A painful message: Testing the roles of suffering and understanding in punishment judgments in second- and third-party contexts

This experiment will use a contrastive vignette method to examine predictors of punishment attitudes in a U.S. sample. The understanding hypothesis predicts that the signal that the perpetrator understands why he has been punished will increase satisfaction with the punishment and reduce additional punishment recommendations, relative to the no understanding condition. The suffering hypothesis predicts that the induction of suffering alone will be sufficient to evoke satisfaction with the punishment and reduce additional punishment recommendations. We expect that indicators of punishment goal fulfillment will be greatest in the combined presence of suffering and understanding. This is a preregistration of the article: Aharoni, E., Simpson, D., Nahmias, E., & Gollwitzer, M. (2022). A painful message: Testing the effects of suffering and understanding on punishment judgments. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 230(2), 138–151. https://doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000460 peerReviewed other