Punishing Without Looking for Reputational Gain

Punishing wrongdoers can confer reputational benefits, and people sometimes punish without careful consideration. But are these two observations related? Do people “punish without looking” for reputational gain? And if so, is this because unquestioning punishment looks particularly virtuous? To investigate, we assigned “Actors” to decide whether to sign punitive petitions about politicized issues (“punishment”), after first deciding whether to read articles opposing these petitions (“looking”). To manipulate reputation, we paired Actors with co-partisan “Evaluators”, varying whether Evaluators observed (i) nothing about Actors’ behavior, (ii) (only) whether Actors punished, or (iii) whether Actors punished and whether they looked. Across four studies of Americans (total n = 10,343), we found that Evaluators rated Actors more positively, and financially rewarded them, if they chose to (vs. not to) punish. Correspondingly, making punishment observable to Evaluators (i.e., moving from our first to second condition) drove Actors to punish more overall. Furthermore, because some of these individuals did not look, making punishment observable increased rates of punishment without looking. Thus, reputation can encourage unquestioning punishment. But do punishers who eschew opposing perspectives look particularly virtuous? No: Evaluators preferred Actors who punished with (vs. without) looking. Correspondingly, making looking observable (i.e., moving from our second to third condition) drove Actors to look more overall—and to punish without looking at comparable or diminished rates. We thus find that reputation fuels unthinking punishment, but simply as a byproduct of encouraging punishment in general. Indeed, rather than fueling reflexive decisions, spotlighting punishers’ decision-making processes may actually encourage reflection.