Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Humans are adept at using punishments to influence and modify the behavior of others. Current approaches model pun-ishment as a direct, immediate imposition of cost. In contrast, our research suggests that people interpret punishment as acommunicative act. We show that people expect costless, yet communicative, punishments to be as effective as cost impos-ing punishment (Experiment 1). Under some situations, people display a systematic preference for costless punishmentsover more canonical, cost imposing punishments (Experiment 2). People readily seek out and infer the communicativemessage inherent in a punishment (Experiment 3). And, people expect that learning from punishment depends on theease with which its communicative intent can be inferred (Experiment 4). Taken together, these findings demonstrate thatpeople expect punishment to be generated and interpreted as a communicative act.