This research proposal seeks to explain the way we punish by investigating the way we learn. It is motivated by a conclusion of research in psychology, biology and economics: Punishment functions to change the behavior of social partners, converting them from harm-doers to do-gooders. Consequently, human intuitions about punishment - and legal institutions that in part reflect those intuitions - may exhibit a match to the capacities and constraints of human learning. In other words, people will punish in ways and contexts that facilitate learning, and will avoid punishing in ways and contexts that fail to do so.
The proposed research targets two case studies. The first is the punishment of accidental outcomes. For instance, consider two drunk drivers who each fall asleep at the wheel. One hits a tree; she can expect an expensive ticket and a suspended license. Another hits and kills a person; he can face years in prison. Their behavior is identical, but the "luck" of the outcome leads to radically different punishments. Why? The proposed research tests an explanation grounded in the human capacity to learn from punishment, in particular the punishment of accidental outcomes. This is tested using games of chance, such as dice and darts, that produce accidents. When an accident happens, do people learn best when punished based on the outcome, or instead based on their intent? The answer will determine the optimal punishment strategy, potentially explaining actual human punishment behavior. The second case study involves the distinction between harmful commissions and omissions. Harms of commission are typically punished more than harms of omission, as indicated both in psychological research and by criminal law. The proposed research tests whether this derives from constraints on learning; specifically, whether people learn from punishment of commissions more effectively than from punishment of omissions.
From a young age, and across cultures, people tend to punish those who harm even when the harm was caused accidentally. Modern legal codes also provide for moderate punishment for some accidental harms. Yet, to punish accidents violates a widely-shared moral principle: most people also feel that a person should be excused from blame for an accident. How can these competing intuitions be reconciled? Our project was motivated by the hypothesis that we punish accidents because people learn from such punishment. For instance, imagine that a child accidentally breaks a plate while setting the table. Although the child did not intend to cause any harm, still a mild scolding might help the child to learn to be more careful in the future. Thus, we predicted that accidents would be fully excused when people judged moral character, as opposed to wrongness. This is because judgments of moral character are designed to predict a person's future behavior, rather than to modify it. Thus, whereas punishing accidents can be useful for teaching, derogating a person's character based on an accident has no such utility. We conducted a series of studies to test this hypothesis. Our first set of studies adapted methods from the field of behavioral economics. We showed that people will pay money to punish other people for harms caused accidentally -- in this case, harms caused by an unlucky roll of the dice. In contrast to punishment, however, our studies showed that people do not judge accidents harshly when making a character-based assessment. Specifically, we tested whether people would tend to avoid accidental harm-doers when choosing partners for future interactions. We found that people ignored accidents when choosing future partners. In our second set of studies we surveyed people in order to assess their moral judgments of hypothetical cases of harm-doing. Motivated by our hypothesis about the teaching value of punishing accidents, we hypothesized that people would cease to punish an accidents caused uncontrollably. (For example, a person who drops a plate during a seizure has acted uncontrollably, whereas a person who simply slips has acted in a manner that could, in principle, be controlled). We reasoned that there is no value in punishing an uncontrollable accident. Our results supported this hypothesis. We also predicted that this effect would not hold for judgments of moral character, again because judgments of character are not adapted to the purpose of changing others' behaviors. Our results supported this hypothesis as well. These findings support the view that the condemnation of accidents is a unique feature of punishment judgments, and does not arise for other categories of moral judgment such as judgments of character. This helps to explain why we may feel torn between competing perspectives when considering an accidental harm. On the one hand, our intuitions about punishment favor condemnation; on the other hand, our intuitions about character favor forgiveness. More broadly, these findings help us to understand the adaptive origins of punishment itself. We suggest that human intuitions about punishment are shaped by the functional role that punishment plays in modifying others' future behavior. Our findings have direct application to the psychological literature on moral judgment and behavior. They also speak to the biological roots of punishment and related forms of reactive aggression that are observed among non-human animals. Finally, they may help to inform philosophical theories of morality and punishment, as well as the structure of the law. Consequently, the publications resulting from our research are targeted to psychological and philosophical audiences. A complementary goal of our project is to inform the broader public about our research and its applications. We designed a series of informational publications targeted for use by high-school teachers as part of a classroom exercise. We disseminated these publications on a research website maintained by our lab, the Moral Sense Test (moral.wjh.harvard.edu).
