Current literature suggests that laypeople’s punishment is primarily driven by retributive reasons (i.e., to give offender their just deserts) rather than utilitarian purposes such as special prevention (i.e., to prevent recidivism of the offender) or general prevention (i.e., to prevent the imitation of the crime by others). One explanation for this may be that individuals tend to focus on salient cues while ignoring others when making a decision and critically, generally pay relatively little attention to secondary or long-term effects of their decision-making. This suggests that people’s punishment goals may be subject to the information salient about the crime situation. Specifically, individuals may only pursue utilitarian goals with their punishment, if aspects related to such long-term consequences of punishment are salient (such as information about the offender or the broad circumstances surrounding the crime). To examine this, we manipulated the salience of different aspects in a scenario describing a crime. In two preregistered experiments, participants were asked to choose from (Experiment 1, N = 291) or rate the appropriateness of (Experiment 2, N = 366) different reactions to the crime; these reactions were pretested for the degree to which they served each of the punishment goals: retribution, special prevention, and general prevention. As hypothesized, we found that participants’ punishment goals were associated with the salience of specific aspects of the scenario describing the crime situation. This extends on research suggesting that laypeople’s punishment goals are malleable and may depend on the research design employed by a particular study.

中文翻译：

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都是关于报应的吗？惩罚目标的灵活性

当前的文献表明，外行人的惩罚主要是由报应性原因（即给犯罪者留下自己的沙漠）而不是诸如特殊预防（即防止犯罪者再犯）或一般性预防（即防止模仿）之类的功利性目的驱动的。他人犯罪）。对此的一种解释可能是，个人在做出决定时倾向于侧重于明显的提示，而忽略了其他提示，并且批判地，通常很少关注其决策的次要或长期影响。这表明人们的惩罚目标可能受有关犯罪情况的信息的影响。具体来说，个人只能通过惩罚来追求功利目标，与惩罚的这种长期后果相关的方面是否显着（例如有关犯罪者的信息或犯罪周围的广泛情况）。为了对此进行研究，我们在描述犯罪的场景中操纵了不同方面的显着性。在两个预先注册的实验中，要求参与者从（实验1，（N  = 291）或 对犯罪的不同反应（实验2，N = 366）进行适当性评分；对这些反应进行预先测试，以了解它们在各个惩罚目标中所能达到的程度：报应，特殊预防和全面预防。如假设的那样，我们发现参与者的惩罚目标与描述犯罪情况的特定场景的显着性有关。这延伸到研究表明外行人的惩罚目标是可延展的，并且可能取决于特定研究采用的研究设计。