A recent study discovered that people are more influenced by their peers to punish than they would be if making the decision on their own when participating in a group that is entrusted with selecting how to punish someone.
“People can get together in a group and be intensified by the other people in their group to behave in ways they wouldn’t typically when alone, including becoming more punitive,” said Oriel FeldmanHall, an assistant professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University and senior researcher on the study. “Even in a fairly sterile laboratory setting, when you’re just exposed to the minimal preferences of a few other people, it is enough to amplify your punishment recommendations of perpetrators by 40 percent.”
The findings were published on Monday, Aug. 12, in the journal Scientific Reports.
FeldmanHall, who is affiliated with Brown’s Carney Institute for Brain Science, and her research team conducted five experiments involving almost 400 participants. Four studies examined people’s readiness to penalize those who acted selfishly in economic duties, and one entailed formulating penalty suggestions for fictitious offenders of crimes of various seriousness.
In every experiment, participants chose whether or not to penalize the offender either individually or as a group. The research measured variations in partiality as well: In some experiments, the decision-maker was required to act as an objective juror; in others, they were instructed to pretend they were the victim of an unfair offer or a mock crime.
People can get together in a group and be intensified by the other people in their group to behave in ways they wouldn’t typically when alone, including becoming more punitive. Even in a fairly sterile laboratory setting, when you’re just exposed to the minimal preferences of a few other people, it is enough to amplify your punishment recommendations of perpetrators by 40 percent.
Oriel FeldmanHall
The team found that as the number of pro-punishment people in the group increased, other participants become up to 40 percent more willing to recommend punishing a perpetrator, FeldmanHall said. This pattern persisted whether the person in the experiment was a victim who had suffered harm or an unbiased juror.
However, they also found some differences. Victims were more easily persuaded to accept punishment by their peers. Comparatively, jurors were less likely than victims to follow community norms, and they additionally considered the gravity of the offender’s crime while determining whether to punish.
The researchers discovered that participants used both their peers’ preferences as a guidepost for how much they should value punishment and were less cautious about making decisions when they believed they were only one voice among many by using a computational model that describes how people use contextual information to make decisions.
“When punishment is delegated to groups, there’s the benefit of pooling people’s preferences and perspectives, but it also introduces the danger that people will conform to the group’s preferences,” said Jae-Young Son, first author on the paper and a doctoral student in FeldmanHall’s lab.
“In real-world contexts, such as a jury, there’s a possibility that being part of a group will make everyone within the group less cautious about their decisions that may be sufficient to convince some people to conform to the majority opinion, and that creates increasingly large majorities that eventually convince everyone else.”
Although these results may seem alarming in certain contexts, FeldmanHall added that conformity can also be adaptive it helps humans survive.
“People use each other as a reference points all the time because it is adaptive and helpful for gathering information,” she said. “Looking to other people, and how they approach a justice dilemma, can although not always be a useful thing.”
However, more research is needed to understand the extent to which people are willing to be flexible about moral decisions, she added.
Both the Brown community and online via Amazon Mechanical Turk were used to find participants, which are two typical methods for this kind of experimentation. FeldmanHall said she prefers to use both methods of recruitment to ensure that the team’s results are robust.
In addition to FeldmanHall and Son, Brown investigator Apoorva Bhandariwas an author on the paper. The research was supported by Brown internal funding.
