Kevin M. Carlsmith

Why Do We Punish? Deterrence and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment

One popular justification for punishment is the just deserts rationale: A person deserves punishment proportionate to the moral wrong committed. A competing justification is the deterrence rationale: Punishing an offender reduces the frequency and likelihood of future offenses. The authors examined the motivation underlying laypeoples use of punishment for prototypical wrongs. Study 1 (N = 336) revealed high sensitivity to factors uniquely associated with the just deserts perspective (e.g., offense seriousness, moral trespass) and insensitivity to factors associated with deterrence (e.g., likelihood of detection, offense frequency). Study 2 (N = 329) confirmed the proposed model through structural equation modeling (SEM). Study 3 (N = 351) revealed that despite strongly stated preferences for deterrence theory, individual sentencing decisions seemed driven exclusively by just deserts concerns.

Incapacitation and Just Deserts as Motives for Punishment

What motivates a persons desire to punish actors who commit intentional, counternormative harms? Two possible answers are a just deserts motive or a desire to incarcerate the actor so that he cannot be a further danger to society. Research participants in two experiments assigned punishments to actors whose offenses were varied with respect to the moral seriousness of the offense and the likelihood that the perpetrator would commit similar future offenses. Respondents increased the punishment as the seriousness of the offense increased, but their sentences were not affected by variations in the likelihood of committing future offenses, suggesting that just deserts was the primary sentencing motive. Only in a case in which a brain tumor was identified as the cause of an actors violent action, a case that does not fit the standard prototype of a crime intentionally committed, did respondents show a desire to incarcerate the actor in order to prevent future harms rather than assigning a just deserts based punishment.

A Persuasive Example of Collaborative Learning

This article details the process of integrating a 12-week collaborative learning project within a course on Persuasion and Propaganda. We present a specific instantiation of Meyerss (1997) articulation of general principles for incorporating small group projects into college courses. Student groups designed, executed, and evaluated persuasive campaigns to change the attitudes and behavior of target populations. Student self-reports indicated that the course format was significantly more popular than traditional formats in other psychology courses. Moreover, students worked significantly harder for and learned more from the cooperative learning components than from the traditional lecture- and text-based components of this course.

The Ex Ante Function of the Criminal Law

Criminal legal codes draw clear lines between permissible and illegal conduct, and the criminal justice system counts on people knowing these lines and governing their conduct accordingly. This is the ex ante function of the law; lines are drawn, and because citizens fear punishments or believe in the moral validity of the legal codes they do not cross these lines. But do people in fact know the lines that legal codes draw? The fact that several states have adopted laws that deviate from other state laws enables a field experiment to address this question. Residents (N = 203) of states (Wisconsin, Texas, North Dakota, and South Dakota) that had adopted a minority position on some aspect of criminal law reported the relevant law of their state to be no different than did citizens of majoritarian states. Path analyses using structural equation modeling suggest that people make guesses about what their state law holds by extrapolating from their personal view of whether or not the act in question ought to be criminalized.A legal code in a complex society is designed to have several functions. First, it is designed to announce beforehand the rules by which citizens must conduct themselves, on pain of criminal punishment. Second, if a person violates one of these rules of conduct, the criminal law must determine whether the violator is to be held criminally liable. Third, another part of its adjudicatory function, where liability is imposed the law must determine the general range, or grade, of punishment to be imposed.It is the first function that is of interest to us here, the so-called ex ante function of the criminal law. The code announces in advance what actions count as criminal; thus the citizenry can use the announcement to guide their actions to avoid criminal conduct. The law, in other words, draws bright lines between allowable and unallowable conduct, and those lines enable the citizens to regulate their conduct so they do not break the laws. To use a familiar metaphor, the criminal law specifies what sorts of actions are out of bounds, and the penalties for those actions, so the players will stay in bounds. The criminal justice system relies on people knowing the law and knowing where the boundaries for their conduct lie. Ignorance does not excuse unlawful conduct, a fact summarized in the phrase ignorance of the law is no excuse. Such a rule is defended as a useful means of creating an incentive for citizens to learn the law.

Eminence Rankings of Personality Psychologists as a Reflection of the Field

The eminence of scholars within a given field can reveal which conceptual work and scientific methods in the field are most prized and valued. The authors follow procedures employed in other disciplines to calculate the eminence of personality psychologists for the first time. The top 60 individuals are classified according to rank, years of productivity, and type of research. The authors found two distinct rankings of eminent individuals depending on the type of textbook surveyed and found that the ranking of eminence overlaps clinical psychology more than social psychology. These and other results are used to discuss the nature of personality psychology today.

Chapter 2 Conation, affect, and cognition in personality

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses conation, affect, and cognition in personality. It discusses (1) their historical origins, (2) their changing description across time, (3) their conceptualization, and (4) a recommended update of their meaning. Conation (or motivation) includes components that propel or move the organism such as the hunger drive or the need for achievement. The affect group—in particular, emotion—includes basic feelings such as anger and happiness along with the mental programs for emotional facial expressions. The cognition group—thought-related processes and mechanisms—includes elements such as working memory, judgment, and reasoning. The chapter clarifies the meaning of this tripartite division. It examines general systems model of personality. This models further development relies on the distinction among classes of conative, affective, and cognitive components.