Why do some societies exhibit more antisocial punishment than others? Martin explores both some literature on the subject, and his own experience liv…
Punished by Victor M Rios | East Bay Booksellers
Honorable Mention, 2014 Eduardo Bonilla-Silva Outstanding Book Award presented by the Society for the Study of Social Problems2012 Best Book Award, Latino/a Sociology Section, presented by the American Sociological Association2012 Finalist, C.
Why Elite White-Collar Criminals Are Rarely Punished
White-collar criminals benefit from institutionalized non-enforcement practices, regulatory policies, and legal representation not available to street criminals.
Discipline and Punish
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is a 1975 book by French philosopher Michel Foucault. It is an analysis of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the changes that occurred in Western penal systems during the modern age based on historical documents from France. Foucault argues that prison did not become the principal form of punishment just because of the humanitarian concerns of reformists. He traces the cultural shifts that led to the predominance of prison via the body and power. Prison is used by the "disciplines" – new technological powers that can also be found, according to Foucault, in places such as schools, hospitals, and military barracks.
Early violence is a bad teacher. But the mind can learn anew | Aeon Essays
A world of violence sustains itself through guns, poverty and other social ills, but also through the minds it creates
The Deaths of Effective Altruism
Sam Bankman-Fried is finally facing punishment. Let’s also put his ruinous philosophy on trial.
La banalité du mal : ce que dit la recherche en psychologie sociale
La violence dans les hiérarchies sociales est exercée par des individus qui se distinguent des autres par leur orientation autoritaire.
From Haymarket to Prairieland: How dissent has unleashed the long arm of the law
The Prairieland sentencing has dark historical parallels, Kim Kelly writes. But we can change the end of the current story.
How social norms emerge: The interindividual actor–critic.
Integrative experiments identify how punishment affects welfare in public goods games
Despite decades of research, the conditions under which punishment promotes cooperation remain unclear. Through an integrative experiment varying 14 design parameters of public goods games across 360 experimental conditions (147,618 decisions from 7100 participants), we reveal substantial heterogeneity in punishment effectiveness: Its impact on welfare ranges from 43% improvement to 44% reduction depending on the game parameters. To characterize these patterns, we developed models that outperformed human forecasters in predicting punishment effectiveness in new experiments. Communication emerges as the most important factor, followed by contribution framing (opt out versus opt in), contribution type (variable versus all-or-nothing), game length, and outcome visibility, though these factors often interact. The results reframe the debate from whether punishment works to when it does, demonstrating how integrative experiments enable discovery of generalizable patterns in social phenomena. , Editor’s summary People face conflicts between maximizing personal gain versus supporting collective interests. If we cooperatively recycle or donate to charities, it benefits society, but it also costs us time and resources that could be selfishly preserved for ourselves. We impose penalties to deter those undesirable or selfish behaviors, but under what conditions do punishments or penalties effectively modify behavior to benefit group welfare? Alsobay et al . systematically and simultaneously varied 14 factors together instead of in isolation. Punishment was unequivocally most effective when paired with consistent communication, particularly over time. Another effective factor was “opting out” or withdrawing some, but not all, endowments already in the public fund. These methodological advances revealed when, rather than whether, punishment works. —Ekeoma Uzogara , INTRODUCTION Human societies face many situations where individual and collective interests conflict, often referred to as social dilemmas. Costly peer punishment has been studied for more than 25 years in public goods games (stylized behavioral experiments in which individuals decide how much to contribute to a shared pool that benefits everyone) as a mechanism to promote cooperation. Prior research has identified many contextual factors that moderate punishment’s effectiveness, including game length, communication, group size, punishment cost, and so on. However, the specific conditions under which punishment improves group welfare remain unclear. RATIONALE We argue that this lack of clarity derives from the dominant experimental paradigm, in which any given study manipulates only one or a few theoretically informed factors. Because such studies differ in many ways (different experimental procedures, populations), their results are often difficult to compare or integrate. Consequently, one can list many factors that have some effect, but cannot say how much each matters relative to the others, or how they work together, and as a result, cannot predict when punishment will help or harm welfare in new settings. To address this fundamental knowledge gap, we use an integrative experimental design and systematically vary 14 parameters across 360 conditions (147,618 decisions from 7100 participants) to elucidate when punishment improves versus undermines welfare in public goods games, which factors matter most, and how they interact. RESULTS The effect of punishment on welfare ranged from 43% improvement to 44% reduction depending on the specific combination of game parameters. To characterize this heterogeneity, we trained a model that outperformed all 553 human forecasters (laypeople and experts) in predicting whether punishment would help or harm welfare in new experiments. Communication emerged as roughly three times more important than any other factor, followed by contribution framing (opt in versus opt out), contribution type (variable versus all-or-nothing), game length, and peer outcome visibility (whether participants can see others’ earnings). These factors often interact. For example, longer games enhance punishment’s effectiveness only when communication is available, and contribution framing effects depend on both contribution type and outcome visibility. CONCLUSION Many phenomena in social science are shaped by many factors whose interactions are consequential, yet the dominant experimental paradigm often limits its inquiry to “does a given effect exist?” and examines hypothesized factors in isolation. As a result, research programs can accumulate many partial explanations without a clear picture of how they combine to determine outcomes across settings. Knowing that factors matter individually is fundamentally different from knowing how much each matters and how they interact. The integrative approach implemented here offers one way forward. It varies many factors simultaneously within a shared design space, evaluates models by their predictive accuracy on new experiments, and probes those models to constrain and develop theory. Our hope is that integrative experiment designs, combined with models that integrate prediction and explanation, represent a path toward more cumulative social science. Integrative experiment reveals when punishment helps versus harms. We systematically varied 14 design parameters across 360 experimental conditions. The effect of punishment on cooperation efficiency ranged from −44% to +43% depending on the specific game parameters. Communication emerged as three times more important than any other factor, followed by contribution framing, contribution type, and game length.
What people learn from punishment: A cognitive model
Authorities, from parents of toddlers to leaders of formal institutions, use punishment to communicate disapproval and enforce social norms. Ideally, from whether and how severely a transgression is punished, targets and observers infer shared social norms. Yet in light of every punitive choice, observers also evaluate the motives and legitimacy of the authority. Here, we show that the effects of punishment can only be understood by considering these inferences simultaneously. We measured human observers’ joint inferences empirically in three preregistered experiments ( N = 1 , 254 ) and developed a rational Bayesian model using an inverse planning framework that captures and explains these inferences and their interactions quantitatively and parsimoniously. When people have different priors about norms or authorities, the model predicted and we experimentally confirmed that observing punishment by the authority can sustain polarization. This work reveals the rational logic behind how people learn from punishment and a key constraint on the function of punishment in establishing shared social norms.
Abolishing the police and prisons is a lot more practical than critics claim
Mariame Kaba's new book “We Do This ‘Til We Free Us” is a pragmatic playbook for a world without walls.
How Human Traffickers Force Victims Into Cyberscamming — ProPublica
Tens of thousands of people from across Asia have been coerced into defrauding people in America and around the world out of millions of dollars. Those who resist face beatings, food deprivation or worse.
Social Norms
Social norms, the informal rules that govern behavior in groups andsocieties, have been extensively studied in the social sciences.Anthropologists have described how social norms function in differentcultures (Geertz 1973), sociologists have focused on their socialfunctions and how they motivate people to act (Durkheim 1895 [1982],1950 [1957]; Parsons 1937; Parsons & Shils 1951; James Coleman1990; Hechter & Opp 2001), and economists have explored howadherence to norms influences market behavior (Akerlof 1976; Young1998a). More recently, also legal scholars have touted social norms asefficient alternatives to legal rules, as they may internalizenegative externalities and provide signaling mechanisms at little orno cost (Ellickson 1991; Posner 2000).