Why do we punish?: Deterrence and just deserts as motives for punishment.

One popular justification for punishment is the just deserts rationale: A person deserves punishment proportionate to the moral wrong committed. A competing justification is the deterrence rationale: Punishing an offender reduces the frequency and likelihood of future offenses. The authors examined the motivation underlying laypeople's use of punishment for prototypical wrongs. Study 1 (N=336) revealed high sensitivity to factors uniquely associated with the just deserts perspective (e.g., offense seriousness, moral trespass) and insensitivity to factors associated with deterrence (e.g., likelihood of detection, offense frequency). Study 2 (N=329) confirmed the proposed model through structural equation modeling (SEM). Study 3 (N=351) revealed that despite strongly stated preferences for deterrence theory, individual sentencing decisions seemed driven exclusively by just deserts concerns. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Cognitive consequences of forced compliance.

Atest of some hypotheses generated by Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance, viz., that "if a person is induced to do or say something which is contrary to his private opinion, there will be a tendency for him to change his opinion so as to bring it into correspondence with what he has done or said. The larger the pressure used to elicit the overt behavior… the weaker will be the… tendency… . The results strongly corroborate the theory." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Some hedonic consequences of the confirmation and disconfirmation of expectances.

In a test of the hypothesis that events which disconfirm expectancies will be perceived as unpleasant, Ss tasted a random sequence of sweet and bitter solutions. On the basis of certain signals given by the E, they developed expectancies or hypotheses about whether the next solution would be bitter or sweet. On trials when the Ss' expectancies were disconfirmed due to incorrect signals, the solutions were judged to taste more unpleasant. Thus, a bitter solution was rated more bitter; a sweet solution was rated less sweet. The results were interpreted in terms of Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effect of the severity of threat on the devaluation of forbidden behavior.

If a person is induced to cease performing a desired action through the threat of punishment, he will experience dissonance. His cognition that he is not performing the action is dissonant with his cognition that the action is desirable. An effective way of reducing dissonance is by derogating the action. The greater the threat of punishment the less the dissonance—since a severe threat is consonant with ceasing to perform the action. Thus, the milder the threat, the greater will be a person's tendency to derogate the action. In a laboratory experiment 22 preschool children stopped playing with a desired toy in the face of either a mild or severe threat of punishment. The mild threat led to more derogation of the toy than the severe threat. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of expectancy on volunteering for an unpleasant experience.

In a laboratory experiment, Ss performed 2 tasks, one unpleasant, the other neutral. They were then led to expect that they would have to perform one of the tasks again. When subsequently presented with a choice, there was an increase in the probability of their choosing the expected task, even when it was objectively less pleasant. The results were interpreted in terms of an extension of the theory of cognitive dissonance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ambient temperature and the occurrence of collective violence: A new analysis.

Prevalent folklore suggests that riots tend to occur during periods of very hot weather. R. A. Baron and V. M. Ransberger (see record 1979-05912-001) examined 102 major riots in the US between 1967 and 1971 and concluded that the frequency of collective violence and ambient temperature are curvilinearly related. The present article argues that the Baron and Ransberger analysis did not take account of the different number of days in different temperature ranges. The artifact was eliminated in the present study, and the probability of a riot, conditional upon temperature, was estimated. Evidence suggests that the conditional probability of a riot increases monotonically with temperature. (7 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The paradoxical consequences of revenge.

People expect to reap hedonic rewards when they punish an offender, but in at least some instances, revenge has hedonic consequences that are precisely the opposite of what people expect. Three studies showed that (a) one reason for this is that people who punish continue to ruminate about the offender, whereas those who do not punish "move on" and think less about the offender, and (b) people fail to appreciate the different affective consequences of witnessing and instigating punishment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Communicator credibility and communication discrepancy as determinants of opinion change.

The theory of cognitive dissonance suggests that opinion change is a function of a specific complex interaction between the credibility of the communicator and the discrepancy of the communication from the initial attitude of the recipient. In a laboratory experiment, Ss who read a communication that was attributed to a highly credible source showed greater opinion change when the opinion of the source was presented as being increasingly discrepant from their own. In sharp contrast to this was the behavior of Ss who were exposed to the same communication—attributed to a source having only moderate credibility. In this condition, increasing the discrepancy increased the degree of opinion change only to a point; as discrepancy became more extreme, however, the degree of opinion change decreased. The results support predictions from the theory and suggest a reconciliation of previously contradictory findings. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)