Reports Revenge without responsibility? Judgments about collective punishment in baseball Fiery Cushman a, ⁎, A.J. Durwin b , Chaz Lively c a Brown University, USA b Hofstra University, USA c Boston University, USA abstract article info Article history: Received 19 January 2012 Revised 12 March 2012 Available online 29 March 2012 Keywords: Collective punishment Responsibility Morality Culture of honor Many cultures practice collective punishment; that is, they will punish one person for another's transgression, based solely on shared group membership. This practice is difficult to reconcile with the theories of moral responsibility that dominate in contemporary Western psychology, philosophy and law. Yet, we demonstrate a context in which many American participants do endorse collective punishment: retaliatory “beaning” in baseball. Notably, individuals who endorse this form of collective punishment tend not to hold the target of retaliation to be morally responsible. In other words, the psychological mechanisms underlying such “vicarious” forms of collective punishment appear to be distinct from the evaluation of moral responsibility. Consequently, the observation of collective punishment in non-Western cultures may not indicate the operation of fundamen- tally different conceptions of moral responsibility. © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Introduction If a man kills your brother, is it morally acceptable for you to kill his brother in retaliation? Many cultures—especially “cultures of honor” (Nisbett & Cohen, 1996)—have practiced this form of collec- tive punishment (Balikci, 1970; Boehm, 1984; Gelfand et al., 2012; Miller, 1990; Sommers, 2009). Its defining characteristic is that one person is punished for another's transgressions based solely on their shared group membership. The most common manifestation is a “blood feud” between family clans. In such feuds there is usually a preference to avenge a death by targeting the killer when possible, but it is considered an acceptable substitute to kill a male member of the killer's clan instead (Boehm, 1984). This form of collective punishment cannot be explained by influential psychological theories of moral judgment (e.g. Alicke, 2000; Darley & Shultz, 1990; Heider, 1958; Weiner, 1995). These models restrict moral responsibility and punishment to those specific individuals who transgress. Specifically, they stipulate that a person must be causally responsible for a transgression and must have performed the transgression intentionally in order to be held morally responsible and punished. These criteria are largely shared by contemporary western legal codes (Darcy, 2002) and philosophical analyses of responsibility and punishment (reviewed in Sommers, 2009). In a blood feud, however, any male member of the rival clan may be deemed an appropriate target for retaliation, even if he played no causal role (much less an intentional one) in the original transgression. Several social and ecological features promote cultures of honor and associated norms of collective punishment (Nisbett & Cohen, 1996; Sommers, 2009): (1) sharp divisions between tightly orga- nized social groups, often kin-based, (2) scarce resources, leading to fierce inter-group competition, and (3) the absence of a strong superordinate authority, such as a state, to mediate inter-group conflict. Under these circumstances it is advantageous to practice severe retribution in order to deter future transgressions, leading to a culture of honor. Additionally, the collective welfare interests of groups and their unique capacity to control the behavior of individual members make it feasible to deter an individual from transgressing by threatening revenge against another member of his or her group (Boehm, 1984; Miller, 2006). This analysis of collective punishment at a functional level leaves open important questions at the mechanistic level. What is the psychological basis of collective punishment? We explore one dimension of this problem: whether collective punishment depends on an underlying theory of collective moral responsibility. Collective punishment may arise from a theory of responsibility according to which each individual is morally responsible for the ac- tions of everyone in his or her social group, even actions that the in- dividual does not cause or intend. As noted above, such a theory of collective responsibility is fundamentally irreconcilable with the theory of individual responsibility identified by contemporary West- ern psychological, legal and philosophical theories. It suggests that the moral psychology that operates in a culture of honor differs sharply from the moral psychology that operates in contemporary Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48 (2012) 1106–1110 ⁎ Corresponding author at: Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, Brown University, 89 Waterman St., Providence, RI 02912, USA. E-mail address: cushman@wjh.harvard.edu (F. Cushman). 0022-1031/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2012.03.011 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Journal of Experimental Social Psychology journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jesp