We propose that intuitions about modern mass-level criminal justice emerge from evolved mechanisms designed to operate in ancestral small-scale societies. By hypothesis, individuals confronted with a crime compute two distinct psychological magnitudes: one that reflects the crime's seriousness and another that reflects the criminal's long-term value as an associate. These magnitudes are computed based on different sets of cues and are fed into motivational mechanisms regulating different aspects of sanctioning. The seriousness variable regulates how much to react (e.g., how severely we want to punish); the variable indexing the criminal's association value regulates the more fundamental decision of how to react (i.e., whether we want to punish or repair). Using experimental designs embedded in surveys, we validate this theory across several types of crime and two countries. The evidence augments past research and suggests that the human mind contains dedicated psychological mechanisms for restoring social relationships following acts of exploitation.
As in other species, the social world of our ancestors contained individuals who were poised to exploit others if such acts were self-beneficial (Daly and Wilson, 1988, Duntley and Buss, 2004 and Duntley, 2005). This selection pressure favored the evolution of psychological mechanisms designed to counter exploitation of one's self, family, and social group through punishment (Boehm, 1985, Daly and Wilson, 1988, Frank, 1988, Duntley and Buss, 2004, Sell et al., 2009, Petersen et al., 2010 and McCullough et al., 2011). Modern crimes have features that satisfy the input conditions of mechanisms designed to respond to exploitation, and recent research suggests that our evolved counterexploitation psychology structures the intuitions that modern individuals have about criminal justice (Aharoni & Fridlund, 2011; Petersen et al., 2010 and Robinson et al., 2007). This research has documented high levels of cross-cultural agreement concerning the seriousness of different crimes (Robinson et al. 2007). Furthermore, with considerable supporting evidence, it has been argued that this perceived seriousness taps into our evolved sense of justice, such that individuals prefer sanctions that are proportional to the seriousness of the crime (e.g., Darley and Pittman, 2003 and Aharoni and Fridlund, 7 Nov, 2011).
Although this research has provided important insights, both the evolutionary literature on exploitation and its applications to modern criminal justice have neglected the existence of counterexploitation strategies beyond punishment. The small-scale social world of our ancestors—with dense social networks and high levels of dependency—should have selected for nonpunitive reparative strategies, in addition to punitive ones (Aureli and de Waal, 2000, Petersen et al., 2010 and McCullough et al., 2011). We propose that a major factor regulating the activation of reparative—rather than punitive—responses to rule violations is the (perceived) social value of the perpetrator. If so, then our intuition that more serious crimes call for more serious sanctions should be joined by another intuition: that different types of sanction are appropriate, depending on perceptions of the criminal's social worth.
An evolutionary and computational dissection of exploitation led us to predict that the human mind spontaneously computes the magnitudes of two distinct psychological variables when confronted with exploitation. One represents the exploitation's seriousness, as stressed by previous theories. The other represents the exploiter's association value—the person's value as a potential associate (Petersen et al. 2010). By hypothesis, the magnitude of each variable is computed based on different sets of cues, and these variables are fed into motivational mechanisms regulating distinct aspects of strategies for countering exploitation. Whereas the indexed seriousness of an exploitive act regulates how much to react (e.g., how severely we want to punish, how long we may wish to incapacitate the perpetrator, or how intense our efforts at social repair will have to be), the exploiter's indexed social or association value regulates the more fundamental decision of how to react (i.e., whether we want to punish or repair). We have termed this theory the recalibrational theory of counterexploitation (Petersen et al. 2010). In this article, we provide empirical evidence for this theory from the intuitions of lay individuals about criminal justice. We argue that current models of criminal justice intuitions should be expanded to account for the existence and effects of nonpunitive reparative sentiments in the human response to exploitation and crime (see also Aureli and de Waal, 2000 and McCullough et al., 2011).
