Department of Psychology, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, United States of America.
Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08540, United States of America.
Cognition. 2021 Mar;208:104544. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104544. Epub 2020 Dec 28.
Humans use punishment to influence each other's behavior. Many current theories presume that this operates as a simple form of incentive. In contrast, we show that people infer the communicative intent behind punishment, which can sometimes diverge sharply from its immediate incentive value. In other words, people respond to punishment not as a reward to be maximized, but as a communicative signal to be interpreted. Specifically, we show that people expect harmless, yet communicative, punishments to be as effective as harmful punishments (Experiment 1). Under some situations, people display a systematic preference for harmless punishments over more canonical, harmful punishments (Experiment 2). People readily seek out and infer the communicative message inherent in a punishment (Experiment 3). And people expect that learning from punishment depends on the ease with which its communicative intent can be inferred (Experiment 4). Taken together, these findings demonstrate that people expect punishment to be constructed and interpreted as a communicative act.
人类利用惩罚来影响彼此的行为。许多现有的理论假设，这是一种简单的激励形式。相比之下，我们表明，人们推断出惩罚背后的交际意图，而这种意图有时与它的即时激励价值大相径庭。换句话说，人们对惩罚的反应不是作为一种需要最大化的奖励，而是作为一种需要解释的交际信号。具体来说，我们表明，人们期望无害但具有交际意图的惩罚与有害惩罚同样有效（实验 1）。在某些情况下，人们会系统地偏爱无害的惩罚而不是更典型的有害惩罚（实验 2）。人们会主动寻找并推断出惩罚中固有的交际信息（实验 3）。人们还期望，从惩罚中学习取决于其交际意图是否容易被推断出来（实验 4）。综上所述，这些发现表明，人们期望惩罚被构建和解释为一种交际行为。
