Abstract: This dissertation argues that crimes are experienced as insults to established status hierarchies. Punishments are understood as 'answers' to those insults: effective punishment will increase the perceived social standing of victims, and a failure to punish will lower it. Four experiments tested this hypothesis. Experiment 1 asked participants to recall either a crime or an accident. Their descriptions were qualitatively different across condition. Comparatively, when describing crimes, they spoke more in terms of dignitary/standing losses; with accidents, they spoke more in terms of objective/material losses. This experiment also revealed that crimes make victims feel angrier and more insulted than accidents causing an equal magnitude of perceived harm. In Experiment 2, participants were exposed to a crime (gang rape) where the offenders were either punished or not; participants also rated the social standing (from a typical community member's perspective) of both the victim and the offenders. For both targets, there was a significant interaction between punishment condition and the change in social standing ratings from baseline. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2, using a different crime (credit card fraud), and adding an additional perspective (the victim's). The results were more mixed. Nonpunishment significantly lowered the social standing of victims in the eyes of both victims and community members. Punishment lowered the social standing of offenders, although the result was only marginally significant from the community's perspective. Punishment increased the social standing of victims, and nonpunishment did the same for offenders, however only half of these effects were significant, and then only marginally so. In Experiment 4, participants imagined themselves as the victim in a crime scenario (hit and run). The scenario manipulated whether the offender was punished, and the identity of the punisher (ingroup or outgroup). The prediction was that ingroup punishers would be perceived as capable of affecting the social standing of victims within their own group, but not the social standing of their group as a whole. Outgroup punishers were predicted to the inverse. The predictions were borne out for group social standing; but were more ambiguous for individual social standing.