A punishment is when one agent (the punisher) imposes costs on another (the punished) in order to affect the punished’s behavior. In a Society where thieves are predictably imprisoned and lashed, people will predictably steal less than they otherwise would, for fear of being imprisoned and lashed.
Punishment is often imposed by formal institutions like police and judicial systems, but need not be. A controversial orator who finds a rock thrown through her window can be said to have been punished in the same sense: in a Society where controversial orators predictably get rocks thrown through their windows, people will predictably engage in less controversial speech, for fear of getting rocks thrown through their windows.
In the most basic forms of punishment, which we might term “physical”, the nature of the cost imposed on the punished is straightforward. No one likes being stuck in prison, or being lashed, or having a rock thrown through her window.
But subtler forms of punishment are possible. Humans are an intensely social species: we depend on friendship and trade with each other in order to survive and thrive. Withholding friendship or trade can be its own form of punishment, no less devastating than a whip or a rock. This is called “social punishment”.
Effective social punishment usually faces more complexities of implementation than physical punishment, because of the greater number of participants needed in order to have the desired deterrent effect. Throwing a rock only requires one person to have a rock; effectively depriving a punishment-target of friendship may require many potential friends to withhold their beneficence.
How is the collective effort of social punishment to be coordinated? If human Societies were hive-minds featuring an Authority that could broadcast commands to be reliably obeyed by the hive’s members, then there would be no problem. If the hive-queen wanted to socially punish Mallory, she could just issue a command, “We’re giving Mallory the silent treatment now”, and her majesty’s will would be done.
No such Authority exists. But while human Societies lack a collective will, they often have something much closer to collective beliefs: shared maps that (hopefully) reflect the territory. No one can observe enough or think quickly enough to form her own independent beliefs about everything. Most of what we think we know comes from others, who in turn learned it from others. Furthermore, one of our most decision-relevant classes of belief concern the character and capabilities of other people with whom we might engage in friendship or trade relations.
As a consequence, social punishment is typically implemented by means of reputation: spreading beliefs about the punishment-target that merely imply that benefits should be withheld from the target, rather than by directly coordinating explicit sanctions. Social punishers don’t say, “We’re giving Mallory the silent treatment now.” (Because, who’s we?) They simply say that Mallory is stupid, dishonest, cruel, ugly, &c. These are beliefs that, if true, imply that people will do worse for themselves by helping Mallory. (If Mallory is stupid, she won’t be as capable of repaying favors. If she’s dishonest, she might lie to you. If she’s cruel … &c.) Negative-valence beliefs about Mallory double as “social punishments”, because if those beliefs appear on shared maps, the predictable consequence will be that Mallory will be deprived of friendship and trade opportunities.
We notice a critical difference between social punishments and physical punishments. Beliefs can be true or false. A rock or a jail cell is not a belief. You can’t say that the rock is false, but you can say it’s false that Mallory is stupid.
The linkage between collective beliefs and social punishment creates distortions that are important to track. People have an incentive to lie to prevent negative-valence beliefs about themselves from appearing on shared maps (even if the beliefs are true). People who have enemies whom they hate have an incentive to lie to insert negative-valence beliefs about their enemies onto the shared map (even if the beliefs are false). The stakes are high: an erroneously thrown rock only affects its target, but an erroneous map affects everyone using that map to make decisions about the world (including decisions about throwing rocks).
Intimidated by the stakes, some actors in Society who understand the similarity between social and physical punishment, but don’t understand the relationship between social punishment and shared maps, might try to take steps to limit social punishment. It would be bad, they reason, if people were trapped in a cycle of mutual recrimination of physical punishments. Nobody wins if I throw a rock through your window to retaliate for you throwing a rock through my window, &c. Better to foresee that and make sure no one throws any rocks at all, or at least not big ones. They imagine that they can apply the same reasoning to social punishments without paying any costs to the accuracy of shared maps, that we can account for social standing and status in our communication without sacrificing any truthseeking.
It’s mostly an illusion. If Alice possesses evidence that Mallory is stupid, dishonest, cruel, ugly, &c., she might want to publish that evidence in order to improve the accuracy of shared maps of Mallory’s character and capabilities. If the evidence is real and its recipients understand the filters through which it reached them, publishing the evidence is prosocial, because it helps people make higher-quality decisions regarding friendship and trade opportunities with Mallory.
But it also functions as social punishment. If Alice tries to disclaim, “Look, I’m not trying to ‘socially punish’ Mallory; I’m just providing evidence to update the part of the shared map which happens to be about Mallory’s character and capabilities”, then Bob, Carol, and Dave probably won’t find the disclaimer very convincing.
And yet—might not Alice be telling the truth? There are facts of the matter that are relevant to whether Mallory is stupid, dishonest, cruel, ugly, &c.! (Even if we’re not sure where to draw the boundary of dishonest, if Mallory said something false, and we can check that, and she knew it was false, and we can check that from her statements elsewhere, that should make people more likely to affirm the dishonest characterization.) Those words mean things! They’re not rocks—or not only rocks. Is there any way to update the shared map without the update itself being construed as “punishment”?
It’s questionable. One might imagine that by applying sufficient scrutiny to nuances of tone and word choice, Alice might succeed at “neutrally” conveying the evidence in her possession without any associated scorn or judgment.
But judgments supervene on facts and values. If lying is bad, and Mallory lied, it logically follows that Mallory did a bad thing. There’s no way to avoid that implication without denying one of the premises. Nuances of tone and wording that seem to convey an absence of judgment might only succeed at doing so by means of obfuscation: strained abuses of language whose only function is to make it less clear to the inattentive reader that the thing Mallory did was lying.
At best, Alice might hope to craft the publication of the evidence in a way that omits her own policy response. There is a real difference between merely communicating that Mallory is stupid, dishonest, cruel, ugly, &c. (with the understanding that other people will use this information to inform their policies about trade opportunities), and furthermore adding that “therefore I, Alice, am going to withhold trade opportunities from Mallory, and withhold trade opportunities from those who don’t withhold trade opportunities from her.” The additional information about Alice’s own policy response might be exposed by fiery rhetoric choices and concealed by more clinical descriptions.
Is that enough to make the clinical description not a “social punishment”? Personally, I buy it, but I don’t think Bob, Carol, or Dave do.