(Press-News.org) MANHATTAN, Kansas -- Our belief in pure evil influences our feelings about capital punishment, finds a Kansas State University psychology study.
Donald Saucier, associate professor of psychological sciences and 2015-2016 Coffman chair for distinguished teaching scholars, looked at how beliefs in pure evil influenced how people treated those who committed crimes. He recently completed the study with Russell Webster at St. Mary's College of Maryland.
Approximately 200 participants were given a summary of a case in which a murderer confessed to his crime. Researchers then asked each participant about his or her support for different types of sentences, such as jail time with community service, jail time with the opportunity for parole, jail time without the possibility for parole and other options.
"We found that as people's beliefs in pure evil increased, they were more likely to support sentences like life in prison without parole and even the death penalty," Saucier said. "We found that this actually happened through our participants perceiving the murderer as a demon and feeling that there was some need for retribution for the murder committed."
Researchers then changed the murderer's characteristics to be consistent with stereotypes about evil. These included having the murderer be interested in the occult, taunting neighborhood children and wearing all black. The characteristics also were changed so the murderer was less stereotypically evil. This included having the murderer be relatively quiet, having a family and being interested in camping.
"People who saw the stereotypically evil person versus the non-stereotypically evil person recommended greater sentences," Saucier said. "But, if they believed in pure evil, it didn't matter the characteristics; they were more likely to support the death penalty or life in prison. The belief in pure evil overrode our stereotypically evil person."
This belief helps explain how opinions of others are formed during social interactions and how believing whether a person is "good" or "bad" at his or her core shapes those interactions.
Moreover, it may help explain how a court jury or judge is likely to assign punishment for a crime. While a belief in pure evil probably would not prompt a guilty verdict, it may influence the jury's sentence, Saucier said. For example, sentencing in the trials of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Colorado movie theater shooter James Holmes could be influenced by jury members' belief in pure evil.
Saucier said it's likely that life experience more than religion that influences a belief in pure evil. When investigating whether a religious upbringing was linked to a belief in pure evil, researchers found that people's belief in pure evil didn't necessitate a belief in pure good and vice versa.
"This belief may change based on traumas, victimization and the celebrations of human success in our life," Saucier said. "We think it's a dynamic variable and influences our social interaction and social perceptions."
The study, "Demons are everywhere: The effects of belief in pure evil, demonization, and retribution on punishing criminal perpetrators," appears in the scientific journal Personality and Individual Differences.
The study builds on research Saucier and a former graduate student conducted to measure whether evil can be personified and whether a person perceived as completely evil could be rehabilitated. The study found that those who believe evil people exist believe the only resolution is to eliminate those evil people.
Saucier is following up both studies by looking at how people who believe in pure evil and people who believe in pure good would punish the leaders of the Islamic State group.
INFORMATION:
AURORA, Colo. (May 14, 2015) - More than half of all Medicaid enrollees prefer the "one-stop shop" of a hospital emergency department to receive care for conditions that could be treated effectively at a primary care clinic, according to an article by a researcher at the University of Colorado School of Medicine on the Anschutz Medical Campus.
The finding exposes a gap in the services provided to Medicaid enrollees. From a patient's perspective, going to the hospital emergency department may be less expensive because patients can avoid costs of travel and time away from ...
PHILADELPHIA - In the first-of-its-kind study since the passage of the HIV Organ Policy Equity Act (the HOPE Act), which lifted the ban on organ donations from one HIV-positive person to another, Penn Medicine researchers report on the quality of these organs and how their use might impact the country's organ shortage. The study, published online ahead of print May 14 in the American Journal of Transplantation, revealed that there are nearly 400 HIV-positive potential organ donors who could be sources of donated organs annually for HIV-positive patients waiting for organ ...
All land is not created equal. Some ecosystems do triple duty in the benefits they provide to society. Massachusetts forests, for example, filter public drinking water while also providing habitat for threatened species and storing carbon to combat climate change.
Ecologists and conservation groups single out the hardest-working ecosystems -- called "hotspots" -- for their exceptional conservation value. A new study published today in the Journal of Applied Ecology reports that the number of ecosystem hotspots has increased in Massachusetts over the past decade, with ...
In 2013, the United States government passed the HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act, which allows research to be conducted on the safety of organ donation from deceased donors with HIV to recipients with HIV. A new study published in the American Journal of Transplantation explores the quality of these organs and how their use might impact the country's organ shortage.
In the United States, there are not enough organ donors to meet the needs of all patients who might benefit from lifesaving organ transplants. Some patients waiting for organs are infected with HIV, and ...
CHICAGO -- With the increasing demand for food with health benefits, high nutritional value food materials are attracting more attention from both consumers and food manufacturers. A new study by researchers at Wilmar (Shanghai) Biotechnology Research and Development Center Co., Ltd. in the Journal of Food Science, published by the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT), found that germinated buckwheat, an important raw material for food and functional food production, had better nutritional value than ungerminated buckwheat.
Germination is a complex process in which ...
An article publishing online today in Brain: A Journal of Neurology has found that individual differences in brain structure could help to determine the risk for future drug addiction. The study found that occasional users who subsequently increased their drug use compared with those who did not, showed brain structural differences when they started using drugs.
In the two studies, researchers, led by Dr. Benjamin Becker, scanned the brain structure of 66 participants to provide the first likely evidence showing volumes of fronto-striato-limbic regions of the brain have ...
A robotic arm that can bend, stretch and squeeze through cluttered environments has been created by a group of researchers from Italy.
Inspired by the eight arms of the octopus, the device has been specifically designed for surgical operations to enable surgeons to easily access remote, confined regions of the body and, once there, manipulate soft organs without damaging them.
It is believed the device could reduce the number of instruments, and thus entry incisions, necessary in surgical operations, with part of the arm being used to manipulate organs whilst another ...
The use of glycated haemoglobin (sugar-bound haemoglobin, or HbA1c) is now in almost universal use to assist doctors in the diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. However new research published in Diabetologia (the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes) highlights how anaemia--a common condition in the general population, especially in women--can lead to a false diagnosis of diabetes based on HbA1c, when a person's blood sugar control is actually normal. The research is by Dr Emma English, University of Nottingham, UK, and colleagues.
In recent years, ...
Weak grip strength is linked with shorter survival and a greater risk of having a heart attack or stroke, according to an international study involving almost 140000 adults from 17 culturally and economically diverse countries [1].
The study, published in The Lancet, also found that grip strength is a stronger predictor of death than systolic blood pressure, and the authors suggest that it could be used as a quick, low-cost screening tool by doctors or other healthcare professionals to identify high-risk patients among people who develop major illnesses such as heart ...
Hamilton, ON (May 13, 2015) - The firmness of your hand grip is better than your blood pressure at assessing your health, Hamilton researchers have found, and reduced muscular strength, measured by your grip, is consistently linked with early death, disability and illness.
The research by the Population Health Research Institute of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences was published in the journal The Lancet today.
"Grip strength could be an easy and inexpensive test to assess an individual's risk of death and cardiovascular disease," said principal investigator ...
