A study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology proposed that exposure to greater variability causes people to judge and punish others more harshly for their bad behavior.
Naturally, people prefer a world that is predictable and stable. The researchers suggest that people dislike things that are more variable or unpredictable because it requires actions and resources to cope with a range of different situations. The one social domain in which this seems to have important consequences is in observing and reacting to others’ actions, especially those that are unethical.
The theory of just deserts states that a punishment should be proportionate to how much harm a person causes. Thus, if people perceive a society or group as more vulnerable because of the associated unpredictability, any harm caused to that societal system will be judged more harshly because of the perception that there’s more harm being done.
This led the researchers to hypothesize that when people are exposed to higher unpredictability, they will perceive society as more vulnerable, which will cause them to be more punitive towards others.
The researchers performed a series of experiments to test their hypothesis. They began by dividing participants into a high variability (HV) condition and a low variability (LV) condition. Each participant was shown a line graph of annual temperatures in the U.S. over the past 30 years.
Those in the HV condition were shown a graph that had a higher standard deviation (i.e. the annual temperature of various years had a greater deviation from the 30-year average temperature). However, the annual temperatures in the LV graph were closer to the average temperature.
For the second part of this experiment, participants were told to pretend that they were residents of a small island that depended entirely on rainfall for its water supply. They were told that due to a drought, the government imposed mandatory water restrictions. However, they witnessed their neighbour watering their lawn and washing their car.
The researchers found that participants in the HV condition judged and punished their neighbours more harshly for violating the mandatory water restriction, compared to those in the LV condition.
In the next experiment, the researchers tested an alternative hypothesis: exposure to higher variability leads people to engage in more action in general. They suggested that, since punishing people was the only possible action in the prior experiment, this made participants in the HV condition seem more punitive.
Participants were divided into an HV and LV condition and watched a six-sided dice roll on a computer screen. In the HV condition, each dice roll was far apart (e.g. 1, 6, 2), while in the LV condition, they were close together (e.g. 3, 4, 5). Afterwards, they were instructed on how to play a strategic game with three roles: the decider, the receiver and the judge. The decider and receiver were played by a computer, although participants were unaware of this.
The decider received 10 bonus points and decided whether to share their points with the receiver or keep it all for themselves. The judge, played by each participant, judged whether the decider acted fairly or not.
If the judge deemed the deciders behavior as unfair, the judge could give up 5 of their own points to punish the decider, who would lose 10 points. However, if the judge deemed the decider’s behavior as fair, they could give 5 of their points to the decider.
The results revealed that participants who were exposed to greater variability in the dice-rolling game were more willing to punish others who behaved selfishly, even at a financial cost to themselves. In addition, the researchers found that greater variability didn’t make participants reward altruistic behavior more.
In the following experiment, the researchers explored why exposure to greater variability makes people more likely to punish unethical behavior. Participants were asked to respond to questionnaires that measured perceptions of variability (e.g. “How variable are most things in the world?”).
The questionnaires also measured their sense of societal vulnerability, general anxiety, and greater feelings of uncertainty. They were also asked to rate how much they approved or disapproved of the death penalty.
The researchers found that the more variability the participants perceived in the world, the more they thought society was vulnerable, and therefore the more they supported the death penalty. The other constructs such as general anxiety and feelings of uncertainty didn’t play a role in these results.
To recap, the researchers provided support for their hypothesis that people exposed to higher variability, or who perceive the world as more variable at baseline, judge and punish others more harshly for unethical behavior. These results were consistent even when participants had to financially pay to punish others.
They also found that exposure to greater variability didn’t significantly encourage others to reward altruistic behavior. Lastly, they found that perceptions of greater variability in the world was associated with a greater perception of societal vulnerability as well as support for the death penalty.