It is a common assumption that if you do something wrong, you should be punished for your actions. Younger children will be placed in time-out for breaking the rules. High school students get detention or suspension for talking to a teacher or fighting. We expect people who break the law to be fined or jailed.
Broadly speaking, there are two reasons for punishing wrongdoers: deterrent (significant penalty makes violation of rules or law less attractive) and public safety (protects the removal of law breakers from society).
For minor infractions (such as being rude to a co-worker/classmate, spray-painting graffiti, or knocking over a trash can at a fast food restaurant), public safety does not apply. Thus, the main value punishment to prevent someone from misbehaving and to prevent someone who has done it once from doing it again.
However, people who do something bad once often do it again. So penalties can be a deterrent, but they are by no means perfect. And this is why creative punishments for minor offenses have grown, where the offender is given a punishment that causes them to feel some of the harm they have caused. A person who yells at a colleague can spend weeks making angry calls to the company’s customer service line. A vandal can spend a month removing graffiti from a public park. Someone who tips the trash at a fast-food restaurant can clean it every day for a week. The idea is that if a person feels the harm caused by their crime, it may make them less likely to do it again.
Public opinion about creative punishments
What do people think about such a punishment? Finally, for a creative approach to punishment, if people thought it was a good idea. Judges, school principals, and others who impose punishment are unlikely to be creative if it causes backlash.
This question was explored in a 2026 paper by Timothy Kundro, Salvatore Affinito, and Daniela Rodríguez-Mincy in the publication. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
In several studies, these authors compared constructive punishments in which the offender experienced the harm caused by their actions with conventional punishments (suspension or imprisonment) of the same length. Punishment duration was determined by a group of participants who rated the appropriate punishment for various simple violations. Then, the research assistants proposed creative punishments for each violation (like the ones I described earlier).
After that, in several studies, participants compared this type of punishment. For example, in one study, participants read about transgression and then read about both creative and conventional punishment and were asked which one should be given and which one they thought the person would learn more from. Participants chose creative punishment about 60% of the time and also judged that the offender learned more from creative punishment than from conventional punishment. Several studies have replicated this finding and also found that participants perceived creative punishments as less severe than conventional punishments, suggesting that creative punishments can lead to learning without being harsh. Other studies have compared creative punishments cognitive-behavioral therapy and the participants in this study also preferred constructive punishment to criminal treatment.
The importance of matching the punishment to the crime
An additional study found that creative punishment should fit the crime. In this study, the punishments the researchers created for one action were paired with another action (so cleaning up at a fast food restaurant could be a punishment for yelling at a co-worker). In this case, the punishments were not superior to the usual punishments and they probably did not lead to learning.
In an interesting twist on this study, the researchers conducted another experiment in which participants were asked to imagine themselves as criminals and asked which punishment they preferred and also which they thought they would learn the most from. Like the observers in the other studies I described, the people who assumed the role of the criminal also preferred creative punishment and thought they would learn more from it.
These studies suggest that for minor infractions, it may be worth changing the way we think about punishing people who do wrong. Rather than handing out arbitrary punishment (such as suspension from school or going to jail), punishment that causes them to feel some harm can be an effective strategy to help keep people from doing the wrong thing again.
