What people learn from punishment: A cognitive model (Exp 3)

Participants read six short scenarios about an authority figure responding to another person's behavior in an unfamiliar society. Each scenario crosses prior information about the wrongness of the act with information about the direct consequences of punishing for the authority; a participant reads all six scenarios, one in each of the six conditions, assigned by a six-arm Latin square. In every scenario they first report prior beliefs about the wrongness of the act and the authority's justice motive, bias and selfishness, and then report the same beliefs plus the harshness and consequences of the response after learning that the authority chose each of doing nothing, punishing mildly and punishing harshly, in a random order.