Sources and References

Primary textbook — Baumeister, R.F. (1997). Evil: Inside human cruelty and violence. W.H. Freeman.

Supplementary texts — Burris, C. T. (2022). Evil in Mind: The psychology of harming others. Oxford University Press.

Online resources — APA PsycINFO; Frontiers in Psychology.

Assigned readings —

• Govrin, A. (2018). The cognition of severe moral failure: A novel approach to the perception of evil. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 557.
• Bastian, B., Denson, T. F., & Haslam, N. (2015). Perceiving the agency of harmful agents: A test of dehumanization versus moral typecasting accounts. Cognition, 146, 33–42.
• Rowan, J., & Dwyer, C. (2015). What makes an “evildoer”? [Assigned reading, PSYCH 232].
• Merritt, A. C., Effron, D. A., & Monin, B. (2010). Moral self-licensing: When being good frees us to be bad. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 4, 344–357.
• Moore, C., & Gino, F. (2013). Ethically adrift: How others pull our moral compass from true North, and how we can fix it. Research in Organizational Behavior, 33, 53–77.
• Furnham, A., Richards, S. C., & Paulhus, D. L. (2013). The Dark Triad of personality: A 10 year review. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 7, 199–216.
• Rempel, J. K., & Sutherland, S. (2016). Hate: Theory and implications for intimate relationships. In K. Aumer (Ed.), The psychology of love and hate in intimate relationships (pp. 105–129). Springer.
• Rempel, J. K., & Burris, C. T. (2005). Let me count the ways: An integrative theory of love and hate. Personal Relationships, 12, 297–313.
• Bulut, S. (2017). The concept of sadism in the current empirical literature. Zbornik Instituta za kriminoloska i socioloska istrazivanja, 36(2), 7–22.
• Hodgkinson, S., Prins, H., & Stuart-Bennett, J. (2017). Monsters, madmen… and myths: A critical review of the serial killing literature. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 34, 282–289.
• Campbell, J.-L., & Goritz, A. S. (2014). Culture corrupts! A qualitative study of organizational culture in corrupt organizations. Journal of Business Ethics, 120(3), 291–311.
• Pedrini, S., & Villeneuve, J.-P. (2017). Villeneuve’s hidden monsters: Representations of evil in Prisoners and Sicario. In ReFocus: The films of Denis Villeneuve. Edinburgh University Press.

Chapter 1: Introduction — The Psychology of Evil

Why Study Evil?

The word evil carries enormous weight. In everyday conversation, in religious traditions, in courtrooms, and in the headlines, people invoke evil to describe the most extreme forms of harm that human beings inflict on one another. Yet despite its cultural centrality, the concept of evil has received surprisingly uneven attention from psychologists. For much of the twentieth century, mainstream psychology treated evil as a folk concept better left to philosophers and theologians. The assumption was that once we understood aggression, antisocial behavior, and psychopathology, there would be nothing left for the word “evil” to explain. That assumption has proven inadequate.

This course examines evil as a psychological phenomenon in its own right. Drawing on social psychology, personality science, moral psychology, criminology, and organizational behavior, we ask a set of deceptively simple questions: What does evil mean to people, and why? When, why, and how do various forms of human-on-human nastiness occur? Why do people feel the need to minimize or justify their own nastiness, and how do they accomplish this? And what impact does all of the above have on perpetrators, victims, and observers?

The Scope of the Course

The course is organized around four broad arcs. The first arc (Chapters 2–4) concerns the concept of evil: how people define it, how they identify evildoers, and how moral self-concept regulates behavior. The second arc (Chapters 5–6) concerns the becoming of evil: how ordinary people come to commit harmful acts through moral disengagement, and how personality traits associated with callousness and cruelty are structured. The third arc (Chapters 7–9) addresses specific manifestations of evil at the individual level: hate, sadism, and serial killing. The fourth arc (Chapters 10–13) examines evil in its collective and institutional forms and considers how individuals and societies respond to evil.

Baumeister’s Opening Provocation

Roy Baumeister’s (1997) Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Violence serves as the conceptual backbone of the course. Baumeister opens with a crucial observation: there is a systematic gap between how perpetrators and victims understand the same harmful event. Victims tend to see evil acts as senseless, gratuitous, and driven by sadistic pleasure. Perpetrators, in contrast, tend to see their acts as provoked, justified, or at least comprehensible. Baumeister calls this the magnitude gap — the tendency for victims to perceive harm as larger, more intentional, and more consequential than perpetrators do.

This gap has far-reaching implications. It means that when we try to understand evil from the victim’s perspective alone, we risk constructing a picture of the perpetrator as an incomprehensible monster — what Baumeister calls the myth of pure evil. The myth holds that evildoers are fundamentally different from ordinary people, that they inflict harm for its own sake, that they have always been evil, and that their victims are entirely innocent. Every element of this myth is psychologically misleading. As the course will demonstrate, most acts of evil are committed by ordinary people under identifiable psychological conditions.

The Myth of Pure Evil

Baumeister identifies several features of the myth of pure evil that pervade folk psychology:

1. Evil is intentional: The perpetrator is seen as deliberately seeking to cause harm for its own sake, rather than as a means to some other end.
2. Evil is the other: Evildoers are fundamentally different from “us” — they lack normal human feelings, motivations, and constraints.
3. Evil is stable: The evildoer has always been evil and will always be evil; there is no developmental trajectory.
4. Victims are innocent: The victim bears no causal role in the chain of events leading to harm.
5. Evil is the antithesis of order: Evil represents chaos and destruction, opposed to the forces of good and civilization.

Each of these assumptions is contradicted by empirical evidence. People who commit terrible acts usually do so for reasons that make sense within their own psychological framework. They often exhibit normal personality profiles. Their behavior frequently escalates gradually rather than appearing fully formed. And victims sometimes contribute to the dynamics that produce harm, though this observation must be handled with extreme care to avoid victim-blaming.

Four Roots of Evil

Baumeister (1997) proposes that most evil actions can be traced to four root causes:

1. Instrumentality: Harm inflicted as a means to some desired end (money, power, territory, resources). This is the most common root of evil and the least “evil-looking” because the perpetrator’s goal is not suffering itself but something else.
2. Threatened egotism: Harm inflicted in response to perceived threats to the self-concept. When people with inflated self-views receive negative feedback, they may lash out violently. This challenges the long-standing assumption that low self-esteem causes aggression.
3. Idealism: Harm inflicted in pursuit of a higher good. Some of the worst atrocities in human history have been committed by people who believed they were making the world better — through religious purification, political revolution, or ethnic cleansing.
4. Sadism: Harm inflicted for the pleasure of inflicting it. Baumeister argues that genuine sadism is the rarest root of evil but that it can develop through a process of gradual escalation.

A Note on Method and Perspective

The psychology of evil is an inherently interdisciplinary undertaking. The research we examine draws on laboratory experiments, field studies, archival analyses, clinical case studies, survey research, and qualitative interviews. No single method is adequate to the subject. Experimental studies offer causal precision but often at the cost of ecological validity; case studies of real atrocities offer richness but limited generalizability. Throughout the course, we will attend carefully to the strengths and limitations of each evidential approach.

We will also attend to the ethical complexities of studying evil. Research on obedience, aggression, and intergroup violence raises serious questions about informed consent, psychological harm to participants, and the social responsibilities of researchers. The Milgram obedience experiments and the Stanford Prison Experiment, which we examine in Chapter 11, remain among the most ethically debated studies in the history of psychology.

Chapter 2: Defining Evil — What Is “Evil”?

The Problem of Definition

The question “What is evil?” has occupied philosophers, theologians, and ordinary people for millennia. Yet arriving at a precise, psychologically useful definition proves remarkably difficult. As Govrin (2018) observes, definitions of evil tend to suffer from three recurring problems: they are circular (defining evil in terms of its emotional impact rather than its essence), they are quantitative (evil is “very, very bad” wrongdoing, differing from ordinary wrongdoing only in degree), and they are partial (capturing some features of evil while neglecting others).

Philosophical Frameworks

The Privation Theory

One of the oldest approaches, associated with Augustine and other theologians, treats evil as a privation — the absence of good, rather than a positive force in its own right. On this view, evil has no independent existence; it is parasitic on goodness in the same way that darkness is the absence of light. While intellectually elegant, this approach has limited psychological utility because it does not explain why people actively choose to inflict harm.

The Kantian Approach

Immanuel Kant defined evil in terms of the inversion of moral priorities. A morally evil person is not one who lacks knowledge of the moral law, but one who knowingly subordinates moral duty to self-interest. Evil, for Kant, is radical because it involves a corruption of the will itself — the capacity for moral choice is present but deliberately misused. This framework captures something important about the psychology of moral disengagement that we will explore in Chapter 5.

The Arendtian Turn: The Banality of Evil

Hannah Arendt’s (1963) analysis of Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem introduced the phrase “the banality of evil” into public consciousness. Arendt observed that Eichmann was not a monster but a bureaucrat — a man of “terrifyingly normal” psychology who participated in genocide primarily through obedience, careerism, and an inability to think critically about what he was doing. The banality thesis does not deny that evil acts occur; it denies that they require evil people. This insight is foundational for much of the social-psychological research we examine in this course.

Psychological Approaches to Defining Evil

Evil as a Folk Concept

One productive approach treats evil not as an objective category but as a folk concept — a label that people apply to certain acts, persons, or situations based on implicit cognitive criteria. On this view, the psychologist’s job is not to determine what evil “really is” but to understand when and why people invoke the concept.

Research on moral typecasting (Gray & Wegner, 2009) suggests that people organize their moral world into two complementary roles: moral agents (those who do good or evil) and moral patients (those who receive good or evil). This dyadic framework implies that evil requires both a perpetrator and a victim, and that perceiving someone as an evildoer simultaneously enhances their perceived agency while diminishing their perceived capacity to experience suffering.

Govrin’s Prototype Model (2018)

Govrin (2018) proposes that the perception of evil operates like other prototype-based categorizations. Rather than checking a fixed list of criteria, the brain recognizes a pattern that resembles the prototype of evil — much as one recognizes a face or a melody. This perception is shaped by four salient features:

1. Extreme asymmetry between victim and perpetrator in terms of power, vulnerability, or capacity for defense. Evil is most readily perceived when the victim is helpless and the perpetrator is powerful.

2. Perceived attitude of the perpetrator toward the victim’s vulnerability. The perpetrator is seen as not merely ignoring but actively exploiting or relishing the victim’s helplessness. This perceived attitude is what transforms mere harm into evil.

3. The observer’s inability to understand the perpetrator’s perspective. Evil is perceived when the observer cannot construct any plausible psychological framework within which the perpetrator’s actions make sense. The act appears not just wrong but incomprehensible.

4. Insuperable differences in moral judgment between observer and perpetrator following the event. After the act, the perpetrator’s response (lack of remorse, justification, indifference) shakes the observer as deeply as the act itself.

The Cognitive Bias in Evil Perception

A crucial implication of Govrin’s model is that the perception of evil involves a systematic cognitive bias. The observer attributes to the perpetrator a specific state of mind — typically involving malice, pleasure in suffering, or fundamental indifference to human life — that is “almost always mistaken.” Perpetrators rarely experience themselves as evil. They are more likely to experience themselves as justified, provoked, compelled by circumstances, or simply doing what anyone would do. This gap between observer attribution and perpetrator experience is not an incidental feature of evil perception; it is constitutive of it.

Evil Versus Wrongdoing: Where Is the Line?

If evil is a prototype-based category rather than a sharply defined one, then the boundary between evil and ordinary wrongdoing is inherently fuzzy. Several dimensions appear to influence where people draw the line:

These dimensions are continuous, not categorical, which means that the boundary between wrongdoing and evil is subject to contextual, cultural, and individual variation. The same act may be judged as evil by one person and as merely wrong by another, depending on the information available, the observer’s moral framework, and the observer’s emotional relationship to the victim.

Natural and Manufactured Evil

The Fall 2007 iteration of the course drew a useful distinction between natural and manufactured manifestations of evil. Natural manifestations include phenomena that cultures have historically attributed to evil forces — unexplained suffering, disease, natural disasters, and the apparent existence of cruelty in nature. In many religious traditions, the problem of evil (theodicy) asks how a benevolent, omnipotent God can permit such suffering.

Manufactured manifestations involve the deliberate creation of the perception of evil for social or political purposes. Throughout history, groups have constructed enemies as evil — through propaganda, demonization, scapegoating, and moral panic — in order to justify aggression, consolidate power, or maintain social cohesion. The construction of witches in early modern Europe, the demonization of Jewish people in Nazi propaganda, and contemporary media portrayals of criminal “monsters” all represent instances of manufactured evil. Understanding how evil is socially constructed is essential to understanding how it is psychologically produced.

Functions of Evil

The concept of evil serves several psychological and social functions:

1. Explanatory function: Evil provides a causal explanation for suffering that might otherwise seem random or meaningless. Attributing suffering to evil agents makes the world feel more predictable, even if more threatening.

2. Moral boundary maintenance: The category of evil marks the outer boundary of acceptable human behavior. By designating certain acts as evil, communities define and reinforce their moral norms.

3. In-group solidarity: Identifying a common enemy as evil strengthens in-group cohesion and cooperation. The narrative of “us versus evil” is one of the most powerful organizing structures in human social life.

4. Justification of punishment: Labeling someone as evil justifies extreme responses — incarceration, execution, war — that would be difficult to justify against someone who is merely “wrong.”

5. The concept of “necessary evil”: Some actions that would normally be considered wrong are reframed as necessary evils — harmful acts committed in the service of a greater good. This concept connects directly to the moral disengagement processes examined in Chapter 5.

Chapter 3: The Evil Person — Making and Perceiving Evildoers

Introduction

If evil acts are to be explained, who commits them? One of the most persistent folk intuitions about evil is that it flows from evil persons — that there exist individuals who are fundamentally, dispositionally, and perhaps irredeemably oriented toward harm. This chapter examines the psychology of perceiving and constructing the “evildoer,” drawing on research in dehumanization, moral typecasting, and the attribution of agency to harmful agents.

Moral Typecasting and the Dyadic Model

Gray and Wegner’s (2009) moral typecasting theory proposes that moral cognition is fundamentally dyadic: it involves a moral agent (one who acts, chooses, and intends) and a moral patient (one who experiences, suffers, and is affected). These roles are seen as complementary and inversely related. The more someone is perceived as a moral agent, the less they are perceived as a moral patient, and vice versa.

Applied to evildoers, moral typecasting theory predicts that harmful agents should be perceived as highly agentic — as possessing strong capacities for planning, intention, and self-control. After all, if they are responsible for terrible acts, they must possess the agency necessary to have chosen those acts. This prediction seems intuitively plausible: folk accounts of evil emphasize the perpetrator’s cunning, deliberation, and cold calculation.

Dehumanization of Harmful Agents: Bastian et al. (2015)

Bastian, Denson, and Haslam (2015) tested the moral typecasting prediction against an alternative drawn from the dehumanization literature. The dehumanization hypothesis predicts that harmful agents will be denied agency — stripped of the qualities that make them fully human — rather than being perceived as super-agentic.

The studies used diverse paradigms:

• Participants rated the agency of individuals described as having committed harmful acts versus neutral or prosocial acts.
• The effect was observed for both individual human targets and for corporations.
• The denial of agency occurred across various gradations of harmfulness — from mild to severe.
• Crucially, the effect persisted even when controlling for perceived likeability, ruling out the alternative explanation that participants simply rated disliked targets lower on all positive dimensions.

These findings suggest that when people encounter someone who has committed serious harm, they do not magnify that person’s perceived agency (as moral typecasting would predict). Instead, they diminish it — treating the perpetrator as less than fully human. This has important implications for how societies respond to evildoers: if we perceive them as subhuman, we may feel justified in treating them in ways that we would not accept for “real” humans.

Forms of Dehumanization

Haslam (2006) distinguishes two forms of dehumanization:

1. Animalistic dehumanization: Denying others uniquely human qualities (civility, refinement, moral sensibility, rationality, maturity) and implicitly equating them with animals. Harmful agents may be described as “beasts,” “monsters,” or “savages.”

2. Mechanistic dehumanization: Denying others human nature qualities (warmth, emotion, agency, individuality) and implicitly equating them with machines or objects. Harmful agents may be described as “cold,” “robotic,” or “calculating.”

Both forms serve to psychologically exclude the perpetrator from the moral community, making it easier to impose harsh punishment and reducing empathic concern.

What Makes an “Evildoer”? The Attribution Process

The process by which someone comes to be labeled an “evildoer” involves several attribution steps:

Dispositional Attribution

People are strongly inclined toward dispositional attribution — explaining others’ behavior in terms of stable internal traits rather than situational factors. When someone commits a harmful act, observers tend to conclude that the person is evil rather than that they were in a situation that produced evil behavior. This is an instance of the fundamental attribution error and it plays a central role in constructing the category of the evildoer.

Essentialism

Once someone is categorized as an evildoer, the label tends to be treated as essentialist — as reflecting a deep, unchangeable, constitutive property of the person. Evil is seen as residing “in” the person, much as a biological property resides in an organism. This essentialism makes it difficult to imagine rehabilitation, redemption, or change.

The Role of Comprehensibility

Govrin’s (2018) third feature of evil perception — the observer’s inability to understand the perpetrator’s perspective — plays a critical role in evildoer attribution. When an observer can understand why someone committed a harmful act (e.g., they were hungry and stole food), the act is more likely to be judged as wrong but not evil. When the observer cannot construct any plausible psychological framework for the act, it is more likely to be judged as evil, and the perpetrator is more likely to be labeled an evildoer.

The “Evildoer” Label as a Social Construction

The label “evildoer” does not simply describe a pre-existing natural kind. It is actively constructed through social processes:

• Media framing: News coverage of violent crime disproportionately emphasizes the most extreme, bizarre, and incomprehensible cases, creating a skewed picture of who commits harm and why.
• Legal and political rhetoric: Politicians and prosecutors use the language of evil strategically to build support for punitive policies.
• In-group/out-group dynamics: Members of out-groups are more likely to be labeled as evil than members of in-groups who commit comparable acts.
• Racial and ethnic bias: Research consistently shows that members of marginalized racial and ethnic groups are more likely to be dehumanized and labeled as evil than members of dominant groups.

Implications for Justice and Rehabilitation

If the evildoer label reflects a cognitive bias rather than an accurate description of a person’s nature, then the justice system’s reliance on this label deserves scrutiny. Treating offenders as irredeemable monsters may satisfy retributive impulses but undermines the possibility of rehabilitation. It may also lead to disproportionate punishment, particularly for members of groups who are more likely to be dehumanized.

At the same time, completely abandoning the concept of the evildoer carries risks. If no one is ever “evil,” then responsibility is diluted, victims’ experiences are minimized, and the moral gravity of the worst human acts is obscured. The challenge is to maintain moral seriousness about harm while resisting the cognitive distortions that the evildoer label tends to produce.

Chapter 4: Moral Licensing and the “Mark of Cain”

Introduction

If people are motivated to see themselves as moral, then a curious paradox arises: does feeling moral protect against future wrongdoing, or does it license it? Moral licensing theory proposes the latter — that establishing a moral track record can free people to behave in ways that are less ethical, because they have “banked” enough moral credit to afford a withdrawal.

Moral Self-Licensing: Merritt, Effron, and Monin (2010)

Merritt, Effron, and Monin (2010) provide a comprehensive review of the moral self-licensing phenomenon in their landmark article “Moral Self-Licensing: When Being Good Frees Us to Be Bad.”

Core Domains of Evidence

Merritt et al. review evidence for moral self-licensing across three domains:

1. Political correctness: After expressing non-prejudiced views or making egalitarian choices, people become more willing to express prejudiced attitudes or make discriminatory decisions. For example, after endorsing Barack Obama as a presidential candidate (establishing non-racist credentials), participants were more likely to favor a White candidate for a police position over an equally qualified Black candidate.

2. Prosocial behavior: After engaging in a prosocial act (donating to charity, volunteering), people may subsequently be less generous or helpful. The initial good deed creates a sense of moral sufficiency that reduces the motivation for further moral behavior.

3. Consumer choice: After purchasing a “green” or ethical product, consumers may subsequently make less ethical consumption choices. The virtuous purchase functions as a moral license for subsequent indulgence.

Two Mechanisms: Credentials Versus Credits

Merritt et al. identify two distinct mechanisms through which moral self-licensing operates:

The distinction matters because the two mechanisms have different implications. The credentials mechanism changes how behavior is interpreted; the credits mechanism changes how much bad behavior is tolerable. Both can produce licensing effects, but through different cognitive pathways.

The “Mark of Cain” Metaphor

The course uses the biblical metaphor of the “Mark of Cain” to explore the paradoxical relationship between moral identity and moral behavior. In the Genesis narrative, after Cain murders Abel, God places a mark on Cain — not as punishment, but as protection, so that no one will kill him. The mark simultaneously identifies Cain as a sinner and shields him from retribution.

Moral licensing operates analogously. A person’s moral track record — their “mark” of goodness — simultaneously identifies them as moral and shields them from the reputational and psychological costs of subsequent immoral behavior. The mark of virtue becomes a license for vice.

Boundary Conditions and Moderators

Moral self-licensing is not universal. Several factors moderate its occurrence:

When Does Past Behavior License Versus Constrain?

In some cases, past moral behavior appears to commit people to continued moral behavior rather than licensing immorality. This occurs when past behavior is interpreted as reflecting a stable moral identity (“I am the kind of person who does the right thing”) rather than as an isolated moral act (“I did something good”). When past behavior is identity-relevant, it creates a commitment to consistency. When it is act-relevant, it creates a license for inconsistency.

Self-Presentation Versus Self-Concept

Is moral self-licensing primarily a public phenomenon (managing others’ impressions) or a private one (managing one’s own self-concept)? Evidence supports both. People license more when their past good behavior is publicly known, suggesting a self-presentational component. But licensing also occurs in private, suggesting that it serves an internal self-regulatory function as well.

Individual Differences

Not everyone licenses equally. People who are high in moral identity centrality — for whom being moral is central to their self-concept — may be less susceptible to licensing because immoral behavior threatens a core aspect of their identity. Conversely, people who view morality as peripheral may license more freely because the costs of occasional immorality are lower.

Implications for Understanding Evil

Moral licensing is relevant to the psychology of evil because it reveals that moral behavior and immoral behavior are not opposites but are psychologically intertwined. The same mechanisms that enable people to be good also enable them to be bad. A person who has built up a substantial moral reputation may feel especially entitled to cut corners, exploit others, or engage in behaviors that they would condemn in others. This dynamic helps explain some of the most puzzling cases of evil: the respected community leader who turns out to be an abuser, the humanitarian organization that covers up internal corruption, the religious figure who commits moral atrocities.

Chapter 5: Becoming Evil — The Psychology of Moral Disengagement

Introduction

How do ordinary, psychologically normal people come to commit acts of extraordinary harm? This chapter examines the psychological processes through which moral self-regulation is neutralized, allowing people to behave in ways that violate their own moral standards without experiencing the distress that such violations would normally produce.

Bandura’s Theory of Moral Disengagement

Albert Bandura (1999, 2002) developed the most influential framework for understanding how people disengage from their own moral standards. His theory identifies eight mechanisms of moral disengagement, organized into four categories based on where in the behavioral chain they operate:

Mechanisms Operating on the Behavior Itself

1. Moral justification: Reconstruing harmful behavior as serving a worthy moral purpose. Killing becomes “defending freedom”; exploitation becomes “necessary sacrifice for progress.” This mechanism is perhaps the most powerful because it transforms evil into virtue.

2. Euphemistic labeling: Using sanitized language to disguise the nature of harmful conduct. “Collateral damage” replaces “killing civilians”; “enhanced interrogation” replaces “torture”; “downsizing” replaces “destroying livelihoods.”

3. Advantageous comparison: Comparing one’s harmful behavior to even more harmful behavior, making it seem benign by contrast. “What I did is nothing compared to what they do.”

Mechanisms Operating on the Sense of Agency

4. Displacement of responsibility: Attributing responsibility to authority figures or external pressures. “I was just following orders” — the defense invoked at Nuremberg and by participants in the Milgram experiments.

5. Diffusion of responsibility: Distributing responsibility across many actors so that no single individual feels personally accountable. This mechanism is especially potent in organizational and bureaucratic settings.

Mechanisms Operating on the Outcomes

6. Disregard or distortion of consequences: Minimizing, ignoring, or denying the harm caused by one’s behavior. If the consequences seem minor, there is less need to activate moral self-censure.

Mechanisms Operating on the Victim

7. Dehumanization: Stripping victims of their human qualities, making it psychologically permissible to harm them. As discussed in Chapter 3, dehumanization of victims (as opposed to dehumanization of perpetrators by observers) is one of the most dangerous prerequisites for mass violence.

8. Attribution of blame: Holding victims responsible for their own suffering. “They brought it on themselves” neutralizes guilt by relocating the cause of harm from perpetrator to victim.

Moore and Gino (2013): Ethically Adrift

Moore and Gino (2013) extend Bandura’s framework by examining how social and organizational contexts pull individuals’ moral compasses away from ethical behavior — a process they call being “ethically adrift.”

Social Triggers of Unethical Behavior

Moore and Gino identify several categories of social triggers:

Moral neglect — People fail to recognize the ethical dimensions of a situation. This connects to the concept of ethical fading, in which the moral aspects of a decision are gradually eroded by framing, context, and habituation until the decision-maker no longer perceives a moral issue at all. A manager making a decision about product safety may come to frame it purely as a cost-benefit analysis, with the moral dimension having “faded” from consciousness.

Moral justification — Organizational identification, group loyalty, and euphemistic framing all increase the likelihood that individuals will judge their own ethically questionable actions as morally acceptable. When people strongly identify with their organization, they are more willing to engage in unethical behavior on its behalf because they see organizational goals as extensions of their own moral purposes.

Immoral action — Social conformity pressures, obedience to authority, and the gradual escalation of commitments all function as direct triggers of harmful behavior. Small initial transgressions pave the way for larger ones through the slippery slope mechanism: each step is only slightly more unethical than the last, so no single step triggers sufficient moral alarm to halt the progression.

Ethical Fading

Ethical fading helps explain one of the most puzzling features of organizational evil: the fact that participants often seem genuinely unaware that they are doing anything wrong. They are not actively suppressing moral concerns; those concerns have simply been erased from the cognitive landscape by the framing and routines of the organization.

Gradual Escalation: The Boiling Frog

The metaphor of the boiling frog (though scientifically inaccurate) captures an important psychological truth: gradual escalation is one of the most effective pathways to evil. Milgram’s obedience experiments (Chapter 11) demonstrated this principle vividly: participants who administered 15-volt increments to a learner escalated all the way to 450 volts — a level they would have refused outright if asked at the start. Each increment was small enough to seem continuous with the previous one, so there was no single point at which a clear moral line was crossed.

The same dynamic operates in many real-world contexts:

• Genocide: The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with boycotts, then legal restrictions, then forced relocations, then ghettos, then deportations, and finally mass extermination. Each step was an incremental escalation from the last.
• Corporate fraud: Enron’s accounting fraud did not begin with massive fabrication. It began with small “aggressive” accounting choices that gradually escalated into systematic deception.
• Intimate partner violence: Abusive relationships typically begin with small controlling behaviors that gradually escalate into physical violence.

The Role of Self-Serving Bias

People are remarkably skilled at constructing self-serving narratives that justify their behavior after the fact. Self-serving bias — the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to internal factors and negative outcomes to external factors — operates powerfully in moral contexts. People who have committed harmful acts tend to emphasize the situational pressures they faced, the provocations they received, and the limited options available to them. This retrospective justification can become a prospective license: having successfully justified past transgressions, the individual develops confidence in their ability to justify future ones.

Implications

The research on moral disengagement and ethical fading has profound implications for how we think about evil. It suggests that the primary barrier to evil is not character but moral awareness — the ability to perceive the ethical dimensions of one’s situation and to maintain that perception in the face of countervailing pressures. Evil is not typically the product of a deliberate choice to be evil; it is the product of a failure to see — or a willingness to stop seeing — the moral reality of what one is doing.

Chapter 6: The Dark Triad and Dark Tetrad

Introduction

While the previous chapter emphasized situational and processual explanations for evil, this chapter turns to personality — the stable individual differences that predispose some people to exploit, manipulate, and harm others more readily than others. The focus is on the Dark Triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) and its extension, the Dark Tetrad, which adds everyday sadism.

The Dark Triad: Furnham, Richards, and Paulhus (2013)

Paulhus and Williams (2002) introduced the term Dark Triad to describe a constellation of three personality variables that are conceptually distinct but empirically overlapping. Furnham, Richards, and Paulhus (2013) reviewed a decade of research on the construct.

Narcissism

Narcissism is characterized by grandiosity, entitlement, dominance, and superiority. In the Dark Triad context, narcissism refers to the subclinical, personality-trait version rather than the clinical diagnosis of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (though the two are related).

Key features:

• Inflated self-views and need for admiration
• Exploitative interpersonal style
• Low empathy, particularly when self-esteem is not threatened
• Reactive aggression when ego is threatened (connecting to Baumeister’s “threatened egotism” root of evil)
• Short-term interpersonal charm that masks long-term exploitativeness

Narcissism is the “lightest” member of the Dark Triad in the sense that it includes some adaptive features (confidence, ambition, social boldness) alongside its darker aspects.

Machiavellianism

Machiavellianism, named after Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince, is characterized by strategic manipulation, cynical worldview, and pragmatic morality.

Key features:

• Calculating and strategic approach to social interaction
• Willingness to manipulate and deceive others for personal gain
• Cynical view of human nature (“everyone is out for themselves”)
• Emotional detachment and pragmatic rather than principled morality
• Long-term planning and patience (distinguishing it from the impulsivity of psychopathy)

Machiavellians are the most “cold” of the Dark Triad — they do not harm for pleasure (like sadists) or out of emotional reactivity (like narcissists), but because harm serves their strategic interests.

Subclinical Psychopathy

Subclinical psychopathy is characterized by callousness, impulsivity, antisocial behavior, and shallow affect.

Key features:

• Profound deficit in empathy and remorse
• Impulsive, thrill-seeking behavior
• Superficial charm and social predation
• Disregard for rules, norms, and the well-being of others
• Fearlessness and stress immunity

Psychopathy is the “darkest” member of the triad, most strongly associated with criminal behavior, violence, and interpersonal exploitation. However, subclinical psychopathy (as opposed to clinical psychopathy measured by the PCL-R) is a dimensional trait present to varying degrees in the general population.

The Common Core: Callous-Manipulation

Despite their distinctiveness, the three Dark Triad traits share a common core that Furnham et al. describe as callous-manipulation — a willingness to exploit others combined with reduced concern for the impact of that exploitation. This shared core is reflected in moderate positive correlations among the three traits and in their joint associations with low agreeableness and low conscientiousness in the Big Five/Five Factor Model.

Structural Location

Furnham et al. review how the Dark Triad maps onto mainstream personality models:

All three traits converge on low Agreeableness (the tendency to be cooperative, trusting, and considerate of others), supporting the interpretation that the common core of the Dark Triad involves a deficit in prosocial orientation.

The Dark Tetrad: Adding Sadism

More recently, Paulhus and colleagues have proposed expanding the Dark Triad to a Dark Tetrad by adding everyday sadism — the tendency to derive pleasure from inflicting suffering on others.

Research by Buckels, Jones, and Paulhus (2013) provided behavioral confirmation of everyday sadism: in a laboratory paradigm where participants could choose to kill bugs in a coffee grinder (a modified apparatus that did not actually harm the insects), individuals high in everyday sadism not only chose the bug-killing task more often but also reported enjoying it. This behavioral evidence distinguished sadism from the other Dark Triad traits, which predicted willingness to harm but not enjoyment of harming.

Why Add Sadism?

The addition of sadism to the Dark Triad is justified on both theoretical and empirical grounds:

1. Unique variance: Sadism predicts aggressive and harmful behavior above and beyond the three existing Dark Triad traits.
2. Qualitative difference: While narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy involve harm as a means to an end (ego defense, strategic advantage, impulsive gratification), sadism involves harm as an end in itself.
3. Baumeister’s fourth root: Sadism corresponds directly to Baumeister’s fourth root of evil — harm inflicted for the pleasure of inflicting it.

The Evil Personality: Baumeister’s Chapter 10

Baumeister (1997, Chapter 10) addresses the question of whether there is such a thing as an “evil personality” — a stable constellation of traits that predisposes individuals to commit evil acts. His answer is nuanced:

• There is no single “evil personality type” that accounts for all or even most evil behavior.
• Most evil is committed by ordinary people under specific circumstances, not by people with distinctive personality profiles.
• However, certain personality features — particularly narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism — do increase the likelihood of harmful behavior.
• The most dangerous personality configuration is one that combines high narcissism (providing the motivation for aggression when ego is threatened), high psychopathy (removing the internal brakes of empathy and guilt), and high sadism (providing positive reinforcement for harmful behavior).

This analysis anticipates the Dark Tetrad framework by several decades, underscoring the convergence between Baumeister’s clinical intuitions and subsequent empirical research.

Personality and Situation: An Interaction

The personality approach to evil should not be interpreted as contradicting the situational approach examined in earlier chapters. Rather, personality and situation interact. People high in Dark Tetrad traits are more susceptible to situational triggers of evil behavior — more likely to obey destructive orders, more likely to exploit power imbalances, more likely to escalate aggression — but they are not immune to situational influences, and people low in these traits are not immune to evil behavior when situational pressures are sufficiently extreme. The psychology of evil requires both dispositional and situational perspectives, not a choice between them.

Chapter 7: Hate

Introduction

Hate is among the most intense and destructive of human experiences, yet it has received far less systematic psychological attention than related constructs such as anger, aggression, and prejudice. This chapter examines hate as a distinct psychological phenomenon, drawing on the integrative theoretical framework developed by Rempel and Burris (2005) and extended by Rempel and Sutherland (2016).

Rempel and Burris (2005): An Integrative Theory of Love and Hate

Rempel and Burris (2005) propose that love and hate are best understood as motivational states rather than as emotions in the traditional sense.

This conceptualization is significant for several reasons:

1. Hate is not simply the opposite of love on a single continuum. Rather, love and hate are distinct motivational systems that can coexist within the same relationship (as in the phenomenon of “love-hate” relationships).

2. Hate is not an emotion. While hate is associated with emotions (anger, contempt, disgust), it is more stable, more cognitive, and more goal-directed than any single emotion. Hate involves a settled, enduring orientation toward diminishing another’s well-being, not a transient emotional state.

3. The core of hate is the desire for harm. Across four studies (three Canadian, one African), Rempel and Burris found that lay understandings of hate consistently center on the perceived desire for a target to experience harm. Statements most central to the concept of hate focused on wishing suffering upon the hated person.

Prevalence of Hate

Rempel and Burris found that between 20–30% of respondents reported either not experiencing hate or denying that they experience it. This suggests that hate, while widespread, is not universal in subjective experience — though it remains unclear whether non-reporters genuinely do not experience hate or simply do not label their experience as such.

Rempel and Sutherland (2016): Hate in Intimate Relationships

Rempel and Sutherland (2016) extend the integrative framework by examining hate specifically in the context of intimate relationships, drawing on advances in understanding the relationship between emotion and motivation.

The Emotivational Framework

Rempel and Sutherland propose an emotivational model that distinguishes three temporal stages of response to threatening or harmful events:

1. Immediate emotional response: Prototypical emotional states (fear, anger, disgust) generate rapid, automatic responses when there is little time for deliberation.

2. Emotivational trajectory: With more processing time, the motivational component inherent in the initial emotion influences behavioral responses. Anger’s emotivational trajectory, for example, pulls toward confrontation and aggression.

3. Conscious motivational deliberation: With still more time, conscious reasoning and deliberation refine the behavioral response. At this stage, hate can become a stable motivational orientation that persists long after the initial emotional trigger has subsided.

Hate Versus Anger

A critical distinction in this framework is between hate and anger:

Anger is a response to a specific perceived wrong; hate is a settled orientation toward a person. One can be angry at someone one loves; hate, by contrast, involves a fundamental reorientation of the relationship toward the other’s destruction.

The Development of Hate

Hate typically develops through a process rather than emerging fully formed:

1. Repeated injury: Ongoing experiences of harm, betrayal, or violation by the same person create a cumulative sense of grievance.
2. Attribution stability: The harmful behavior comes to be attributed to the other person’s stable character rather than to situational factors.
3. Perspective refusal: The injured party becomes unwilling or unable to take the other’s perspective or to imagine charitable interpretations of their behavior.
4. Motivational crystallization: The desire for the other’s suffering or destruction becomes a stable, enduring motivational orientation that organizes thought, feeling, and behavior.

Group-Level Hate

While Rempel and colleagues focus primarily on interpersonal hate, the framework has clear implications for group-level phenomena. Intergroup hate — directed at entire ethnic, religious, national, or political groups — follows a similar developmental trajectory:

• Accumulated group-level grievances (real or perceived)
• Essentialist attribution (the other group is inherently threatening or evil)
• Dehumanization (refusing to take the other group’s perspective)
• Collective motivational orientation toward the other group’s diminishment or destruction

Group-level hate is particularly dangerous because it can be culturally transmitted, institutionally reinforced, and politically mobilized. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass persecution all involve the crystallization of group-level hate into organized violence.

Hate and Evil

Hate connects to the psychology of evil in multiple ways:

• Hate provides the motivational fuel for sustained, deliberate harm — the kind of harm most likely to be perceived as evil.
• The development of hate involves many of the cognitive processes examined in earlier chapters: dehumanization (Chapter 3), moral disengagement (Chapter 5), and dispositional attribution (Chapter 3).
• Hate can transform otherwise ordinary people into perpetrators of extraordinary harm, supporting the course’s theme that evil is a product of psychological processes rather than innate wickedness.

Chapter 8: Sadism

Introduction

Sadism — the derivation of pleasure from inflicting pain, suffering, or humiliation on others — occupies a distinctive place in the psychology of evil. Unlike instrumental harm (which serves some external goal), sadistic harm is its own reward. The perpetrator is motivated not by what the suffering will produce but by the suffering itself. This chapter examines sadism in both its clinical and everyday manifestations, drawing on Baumeister’s (1997) developmental analysis and contemporary research on the Dark Tetrad.

Historical and Clinical Background

The term “sadism” derives from the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), whose literary works depicted extreme cruelty and sexual violence. In clinical usage, sadism has traditionally been associated with two contexts:

1. Sexual sadism: Classified in the DSM as a paraphilic disorder, involving sexual arousal from inflicting pain or humiliation on others.
2. Sadistic personality disorder: Briefly included in the DSM-III-R appendix (1987) and subsequently removed, characterized by a pervasive pattern of cruel, demeaning, and aggressive behavior not limited to sexual contexts.

The removal of sadistic personality disorder from the DSM reflected concerns about potential misuse in forensic settings, not a conclusion that the construct was invalid. Contemporary research has revived interest in sadism as a personality dimension.

Baumeister’s Developmental Model of Sadism

Baumeister (1997) argues that sadism is not an innate drive but a learned pleasure that develops through a process of gradual escalation:

1. Initial instrumentality: The person first inflicts harm for instrumental reasons (self-defense, obedience, material gain). There is no pleasure in the harm itself.

2. Emotional override: During or after the harmful act, the person experiences a rush of power, excitement, or relief that becomes associated with the act of inflicting harm.

3. Pleasure conditioning: Through repeated association, the infliction of harm becomes intrinsically pleasurable — a classically conditioned response in which the act of harming acquires positive emotional valence.

4. Escalation: As with other pleasures, habituation sets in. The same level of harm no longer produces the same level of pleasure, driving the person to escalate — to inflict more severe, more frequent, or more creative forms of harm.

5. Addiction: In extreme cases, the pleasure of harming becomes compulsive and self-sustaining, resembling a behavioral addiction. The person actively seeks opportunities to harm others, not because of any external goal but because the harming itself has become a need.

This developmental model is important because it implies that sadism is a continuum rather than a category. Anyone who repeatedly inflicts harm under certain conditions may develop sadistic tendencies. The difference between the ordinary person and the sadist is not a difference in kind but a difference in developmental history.

Everyday Sadism: Bulut (2017) and the Dark Tetrad Research

Bulut (2017) reviews the concept of sadism in the current empirical literature, noting the shift from studying sadism exclusively in clinical and forensic populations to recognizing its presence in the general population.

The Comprehensive Assessment of Sadistic Tendencies (CAST)

Paulhus and colleagues developed the Comprehensive Assessment of Sadistic Tendencies (CAST) to measure everyday sadism. The scale captures two facets:

1. Direct sadism: Enjoyment of directly inflicting physical or emotional pain on others (e.g., bullying, humiliation, cruelty to animals).
2. Vicarious sadism: Enjoyment of witnessing others’ suffering (e.g., watching violent media, enjoying footage of real violence, attraction to combat sports).

Behavioral Evidence

As noted in Chapter 6, Buckels et al. (2013) provided behavioral confirmation of everyday sadism using the “bug-killing” paradigm. Additional behavioral evidence includes:

• Trolling: Internet trolling — the deliberate provocation of others online for personal amusement — is strongly predicted by everyday sadism, even after controlling for the other Dark Triad traits.
• Aggressive behavior in laboratory settings: Individuals high in everyday sadism are more willing to aggress against opponents, particularly when aggression requires extra effort, suggesting that the aggression is motivated by the pleasure of harming rather than by instrumental goals.
• Willingness to punish: High-sadism individuals choose harsher punishments for transgressors, not because they perceive the transgression as more severe but because they enjoy the act of punishing.

Sadism Versus Psychopathy

Sadism and psychopathy are related but distinguishable:

A psychopath may harm someone without caring; a sadist harms someone because they care — about the pleasure the harming provides.

Sadism and Evil in Cultural Representations

Sadism occupies a prominent place in cultural representations of evil. The archetype of the villain who enjoys suffering — from fairy-tale witches to cinematic serial killers to real-world torturers — reflects the folk intuition that the most evil form of harm is harm inflicted for pleasure. Govrin’s (2018) second feature of evil perception — the perceived attitude of the perpetrator toward the victim’s vulnerability — captures this intuition precisely: evil is most readily perceived when the perpetrator appears to relish the victim’s helplessness.

Pedrini and Villeneuve’s (2017) analysis of Denis Villeneuve’s films Prisoners and Sicario illustrates how cinema constructs “hidden monsters” — characters whose evil is defined not by their physical appearance but by their behavioral and moral characteristics. These characters function as realistic human monsters who corrupt their assumed sociocultural identities, blurring the boundary between ordinary personhood and monstrous evil. The concept of the “hidden monster” resonates with the psychological research on everyday sadism: the sadist does not look different from anyone else but harbors a distinctive motivational orientation toward others’ suffering.

Chapter 9: Serial Killers

Introduction

Serial killing occupies a unique place in public consciousness. It is statistically rare — serial killers account for a tiny fraction of all homicides — yet it dominates media coverage, true crime entertainment, and popular imagination. This chapter examines the psychology of serial killing critically, drawing on Hodgkinson, Prins, and Stuart-Bennett’s (2017) review of the serial killing literature and on Baumeister’s (1997) analysis of violent offenders.

Hodgkinson, Prins, and Stuart-Bennett (2017): Monsters, Madmen, and Myths

Problems with the Existing Literature

Hodgkinson et al. identify several persistent problems:

1. Biographical reductionism: The field is dominated by individual case studies that offer highly simplified portrayals of perpetrators. These accounts tend toward the sensational and the voyeuristic, reinforcing stereotypes rather than generating generalizable knowledge.

2. Confusing terminology: Terms such as “serial killer,” “mass murderer,” and “spree killer” overlap in confusing ways, and definitions vary across jurisdictions and researchers. The FBI’s social construction of the “serial killer problem” has been particularly influential in shaping misleading popular assumptions.

3. The “organized killer” myth: The widely circulated distinction between “organized” and “disorganized” serial killers implies that organized killers are highly intelligent, socially skilled, and effective at evading detection. Research suggests, however, that serial killers often succeed not because of exceptional ability but because of conscious learned strategies, investigative failures, and biases in law enforcement that lead police to overlook or deprioritize certain victims (particularly marginalized populations).

4. Media distortion: Popular media portrayals of serial killers emphasize the most extreme and bizarre cases, creating a picture of serial killing as invariably involving genius-level intelligence, elaborate rituals, and sexual sadism. Most serial killers do not match this profile.

Typologies of Serial Killers

Despite the problems with existing typologies, several classification systems have been proposed:

By motivation:

• Visionary: Kills in response to hallucinations or delusions (e.g., hearing voices commanding them to kill)
• Mission-oriented: Kills to eliminate a group perceived as unworthy (e.g., sex workers, members of a particular ethnic group)
• Hedonistic: Kills for the pleasure of killing, which may involve sexual gratification (lust killers), material gain (comfort killers), or the thrill of the experience (thrill killers)
• Power/control: Kills to exercise dominance and control over victims

By behavioral pattern:

• Organized: Plans murders, selects victims, conceals evidence, maintains outward normalcy
• Disorganized: Attacks impulsively, leaves evidence, shows signs of psychological disturbance
• Mixed: Displays features of both organized and disorganized patterns

Hodgkinson et al. caution that these typologies are oversimplified and empirically unsupported in many cases. Real serial killers rarely fit neatly into a single category.

Psychological Profiles

Childhood Antecedents

Research has identified several recurring (though by no means universal) features in the developmental histories of serial killers:

• Early abuse and neglect: Physical, sexual, and emotional abuse in childhood is disproportionately common.
• Attachment disruption: Insecure or disorganized attachment relationships with primary caregivers.
• Animal cruelty: Cruelty to animals in childhood is one of the most frequently cited precursors.
• Fire-setting and enuresis: Along with animal cruelty, these form the “MacDonald triad,” though the empirical support for this triad as a predictor of future serial killing is weak.
• Social isolation: Many serial killers report profound loneliness and social marginalization in childhood and adolescence.

Personality Features

Serial killers are heterogeneous in personality, but several features recur:

• High psychopathy scores (particularly on Factor 1: interpersonal/affective features)
• Narcissistic traits, including grandiosity and entitlement
• Sadistic tendencies (particularly in lust-motivated killers)
• Paraphilic interests (sexual fetishes involving violence, control, or degradation)
• Superficial charm and social manipulation ability

The Role of Fantasy

Many serial killers report an active fantasy life centered on violence and domination, often beginning in adolescence. The relationship between fantasy and action is complex: not everyone who fantasizes about violence acts on those fantasies, and not all serial killers report prior violent fantasies. However, when violent fantasies are combined with opportunities, facilitating circumstances, and the absence of internal or external inhibitors, they can function as rehearsals for actual violence.

Baumeister’s Analysis: Chapters 4 and 7

Baumeister (1997) discusses serial killers primarily in the context of his analysis of sadism (Chapter 7) and blatant evil (Chapter 4). His key contributions include:

• The observation that serial killers frequently begin with lesser offenses and gradually escalate, consistent with the developmental model of sadism.
• The emphasis on power and control as central motivations, even in cases that appear to be primarily sexual.
• The argument that serial killers are not qualitatively different from other people but represent an extreme endpoint on continuous dimensions of personality and developmental experience.

Socio-Cultural Context

Hodgkinson et al. (2017) emphasize that serial killing cannot be understood solely through individual psychology. Socio-cultural factors that enable serial killing include:

• Marginalization of victims: Serial killers disproportionately target marginalized populations (sex workers, homeless individuals, runaway youth, members of racial minorities) whose disappearances are less likely to be investigated.
• Law enforcement biases: Investigative resources are unevenly distributed, with cases involving White, middle-class victims receiving disproportionate attention.
• Cultural fascination: The intense cultural fascination with serial killers — through true crime media, documentaries, and fiction — may contribute to a climate in which serial killing is simultaneously condemned and glamorized.

Chapter 10: The Evil Personality

Introduction

This chapter draws primarily on Baumeister’s (1997) Chapter 10 analysis of whether there exists a coherent “evil personality” — a stable configuration of traits that predisposes certain individuals to commit evil acts. While Chapter 6 examined the Dark Triad/Tetrad as specific trait constellations, this chapter takes a broader view, asking whether the concept of an evil personality is psychologically coherent and empirically supported.

Is There an Evil Personality?

Baumeister’s answer is carefully qualified. He argues that:

1. There is no single evil personality type. Evil acts are committed by people with diverse personality profiles, and no single trait or combination of traits is either necessary or sufficient for evil behavior.

2. Certain traits increase risk. As discussed in Chapter 6, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism each contribute to the likelihood of harmful behavior, and their combination is particularly dangerous.

3. Personality interacts with situation. Even high-risk personality profiles do not inevitably produce evil behavior. Environmental factors — opportunity, social support, institutional context, cultural norms — determine whether dispositional tendencies are expressed.

4. The concept of the “evil personality” is more useful as a folk category than as a scientific one. People use the concept to identify and exclude individuals perceived as threatening, but this use reflects the cognitive biases discussed in Chapter 3 (dispositional attribution, essentialism, dehumanization) as much as it reflects genuine personality differences.

Narcissism and Evil

Baumeister devotes particular attention to narcissism (Chapter 5 of his book) as a pathway to evil. His analysis anticipates subsequent research on the Dark Triad:

The Threatened Egotism Hypothesis

This hypothesis directly contradicts the long-standing popular belief that low self-esteem causes aggression. Baumeister marshals extensive evidence that the relationship runs in the opposite direction: it is high self-esteem — specifically, high but unstable or unwarranted self-esteem — that predicts aggression. People who think very highly of themselves and encounter challenges to that self-assessment are the most dangerous.

Applications of the threatened egotism hypothesis:

• Domestic violence: Abusers often have inflated self-images and respond aggressively to perceived disrespect from their partners.
• Gang violence: Much gang violence is precipitated by perceived disrespect (“dissin’”), which threatens the inflated self-concepts that gang membership supports.
• Terrorism: Some terrorist actors are motivated by perceived threats to the honor or status of their group, which they experience as threats to their own identity.

The Transformative Effects of Power (Baumeister, Chapter 8)

Baumeister examines how the acquisition of power transforms personality and behavior. Power does not simply reveal pre-existing personality traits; it actively changes people.

Power and Disinhibition

Research consistently shows that power increases disinhibition — the tendency to act on impulses without considering their consequences for others. Powerful people are:

• More likely to act on their desires without considering others’ perspectives
• Less accurate in reading others’ emotions
• More likely to objectify and exploit subordinates
• More likely to bend or break rules for personal benefit

Power and Moral Hypocrisy

Power also increases moral hypocrisy — the tendency to hold others to higher moral standards than oneself. Powerful people judge others’ moral violations more harshly while simultaneously excusing their own comparable violations. This asymmetry is particularly dangerous in institutional contexts, where power-holders may enforce ethical standards for subordinates while exempting themselves.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

The transformative effects of power were famously (and controversially) demonstrated in Zimbardo’s (1971) Stanford Prison Experiment, in which college students randomly assigned to the role of “guard” in a simulated prison rapidly adopted authoritarian, abusive, and dehumanizing behaviors toward students assigned to the role of “prisoner.” The study was terminated after six days due to the severity of the guards’ behavior and the psychological distress of the prisoners.

The Stanford Prison Experiment has been subjected to extensive methodological criticism (including allegations that Zimbardo actively encouraged guard aggression and that participants were play-acting rather than genuinely transformed). Despite these criticisms, the study’s core insight — that situational roles and power dynamics can rapidly and dramatically alter behavior — has been supported by subsequent research.

The Engulfment Motive

The course outline references the engulfment motive — the desire to subsume or consume another person, to make them an extension of oneself. This motive represents a pathological form of attachment in which the other person’s separate existence is experienced as threatening. In extreme form, engulfment can motivate controlling behavior, stalking, and violence — particularly in the context of intimate relationships where the perpetrator cannot tolerate the partner’s autonomy.

The engulfment motive connects to both narcissism (the narcissist’s need for others to serve as mirrors and extensions of the self) and to hate (the transformation of frustrated love into the desire to destroy the object that refuses to be consumed).

Chapter 11: Group-Based Evil — Obedience, Conformity, and Collective Violence

Introduction

Some of the worst atrocities in human history have been committed not by isolated individuals but by groups — armies, mobs, bureaucracies, and entire societies. This chapter examines the social-psychological processes that enable collective evil, drawing on classic research on obedience and conformity and on contemporary analyses of organizational corruption and genocide.

Milgram’s Obedience Experiments

Stanley Milgram’s (1963, 1974) obedience experiments remain the most influential — and most controversial — studies in the psychology of evil. In the basic paradigm, participants were instructed by an experimenter (the authority figure) to administer increasing levels of electric shock to a learner (actually a confederate) each time the learner made an error on a learning task. The shocks ranged from 15 to 450 volts, with labels from “Slight Shock” to “XXX.”

Key Findings

• 65% of participants in the baseline condition administered the maximum 450-volt shock, despite the learner’s screams, protests, and eventual silence.
• Obedience rates varied systematically across conditions: they decreased when the learner was in the same room, when the experimenter was absent, when the participant had to physically force the learner’s hand onto the shock plate, and when other “participants” (confederates) refused to continue.
• Obedience rates increased when the participant was in a different room from the learner, when the experimenter was physically present, and when the institutional setting (Yale University) lent authority to the procedure.

Why Do People Obey?

Milgram proposed the concept of the agentic state — a psychological condition in which individuals cede personal responsibility to an authority figure, viewing themselves as mere instruments of the authority’s will rather than as autonomous moral agents. In the agentic state, the individual’s moral concerns are not eliminated but redirected: the primary moral concern becomes obeying the authority rather than avoiding harm to the victim.

Additional factors contributing to obedience include:

• Gradual escalation: Each shock increment was only 15 volts more than the last, so there was no single clear decision point at which to refuse. This connects to the slippery slope dynamics discussed in Chapter 5.
• Entrapment: Having already administered shocks at lower levels, participants felt committed to continuing. Stopping would require admitting that their previous behavior was wrong.
• Diffusion of responsibility: The experimenter’s instructions and the institutional setting allowed participants to attribute responsibility to the authority rather than to themselves.
• Ambiguity: The situation was novel and confusing. Participants were uncertain whether the learner was actually being harmed and whether their concerns were warranted.

Ethical Controversies

The Milgram experiments have been criticized on multiple ethical grounds:

• Participants were deceived about the nature of the study and the reality of the shocks.
• Many participants experienced severe distress during and after the study.
• The debriefing process was inadequate in some cases.
• The study may have caused lasting psychological harm to some participants.

These concerns contributed to the development of modern research ethics protocols, including institutional review boards (IRBs) and requirements for informed consent and minimal harm.

The Stanford Prison Experiment Revisited

As discussed in Chapter 10, Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated the power of situational roles to shape behavior. In the context of group-based evil, the study illustrates several key principles:

• Role internalization: Participants rapidly internalized the behaviors associated with their assigned roles, suggesting that social roles carry powerful behavioral expectations.
• Power dynamics: The asymmetry of power between guards and prisoners created conditions conducive to abuse.
• Deindividuation: Uniforms, numbers instead of names, and other depersonalizing features reduced individual accountability and increased willingness to engage in harmful behavior.

Conformity and Group Pressure

Solomon Asch’s (1951) conformity experiments demonstrated that individuals will deny the evidence of their own senses in order to agree with a unanimous group. While Asch’s studies involved a low-stakes perceptual judgment (comparing line lengths), the underlying principle — that group unanimity exerts powerful pressure on individual judgment — has profound implications for understanding group-based evil.

In the context of evil, conformity pressures operate through several mechanisms:

1. Informational influence: Group consensus is taken as evidence about reality. If everyone else supports a harmful policy, perhaps it really is justified.
2. Normative influence: Dissent carries social costs — rejection, ostracism, punishment. The desire to maintain group membership motivates compliance with group norms, even harmful ones.
3. Pluralistic ignorance: Each individual privately disagrees with the group’s behavior but assumes that everyone else supports it. This creates a situation in which no one speaks up, reinforcing the illusion of consensus.

Campbell and Goritz (2014): Culture Corrupts

Campbell and Goritz (2014) provide a qualitative analysis of organizational culture in corrupt organizations, demonstrating how institutional environments facilitate collective unethical behavior.

Key Features of Corrupt Organizational Culture

Based on interviews with 14 experts across multiple industries (government, foreign trade, pharmacy, sports, construction):

1. Warfare metaphor: Corrupt organizations perceive themselves as fighting a war against competitors, regulators, or external threats. This taken-for-granted assumption justifies extreme measures — including corruption — as necessary for survival.

2. “The end justifies the means”: This foundational assumption pervades the organization’s values and norms. Ethical concerns are subordinated to organizational goals (success, results, performance).

3. Security as a core value: Maintaining secrecy and protecting the organization from exposure become paramount. Employees who refuse to participate in corruption are seen as security threats.

4. Punishment of deviance: Non-corrupt behavior is treated as deviant and punished — through ostracism, demotion, or termination. The normal moral order is inverted: compliance with corruption is rewarded, while ethical behavior is sanctioned.

5. Rationalization strategies: Employees develop elaborate rationalizations for their behavior, drawing on the moral disengagement mechanisms described in Chapter 5.

6. Cynical view of human nature: Employees in corrupt organizations come to view human beings as fundamentally evil and self-interested, which further justifies corrupt behavior (“everyone does it”).

Genocide: The Ultimate Group-Based Evil

Genocide represents the most extreme form of group-based evil — the systematic attempt to destroy an entire ethnic, national, religious, or racial group. The psychology of genocide draws on all the processes discussed in this chapter and throughout the course.

Stages of Genocide

Gregory Stanton (1996) proposed an influential model identifying stages through which genocide develops:

1. Classification: Division of society into “us” and “them.”
2. Symbolization: Names, languages, uniforms, or physical characteristics are used to distinguish groups.
3. Discrimination: The dominant group uses law, custom, and political power to deny rights to the targeted group.
4. Dehumanization: The targeted group is equated with animals, vermin, insects, or disease. This overcomes the normal human inhibition against killing.
5. Organization: Genocide is always organized, usually by the state or by militias supported by the state.
6. Polarization: Extremists drive the groups apart. Moderates are silenced, intimidated, or eliminated.
7. Preparation: Plans are made for genocidal killing. Victims are identified and separated.
8. Persecution: Victims are identified and separated because of their ethnic or religious identity. Death lists are drawn up.
9. Extermination: Mass killing begins, considered “extermination” by the killers because they do not view their victims as fully human.
10. Denial: The perpetrators deny that they committed any crimes.

Baumeister’s Analysis: Evil for the Masses (Chapter 6)

Baumeister’s chapter on genocide emphasizes several factors:

• Idealism: Genocidal movements are typically driven by idealistic visions of a purified society, not by sadistic pleasure. The perpetrators believe they are building a better world by eliminating the group they perceive as threatening or contaminating.
• Obedience and conformity: Most participants in genocide are not leaders or fanatics but ordinary people who comply with orders and social expectations.
• Diffusion of responsibility: The bureaucratic organization of genocide distributes responsibility so widely that no individual feels personally culpable.
• Dehumanization: As discussed throughout the course, the dehumanization of victims is a necessary precondition for mass killing.

The Fall 2007 course included the film Biography: Gen. Romeo Dallaire, which documents the experience of the Canadian general who commanded UN forces in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. Dallaire’s account illustrates the devastating consequences of international community failure to respond to early warnings of genocide and the lasting psychological impact on witnesses.

Chapter 12: Corporate and Institutional Evil

Introduction

Evil is not exclusively the province of individual actors or political movements. Corporations, bureaucracies, and institutions can produce systematic, sustained harm through their normal operations — harm that may be more devastating in its cumulative impact than any individual act of violence. This chapter examines how institutional structures facilitate evil, drawing on Baumeister’s (1997) analysis of “destruction by committee” and Campbell and Goritz’s (2014) research on corrupt organizational cultures.

Destruction by Committee (Baumeister, Chapter 9)

Baumeister’s analysis of corporate and institutional evil focuses on several mechanisms through which group decision-making produces harmful outcomes:

Groupthink

Irving Janis’s (1972) concept of groupthink describes a mode of thinking that occurs when the desire for harmony and conformity in a group overrides realistic appraisal of alternatives. Symptoms include:

• Illusion of invulnerability
• Collective rationalization
• Belief in the inherent morality of the group
• Stereotyping of out-groups
• Direct pressure on dissenters
• Self-censorship
• Illusion of unanimity
• Self-appointed “mindguards” who protect the group from dissenting information

Groupthink can lead to catastrophic decisions because the normal corrective function of debate and dissent is suppressed. Historical examples include the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Challenger space shuttle disaster, and numerous corporate scandals.

Diffusion of Responsibility in Organizations

In large organizations, decisions that produce harm are rarely made by a single individual. Instead, they emerge from complex chains of command, committee deliberations, and bureaucratic processes in which no single person has full knowledge of or full control over the outcome. This structural feature creates a powerful form of moral disengagement: each individual can truthfully say that they were responsible only for their small part of the process, that they did not know the full picture, and that the final outcome was not their intention.

Bureaucratic Evil

Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil finds its fullest expression in bureaucratic settings. Bureaucracies are designed to operate according to rules, procedures, and hierarchies that minimize individual discretion. This design has many benefits (consistency, efficiency, accountability), but it also creates conditions conducive to evil:

• Rule-following as moral shield: Bureaucrats can deflect moral responsibility by pointing to rules and procedures. “I was just following the rules” is the bureaucratic equivalent of “I was just following orders.”
• Fragmentation of action: Bureaucratic divisions of labor mean that no single person performs the complete harmful action. One person processes the paperwork, another signs the authorization, another carries out the order. Each person’s individual action seems innocuous; the cumulative effect is devastating.
• Dehumanization through abstraction: Bureaucratic processing transforms human beings into cases, files, numbers, and statistics. This abstraction removes the human face from decision-making, reducing empathic concern.

The Corporation (Film Analysis)

The Fall 2007 course included the documentary The Corporation (2003), which examines the modern corporation through the lens of personality diagnosis. The film’s provocative thesis is that if a corporation were a person, its behavior would meet the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy: callous disregard for the well-being of others, inability to maintain enduring relationships, reckless disregard for the safety of others, deceitfulness and repeated lying, incapacity to experience guilt, and failure to conform to social norms.

While this analogy is deliberately provocative, it highlights a genuine feature of corporate structure: corporations are designed to maximize shareholder value, and this design imperative can produce behavior that, in an individual, would be recognized as pathological. The key insight is that the harmful behavior is not a product of individual malice but of structural incentives and institutional design.

Organizational Corruption: Lessons from Campbell and Goritz (2014)

As detailed in Chapter 11, Campbell and Goritz’s research on corrupt organizations reveals that organizational cultures can systematically invert normal moral standards. Several additional features are relevant to institutional evil:

Normalization of Deviance

Diane Vaughan’s (1996) concept of the normalization of deviance describes the process by which initially alarming deviations from safety standards gradually come to be accepted as normal within an organization. Each deviation that does not produce a catastrophe is taken as evidence that the standards were unnecessarily conservative, leading to progressively greater tolerance of risk. This process played a central role in both the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters.

Ethical Infrastructure

Organizations can also actively promote ethical behavior through their institutional design. Research on ethical infrastructure identifies several features that reduce institutional evil:

• Clear ethical codes with enforcement mechanisms
• Whistleblower protections
• Ethics training that addresses specific situational challenges rather than abstract principles
• Leadership modeling of ethical behavior
• Organizational cultures that reward speaking up and penalize retaliation

Chapter 13: Responses to Evil

Introduction

The preceding chapters have examined what evil is, who commits it, and how it comes about. This final chapter turns to the question of how people respond to evil — as victims, bystanders, and societies. Drawing on Baumeister’s (1997) analysis of responses to evil (Chapter 11) and broader research on coping, justice, and moral repair, we examine the psychological aftermath of evil and the processes through which individuals and communities attempt to make sense of, cope with, and recover from experiences of extreme harm.

Victim Responses: Hug, Hide, Hiss, or Huh

Baumeister (1997, Chapter 11) identifies four prototypical responses to victimization:

“Hug” — Seeking Closeness

Some victims respond to evil by seeking closeness with others — including, paradoxically, with the perpetrator. Identification with the aggressor (a concept from psychoanalytic theory) and trauma bonding (also known as the Stockholm syndrome) represent extreme forms of this response. In less extreme forms, victims may seek social support, join communities of fellow survivors, or strengthen existing relationships.

The affiliative response to victimization serves several functions:

• Safety through proximity to powerful others
• Social validation of one’s experience
• Shared meaning-making
• Practical assistance and resources

“Hide” — Withdrawal and Avoidance

Other victims respond by withdrawing from social contact, avoiding reminders of the traumatic event, and retreating into psychological isolation. This response pattern corresponds to the avoidance symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which include:

• Avoidance of thoughts, feelings, or conversations associated with the trauma
• Avoidance of activities, places, or people that trigger recollections
• Emotional numbing and detachment from others
• Diminished interest in previously enjoyed activities
• Sense of foreshortened future

“Hiss” — Anger and Retaliation

Some victims respond with anger, hostility, and the desire for revenge. This response is psychologically functional in the short term — it restores a sense of agency, combats helplessness, and mobilizes energy for self-protection. However, chronic anger and retaliatory desires can become destructive, perpetuating cycles of violence and preventing recovery.

The retaliatory response connects to the broader psychology of hate examined in Chapter 7. When victimization is attributed to the perpetrator’s stable, malicious character (rather than to situational factors), and when the perpetrator is dehumanized, the desire for retaliation can crystallize into hate — a stable motivational orientation toward the perpetrator’s destruction.

“Huh” — Confusion and Incomprehension

Some victims respond with bewilderment and an inability to comprehend what has happened to them. This response corresponds to Govrin’s (2018) third feature of evil perception — the observer’s inability to understand the perpetrator’s perspective. When the harmful act seems senseless, gratuitous, and incomprehensible, the victim may be left in a state of existential confusion that resists normal meaning-making processes.

The “huh” response is particularly common when the perpetrator was someone the victim trusted (a parent, spouse, friend, community leader) and when the harmful act violated fundamental assumptions about the world’s safety, predictability, and meaningfulness.

Bystander Responses

The Bystander Effect

The bystander effect — the tendency for individuals to be less likely to help when others are present — is one of the most robust findings in social psychology. Classic research by Latane and Darley (1968, 1970) demonstrated that the presence of others inhibits helping through three mechanisms:

1. Diffusion of responsibility: When multiple bystanders are present, each feels less personally responsible for intervening.
2. Pluralistic ignorance: Each bystander looks to others for cues about how to respond. When others appear calm, the individual concludes that the situation is not serious.
3. Evaluation apprehension: Bystanders fear appearing foolish if they intervene and the situation turns out not to be an emergency.

The Upstander

Not all bystanders remain passive. Upstanders — individuals who intervene to prevent or mitigate harm — provide a counterpoint to the bystander effect. Research on upstander behavior identifies several factors that increase the likelihood of intervention:

• Clear perception that harm is occurring
• Sense of personal responsibility
• Perceived competence to help
• Emotional connection to the victim
• Moral identity and values that emphasize helping
• Presence of a single other bystander who intervenes (breaking the pluralistic ignorance)

Societal Responses to Evil

Retributive Justice

The most common societal response to evil is retributive justice — punishment of the perpetrator proportionate to the harm caused. Retributive justice serves multiple functions:

• Expresses moral condemnation of the harmful act
• Incapacitates the perpetrator, preventing further harm
• Deters potential future perpetrators
• Provides symbolic validation of the victim’s suffering

However, retributive justice has significant limitations. It does not undo the harm caused, it often fails to provide psychological closure for victims, and it can perpetuate cycles of violence (particularly when punishment is experienced as disproportionate or unjust).

Restorative Justice

An alternative approach, restorative justice, focuses on repairing the harm caused by wrongdoing rather than on punishing the wrongdoer. Restorative justice processes typically involve facilitated encounters between victims, offenders, and community members, with the goals of:

• Acknowledging the harm caused
• Taking responsibility for one’s actions
• Developing a plan for repair and restitution
• Reintegrating the offender into the community

Restorative justice has shown promise in reducing recidivism and increasing victim satisfaction, but it is controversial when applied to the most severe forms of harm.

Truth and Reconciliation

At the societal level, truth and reconciliation commissions (most famously in post-apartheid South Africa) represent an attempt to respond to systemic evil through public acknowledgment, testimony, and conditional amnesty rather than through conventional criminal prosecution. These processes rest on the assumption that publicly establishing the truth about past atrocities is a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for social healing.

Meaning-Making After Evil

One of the most important psychological tasks facing victims and societies after experiences of evil is meaning-making — the construction of a narrative that integrates the traumatic experience into a coherent understanding of oneself and the world. Meaning-making after evil is particularly challenging because evil, by definition (see Chapter 2), involves events that seem to defy comprehension.

Shattered Assumptions

Janoff-Bulman (1992) proposed that traumatic experiences “shatter” three fundamental assumptions:

1. The world is benevolent: People generally believe that the world is a good place and that good things happen more often than bad things.
2. The world is meaningful: People generally believe that events are predictable, controllable, and fair — that good behavior leads to good outcomes.
3. The self is worthy: People generally believe that they are good, capable, and deserving of positive outcomes.

Evil acts — particularly those that are random, unprovoked, or committed by trusted individuals — violate all three assumptions simultaneously. The resulting psychological distress is not simply fear of future harm but an existential crisis of meaning.

Post-Traumatic Growth

Despite the devastating impact of evil, research on post-traumatic growth suggests that some victims ultimately report positive psychological changes as a result of their struggle with trauma:

• Enhanced appreciation for life
• Improved relationships with others
• Increased personal strength
• Recognition of new possibilities
• Spiritual or existential development

Post-traumatic growth does not mean that the trauma was “worth it” or that suffering is beneficial. It means that the process of struggling with trauma can sometimes catalyze psychological development that would not otherwise have occurred.

Cinematic Representations of Responses to Evil

Pedrini and Villeneuve’s (2017) analysis of Denis Villeneuve’s films illustrates how cinema explores the moral complexity of responses to evil. In Prisoners, a father responds to the abduction of his daughter by kidnapping and torturing a suspect — becoming a “hidden monster” himself in his desperate pursuit of justice. In Sicario, a government operative responds to cartel violence by adopting the cartel’s own methods. Both films pose the question that runs throughout this course: when does the response to evil itself become evil?

The concept of “hidden monsters” — characters whose monstrosity is defined by behavior and moral attitude rather than by appearance — reflects the psychological insight that the boundary between victim, bystander, and perpetrator is more permeable than folk psychology suggests. Under sufficient pressure, ordinary people can cross that boundary in any direction.

Conclusion: Living With Evil

The psychology of evil does not offer easy answers or comfortable conclusions. It reveals that evil is not the exclusive property of monsters, madmen, or the morally defective. It is a potential that resides in ordinary psychological processes — obedience, conformity, moral disengagement, self-serving bias, escalation of commitment — that are present in all of us. The most important lesson of this course is not that evil is ubiquitous or inevitable, but that understanding its psychological mechanisms is the first step toward preventing it.

Awareness of moral disengagement can help individuals recognize when they are rationalizing harmful behavior. Understanding the dynamics of obedience can help people resist destructive authority. Knowledge of the bystander effect can motivate individuals to intervene rather than stand by. And appreciation for the complexity of evil can promote responses to wrongdoing that are both morally serious and psychologically informed — avoiding both the naive optimism that denies evil and the punitive moralism that sees evil everywhere.

As Baumeister (1997) concludes: the myth of pure evil is itself a barrier to understanding evil. Only by abandoning the myth — by accepting that evil is human, comprehensible, and psychologically produced — can we hope to reduce it.