Today I’m excited to post about women, violence and justice. How do women and men think about systems of justice, and how does this affect how they choose to punish cheaters and defecters? In particular, how do women feel about violent punishments, even if those punishments are merited?

This topic has, in my opinion, broad implications for law, policy, and interpersonal relationships. Understanding how one feels when observing punishment has bearing on how one chooses to punish and what outcomes they deem fair.

The inflicting of punishment is deeply related to our capacity for empathy and our tendency to experience the emotions of an individual we are merely observing. Women, as today’s study reveals, feel empathy in ways that are noticeably different from men, and it appears that these differences have implications for the way that women will regard an individual being punished. This finding may inform our notions of the female punisher, suggesting that women will either choose less severe punishments or, perhaps more likely, non violent forms of punishment.

The article, published in Nature in 2006, employs fMRI techniques to scan the brains of women and men as they watch other people play an economic game, the prisoner’s dilemma. After the players in the game make their decisions, the subjects watched either fair or unfair players receive an electric shock to their hand.

The researchers were hoping to observe the differences in brain activation as a response to fair and unfair punishment. The researchers were paying special attention to the fronto-insular cortex (FI), a part of the brain implicated in empathetic responses. The researchers hypothesized that activation in this area would be reduced when subjects observed a fair -- as opposed to an unfair -- punishment, feeling less empathy for those who are in pain if they deserve it.

The researchers were surprised to find a significant difference in empathy responses along these unfair/fair dimensions between men and women: “This analysis revealed that less empathic activity was elicited by the knowledge that an unfair player was in pain. However, there was also a marked difference between the sexes. In women this reduction in activity was very small, whereas in men the knowledge
that an unfair player was in receipt of pain elicited no increase in empathic activity in FI.” Whether or not the player deserved the punishment, women felt significant levels of empathy.

The authors suggest, in a way that I find compelling, that it is the nature of the punishment that is responsible at least in part for this difference between the sexes: “It is possible that our experimental design favoured men because the modality of punishment was related to physical threat, as opposed to psychological or financial threat. Alternatively, these findings could indicate a predominant role for males in the maintenance of justice and punishment of norm violation in humans.”

Whatever the empirically correct conclusion to be drawn from this study, it is a finding that is worth noting. Its my personal hypothesis that men think abstractly about upholding justice whereas women focus in on the state of the individuals involved. In terms of the alternative that it is merely the unique nature of the punishment as a violent punishment, I thought I’d include an relevant article from yesterday’s New York Times about women and violence as depicted in art.

I would be unsurprised if further studies corroborated the idea that women think differently about abstract justice enforcement in addition to violent forms of punishment. If so, we must begin to think about how females judge and enact fairness.