Motivations and consequences of punishment: A justice motive theory perspective

This thesis explores punishment as a reaction to injustice from the perspective of just-world theory, which argues that individuals are motivated to believe that the world is a just and fair place where people get what they deserve. Despite the theory’s prominence, there has been limited research on punishment. Evidence from mock-jury studies (Devine & Caughlin, 2014; Mazzella & Feingold, 1994) suggests that punishment and guilt attributions can be biased by extra-legal factors relating to victims and defendants, potentially leading to wrongful punishment and innocent individuals suffering within the criminal justice system. The research first examined whether extra-legal attributes, irrelevant to legal proceedings, could influence punishment severity. Chapter 2 found no significant effect of a defendant’s appearance on punishment severity. Chapter 3 expanded on this by exploring additional extra-legal attributes, such as socio-economic status and the target’s character (victims and defendants), either in isolation or in combination with other attributes. The results showed that the defendant’s character affected punishment severity, either alone or interacting with the victim’s attributes, and these effects were mediated by perceptions of injustice and deservingness, in line with the just-world theory. Highlighting how bias from extra-legal attributes could lead to unjust punishment decisions for the defendant. Chapter 4 examined reactions to exonerees who had been wrongfully imprisoned, showing that character derogation occurred when the miscarriage of justice was more severe. Finally, Chapter 5 used a novel eye-tracking method to explore selective exposure to guilt- and innocence-affirming information based on the severity and resolution of miscarriages of justice. Showing that people spent more time on guilt-affirming documents when the cases were unresolved compared to innocence affirming documents. Overall, the research opens promising avenues for further investigation into normative and counter-normative responses to injustice. The findings deepen our understanding of how extra-legal factors influence judgements within the criminal justice system and how people react to clear instances of injustice exonerees face.