If moral disengagement drives it, desire to punish amplifies agency denial.

Evidence

If the moral disengagement hypothesis is correct, then denial of agency to harmful agents should be amplified when motivations to see the agent punished are made salient. It follows that if people dehumanize harmful agents as a means of legitimating punitive reprisals we would expect people to increase their level of dehumanization—including denying them high levels of agency—as a function of their desire to see the perpetrator brought to justice. — Mansur Khamitov, Jeff D. Rotman, and Jared Piazza, Perceiving the Agency of Harmful Agents, 167

Categorization

• QUESTION: This is the disengagement-specific prediction that Study 5 likely tests against the inferential account.
• XREF: connects to: Desire to punish offenders should amplify the denial of their agency.