Stefania Ottone (Università di Torino)

Seminar series “CLOSER, but not quite” – Intrinsic disutility of punishment: a survey experiment

Venue: Campus Luigi Einaudi, room 3 D1 01

Abstract: The social sciences, and economics in particular, have emphasized for a long time the crucial role of third-party punishment since it has been defined as the Golden Keystone of Human Cooperation and Social Stability (Lewisch, 2020 for a brief survey). Usually, interdisciplinary studies underline the private cost of punishment (Galle and Mungan 2021) as well as both its social and private benefits (Levy, 2022). The category of benefits covers all non-instrumental motivations, ranging from considerations of just desert and justice to the “sweet taste of revenge”. However, little evidence is provided on the existence and impact of the “inverse category”, namely a possible negative non-instrumental utility that people may experience when punishing another person. The basic idea of this “intrinsic disutility of punishment” has been formulated by Nobel prize laureate James Buchanan (Buchanan 1975), describing a second category of punishment costs that goes beyond the ‘regular’ resource components (for investigations, proceedings, etc.) required for penal enforcement. This second category captures the negative emotions by the punisher associated with the deliberate infliction of a bad onto someone else. ‘Intrinsic disutility’ accounts for the straightforward fact that people normally do not like to harm another being. Our research question is: in a third-party (altruistic) punishment scenario, which factor (the intrinsic utility or the intrinsic disutility) will dominate under what conditions? In our study, we want to detect whether personal traits (like prosociality and empathy), experiences, social context and the severity of a crime (assault vs theft) may influence the relative weight of intrinsic disutility of third-party punishment.