Why we sometimes punish the innocent: The role of group entitativity in collective punishment.

ABSTRACT: Because punishments are expected to give offenders what they deserve proportionally to the severity of their offenses, the punishment of an entire group because of the misdeed of a few of its members is generally considered as unfair. Group entitativity might increase support for such collective punishment, because members of highly entitative groups are perceived as more similar and interchangeable. We designed three experiments comparing support for third-party collective punishment of low versus high entitative groups. As comparison base-rate, we included conditions in which participants punish an individual wrongdoer (Experiments 1 & 2). Results show that although support for individual punishment is higher than support for collective punishment, this difference was reduced (Experiment

SUBMITTER: Pereira A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5933726 | biostudies-literature | 2018

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature