What is the impact of the length of exclusion from a group on behavior after reintegration?

What is it about?

Locking people away is a widely used punishment across societies around the globe. However, the impact of the length of imprisonment on convicts' behavior when they are reintegrated in their society is mixed. Does long-term exclusion improve ex-convicts’ pro-social behavior when they get out or, on the contrary, does it increase the of anti-social behavior such as retaliation and recidivism? In order to answer that question, we recreate in the laboratory a real-life situation similar to the scenario described above. In our experiment, groups of four participants face a social dilemma in which their personal interest conflicts with the interest of the group. We give participants the opportunity to punish group members that behave selfishly by excluding them from the group for a certain amount of time. The decision to exclude someone from the group results from a vote. In one half of the groups, the length of exclusion was imposed (either short exclusion or long exclusion), while in the other half, the length of exclusion was also the result of the vote among the group members. Our results show that people are willing to exclude selfish group members and they punish more, and more severely, recidivism. A longer exclusion has a positive impact on excluded group members after reintegration. However, this effect is smaller when the longer exclusion was the result of the vote than when the length was imposed to the group. When the group members can choose the length of exclusion, a quicker reintegration is preferable: it has a positive impact on pro-social behavior and limits retaliation. These results show that post-reintegration behavior depends not only on the length of exclusion but also whether a shorter exclusion can be interpreted as a second chance by the excluded group member or not.

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