., 2003; Gollwitzer et al., 2011). As discussed above, philosophers have discussed the communicative functions of punishment toward the offender in broadly two ways. First, there is a unidirectional conception, according to which punishment simply gives victims a way of expressing their condemnation of the offender’s behavior (Feinberg, 1965; Nozick, 1981). Second, there is a more interactional conception, according to which punishment not only gives victims a way of expressing their condemnation, it also provides a prompt or spur for offenders to change their attitudes and behavior in response to the victim’s condemnation (Hampton, 1984; Miller, 2001; Morris, 1981). Study 2 aimed at examining whether positive affective consequences found in previous studies are sensitive to the difference in these conceptualizations. Is positive affect simply the result of successfully delivering the message (in accordance with the unidirectional conception, that is, reacting to offender acknowledgment), or is it the result of actually effecting a change in the offender’s attitude (in accordance with the more interactional conception, that is, reacting to the offender’s moral change)?

Method

Procedure

The design was similar to Study 1. To increase the credibility of the cover story, participants were brought into the lab in groups of two and told they would be participating in a study to examine whether virtual collaboration can enhance group performance. They were placed in different rooms and were told they would be paired with other students to work on a collective task. Next, the computer software paired each participant with one other ostensible student collaborator. After reading general instructions about the task, participants were invited to send a message to the fellow student if they wished. To increase credibility, all the participants received in turn a message from their ostensible partner (“Hi ‘fellow student’ . . . What am I supposed to say. —Just saw that the more problems we solve, the more bonus we get? Not bad . . . Game on!”). As in Study 1, participants were asked to individually solve as many anagrams as possible within 2 min. For each anagram solved, the team received $US 0.10. Ostensible partners always solved one anagram less than the participant, but in the reward sharing stage of the procedure, they recommended keeping the entire bonus for themselves. Consequently, the final averaged pay-off was very unfair.

At this point, participants received an apparent error message from the system indicating that they received significantly less money than their partner and that this happens when partners suggest split-ups that are not in relation to their performances. Participants were told that they could reduce their partner’s pay-off if they wanted to and that this would not affect their own bonus. For the sake of feasibility, and in contrast to Study 1, punishment was not costly in this study (i.e., participants did not need to invest their share of the bonus to reduce their partner’s bonus). Only people who decided to reduce their partner’s bonus received the second experimental manipulation (i.e., different kinds of feedback from the offender). Participants in the control condition did not have the opportunity to reduce their partner’s bonus and did not receive any feedback.

Feedback manipulation

After participants had made the decision to punish, they were randomly assigned to one of three feedback conditions. Either (a) they did not receive any feedback from their partner (no feedback condition); (b) they received a message indicating offender acknowledgment of the victim’s intent to punish plus a resulting change in moral attitude toward the offending behavior (“Hey you reduced my bonus! Ok—I was greedy . . . and I now see what’s wrong with that . . . I shouldn’t be such a jerk in situations like this,” feedback and change condition); or (c) they received a message indicating offender acknowledgment of punishment but without any resulting change in moral attitude (“Hey, you reduced my bonus! Ok—I was greedy . . . but I don’t see what’s wrong with that . . . In situations like this I always try to get as much as I can,” feedback and no change condition).

On the next page, participants who had received feedback were asked to imagine re-doing the task and deciding how to split up the bonus. They were then asked to indicate if they would allocate the bonus in the same way again and were told that they would see how their partner replied to this question on the subsequent page. On that page, participants in the change condition saw that their ostensible partners had indicated “No, I would behave differently in the future;” participants in the no change condition saw that their ostensible partners had indicated “Yes, I would behave the same way in the future.”In total, there were four experimental conditions manipulated between subjects: feedback and change, feedback and no change, no feedback, and no punishment/no feedback.

Dependent measure

At the end of the study, participants filled out three items about their explicit satisfaction regarding the interaction with the other player ranging from 1 = not at all to 7 = very much (“I feel satisfied,” “I feel mad” [reversely coded], and “I feel disappointed” [reversely coded]; Cronbach’s α = .62) and answered some filler items on the anagram task and their partner. If participants had decided to punish, they further indicated to what extent they thought adjusting their partner’s bonus made him or her think about his or her behavior, and whether adjusting their partner’s bonus had caused a change in his or her attitude (order randomized, all items ranging from 1 = not at all to 7 = very much). After filling out some demographic information, participants were debriefed about the true purpose of the study. They were asked whether they had been suspicious that the other partner was not real or whether they had known about the real purpose of the study before. Participants were thanked and received half an hour of course credit plus $US 0.10 for each anagram they solved.

Participants

Participants (404 undergraduate students, 258 female, M_age = 19.5, SD_age = 1.1) were recruited through the University’s psychology subject pool for the study “Problem solving in virtual groups.” Thirty-nine participants were in the control condition. The remaining 365 participants were given the opportunity to punish; only 117 of these decided to reduce their partner’s bonus (32%).⁵ Data from the students who decided not to punish were not used for the analyses. Many students were suspicious that the other partner was not real (e.g., because they knew the student they were paired with, or they had heard from other participants what the study was really about). Those students were excluded from the analyses.⁶ As in Study 1, the no punishment control condition was not included in the final analyses.⁷ In the following, we will focus on the three remaining punishment conditions only (feedback and change, feedback and no change, and no feedback).The final sample consisted of 73 students, with 23 to 26 participants in each experimental condition (M_age = 19.5, SD_age = 1.2, 46 female participants equally distributed across conditions).

Results

Preliminary analyses

Participants solved on average 8.8 anagrams (SD = 2.4). They proposed keeping on average 52.7% (SD = 4.5%, minimum = 50%, maximum = 60%) of the bonus for themselves. People who decided to punish deducted on average $US 0.75 (SD = $US 0.26) from their partner’s bonus. The magnitude of punishment did not correlate with satisfaction after punishment and will not be discussed further. The number of anagrams solved, participants’ initial allocation recommendations, and the magnitude of punishment also did not reliably differ between experimental conditions (ps ≥ .88).

Manipulation checks

As expected, participants in the feedback and change condition agreed more strongly than participants in the feedback and no change condition that adjusting their partners’ bonus made the partners think about their behavior (M_change = 6.09, SD_change = 0.95; M_{no change} = 4.08, SD_{no change} = 1.79); Welch’s t(35.23) = 4.82, p < .001, d = 1.40, and agreed more strongly that adjusting the bonus has caused a change in their partners’ attitude (M_change = 5.00, SD_change = 1.41; M_{no change} = 2.58, SD_{no change} = 1.69); t(45) = 5.30, p < .001, d = 1.55.

Main analysis

There was a significant effect of the experimental conditions on participants’ satisfaction, F(2, 70) = 4.76, p = .012, η² = .12. Planned Helmert-coded contrast analyses revealed that participants in the feedback and change condition (M = 4.46, SD = 1.00) showed significantly greater satisfaction than participants in the two other conditions, t(70) = 2.98, p = .004, d = 1.17 (contrast weights: feedback about change = 2, feedback about no change = −1, no feedback = −1). The feedback and no change condition (M = 3.76, SD = 1.22) did not reliably differ from the no feedback condition (M = 3.54, SD = 1.00) with regard to satisfaction, t(70) = 0.74, p = .464 (contrast weights: feedback about change = 0, feedback about no change = 1, no feedback = −1).

Discussion

To further examine why the offender’s acknowledgment of the victim’s intent to punish makes punishment satisfying, Study 2a experimentally manipulated the kind of feedback offenders gave to punishment. Keeping the offender’s acknowledgment of punishment constant, our results showed that victims were more satisfied after punishment if offenders indicated that punishment also caused a change in their moral attitude toward their offending behavior. Adding to the findings obtained in Study 1, results from Study 2a suggest that, even for uncostly punishment, victims seem to need more than the simple delivery of “just deserts” to be satisfied by punishment. In keeping with Study 1, these results highlight victims’ need for offender feedback for punishment to be satisfying, and thereby add to previous findings, showing that punishment without any feedback is dissatisfying (Carlsmith et al., 2008). More importantly, these findings show that the type of feedback is crucial. If the only thing that matters to victims was that offenders know why they are being punished (as previous studies have found, see Gollwitzer et al., 2011), victims should have been equally satisfied with both kinds of feedback from the offender, as both acknowledged the victim’s intent to punish. Yet, the results from Study 2a suggest that victims are seeking more than this: They want to see a change in the offender’s moral attitude. If offenders give feedback that indicates punishment has not been efficacious in this respect, then, despite the fact that offenders show they understand why they are being punished, punishers are just as unsatisfied as when they receive no feedback at all.

Study 2b

To make sure that the findings of Study 2a referred to justice-related satisfaction with punishment and not just mood (e.g., because the offender showed agreement with the participant’s decision to punish, or because the feedback in the feedback and no change condition could have been perceived as a challenge to the legitimacy of punishment), we conducted a replication study. Study 2b was a slightly modified online version of Study 2a, contrasting only the two different feedback conditions (feedback and change vs. feedback and no change).

Method

In this study, the dependent variable was again the 12-item scale that was used in Study 1, including items on justice-related satisfaction, deservingness, rumination, and psychological closure (e.g., “I think that I can now close this chapter,” “I am content with the way things worked out eventually,” “I think that everybody got what they deserved,” order randomized; Cronbach’s α = .85, for all items see the appendix). Because we recruited participants online, the initial message from the ostensible partner did not refer to fellow students; it read “Hi—hope you’re good at this. jUst saw the better we BOTH do, the more bonus we get.Let’s go for it!” (typos deliberately added for reasons of credibility).

Participants

Participants from the United States were recruited on Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk, for its use in social science, see Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011; Paolacci, Chandler, & Ipeirotis, 2010), and the total number of participants were 121 (38 female, M_age = 29.3, SD_age = 10.0). Eighty participants (66%) decided to reduce their partner’s bonus.⁸ When participants were suspicious that the ostensible partner was not real, they were excluded from the analyses.⁹ The final sample consisted of 59 participants (17 female, M_age = 27.4, SD_age = 8.6).

Results

Manipulation checks

As in Study 2a, manipulation checks indicated that participants in the feedback and change condition agreed more strongly than participants in the feedback and no change condition that adjusting their partners’ bonus made the partners think about their behavior (M_change = 6.69, SD_change = 0.54; M_{no change} = 4.10, SD_{no change} = 2.30); Welch’s t(32.3) = 6.01, p < .001, d = 1.54, and agreed more strongly that adjusting the bonus had caused a change in their partners’ attitude (M_change = 6.41, SD_change = 0.78; M_{no change} = 2.47, SD_{no change} = 2.05); Welch’s t(37.5) = 9.85, p < .001, d = 2.52.

Main analysis

The main analyses revealed that Study 2b replicated the effect of feedback type we found in Study 2a. Participants who received feedback indicating moral change from their ostensible partner (M = 4.23, SD = 1.10) were significantly more satisfied after punishment than participants who received feedback indicating no moral change from their partner (M = 3.51, SD = 1.19), t(57) = 2.40, p = .020, d = 0.63.

General Discussion

Results from three studies demonstrate that victims’ satisfaction with punishment is influenced by the kind of feedback they receive from the offender after punishment. These findings indicate that one cannot say that punishment per se is satisfying (de Quervain et al., 2004) or dissatisfying (Carlsmith et al., 2008) without taking its effects on the offender into account.

Results from Study 1 demonstrate the importance of the offender’s acknowledgment of the victim’s intent to punish on victims’ satisfaction with punishment. Findings from Study 1 indicate that participants can anticipate the importance of such feedback when they are asked to forecast their satisfaction from punishment. Findings of Study 2 further demonstrate that mere offender acknowledgment is not what ultimately brings satisfaction. If victims decided to punish, they were demonstrably more satisfied with punishment only if the feedback reflected a change in the offenders’ moral attitude toward their offending behavior.

These findings suggest that victims report feeling more satisfied after feedback about mere offender acknowledgment compared with no feedback (see Study 1, as well as Gollwitzer et al., 2011) because they suppose that such acknowledgment is also signaling a change in the offender’s moral attitude. All in all, our findings suggest that making offenders realize why they are being punished is seen as a first step to effecting the desired change in attitude (see also Durkheim, 1893/1964; Miller, 2001; Vidmar, 2001). Our findings have several implications for psychological and philosophical theories on punishment goals and highlight the importance of taking communicative aspects of punishment into account.

Implications for Psychological Research on Punishment Goals

So far, many social-psychological studies have used the philosophical distinction between deontological justifications for punishment (beginning with Kant, 1797/1968) and consequentialist justifications (beginning with Bentham, 1830; see, for example, Carlsmith, 2006; Darley, Carlsmith, & Robinson, 2000; Keller, Oswald, Stucki, & Gollwitzer, 2010). Deontological justifications refer to retributive, backward-looking concerns (giving offenders their “just deserts,” that is, the punishment they deserve in light of the wrong they have done), whereas consequentialist justifications are mostly concerned with utilitarian, forward-looking reasons for punishment (e.g., the deterrence of future crimes). Results from several psychological studies show that when people are asked why offenders should be punished, they appear to endorse both retributive and consequentialist justifications (Carlsmith, 2008; Darley, 2002; Orth, 2003). However, when people are asked to assign punishment, they do so proportionally to the seriousness of the offense, even when there is no deterrent or incapacitating value to it. Theorists have therefore concluded that factors linked to retributive theories (e.g., giving offenders their “just deserts” in proportion to the seriousness of the offense) seem to matter more for the magnitude of punishment than instrumentality (e.g., whether punishment leads to deterrence; for a review, see Carlsmith & Darley, 2008). These retributive reactions occur intuitively and heuristically (Aharoni & Fridlund, 2012; Carlsmith, 2006; Darley, 2009).

Our results demonstrate that people are most satisfied with punishment when it effects a change in the offender. These findings cannot be explained by a purely retributivist framework. If people merely aim at giving offenders what they deserve, feedback from the offender should not matter once that goal is achieved. While previous psychological studies have inferred retributive motives from people’s concern with proportional punishment, proportionality might also be important for communicating to the offender how wrong the behavior was (a backward-looking concern) and how much he or she needs to change (a forward-looking concern). If psychologists started to conceptualize punishment as a message, they could stop examining whether punishment is either backward-looking or forward-looking. It is likely that punishment is both.

In addition, a communicative conceptualization of punishment has more explanatory power than current retributive views with regard to addressing the social processes that come along with punishment. Punishment does not occur in a social vacuum but rather reflects social motives (for a review, see Gollwitzer, Keller, & Braun, 2012). For example, punishment restores the victim’s self-esteem (Bies & Tripp, 1998; Frijda, 1994; Zdaniuk & Bobocel, 2012) and restores consensus about shared values (Feather & Boeckmann, 2013; Okimoto & Wenzel, 2009; Skitka & Mullen, 2002). Future studies could investigate to what extent these variables are affected by pure punishment versus punishment that leads to moral change in the offender, and whether these variables are potential mediators of the effect of offender feedback on victims’ satisfaction with punishment.

Previous studies have shown that satisfaction is not the reason why people punish (Gollwitzer & Bushman, 2012). If one wants to interpret the findings of the present studies from a punishment goal perspective, one might interpret people’s anticipated and actual satisfaction with punishment as an indicator that a certain punishment goal has been achieved. The presented studies suggest that people aim at effecting a change in the offender when they decide to punish. Instead of focusing on purely deterrent or purely retributive motives, future studies should continue to investigate the punishment goal of rehabilitation (or re-education). These studies could also address whether the effect of offender feedback on victims’ satisfaction with punishment is mostly caused by a change in the offenders’ underlying attitudes or by a change in their behavior, a distinction that was confounded in the experimental design of Studies 2a and 2b. In addition, these studies could include a baseline condition of offender feedback that does not indicate whether offenders accepted or rejected the message of punishment to compare it with our no change condition (i.e., a mere offender acknowledgment condition, similar to Study 1). Such a baseline condition could help to examine whether feedback that explicitly expresses no change is simply less satisfying to punishers than feedback that explicitly expresses change, or whether the offender’s explicit resistance to change is even frustrating or disappointing to punishers because they have failed to achieve what they may regard as the ultimate goal of punishment.

Implications for Recent Philosophical Work on Punishment

The presented findings challenge philosophical discussions of punishment that argue, or presuppose, that people endorse a “bare” retributive norm; that is, in the words of Shaun Nichols, “a norm that wrongdoers should be punished because (and only because) of their past wrongdoing” (Nichols, 2013, p. 26; see also Gaus, 2011; Greene & Cohen, 2004; Moore, 1987). To extract a purely retributive punishment motive, Nichols cites experimental evidence suggesting that people will opt to punish a transgressor even if the transgressor is unaware of the punishment as such (i.e., participants decide to reduce a transgressor’s welfare in an economic game even if the transgressor did not know that he or she would receive a bonus at all; Nadelhoffer, Heshmati, Kaplan, & Nichols, 2013). While this evidence shows that punishment can be evoked in laboratory settings even when people cannot actually use their punishment to send a message to the offender, we think that it does not speak unequivocally to the underlying rationale of people’s punishment behavior. The findings obtained by Nadelhoffer and colleagues (2013) focus on when people punish (and apparently people punish even if there is no chance that the offender receives the message), but they do not address the question whether such ineffective punishment actually satisfies any goals. In addition, even if punishment is partly driven by purely retributive motives, it does not follow that a purely retributive theory is sufficient to explain the motivational forces underlying punitive reactions.

By contrast, the findings presented in this article are in line with communicative theories on punishment. Such a conceptualization of punishment is neither purely retributive nor consequentialist because punishment as communication “will now look both back (as retributivists insist it must) to a past crime as that which merits this response, and forward (as consequentialists insist it must) to some future good that it aims to achieve” (Duff, 2001, p. 89). Although communicative theories are criticized as justifications for the legitimacy of punishment by some philosophers (e.g., Hanna, 2008), they show great promise to study the reasons why people punish in a given situation.

Another possible interpretation of the current findings is that victims do not see punishment as an end in itself; instead, they use it as a means to effect something else, for instance, a change in the offender’s attitude. In the philosophical literature, forward-looking consequentialist rationales for punishment, like offender education, deterrence or reform, have taken a back seat to retributivism in recent years. But coupled with a newfound interest in restorative justice (see, for example, Braithwaite & Pettit, 1990; Gromet & Darley, 2009; Wenzel, Okimoto, Feather, & Platow, 2008), it may be that the pendulum has begun to swing back the other way. This is timely in our view because results like ours suggest that offender education and reform may resonate more with people’s punishment motives than research on retributive justice had previously indicated (e.g., Carlsmith & Darley, 2008). These forward-looking motivations could also explain why people punish even when the offender is unaware of the punishment (cf. Nadelhoffer et al., 2013). It is possible that by punishing offenders, punishers hope to influence the offender’s behavior or attitude indirectly, even without the offender’s awareness of these intentions.

Both communicative and consequentialist (including restorative) punishment theories are frameworks that acknowledge the importance of other factors than only retribution. Future philosophical debate should investigate how purely retributive concepts of punishment are affected by the current findings on the link between different kinds of offender feedback and victim satisfaction.

Implication for Legal Policies

Last, empirical findings on what brings victims satisfaction and closure after the experience of injustice may have implications for legal policies. It is inherent to social situations that people dynamically interact and communicate with each other. Our findings suggest that victims need a specific reaction from the offender after punishment to experience satisfaction. Yet in contemporary justice settings, the opportunity for such communicative exchanges between offenders and victims is extremely limited. The current results suggest that, supposing punishment has effected a change in an offender’s attitude, if victims were able to hear this from the offender, it might be psychologically beneficial. At the very least, victims should not be led to believe that their feeling of injustice can be attenuated by punishment alone. If legal procedures could in general allow for such interaction (e.g., not just in restorative justice conference settings), it could help victims to reach psychological closure and to give up bitterness.

Future studies should investigate whether feedback from the offender that signals understanding and change is particularly important for certain types of crimes, or whether it can also have negative effects for other types of crimes. Future studies should also examine ways in which victims can achieve closure after the experience of injustice and how they can be satisfied even if they decided to refrain from punishing the wrongdoer. Finally, for the present set of studies, we conceptualized justice-related satisfaction as a broad construct that included notions of satisfaction, deservingness, rumination, closure, and respect. Future research could also aim to tease apart potentially different subcomponents of victims’ punishment reactions (e.g., rumination, respect, and satisfaction) by using a different operationalization. Such studies could particularly examine whether different kinds of offender feedback might have differential impact on these or other subcomponents.

Conclusion

By showing that the effect of punishment is important for victims’ satisfaction with punishment the present findings provide a twofold extension on previous research (Carlsmith et al., 2008; Gollwitzer et al., 2011). First, they demonstrate that punishers are not only affected by the offender’s acknowledgment of their intent to punish, they are also aware of the importance of such acknowledgment when its presence or absence is brought to their attention. These findings suggest that punishers might aim for a reaction when they punish.

Second, our findings demonstrate that an offender’s change in moral attitude is ultimately what makes punishment satisfying. Previous research has found that punishers’ satisfaction is dependent on offenders’ showing that they understand why they are being punished (i.e., offenders’ acknowledgment of the victims’ intent to punish, Gollwitzer et al., 2011). Findings from Studies 2a and 2b suggest that such acknowledgment is not sufficient: Punishers’ satisfaction is critically modulated by whether or not victims think their punishment leads to a change in the offender’s attitude and behavior (moral change). It is only when offenders indicated such a change that punishers felt satisfied, agreeing that they now “could close the chapter.” By contrast, when punishers received explicit offender feedback indicating that no such change had occurred they were less satisfied. Indeed, in such cases, despite the offender’s acknowledgment of the victim’s intent to punish, punishers did not agree that “everybody got what they deserved.” We hope that these findings will inspire future psychological and philosophical researchers to pay close attention to communicative aspects of punishment and to look deeper into social motives and their role in punishment interactions.

Footnotes

Appendix

Acknowledgements

We thank Liridon Korcaj for his help in conducting Study 1 and John M. Darley for his helpful comments on a previous version of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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