Distancing evil acts to evildoers preserves belief in a just world.

Evidence

A polemical message lies behind this scientific one, or at least I have extracted one. It is too easy to defuse conceptually the chilling implications of evil actions by psychologically distancing them. Reading about an evil action, we assume that it was committed by an evildoer, a person who, because of a psyche twisted by genetic mischance or developmental trauma, is abnormal and evil. We assume evil actions normally flow from the actions of individuals who contain the quantum of evil I described earlier. By doing this, I would argue, we preserve our belief in the essential justness of the world, by having a limited and contained generalization about when that justness will not prevail. We are assisted in this process in that we are led to commit what social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error, to attribute behavior to the internal dispositions of an individual rather than to recognize that it stems from situational pressure. Thinking about evil actions, we call to mind typical or modal representations (“prototypes” or exemplars) of such actions, and in examining those representations, we find that they include images of evil individuals. In our minds evil acts are committed by evil individuals. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4033

Categorization

• QUESTION: Zimbardo folds the just-world hypothesis and fundamental attribution error together to explain why people resist social explanations of evil — worth mapping which experiment supports which link.