Agency denial to harmful agents is inferential, not driven by dislike or punishment motives.

Evidence

Importantly, denial of agency to harmful agents occurred even when controlling for perceptions of the agent’s likeability (Studies 2a and 2b) and while using two different operationalizations of agency (Study 2a). Study 5 showed that harmful agents are denied agency primarily through an inferential process, and less through motivations to see the agent punished. — Mansur Khamitov, Jeff D. Rotman, and Jared Piazza, Perceiving the Agency of Harmful Agents, 14

Categorization

• XREF: Rules out liking and punitive motivation as the mechanism, isolating the inference itself — a key move for adjudicating mechanism in the reader’s dehumanization-vs-typecasting question.