People commit crimes. They are punished. They begin to cooperate. This basic intuition that people are rational and therefore respond to punishment by changing their behavior underlies Western legal systems, economic theories of crime, and evolutionary theories of cooperation. The only problem is that decades of research show that punishment doesn't actually work.
Analyzes previous studies consistently show that harsher punishments such as “three strikes laws do not reduce crime rates. report Regarding the death penalty, the US National Research Council has been unable to conclude that it is effective. Meanwhile, in the United States, which has one of the most punitive criminal justice systems in the world, there is a high level of detention And recidivism.
These real results contradict many experimental data in the literature. In the famous studyEconomists Ernst Fehr and Simon Gächter created a game in which players were given money and the opportunity to contribute to a common pool. The pool was multiplied and redistributed among the players, meaning that everyone won the most when everyone contributed. But each person would be better off not contributing while others were doing so. When participants were unable to punish free riders, cooperation decreased, but when punishment was introduced, contributions to the pool increased sharply.
So what happens in the real world that experiments don't capture? We explored this mystery in a recent episode paper V PNAS. We began with the observation that in society, people in punitive roles often have incentives that undermine their legitimacy and undermine our trust in them. IN Ferguson, MissouriOfficials used fines to fund city services, disproportionately targeting black residents. Billions of dollars were confiscated in the United States. civil asset forfeiturewhich allows police to confiscate property from those suspected of involvement in a crime.
We hypothesized that these kinds of self-serving motives for punishment can destroy cooperation because they distort its moral signal. Unlike other animals, humans have a “theory of mind”—we are hyper-attuned to the intentions and motivations of others. Punishment sends a signal of disapproval that requires behavior change. But this signal only works if we believe that the punisher’s motives are fair. Humans are social creatures who ask, “Why are you doing this to us?” If the response seems self-serving, punishment loses its power to promote cooperation.
To test this idea, we conducted a series of experiments using the same games that showed how punishment promotes cooperation. In these games, one player (the dictator) decides whether to share the money with another (the recipient), and a third (the punisher) can take the money from the dictator. But we added a twist: we paid the punishers. Just as when police departments use ticket quotas to increase revenue, our punishers received a financial bonus every time they punished a dictator. And when we did this, the classic effect was reversed: instead of encouraging cooperation, punishment undermined it. People were less willing to cooperate because their trust in the punishers had decreased.
Our findings show that we need to rethink the fight against crime. When punishers are seen as self-serving, punishment breeds distrust and undermines the cooperation it is intended to foster. If we want to build safer and more cohesive communities, we need to abandon practices that compromise the moral meaning of punishment. This includes eliminating measures such as speeding ticket quotas and commercial incarceration, practices that signal that punishment is driven by profit rather than justice.
Raihan Alam and Tage Rai are students at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego.
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