The topic of the Special Issue: Unfair treatment triggers a desire to punish the offender, both among victims and among uninvolved observers. Strikingly, the question of "why" exactly victims and observers punish, that is, which underlying motives punishment aims to satisfy, has not yet been answered conclusively.
The aim of the Special Issue titled "What Drives Second- and Third-Party Punishment? Conceptual Replications of the 'Intuitive Retributivism' Hypothesis" is to motivate experts in the field of punishment research to investigate the motivational basis of punishment more rigorously and more strictly than it has been done so far.
More precisely, all studies will conceptually replicate the "intuitive retributivism" hypothesis by varying design features to which the hypothesis should be principally insensitive. That is, the aim of the Special Issue is to determine the degree to which the "intuitive retributivism" hypothesis is valid across different samples, times, or situations.
Protocols that pass peer review will be principally accepted
There is a three-stage submission process. Initially, interested authors are requested to submit extended abstracts of their proposed papers. Authors of the selected abstracts will then be invited to submit a Stage-1 protocol that will undergo blind peer review. Protocols that pass peer review will be principally accepted, indicating that the article will be published pending successful completion of the study according to the protocol.
Subsequently, authors will either collect the data themselves or prepare the study materials (e.g., program the study for online data collection) so that ZPID's PsychLab Online can manage the data collection. Once the data are analyzed strictly following the preregistered analyses plan, authors submit a Stage-2 paper including a Results and Discussion section.
If the analysis has been conducted as planned and if no other issues have emerged leading to a substantial deviation from the Stage-1 protocol, the paper will be finally accepted for publication.
The deadline for submitting structured extended abstracts is December 1, 2019.
More information on the aim and procedure of this special issue can be found here.
Please direct any inquiries (e.g., suitability, format, scope, etc.) about this Special Issue to the following email address: zfp-replication-on-punishment(at)leibniz-psychology.org