Marking the Boundaries of Punishment: Retribution Directed at Innocents, Animals & Collectives

了解人类惩罚欲望的动机对于建立有效和公平的法律的制度至关重要。惩罚性动机是出于威慑未来的不法行为者和更好地保护社会的愿望，还是出于对过去的不良行为给予罪犯应得惩罚的报复性驱动？要找到一个值得惩罚的实体，必须存在哪些因素，这些因素如何影响我们惩罚性反应的严重性？虽然我们的司法系统以刑法典、量刑指南和其他法律的规则的形式为这些问题提供了答案，但很少有证据表明这些规定与人们对惩罚的直觉相一致。 此外，过去的心理学研究试图分离出人们想要惩罚罪犯的动机，但由于难以区分报复性动机和一般威慑性动机，因此没有得出结论。利用在线和实验室实验，本项目旨在提供更明确的证据，证明存在一个具体的报复动机。 该项目还旨在记录报复的范围。 这种惩罚的动机是否依赖于行为者具有成人的精神状态和道德能力，或者通常被认为不适合国家一级惩罚的实体--包括儿童、精神能力有限的成年人和非人类实体--是否可以成为适当的惩罚对象？ 该项目的数据将对一些紧迫的政策问题至关重要，包括将更多惩罚性原则纳入州和联邦刑法的运动，以及最高法院最近限制死刑的举措。 虽然该项目最直接的受益者应该是学者、法官和法律的决策者，但该项目也旨在加强对法律和心理学交叉领域的下一代学者的教育、培训和指导。

Understanding what motivates the human desire to punish is essential for building an effective and fair legal system. Are punitive motivations informed by a desire to deter future wrongdoers and better protect society or by a retributive drive to deliver just deserts to offenders for past bad acts? What factors must be present to find an entity punishment-worthy and how do these factors impact the severity of our punitive response? While our judicial system offers answers to these questions in the form of penal codes, sentencing guidelines, and other legal rules, there is scant evidence to show that these provisions align with people's intuitions about punishment. Additionally, past psychological research that has tried to isolate the motivations underlying people's desire to punish offenders is inconclusive, owing to the difficulty of separating retributive and general deterrence motivations. Using online and laboratory experiments, the present project aims to provide much clearer evidence for the existence of a specifically retributive motive. The project also aims to document the scope of retribution. Does this motivation to punish rely on the actor having human adult mental states and moral capacities or can entities generally thought to be inappropriate targets for state-level punishment - including children, adults with limited mental capacities, and non-human entities - be appropriate recipients of punishment? The data from this project will be critical to a number of pressing policy issues, including the movement incorporating more retributive principles into state and federal criminal law, and recent moves to place limitations on capital punishment by the Supreme Court. Although the project should yield benefits most directly for scholars, judges, and legal policymakers, the project is also designed to enhance the educating, training, and mentoring of the next generation of scholars at the intersection of law and psychology.