The Importance of Unfair Intentions and Outcome Inequality for Punishment by Third Parties and Victims

Retributive theories predominantly focus on third party’s motives for punishment, which are rather affected by the offender’s malicious intentions than the actual outcome of the offense. However, victims experience an offense from a different perspective. The value/status approach argues that an offense has two facets that produce different threats: the intentional violation of values and status imbalance between offender and victims. We suggested that third parties and victims punish unfair intentions, whereas victims also punish because of the outcome inequality. In the present study, we orthogonally crossed the factors offender’s intention with the actual outcome and perspective of punisher (third-party versus victim). Results show that victims punish harsher than third parties. However, there are no qualitative differences of third-party punishment and punishment by victims. Rather, both punish malicious intentions and outcome inequality. We discuss how the findings relate to retributivism and other psychological theories of punishment.