Laypeople hold coherent everyday theories about what makes acts evil

Evidence

At the level of our everyday functioning, we operate on the basis of “naive psychology,” which comprises the understandings we all carry around with us to analyze the events and actions of our everyday life. These are the sorts of understandings Heider (1958) most successfully called to our attention: those often unexamined understandings, frequently built into everyday vocabularies, that categorize our everyday world and enable us to function in it. At this level, we have both a conceptualization of evil acts that is generally shared and coherent and a theory of what causes these evil actions. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3866

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces Heider’s naive psychology and distinguishes it from considered, analytic thought.
• XREF: The considered-vs-naive distinction parallels dual-process theory in reasoning research (Kahneman-style System 1/2) and the reader’s notes on folk theories across domains.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that ordinary people carry a coherent, shared implicit theory of evil causation is a substantial and non-obvious claim about folk moral cognition worth sitting with.