Skip to main content

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Psychol.
Sec. Personality and Social Psychology
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1227961
This article is part of the Research Topic

Culture and Morality: Things We Value

View all 11 Articles

The Effect of Wrongdoer's Status on Observer Punishment Recommendations：The Mediating Role of Envy and The Moderating Role of Belief in a Just World

Zechuan Lin1 Fengxiao Cui1 Yue Wu2 Qingwang Wei1*
  • 1Department of Psychology, Faculty of Science and Technology, Renmin University of China, China
  • 2Beijing Vocational Transportation College, China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Receive an email when it is updated
You just subscribed to receive the final version of the article

Our proposition postulates that the correlation between the wrongdoer's status and the punishment suggestions of onlookers is primarily influenced by group-oriented envy rather than the ascription of intentionality and is moderated by the belief in a just world. In three separate studies, 389 university students were asked to read scenarios describing a hit-and-run crime committed by either a rich or a poor individual and then report their opinions on intentionality attribution (Study 1 and Study 2), envy emotions (Study 2), punishment recommendations (all three studies), and belief in a just world (Study 3). Consistently, the findings indicated that those observing recommended harsher penalties to be imposed upon high-status perpetrators engaging in the same wrongdoing (such as hit-and-run) as their low-status equivalents. The effect of the rich receiving more severe punishment was predicted more strongly by envious emotions than by intentionality attributions to high-status wrongdoers and was only present for those observers who endorsed a lower belief in a just world.

Keywords: punishment1, social status2, envy3, belief in a just world4, active harm5. (Min.5-Max

Received: 24 May 2023; Accepted: 09 Jan 2024.

Copyright: © 2024 Lin, Cui, Wu and Wei. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Mx. Qingwang Wei, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Science and Technology, Renmin University of China, Beijing, 100872, Beijing, China