Mathias Twardawski

The Motivational Basis of Punishment Mathias Twardawski

Learn more about why victims and observers of unfair treatment punish others



This collection of contributions by international experts in the field focuses on studies replicating and/or qualifying previous research on a specific hypothesis that has dominated scientific debate on publishment motives for the last 25 years: the "intuitive retributivism" hypothesis, i.e., people believe intuitively that offenders should be punished because they deserve it. All the studies reported underwent peer review prior to data collection and the evidence from all the studies was aggregated in a meta-analysis.

The contributions include a wide range of methodological approaches, such as economic games, information-search tasks, behavioral intentions, and self-reports. Moreover, data was collected from various populations, such as Germany, Italy, UK, and US, and from both adults and children. Lastly, several boundary conditions for the hypothesis were tested, such as the role of the punisher in the initial transgression, punisher status, transgression type or magnitude, centrality of punishment, thinking style, direct vs. indirect punishment, transgressor's power, and interindividual differences in punishers.