Justice Served?

New study from GWSB professor Elizabeth Mullen suggests punishing perpetrators may decrease people’s willingness to compensate victims.

August 27, 2014

Crime

By Lauren Ingeno

Once a perpetrator is behind bars, sometimes the victim still loses. Why do some crime victims not receive the compensation that they need for lost property, medical bills or lost time at work?

Although there is often an insufficient amount of resources to aid victims, a new study shows that people’s underlying attitudes about justice could also be to blame.

Elizabeth Mullen, an associate professor in the George Washington University School of Business, and her research partner at the London Business School presented more than 400 men and women with varying hypothetical scenarios regarding perpetrators and crime victims. The researchers then surveyed the participants to examine the influence of punishment on their desires to better compensate victims and vice versa.

The researchers’ findings, which were published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, suggest that punishment restores people’s sense of justice to such a degree that it leads individuals to neglect victims’ needs.

“Even in contexts where people clearly care about victim mistreatment, it seems that there is a disconnect between what they want for victims and what they actually do to help them,” Dr. Mullen said. “Somewhere along the way, outrage over victim mistreatment wasn’t transferring into actually helping or providing adequate resources to them.”

In one of the studies, participants read about a man who stabbed and robbed a stranger. The offender was apprehended eventually, but he already had spent the $100 that he stole from the victim.

The researchers varied the amount of punishment that the offender received, from probation to 25 years in prison, and they randomly assigned participants to one of these four punishment conditions. The more punishment a perpetrator received, the less likely participants were to recommend that the victim be compensated. However, varying victim compensation amounts did not significantly affect participants’ punishment recommendations.

In the final study, participants read about an employee who assaulted a co-worker. For the first part of this study, researchers again randomly assigned participants to one of two conditions: In the first condition, the offender went unpunished. In the second, he was convicted and had to perform 10 hours of community service. Researches then asked participants how much they desired the victim to be compensated.  

In the second version of this study, participants learned either that the victim was not compensated due to budget cuts or that the state’s Office for Victims of Crime awarded him $100. They were then asked how much they desired to punish the perpetrator.

Finally, in both studies, participants were asked, ‘‘To what extent was justice served?’’ and ‘‘To what extent did the state’s response restore your sense of justice?’’ on seven-point scales ranging from “not at all” to “a great extent.”

Results showed that participants wished to compensate the victim less when the perpetrator had been punished, versus when he had not been punished. Participants also more strongly believed that justice had been restored when the perpetrator had been punished, rather than when the victim had been compensated.

What Dr. Mullen found most compelling about the research is that all of the studies led to this same conclusion. The research sheds new light on people’s beliefs about justice.

“It’s not that people aren’t motivated to help necessarily,” Dr. Mullen said.

The researchers are hoping to conduct future research to identify factors that might help to mitigate people’s tendency to neglect victims after learning a perpetrator has been punished. For instance, increasing individuals’ empathy for victims through more emotionally arousing appeals or educating decision-makers about how punishment can lead to victim neglect may mitigate the effects of punishment that were identified in this research.