Public’s Attribution vs Punitive Behavior in Indonesian Public Relations Practice

The research aims to test situational crisis communication and attribution theories in Indonesian context. Crisis threats companies’ reputation and affects the public’s attribution which will lead to the creation of punitive behavior from the public towards the organization. The study used a quantitative approach with experimental method and content analysis in the pre-research. Involving 90 respondents, the research fi nds that mass media infl uences public’s attribution within the experimental group who were given positive and negative news. The research shows that the crisis history and the relational reputation determine the public attribution toward the initial crisis responsibility.

Observation enhances third-party punishment only among people who were not hot-tempered

The evolution of punishment toward norm-violators has been discussed for understanding a large-scale human cooperation. Recent studies showed that the presence of cues of surveillance makes people concern about their reputation and increase altruistic behavior. Recent study also suggests that explicit cues of observation affect punitive behavior. We examined whether both explicit (being observed by an experimenter) and implicit cues (drawing of stylized eyes) of observation enhance third-party punishment. The results of the experiments with Japanese participants showed that both type of cues of observation increased third-party punishment only among those who did not feel anger toward an unfair allocator. In contrast, the cues suppressed the punishment when participant felt stronger anger toward an allocator. Moderating effect of emotion is interpreted as a cultural norm of emotional expression. Our study suggests that we humans are endowed with the psychological system inducing third-party punishment in response to cues of being observed while its function may be moderated by cultural factors.

Punishers May Be Chosen as Providers But Not as Recipients

The issue of evolution of punitive behavior has been a focus of recent studies of human cooperation. One of the topics for discussion in this literature is whether punishers receive benefits, on which no clear conclusion has been reached yet. We conducted a scenario experiment in which we manipulated game types and reward types, and found that punishers were chosen more frequently than non-punishers as providers of rewards, and yet, they were chosen less frequently than non-punishers as recipients of rewards. Adaptive advantages of punishers are suggested to be in their likelihood of being chosen as providers of resources, rather than as recipients of reward.