We are more or less expeditious in applying our justice to others depending on whether we are in front of other people or not, that is, whether our punishment is carried out from a public pulpit or a private one.
In fact, according to This studio, people punish three times as harshly in the presence of their peers, because punishment is a way of tacitly saying: I find this behavior very reprehensible and my anger makes it clear that not only do I not tolerate it in others, but eventually I wouldn't do it on myself either..
virtue signaling
Punishment is fundamental to two distinctively human phenomena: cooperation in groups and morality. There is currently no consensus on which evolutionary model best explains this phenomenon in humans.
But in the aforementioned study, two experiments have been presented in which participants are induced to commit moral violations and then present third parties with the opportunity to pay to punish the wrongdoers in order to verify which weighed more, morality or cooperation. in groups.
The presence of an audience, even if only that of the experimenter, was enough to provoke an increase in moralistic punishment.
Part of the idea of virtue display originates in the scientific study of signaling theory, initially conceived by Charles Darwin and your work, The origin of man and selection in relation to sex, published in 1871.
But then, is this indignation real or fake? The psychologists Jillian Jordan and David Rand argue that virtue signaling as feigned indignation is separable from real indignation toward a particular belief, but that most cases of display of virtue swith in fact simultaneously real indignation.
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The news
We care more about our public image than justice, which is why we are harsher when applying it in the presence of others.
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.