For the sake of discussion, consider that a murderer is sentenced to death. What is the motivation behind this sentence? Is it to deter future crimes? Or is it to give the criminal “just deserts”? Princeton psychologist John Darley and his collaborators Kevin Carlsmith and legal scholar Paul Robinson, of Northwestern University, explore this question in a paper published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2002 (Vol. 83). The researchers report on three separate studies they conducted on more than 1,000 university students. The studies used questionnaires to determine what motivated participants to determine sentences for a variety of crime cases presented to them.

The studies show that participants more often assign the punishment that they think the perpetrator deserves rather than the punishment that they think will have a deterring effect. Even after participants noted that they believed in the deterrence theory of punishment, results show that the same participants exemplified a “just deserts” theory in their responses. “The ordinary person arranges what he or she is persuaded about to maintain the general notion that punishment must be proportional to the blameworthiness of the offense,” the researchers note.

That data suggest that culturally conversant individuals have created a scale of penalties in their minds to correspond with a hierarchy of offenses. Rather than a thoughtless eye-for-an-eye vengeance, however, the just deserts approach is more measured in its application, the researchers suggest. Moral proportionality is at the heart of the responses shown in the study. The researchers further conclude that both society and the victims require just desserts punishments. “Unless the punishment is imposed, a real feeling of incompleteness lingers, and there is a sense that justice has not been done,” they note.

Such retribution doesn’t demand capital punishment, but merely ranks certain crimes, such as murder, as most serious and deserving of maximum penalty, they conclude.

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