Jail sentence community service or compensation?

Abstract

This study investigated the reactions of lay persons to a serious corporate offence (food-poisoning), focusing on executive officers and the organisations they represent. Two hundred and forty-one participants from Adelaide, South Australia, read a realistic scenario describing the offence and then responded to questions concerning carelessness, seriousness, responsibility, deservingness, harshness of penalty, anger, sympathy, jail sentence, community service, and compensation, as well as a measure of right-wing authoritarianism. Results showed that the predictors of the appropriateness of a penalty varied depending on penalty type, that reported anger failed to predict any type of penalty, that reported sympathy and female gender predicted community service, and that perceived responsibility mediated the relation between perceived carelessness and compensation judgments.