We propose that intuitions about modern mass-level criminal justice emerge from evolved mechanisms designed to operate in ancestral small-scale societies. By hypothesis, individuals confronted with a crime compute two distinct psychological magnitudes: one that reflects the crime's seriousness and another that reflects the criminal's long-term value as an associate. These magnitudes are computed based on different sets of cues and are fed into motivational mechanisms regulating different aspects of sanctioning. The seriousness variable regulates how much to react (e.g., how severely we want to punish); the variable indexing the criminal's association value regulates the more fundamental decision of how to react (i.e., whether we want to punish or repair). Using experimental designs embedded in surveys, we validate this theory across several types of crime and two countries. The evidence augments past research and suggests that the human mind contains dedicated psychological mechanisms for restoring social relationships following acts of exploitation.

中文翻译：

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惩罚还是修复？进化心理学和关于现代刑事司法的外行直觉。

我们提出，关于现代大规模刑事司法的直觉来自旨在在祖先小规模社会中运作的进化机制。根据假设，面对犯罪的个人计算两个不同的心理量级：一个反映犯罪的严重性，另一个反映罪犯作为同伙的长期价值。这些量级是根据不同的线索集计算出来的，并被输入到调节制裁不同方面的激励机制中。严重性变量调节反应的程度（例如，我们想要惩罚的严重程度）；对罪犯的联想价值进行索引的变量调节了如何反应的更基本的决定（即，我们是想惩罚还是修复）。使用嵌入在调查中的实验设计，我们在多种类型的犯罪和两个国家中验证了这一理论。证据增强了过去的研究，并表明人类的思想包含专门的心理机制，用于在剥削行为后恢复社会关系。