Time and Punishment: Time Delays Exacerbate the Severity of Third-Party Punishment.

Punishments are not always administered immediately after a crime is committed. Although scholars and researchers claim that third parties should normatively enact punishments proportionate to a given crime, we contend that third parties punish transgressors more severely when there is a time delay between a transgressor's crime and when they face punishment for it. We theorize that this occurs because of a perception of unfairness, whereby third parties view the process that led to time delays as unfair. We tested our theory across eight studies, including two archival data sets of 160,772 punishment decisions and six experiments (five preregistered) across 6,029 adult participants. Our results suggest that as time delays lengthen, third parties punish transgressors more severely because of increased perceived unfairness. Importantly, perceived unfairness explained this relationship beyond other alternative mechanisms. We explore potential boundary conditions for this relationship and discuss the implications of our findings.

Performance pressure amplifies the effect of evening detachment on next-morning shame: Downstream consequences for workday cheating behavior.

Detaching from work is beneficial because it helps employees recover from work demands. However, we argue that detachment may be a trade-off for employees in organizations with higher (vs. lower) levels of performance pressure. Drawing on social self-preservation theory, we hypothesize that evening detachment leads employees working in higher (vs. lower) performance pressure work contexts to experience increased shame at work the next morning. In turn, we hypothesize that shame motivates employees to engage in cheating behaviors to covertly inflate their performance and reduce the possibility that others will form negative perceptions of them. In three studies-a 2-week experience sampling study and two experiments-we find that evening detachment leads to heightened next-morning shame in higher (vs. lower) performance pressure work contexts, increasing cheating behavior throughout the workday. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).