Evil in Mind by Burris Christopher T.;

Author:Burris, Christopher T.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Justified admission

Justified denial—in its extreme, making the case that what looks like hate is actually “love”—can require a fair bit of mental gymnastics. By comparison, justified admission is more straightforward: One can say “I hate X” and still sidestep the Mark of Cain—that is, being seen as evil—IF one can offer adequate justifications for hating. The least subtle way of doing this is to portray the target as an unjustified hater who is therefore evil.

Some of Halperin’s (2008) findings, briefly mentioned earlier, are consistent with this possibility (see also Waytz et al., 2014). For example, when “asked to recall an incident in which he or she thought that a certain person felt hatred toward a certain social group” (p. 737), over 80% of Halperin’s Israeli interviewees confessed to wanting bad things to happen to members of the targeted group. Why? Nearly two-thirds indicated that the targeted group had intentionally done something that was unfair, and 73% linked hate to the perception that members of the targeted group were evil. In a large follow-up experiment, Halperin had participants read several stories involving an outgroup member engaging in harmful behavior. Of the key elements of the stories that were varied systematically across participants, the two that had the biggest impact on reported hate were whether the outgroup member was (1) portrayed as intending the harm and (2) (especially) portrayed as evil. For anger, the effects of both of these story variations were weaker; for fear, the effects were negligible. Thus, although these results do not offer direct evidence of Mark of Cain dynamics, they do suggest that thinking of a target as “evil” is a particularly powerful way to decrease people’s reluctance to admitting hate (see also Goodvin, 2019).

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