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The opinion of victims of robberies about the fairness of sentences differs from the opinion of disinterested persons. Outsiders believe that a fair law – “crooks and thieves must be punished”, but the victims themselves would prefer to receive monetary compensation.
Psychologists at New York University, led by Oriel Feldman Hall, conducted a series of experiments to find out how we understand justice and how we react when we are treated unfairly*. An article about their work was published in the journal Nature Communications.
Read more:
- Fair Minority
The essence of the first game, which was played in pairs by more than 100 participants, is as follows. One player asks another to share a $10 pie in an arbitrary proportion. The second player may in response, at his choice, make one of the following moves: agree; punish the first player by reducing his share; accept compensation in cash; to prefer the “sharing in reverse”, that is, to leave the partner exactly as much as he intended to leave to the other.
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- Justice or luck?
As it turned out, most of the participants preferred to be compensated and refused the most “vengeful” option, “reverse sharing”, even when the initial offer of the first player was completely offensive, for example, he tried to keep 9/10 of the pie.
In the second game, a third participant, an observer, appeared on the stage, who was asked to speak out how the second player, “suffering from injustice”, should react. What, in his opinion, should be a just law? It turned out that the observer much more often insisted on the “reverse division”, that is, on the most severe possible punishment, than on the restoration of justice.
Finally, in the final round, the same participants alternately got the role of either the second player, the “victim”, or the third, the “judge”. And the same people behaved differently depending on the role.
According to the authors, the results of experimental games of “fair law” can be transferred to people’s behavior in real life situations. In other words, the victim of criminal encroachment on property wants to be compensated for his losses, but the external observer is primarily concerned with punishing the attacker. And this means that the sentences handed down by the courts do not particularly satisfy the victims of non-violent crimes themselves.
“In our legal system, people choose between being able to punish the offender or not being punished, but this choice is too narrow, it misses alternative ways to restore justice,” Feldman-Hall emphasizes.
* O. FeldmanHall, P. Sokol-Hessner, et al. (In Press). «Fairness violations elicit greater punishment on behalf of another than for oneself». Nature Communications