Motives for Punishing Powerful Vs. Powerless Offenders: The Mediating Role of Demonization

ABSTRACT

In the present research, we examine how power and group membership of an offender influence observers’ motives for punishment. As compared to powerless offenders, powerful offenders should elicit a stronger motivation of an observer to incapacitate them and protect society (i.e., utilitarian punishment motivation). Moreover, demonization of the offender (e.g., perceiving the offender as evil) should mediate the effect of power on punishing motives. Finally, we investigated whether group membership of an offender would moderate the effects of power on punishing motives. In three studies, we manipulated an offender’s power (high, low) and group membership (ingroup, outgroup, and – in Study 1 – ambiguous). Supporting our hypotheses, all three studies revealed that powerful offenders triggered stronger utilitarian punishment motivation as opposed to powerless offenders, while demonization of the offender mediated this effect. Moreover, Studies 1 and 2 showed that powerless offenders triggered stronger restorative punishment motivation as opposed to powerful offenders while low demonization of the offender mediated this effect. Contrary to our expectations, however, group membership did not moderate the effect of power on observer’s punishing motives. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Power
• group membership
• utilitarian and restorative motives for punishment
• demonization

Compliance with ethical standards

This research involves human participants. All procedures performed in this study were in

accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. For the current research we got approval from the Ethical Committee of the Free University of Amsterdam; Veste Commissie Wetenschap en Ethiek (Scientific and Ethical Review Board), Nr VCWE-2017-178.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Open practices

Data and Online Supplemental Materials are available from the Open Science Framework at:

https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/RZT5X

Preregistration of hypotheses and research plan: https://osf.io/ckebt/?view_only=80a2a6af828a4bc8884abc9251c89665

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. It is worth mentioning that in this research, no matter what their group membership was, offenders were always presented as part of the broader ingroup society (e.g., in Study 1, the offender was either British, Indian, or British-Indian but the offense was carried out in the UK).

2. In several situations (e.g., in multi-national societies, politics, sports etc.) some members cannot be classified clearly as ingroup or outgroup members because they have characteristics of two or more different groups (e.g., being half Indian and half British), and thus boundaries between the groups are blurred. In such cases, members are ascribed ambiguous group membership. In line with the ingroup over-exclusion theory (Leyens & Yzerbyt, 1992), people treat members with ambiguous membership as outgroup members, aiming to maintain clear group boundaries (Yzerbyt et al., 1995).

3. This study was pre-registered on OSF before data collection (https://osf.io/ckebt/?view_only=80a2a6af828a4bc8884abc9251c89665). It should be mentioned, however, that there were additional predictions and measures that have been excluded from the current work for efficient presentation; the additional measures are available in the online material on OSF.

4. Utilitarian motives for punishment can be distinguished between deterrent (both private and public) and incapacitative motives. For the very reason that the objective of all these motives is to control an offender’s future behavior, they are all included under the umbrella of utilitarian motives for punishment (see, Carlsmith & Darley, 2008). In line with prior research (Fousiani & Demoulin, 2019; Fousiani & Van Prooijen, 2019; Fousiani & van Prooijen, 2022a, 2022b; Fousiani et al., 2019) we calculated a general mean for utilitarian motives for punishment instead of three different means for each of those dimensions separately.

5. In this study, we also measured punishment intent as a proxy for severity of punishment. When controlling for punishment intent, the results are similar to the ones reported in the manuscript. Moreover, in all our studies we included measures of ingroup threat and ingroup typicality. Findings consistently showed that group membership of an offender, but not power, had a significant main effect on these variables. Yet, for the sake of brevity and because the focus of this work lies on punishment motives, we decided to exclude these variables from this study. The data regarding these variables can be accessed in the publicly available datasets.

6. We additionally included a measure for the perceived severity of the offense. When controlling for severity of the offense, the findings are similar to the ones reported in this section.

7. As in Study 2, we ran additional analyses controlling for severity of the offense. These analyses produced similar results to the ones reported in this section.

8. We also conducted two additional studies with a similar vignette but with slightly different offenses (e.g., stealing a wallet out of a colleague’s bag and money embezzlement). The results were largely similar as Study 1: Findings again showed a main effect of power on utilitarian and restorative punishment motives and demonization, as well as the indirect effect of power on punitive motives through demonization. These effects were again independent from group membership. We report the methods and results of the additional studies in the OSF.