Brutality Under Cover of Ambiguity: Activating,Perpetuating,and Deactivating Covert Retributivism

Five studies tested four hypotheses on the drivers of punitive judgments. study 1 showed that people imposed covertly retributivist physical punishments on extreme norm violators when they could plausibly deny that is what they were doing (attributional ambiguity). studies 2 and 3 showed that covert retributivism could be suppressed by subtle accountability manipulations that cue people to the possibility that they might be under scrutiny. studies 4 and 5 showed how covert retributivism can become self-sustaining by biasing the lessons people learn from experience. covert retributivists did not scale back punitiveness in response to feedback that the justice system makes false-conviction errors but they did ramp up punitiveness in response to feedback that the system makes false-acquittal errors. taken together,the results underscore the paradoxical nature of covert retributivism: it is easily activated by plausible deniability and persistent in the face of false-conviction feedback but also easily deactivated by minimalist forms of accountability. © 2015 by the society for personality and social psychology,inc