Managing Punitive Dissonance: How Social Proximity Shapes Punishment Preferences

How should society react when someone commits a crime? In a democracy, public consent matters. Punitive approaches are popular, but not always consistently desired. Drawing on a variety of theoretical work, we use punitive dissonance to describe the phenomenon where punitive preferences—encouraged by pervasive punitive frames—conflict with redemptive impulses toward specific populations. We further explain how people manage this dissonance through the selective use of social and spatial boundaries—a strategy boosted by widespread frames of ‘criminals’ as others. We employ a simple survey experiment to reveal evidence of this boundary-based management strategy for punitive dissonance, finding higher punitive preferences for juveniles who are more socially and spatially distant from the respondent. We discuss implications for understanding popular punitiveness.