Testing the Effectiveness and Endorsement of Collective Punishment

Collective punishment has been applied to sanction and mitigate unethical or illegal behavior. While the use of this controversial mode of punishment might be justifiable from a consequentialist perspective, its effectiveness as well as factors affecting individuals’ endorsement of its use are largely unexplored. Focusing on dishonesty and rule breaking as two prominent examples of unethical and often illegal behavior, we herein address these gaps by testing the effectiveness and endorsement of collective punishment across six preregistered experiments and survey studies with samples from three countries (overall N = 11,020). Exploring the role of inter-individual differences, we tested whether the HEXACO dimensions and the Dark Factor of Personality (D) interact with the implementation of collective punishment in predicting dishonesty and relate to the endorsement of collective punishment (in context of the COVID-19 pandemic). Our results provide substantive evidence for the effectiveness of collective punishment. Further, both honesty-humility and D predicted dishonesty irrespective of the presence of collective punishment, while individuals high (vs. low) in emotionality reacted more to the implementation of collective punishment and more strongly endorsed its use. Combined, these results provide important implications for the evaluation and consideration of collective punishment, including the role of individual differences.