The Rewards of Punishment

by Horne, Christine

• ISBN13: 9780804760225
• ISBN10: 0804760225
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-05-08
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

The Rewards of Punishmentdescribes a new social theory of norms to provide a compelling explanation why people punish. Identifying mechanisms that link interdependence with norm enforcement, it reveals how social relationships lead individuals to enforce norms, even when doing so makes little sense. This groundbreaking book tells the whole story, from ideas, to experiments, to real-world applications. In addition to addressing longstanding theoretical puzzlessuch as why harmful behavior is not always punished, why individuals enforce norms in ways that actually hurt the group, why people enforce norms that benefit others rather than themselves, why groups punish behavior that has only trivial effects, and why atypical behaviors are sometimes punished and sometimes notit explores the implications of the theory for substantive issues, including norms regulating sex, crime, and international human rights.

Author Biography

Christine Horne is Associate Professor of Sociology at Washington State University. She is editor of Theories of Social Order (Stanford 2003, 2009) with Michael Hechter and Experiments in Criminology and Law with Michal Lovaglia.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
The Problem	p. 1
Social Relations: Controlling Disruptive Colleagues	p. 22
Metanorms: Even Tyrants Care What Others Think	p. 37
More on Metanorms: Political Correctness and the Excesses of Control	p. 51
Metanorm Expectations: If Everybody's Doing It, Does That Make It Right?	p. 66
Moving Out of the Lab: Sex, Crime, and Human Rights	p. 85
Norms, Laws, and Markets: Implications for Policy	p. 104
Conclusion	p. 127
Definitions	p. 135
Methods	p. 137
Notes	p. 177
References	p. 189
Index	p. 207
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