Wheat Ryan, Goodwin Geoffrey
Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2025 Oct;1552(1):165-173. doi: 10.1111/nyas.70054. Epub 2025 Sep 11.
What consequences result from judging a given act (or its perpetrator) as evil? Because evil actions represent the worst possible forms of immorality, and that on some conceptions evil people are irredeemable, it stands to reason that judgments of evil would predict severe punishments. However, surprisingly little is known about precisely how judgments of evil relate to judgments of punishment. We theorized that judgments of evilness should add unique predictive value beyond comparable, and more widely studied, measures of wrongness, blame, and moral character. In a preregistered study, participants (N = 238) made moral judgments and punishment recommendations in response to a comprehensive range of wrongs (e.g., theft, battery, manslaughter, murder). Results revealed three general findings. First, judgments of evil uniquely predicted punishment recommendations beyond related moral judgments (e.g., wrongness, blame, moral character). Second, judgments of evil uniquely predicted death penalty endorsement and judgments of an offender's potential rehabilitation, whereas other moral judgments did not always do so. Finally, death penalty endorsement and rehabilitation judgments were better associated with person judgments than with act judgments, whereas more general punishment judgments showed no such divergence. These findings illuminate the predictive power of judgments of evil with regard to punishment judgments.
将某一特定行为（或其实施者）判定为邪恶会产生什么后果？由于邪恶行为代表了最严重的不道德形式，而且在某些观念中，恶人是不可救赎的，因此可以合理推断，对邪恶的判断会预示着严厉的惩罚。然而，令人惊讶的是，对于邪恶判断与惩罚判断究竟如何关联，我们知之甚少。我们提出理论，认为邪恶判断应能在可比且研究更广泛的错误、责备和道德品质衡量标准之外，增加独特的预测价值。在一项预先注册的研究中，参与者（N = 238）针对一系列广泛的过错（如盗窃、殴打、过失杀人、谋杀）做出了道德判断和惩罚建议。结果揭示了三个总体发现。首先，除了相关的道德判断（如错误、责备、道德品质）之外，邪恶判断能独特地预测惩罚建议。其次，邪恶判断能独特地预测死刑支持率以及对罪犯潜在改过自新的判断，而其他道德判断并非总是如此。最后，死刑支持率和改过自新判断与人的判断的关联比与行为判断的关联更强，而更一般的惩罚判断则没有这种差异。这些发现揭示了邪恶判断在惩罚判断方面的预测能力。
