How People Interpret Punishment Depends on Their Prior Beliefs

From toddlers’ timeouts to criminals’ prison sentences, punishment reinforces social norms, making it known that an offender has done something unacceptable. At least, that is usually the intent – but the strategy can backfire. When a punishment is perceived as too harsh, observers can be left with the impression that an authority figure is motivated by something other than justice.

It can be hard to predict what people will take away from a particular punishment, because everyone makes their own inferences not just about the acceptability of the act that led to the punishment, but also the legitimacy of the authority who imposed it. A new computational model developed by scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research makes sense of these complex cognitive processes, recreating the ways people learn from punishment and revealing how their reasoning is shaped by their prior beliefs.

Their work, reported Aug. 4 in the journal PNAS, explains how a single punishment can send different messages to different people, and even strengthen the opposing viewpoints of groups who hold different opinions about authorities or social norms.

“The key intuition in this model is the fact that you have to be evaluating simultaneously both the norm to be learned and the authority who’s punishing,” says McGovern investigator and John W. Jarve Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences Rebecca Saxe, who led the research. “One really important consequence of that is even where nobody disagrees about the facts – everybody knows what action happened, who punished it, and what they did to punish it – different observers of the same situation could come to different conclusions.”

For example, she says, a child who is sent to timeout after biting a sibling might interpret the event differently than the parent. One might see the punishment as proportional and important, teaching the child not to bite.But if the biting, to the toddler, seemed a reasonable tactic in the midst of a squabble, the punishment might be seen as unfair, and the lesson will be lost.

People draw on their own knowledge and opinions when they evaluate these situations – but to study how the brain interprets punishment, Saxe and graduate student Setayesh Radkani wanted to take those personal ideas out of the equation. They needed a clear understanding of the beliefs that people held when they observed a punishment, so they could learn how different kinds of details altered their perceptions. So Radkani set up scenarios in imaginary villages where authorities punished individuals for actions that had no obvious analog in the real world.

Participants observed these scenarios in a series of experiments, with different information offered in each one. In some cases, for example, participants were told that the person being punished was either an ally or a competitor of the authority, whereas in other cases, the authority’s possible bias was left ambiguous.

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