Learn more about why victims and observers of unfair treatment punish others This collection of
contributions by international experts in the field focuses on studies replicating and or
qualifying previous research on a specific hypothesis that has dominated scientific debate on
publishment motives for the last 25 years: the intuitive retributivism hypothesis i.e. people
believe intuitively that offenders should be punished because they deserve it. All the studies
reported underwent peer review prior to data collection and the evidence from all the studies
was aggregated in a meta-analysis. The contributions include a wide range of methodological
approaches such as economic games information-search tasks behavioral intentions and
self-reports. Moreover data was collected from various populations such as Germany Italy UK
and US and from both adults and children. Lastly several boundary conditions for the
hypothesis were tested such as the role of the punisher in the initial transgression punisher
status transgression type or magnitude centrality of punishment thinking style direct vs.
indirect punishment transgressor's power and interindividual differences in punishers.
