Recommendation

Punishing Offenders

ORCID_LOGO based on reviews by Gilad Feldman and Rajarshi Majumder
A recommendation of:

The Role of Offender Identifiability in Second- and Third-Party Punishment

Abstract

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Submission: posted 23 March 2024
Recommendation: posted 03 September 2024, validated 06 September 2024
Cite this recommendation as:
Conry-Murray, C. (2024) Punishing Offenders. Peer Community in Registered Reports, . https://rr.peercommunityin.org/PCIRegisteredReports/articles/rec?id=749

Recommendation

When people are less-well-known to us, it can impact how we treat them. People outside our communities may feel more anonymous or de-personalized to us, and this could impact the empathy we feel for them. Indeed, past research shows that people seem to care more for those who are who are identified to us, especially when they are victims of a crime (Small & Loewenstein, 2003). In addition, past research also shows that anonymizing victims can influence criminal behavior (Walters, 2022).  Thus, social cognitive factors related to anonymity appear to affect both positive feelings (engaging in empathy) and negative activities (criminal activity) related to victims. It seems likely that anonymity can also affect how people judge criminals themselves.
 
This paper by Blanke and Twardawski (2024) examines how even minor identifying features can make individuals react differently to a perpetrator of a crime. A picture or name (information that may appear in the press) may impact how people perceive criminals in terms of punishment, empathy, outrage, and blame.
 
How people respond to anonymous or identified criminals may depend on whether the impact of the crime on the victim is made salient. Similar to the Black Sheep Effect (Marques & Paez,1994), the current paper expects that people who identify with victims are expected to punish a perpetrator more when the perpetrator’s name and image are known. This is similar to the case with an ingroup member in The Black Sheep Effect, where ingroup members are punished more for transgressions than outgroup members. For people who view the situation as a third party (and are thus less connected to the victim), an identified perpetrator is expected to lead to less punishment (and also less outrage and blame, and more empathy).
 
The current study focuses on pickpocketing since it is a crime that can be committed without identifying oneself to the victim. Future research should examine how the type of event impacts judgments, especially given the stigma of being a victim of some crimes. Littering and other minor violations may be seen as understandable when you see someone as a person, rather than a anonymous, impersonal criminal.  On the other hand, there can be stigma to being a victim in some cases, such as the case of sexual harassment, where, research shows, perpetrators are judged more positively if they are identified, and victims, especially women, are judged more negatively if they are identified (Barak-Corren & Lewinsohn-Zamir, 2019).
 
People around the world engage in moral and legal transgressions, and if our judgments of them are influenced by minor features such as a photo or name, we should take action to treat people more fairly. This research will help to determine if people are influenced by these factors.
 
The Stage 1 manuscript underwent one round of thorough review. After considering the detailed responses to the reviewers' comments, the recommender determined that the manuscript met the Stage 1 criteria and granted in-principle acceptance (IPA).
 
URL to the preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/7qzva
 
Level of bias control achieved: Level 6. No part of the data or evidence that will be used to answer the research question yet exists and no part will be generated until after IPA.
 
List of eligible PCI RR-friendly Journals:
 
 
References
 
1. Barak‐Corren, N., & Lewinsohn‐Zamir, D. (2019). What's in a Name? The Disparate Effects of Identifiability on Offenders and Victims of Sexual Harassment. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 16, 955-1000. https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12233
 
2. Blanke, T. & Twardawski, M. (2024). The Role of Offender Identifiability in Second- and Third-Party Punishment. In principle acceptance of Version 2 by Peer Community in Registered Reports. https://osf.io/7qzva
 
3. Marques, J. M., & Paez, D. (1994). The ‘black sheep effect’: Social categorization, rejection of ingroup deviates, and perception of group variability. European Review of Social Psychology, 5, 37-68. https://doi.org/10.1080/14792779543000011
 
4. Small, D. A., & Loewenstein, G. (2003). Helping a victim or helping the victim: Altruism and identifiability. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 26, 5-16. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022299422219
 
5. Walters, G. D. (2022). Crime and social cognition: A meta-analytic review of the developmental roots of adult criminal thinking. Journal of Experimental Criminology, 18, 183-207. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-020-09435-w
Conflict of interest:
The recommender in charge of the evaluation of the article and the reviewers declared that they have no conflict of interest (as defined in the code of conduct of PCI) with the authors or with the content of the article.

Reviewed by ORCID_LOGO, 20 Jul 2024

I went over the reply to my comments and find those satisfactory. Thank you for making it easy for us to see the changes and the careful revision. The manuscript and accompanying materials have greatly improved. To me, this already makes for very interesting research, regardless of the results, and this is what I really like about Registered Reports and the two stage process.

 

I also ran the Rmd code. Aside from minor issues (author appearing twice preventing from knitting, and the t-test's paired = FALSE needing to be removed, possibly because of multiple packages I have installed having that function), I was able to run it and understand the output. I appreciate that.

I especially appreciate you addressing my request to simulate code and add that to the manuscript. Well done. I really hope this will become common practice in Registered Reports.

What I would recommend and ask is for upcoming submissions for you to also provide the knitted HTML output alongside the Rmd code, it would make sure that anyone with your version of R would be able to see the code alongside the output.

 

I look forward to the IPA and seeing the results following the data collection.

Reviewed by , 06 Aug 2024

The authors have significantly improved the manuscript. I have a few minor comments, which I have included in the manuscript. I only have one suggestion for the authors:

Please be cautious about interpreting the effects since they are highly contested in the recent literature. This is all the more reason we need this research to show the validity/boundary conditions of the effect.

Download the review

Evaluation round #1

DOI or URL of the report: https://osf.io/py9xs?view_only=60348d468d8949aab31e9304128ec76a

Version of the report: 1

Author's Reply, 29 Jun 2024

Decision by ORCID_LOGO, posted 27 May 2024, validated 28 May 2024

The is a well written, well-designed study that has the potential to be an important contribution to the literature. I have invited two expert in the field to review the manuscript and they have both provided very useful and important comments.  I outline below the comments that I view as most important, along with a few of my own suggestions.  

Both reviewers expressed concern with the way the victim identifiability findings were summarized on p. 5.  I suggest you consider both reviewers comments and then revise this section to address the publication bias in the metanalysis, which may help explain why victim identifiability did not replicate.  I also suggest that you address what this means for the importance of the topic.  

Like Dr Feldman, I wondered about how you chose the features of identifiability.  Why might including a photo, name and age matter, out of all the ways an offender could be identified?  I see that you will control for gender.  Will you also control for race or any other features?

I thought that H1 could have been written more clearly. By “weaker intention to punish” do you mean a smaller effect or a reversed effect where identified would be punished less than unidentified in the 3rd party condition?

Both reviewers mentioned that you might want to revise the way you treat the mediation analysis.  I agree with them (especially concerns about power for the mediation analysis), but I also see the mediation analysis as a valuable way to investigate how these factors might contribute differently.  Your hypotheses are all very similar, in that victims will judge the offender more negatively than third parties.  If these DV are each uniquely useful to building a theory, it would be helpful to show how that they go beyond more or less negative attitudes.  Your 5th hypothesis might shed light on how these factors differ if you predicted or explored more specific effects. My suggestion is to use the mediation analysis as an exploratory test.

There is only one trial to test the effect, despite that you note that context is likely to have an effect on judgments.  I wonder why you chose pickpocketing and what features of pickpocketing might differ from other crimes in ways that could impact punishment and other relate judgments. I suggest you add more justification for selecting that particular crime, and later consider discussing how different crime might differ (which could be in the future-discussion).

Check the language of a “hard treatment.”  I am a native English speaker and I agree with Dr Feldman that a “hard treatment” does not sound right.  I do think you can say wither “angry at” or “angry with” or at least both sound correct to me.

The other suggestions from the reviewers were also very useful, and I hope they will be helpful to you.  Please note that I am transitioning into a new role, and so I can’t be sure that I will be available to act as a recommender for future manuscripts. Therefore, even more than usual, please do consider my suggestions as suggestions and not requirements.

Reviewed by ORCID_LOGO, 11 May 2024

Please see attached.

Download the review

Reviewed by , 22 May 2024

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