In September 2023, at an Ohio Chipotle, a woman who was dissatisfied with her order hurled a burrito bowl at a worker’s face. When the worker pressed charges, the judge in the case handed down an unusual sentence: either 90 days in jail, or 30 days in jail plus two months working at a fast food restaurant. The woman chose the second option.
The sentence was an example of a creative punishment, defined in a new research paper as a sanction tailored to the offense itself and designed to make offenders directly experience something connected to the harm they caused.
“Creative punishments offer an alternative to traditional ones," says one of the paper’s authors, Daniela Rodriguez-Mincey. “A creative punishment might feel deterring not because it makes someone suffer more, but because it helps them grasp, concretely and personally, what their behavior costs to themselves and others.”
Rodriguez-Mincey, a Columbia Business School PhD candidate, co-authored the paper with University of North Carolina Associate Professor Timothy Kundro and NYU Stern Assistant Professor Salvatore Affinito. Together, they set out to solve a longstanding puzzle in punishment psychology: observers generally want punishments to deter future wrongdoing, but they also dislike punishments that seem excessively harsh.
Across 13 studies, including a thorough analysis of more than 17,000 social media reactions, the takeaway was clear and consistent. Creative punishments tailored to the specific offense are perceived as more appropriate, more deterring, and less harsh than traditional punishments.
“The findings suggest that people’s intuitions about justice are more sophisticated than decision-makers sometimes assume,” Rodriguez-Mincey says. “People aren’t out for blood as much as they are on the side of common sense. For judges and policymakers, that means severity should not be the only tool in their toolbox.”
From viral videos to behavioral science
To understand why people respond so positively to creative punishments, the researchers designed a broad project that blended social-media analysis, behavioral experiments, workplace scenarios, and AI-powered text coding.
One of the first places they looked was YouTube. The team collected videos featuring judges known for creative sentencing, like Michael Cicconetti, whose unconventional punishments have gone viral for years. In one case, Cicconetti sentenced a man who skipped out on a 30-mile cab ride to walk 30 miles himself. In another, he ordered a woman who knocked over a portable toilet at a county fair to shovel manure.
Using a custom-built Python script, the researchers scraped 39 videos and more than 17,000 comments reacting to the punishments. Then they trained a GPT-4-based system to analyze whether commenters supported or opposed the punishments. To make sure the AI wasn’t hallucinating patterns, they also had human coders independently review a large sample of comments. Across the board, comments endorsing creative punishments attracted significantly more “likes” from other users than comments criticizing them.
From there, the team moved into a series of controlled experiments. Participants evaluated fictional cases involving low-level offenses and compared traditional punishments like jail time or suspension with tailored alternatives designed to make offenders experience the consequences of their actions firsthand. The pattern held: people consistently viewed creative punishments as more appropriate, more educational, and more likely to prevent future bad behavior, even while seeing them as less harsh.
Lessons for judges, policymakers, and employers
The findings suggest an alternative to severity when it comes to punishing offenders. “The usual assumption is that people stop breaking rules when the punishment becomes scary enough to outweigh the payoff,” Rodriguez-Mincey says. “But fear is not the only thing that can change behavior. From research in psychology, we know that understanding and reflection can, too.”
The implications extend well beyond courtrooms. Organizations routinely struggle with how to discipline employees for low-level misconduct without damaging morale, provoking backlash, or creating legal risk. Universities face similar tensions around academic integrity violations and student discipline. In both cases, the research suggests that penalties designed to foster understanding may feel more legitimate than purely punitive responses.
“Most organizations deal with misconduct that is not criminal but still requires a response,” notes Rodriguez-Mincey. “A generic warning, suspension, or training module might check a procedural box without helping the person understand what they did wrong.”
The key, she says, is specificity. The studies found that creative punishments only seem to work when they clearly match the offense. Punishments that feel random, humiliating, or disconnected, on the other hand, lose the educational effect that makes people support them in the first place.
While more research needs to be done on how creative punishments affect long-term recidivism, Rodriguez-Mincey says there is good reason to believe they may be more effective at preventing future offenses than traditional punishments—and in the meantime, the way people perceive punishments can have a meaningful impact on how they’re carried out.
“People’s opinions matter in this discourse,” she says. “Judges respond to public sentiment, and so do disciplinary bodies in organizations. What observers approve or disapprove of informs justice at large.”
