The scope-severity paradox
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- Anikó Sebestény
- Sunday, 30 October 2011
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Do criminals deserve a less severe punishment if they harmed more people ?
Most people would almost certainly answer "no". Of course: punishment should be sensitive to the severity of the crime. That's what we usually think.
Yet in a compelling paper published in Social Psychological and Personality Science in August 2010, Loran F. Nordgren and Mary-Hunter Morris McDonnell found that increasing the number of people victimized by a crime actually decreases the perceived severity of that crime and leads people to recommend less punishment.
The scope-severity paradox presented in the article is indeed astonishing. The paper is also exemplary in how beautifully it combines lab experiments and analysis of real-world data.
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