Western jurisprudence and criminal justice systems as superstitious belief.

Western punitive justice systems persist despite weak evidence that they reduce crime. We argue that they function as WEIRD cultural superstitions: punishment intuitively feels effective even when it fails. Drawing on Singh's framework, historical evidence of punishment's dominance origins, and our own experiments, we show how subjective selection sustains maladaptive punitive institutions - ultimately raising the question, intuitively effective to whom?