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It is a standard assumption that if you do something wrong, you should be punished for your action. Young children are put in time-out for breaking the rules. Grade school students go to detention or get suspended from school for talking back to the teacher or getting in a fight. We expect that people who break the law will receive a fine or jail time.
Broadly, there are two main justifications for punishing wrongdoers: deterrence (a significant penalty makes breaking the rules or the law less attractive) and public safety (taking law-breakers out of society protects those who follow the law).
For minor infractions (like being mean to a coworker/classmate, spray painting graffiti, or tipping over a trash can at a fast-food restaurant), public safety doesn’t apply. So, the main value of punishment is to prevent someone from engaging in a bad behavior and preventing someone who has done it once from doing it again.
Yet, people who do something bad once often do it again. So, punishments may be a deterrent, but they aren’t a perfect one by any stretch. And that is why there has been a rise in creative punishments for small infractions in which the transgressor is given a punishment that causes them to experience some of the harm they caused. A person who yells at a colleague may spend a few weeks fielding irate calls at the company’s customer service line. The vandal might spend a month cleaning graffiti from a public park. Someone who tips over the trash at a fast-food restaurant may spend a week cleaning that restaurant each day. The idea is that if an individual experiences the harm they caused with their infraction, it may make them less likely to want to do something like that again.
Public Opinion on Creative Punishments
What do people think of punishments like this? After all, for a creative approach to punishment to catch on, it would help if people thought it was a good idea. Judges, school principals, and others who mete out punishments are unlikely to be creative if it is going to cause a backlash.
This question was explored in a 2026 paper by Timothy Kundro, Salvatore Affinito, and Daniela Rodriguez-Mincey published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Across several studies, these authors compared creative punishments in which the transgressor experienced the harm caused by their action to a typical punishment (suspension or incarceration) of the same length. The length of the punishment was determined by a group of participants who rated the appropriate punishment for a variety of simple infractions. Then, research assistants came up with creative punishments for each infraction (similar to the ones I described earlier).
Afterward, across several studies, participants compared these types of punishments. In one study, for example, participants read about the infraction and then read both about the creative and the typical punishment and were asked both which one they thought should be given and which one they thought the individual would learn more from. Participants selected the creative punishment about 60% of the time, and also judged that the transgressor would learn more from the creative punishment than the typical one. Several studies replicated this finding and also found that participants tend to find creative punishments less harsh than typical ones, suggesting that creative punishments can lead to learning without being harsh. Another study compared creative punishments to cognitive-behavioral therapy and participants in that study also preferred the creative punishment to giving therapy to the transgressor.
Importance of Matching the Punishment to the Transgression
One additional study demonstrated that the creative punishment needs to match the transgression. In this study, punishments the researchers made up for one action were paired with a different action (so, cleaning up the fast-food restaurant might be the punishment for yelling at a colleague). In this case, the punishments were not preferred to typical punishments, nor were they seen as likely to lead to learning.
In an interesting twist on these studies, the researchers did another experiment in which participants were asked to imagine they were the transgressor and were asked both which punishment they would prefer as well as which they thought they would learn more from. Like the observers in the other studies I described, the people adopting the role of the transgressor also preferred the creative punishment and thought they would learn more from it.
These studies suggest that for minor infractions, there may be value in changing our view on how to punish people who do something wrong. Rather than giving them an arbitrary punishment (like getting suspended from school or going to jail), a punishment that causes them to experience some of the harm they created may be an effective strategy for helping to keep people from doing the wrong thing again.
