The accessibility of justice-related concepts can validate intentions to punish

Abstract

The present study examined the impact of the accessibility of justice-related concepts when assigning punishment. Across two experiments, participants first were paired with either a pro-social or anti-social target. Next, participants received either an ethics prime (Experiments 1 and 2) or a legality prime (Experiment 2) compared with a control prime (Experiments 1 and 2). Finally, participants reported their intentions to punish the target by taking money from him in an economic game (Experiment 1) or their behavioral intentions to punish the target (Experiment 2). We predicted and found that punishment assignment was greater for those participants who were paired with the anti-social target and activated the idea of justice-related concepts than for those who did not activate it.

Keywords::

• social justice
• just deserts
• self-validation
• priming
• punishment

Acknowledgements

We thank Pablo Briñol, Borja Paredes, Agustín Pedrazzoli and Louis Sánchez for their comments and corrections on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ When the four participants were included in the analysis, the two-way interaction remained significant, F(1, 84) = 3.977, p = .049, η² = .05.

² Pairwise comparisons were conducted between contrasts. The difference between control and ethics prime was statistically significant, t(171) = − 2.58, p = .011, as well as the difference between control and legality prime, t(171) = − 2.75, p = .007, but the difference between legality and ethics prime did not yield significance, t(171) = .29, p = .77. The difference between the ethics and legality primes taken together and the control prime was also statistically significant, t(171) = − 3.11, p = .002.

³ Pairwise comparisons were conducted between contrasts. The difference between control and ethics primes did not yield significance, t(171) = 0.84, p = .4, nor did the difference between control and legality prime, t(171) = 1.44, p = .15, nor the difference between legality and ethics prime, t(171) = − .60, p = .55.