Abstract Faced with punishing severe offenders, why do some prefer imprisonment whereas others impose death? Previous research exploring death penalty attitudes has primarily focused on individual and cultural factors. Adopting a functional perspective, we propose that environmental features may also shape our punishment strategies. Individuals are attuned to the availability of resources within their environments. Due to heightened concerns with the costliness of repeated offending, we hypothesize that individuals tend towards elimination-focused punishments during times of perceived scarcity. Using global and United States data sets (studies 1 and 2), we find that indicators of resource scarcity predict the presence of capital punishment. In two experiments (studies 3 and 4), we find that activating concerns about scarcity causes people to increase their endorsement for capital punishment, and this effect is statistically mediated by a reduced willingness to risk repeated offenses. Perceived resource scarcity shapes our punishment preferences, with important policy implications.

中文翻译：

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死刑与惩罚：资源稀缺增加了对死刑的认可

摘要 面对严惩重罪犯，为什么有人喜欢坐牢，有人喜欢死刑？先前探索死刑态度的研究主要集中在个人和文化因素上。从功能的角度来看，我们提出环境特征也可能影响我们的惩罚策略。个人会适应其环境中资源的可用性。由于对反复冒犯的代价的高度关注，我们假设个人在感到匮乏的时候倾向于以消除为重点的惩罚。使用全球和美国的数据集（研究 1 和 2），我们发现资源稀缺性指标可以预测死刑的存在。在两个实验（研究 3 和 4）中，我们发现，激发对稀缺性的担忧会导致人们增加对死刑的认可，而这种影响在统计上是通过降低重复犯罪风险的意愿来调节的。感知资源稀缺性塑造了我们的惩罚偏好，具有重要的政策含义。