Humans balance victim compensation and future deterrence in shared sense of justice

Léo Fitouchi of the Toulouse School of Economics and Manvir Singh of the University of California, Davis, conducted a study to determine why humans feel the need to punish bad behavior.

The researchers tested a theory suggesting that human punishment serves a dual purpose: restoring a balance by compensating a victim for material loss and imposing an extra penalty to prevent future exploitation.

This model addresses a tension between pure deterrence and retributive feelings, where people want offenders to suffer in proportion to the harm caused. The researchers first tested this theory with 74 members of the Mentawai, a rainforest horticulturalist population in Indonesia. In Mentawai society, justice often happens directly between families through fines called tulou, which involve resources like pigs or fruit trees.

Participants reacted with higher moral outrage and demanded larger fines when an offender caused extra harm to a victim without gaining extra benefit. The findings showed that participants wanted victims compensated for their specific losses while also demanding an additional penalty to deter repeat offenses. The team then replicated the experiment with 600 participants in the United States to see if these patterns exist in industrialized societies.

Using scenarios involving disputes between farmers over livestock and gardens, the American participants showed similar results to those in Indonesia. They demanded extra penalties beyond simple restitution for most offenses, especially in cases of repeat crimes. However, nearly half of the American participants decided that accidental harms required no extra penalty beyond replacing the exact value of the destroyed property.