Punishment in Humans: From Intuitions to Institutions

Humans have a strong sense of who should be punished, when, and how. Many features of these intuitions are consistent with a simple adaptive model: Punishment evolved as a mechanism toteach social partners how to behave in future interactions. Yet, it is clear that punishment as practiced in modern contexts transcends any biologically evolved mechanism; it also depends on cultural institutions including the criminal justice system and many smaller analogs in churches, corporations, clubs, classrooms, and so on. These institutions can be thought of as ak ind of‘exaptation’: a culturally evolved set of norms that exploits biologically evolved intuitions about when punishment is deserved in order to achieve cooperative benefits for social groups. Building a psychological model of human punishment is something like building a psychological model of Valentine’s Day: perhaps as alluring, and certainly as fraught. What should a psychological model of Valentine’s Day consist of? Human behavior on February 14 is deeply grounded in a long adaptive history of sexual reproduction, in the biology of pair bonding, in the psychology of courtship, and so on. It would be a tremendous folly to regard Valentine’s Day as an arbitrary bundle of cultural norms, as if we might have been equally likely to give Hershey’s kicks as kisses. Yet, it would be equally foolish to approach Valentine’s Day as a pure psychological object. Valentine’s Day is a holiday, after all, and not just a concept or a behavior. It cannot be understood in isolation of the influenceof Hallmark, or the symbolicvalue of roses and chocolate, or even the unlikely historical significance of a fifth century Christian martyr (one for whom the theoretical analogy between love and punishment became all too real). Valentine’s Day lives somewhere at the intersection of these two forces: it is a cultural institution that has hijacked a set of evolved psychological mechanisms. Punishment ismuch the same.Nodoubt, there issomesense in treating punishmentasa psychological process. There exist a set of stimuli that the brain perceives; it processes these stimuli according to a set of computations; this ultimately results in a behavior such as punishment, or the judgment that it is deserved. This psychological level of analysis is a genuinely helpful approach as we try to understand the ways in which punishment in the world reflects something about processes in our heads. But ending the story of human punishment there might be nearly as unsatisfying as ending the story of Valentine’s Day with the evolutionary dynamics of sexual reproduction and neurological effects of oxytocin. In any event, it would certainly be as incomplete.Muchpunishmentaspracticedby humanstodayisregulated and institutionalized. An obvious example is the criminal justice system, but similar mechanisms exist in clubs, schools, families, churches, and corporations. Thus, a model of ‘human punishment’ cannot merely specify a process of perception, computation, and behavior. We must also explain the social function of this process, and its interaction with cultural institutions. Thisessaysummarizescurrentresearchonthepsychologicalmechanismsthatguideourjudgments about punishment, as well as their adaptive history. It also attempts to explain how they do, and don’t, contribute to modern institutions that carry out punishment. Finally, it argues that modern institutions have hijacked an evolved psychology of punishment, in much the