Age-moderated effects of consequence and intent information on punishment: an intuitive prosecutorial interpretation

Abstract

In responding to wrongdoings, people simultaneously pursue the goals of social control and fairness to the wrongdoer. Social control necessitates stronger weighting of consequences than causes; fairness entails the opposite. The authors hypothesized that the developmental shift from overweighting consequence to overweighting intent when determining levels of punishment illustrates a shift from a default defender of the normative order to a motivated crusader of fairness to the wrongdoer. Thus, punishment should increase slightly for intentional wrongdoings but decrease substantially for accidental wrongdoings as people age. In an experiment on disciplinary action in Singapore, 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds learned about the consequences of and intentions behind wrongdoings by peers and predicted consistency of the same act in the future, assigned blame to the wrongdoers, and recommended punishment for them. Results supported hypotheses derived from a fair-but-biased-yet-correctible model of intuitive prosecutors.