People who do evil use shifting justifications rather than entering a fixed altered state

Evidence

These are the family of processes that seem to me to be involved in creating individuals who willingly do evil. That they often occur together, and that many of them are frequently caused by the same circumstances, is undeniable. It is the fact that many of these processes are involved in the conversion process, and that the individual is in some unstable and dynamic state—now relying on one justification, now on another—that seems to me to become obscured when an altered state is postulated. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3940

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the ‘altered state’ account of torturers, paralleling debates about the banality of evil and Milgram’s own explanation.