Norm violation and punishment - a behavioral study

People punish norm violation, a behavior that contributes to the enforcement of social norms and serves as an important mechanism for human cooperation and the regulation of social life (Schiller et al., 2014). In third-party punishment (TPP) contexts, the offence is sanctioned by an individual not directly affected by it (e.g.: judges and jurors in criminal contexts) (Krueger and Hoffman, 2016). Although sentencing aims to be impartial, research consistently shows that non-legal factors, such as an offender’s race, age, gender, and professional status, can significantly influence sentencing decisions (Schmidt et al., 2023). One possible explanation for this influence comes from the Attribution Theory; judges faced with evaluating a defendant must make a complex decision in a context where full rationality is constrained by different factors, such as caseload pressure and other organizational limitations (Lehmann & Gomez, 2022). To do so, they may rely on so-called “ideal cognitive states”, which include “global, culturally derived stereotypes” related, for example, to an individual’s origin or age (Lehmann & Gomez, 2022; Schmidt & Kroska, 2023). In judicial context, judges might automatically activate negative stereotypes toward an individual, which can, in turn, lead to more negative evaluations and harsher punitive judgments (Gilbert et al., 2024). Another framework that may account in judicial outcomes is intergroup bias in TPP. When third parties are required to administer punishment, they are often not fully objective (Schiller et al., 2014; Guo et al., 2020). In fact, they tend to respond differently to norm violations committed by members of their own group (ingroup) compared to those committed by members of an outside group (outgroup). Justice research has shown that a person judges an outgroup perpetrator’s norm violation harsher than the same transgression coming from an ingroup perpetrator (Schiller et al., 2014). The impact of socioeconomic status (SES) on legal outcomes, however, remains ambiguous. Some studies suggest that individuals with high-prestige or high-SES backgrounds may receive harsher sentences (Maddan et al., 2012), whereas others report more lenient treatment for such individuals (Payne et al., 2011). In the present study, first-year psychology students will complete two tasks. First, they will be placed in a TPP context using vignette-based scenarios depicting norm violations of different degrees of severity committed by agents of high and low SES. Second, participants will complete an Implicit Association Test (IAT) specifically designed to assess their implicit biases toward individuals of high versus low SES. Altogether, this study aims to investigate the question, still yielding mixed findings in the literature, of the impact of the offender’s SES on the severity of punishment imposed by a third party.