Moral justification drives death penalty attitudes more than dehumanization does

Evidence

After controlling for the influence of sociodemographic factors, moral justifications for the death penalty contributed significantly to every aspect of capital punishment. High moral justifiers favor the death penalty, oppose life imprisonment without parole, and are against exempting defendants of low intelligence from execution. Dehumanization did not contribute to support of the death penalty or to the stand taken on life imprisonment as an alternative to execution. However, those who dehumanized condemned inmates were more strongly opposed to exempting those of low intelligence from execution. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1980

Categorization

• XREF: Distinct moral disengagement mechanisms do separable causal work — links to the reader’s existing claims that discrete rationalization mechanisms correlate with distinct policy positions. — connects to: Claiming the greatest-victim status grants moral absolution for present violence — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 1554; Death penalty attitudes rest on retribution, not empirical deterrence evidence.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1980