"They're Not True Humans:" Beliefs about Moral Character Drive Denials of Humanity

A puzzling feature of paradigmatic cases of dehumanization is that the perpetrators often attribute uniquely human traits to their victims. This has become known as the "paradox of dehumanization." I address the paradox by arguing that the perpetrators think about their victims as human in one sense, while denying that they are human in another sense. I do so by providing evidence that people harbor a dual character concept of humanity. Research has found that dual character concepts have two independent sets of criteria for their application, one of which is descriptive and one of which is normative. Four experiments provided evidence that people deploy a descriptive criterion according to which being human is a matter of being a Homo sapiens; as well as a normative criterion according to which being human is a matter of possessing a deep-seated commitment to do the morally right thing. Importantly, I found that people are willing to affirm that someone is human in the descriptive sense, while denying that they are human in the normative sense, and vice versa. In addition to providing a solution to the paradox of dehumanization, these findings suggest that perceptions of moral character have a central role to play in driving dehumanization.

"Internally Wicked": Investigating How and Why Essentialism Influences Punitiveness and Moral Condemnation

Kant argued that individuals should be punished "proportional to their internal wickedness," and recent work has demonstrated that essentialism-the notion that observable characteristics reflect internal, biological, unchanging "essences"-influences moral judgment. However, these efforts have yielded conflicting results: essentialism sometimes increases and sometimes decreases moral condemnation. To resolve these discrepancies, we investigated the mechanisms by which essentialism influences moral judgment, focusing on perceptions of actors' control over their behavior, the target of essentialism (particular behaviors vs. actors' character), and the component of essentialism (biology vs. immutability). Participants punished people described as having a criminal essence more than those with a non-criminal essence or no essence. Probing potential mechanisms underlying this effect, we found a mediating role for perceptions of control and weak influences of essentialism focus (behavior vs. character) and component of essentialism (biology vs. immutability). These results extend prior work on essentialism and moral cognition, demonstrating a causal link between perceptions of "internal wickedness" and moral judgment. Our findings also resolve discrepancies in past work on the influence of essentialism on moral judgment, highlighting the role that perceptions of actors' control over their behavior play in moral condemnation.

Moral decision-making and support for safety procedures amid the COVID-19 pandemic

Given that individual differences influence virus-mitigating behaviors and the COVID-19 pandemic posed new moral dilemmas for individuals to resolve, across three studies (N = 704), we assessed how masculine honor beliefs (MHB), beliefs in pure good (BPG), evil (BPE), and the dark triad (DT) influence COVID-19 moral decision-making. Specifically, we analyzed moral decision-making at the microlevel (i.e., individual- and familial-level; Study 1), in decisions with (hypothetical) life-or-death consequences (Study 2), and at the macrolevel (i.e., nationwide virus-mitigation efforts; Study 3). In all studies, participants completed the four individual difference scales and rated their pandemic attitudes on Likert-type agreement scales, and resolved various moral dilemmas in Studies 2 and 3. Consistent with our hypotheses, individuals reported more virus-mitigation efforts in order to protect their families than themselves. In terms of hypothetical life-or-death and nationwide decisions, MHB, BPE, and the DT predicted more confidence and social motivations, whereas BPG predicted more distress. This research has implications for moral decision-making at varying degrees of severity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Measurement invariance of the moral vitalism scale across 28 cultural groups

Moral vitalism refers to a tendency to view good and evil as actual forces that can influence people and events. The Moral Vitalism Scale had been designed to assess moral vitalism in a brief survey form. Previous studies established the reliability and validity of the scale in US-American and Australian samples. In this study, the cross-cultural comparability of the scale was tested across 28 different cultural groups worldwide through measurement invariance tests. A series of exact invariance tests marginally supported partial metric invariance, however, an approximate invariance approach provided evidence of partial scalar invariance for a 5-item measure. The established level of measurement invariance allows for comparisons of latent means across cultures. We conclude that the brief measure of moral vitalism is invariant across 28 cultures and can be used to estimate levels of moral vitalism with the same precision across very different cultural settings.

The Cognition of Severe Moral Failure: A Novel Approach to the Perception of Evil

I describe the perception of evil as a categorization judgment, based on a prototype, with extensive feedback loops and top-down influences. Based on the attachment approach to moral judgment (Govrin, 2014, 2018), I suggest that the perception of evil consists of four salient features: Extreme asymmetry between victim and perpetrator; a specific perceived attitude of the perpetrator toward the victim's vulnerability; the observer's inability to understand the perpetrator's perspective; and insuperable differences between the observer and perpetrator's judgment following the incident which shake the observer no less than the event itself. I then show that the perception of evil involves a cognitive bias: The observer is almost always mistaken in his attributions of a certain state of mind to the perpetrator. The philosophical and evolutionary significance of this bias is discussed as well as suggestions for future testing of the prototype model of evil.

Pleasure From Another's Pain: The Influence of a Target's Hedonic States on Attributions of Immorality and Evil

Can people's feelings about harm (i.e., their hedonic reactions) lead them to be morally condemned, even if they do not cause the harm themselves? We show that individuals who experience pleasure at serious harm that has befallen another person are judged both immoral and evil. This effect occurs for harm-causing actors, and for observers who play no role in causing the harm; actors can also be judged as immoral and evil when they experience mere indifference (Study 1). Observers are more likely to be similarly judged when they experience direct rather than indirect pleasure from harm caused to another (Study 2). The effects of pleasure are dissociable from those of malevolent desires (Study 3). Targets' experience of pleasure at the harm caused to another person leads to the social exclusion of observers (Studies 1-3) and the harsh punishment of actors, including the death penalty (Studies 1, 4a, and 4b).

Moral Vitalism: Seeing Good and Evil as Real, Agentic Forces

Moral vitalism refers to a tendency to view good and evil as actual forces that can influence people and events. We introduce a scale designed to assess the belief in moral vitalism. High scorers on the scale endorse items such as "There are underlying forces of good and evil in this world." After establishing the reliability and criterion validity of the scale (Studies 1, 2a, and 2b), we examined the predictive validity of the moral vitalism scale, showing that "moral vitalists" worry about being possessed by evil (Study 3), being contaminated through contact with evil people (Study 4), and forfeiting their own mental purity (Study 5). We discuss the nature of moral vitalism and the implications of the construct for understanding the role of metaphysical lay theories about the nature of good and evil in moral reasoning.