ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2650-4541
Date of Award
Fall 2024
Language
English
Embargo Period
11-26-2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
College/School/Department
Department of Psychology
Program
Social/Personality Psychology
First Advisor
Ronald Friedman
Committee Members
Ronald Friedman, Anna Reiman, Brendan O'Connor
Keywords
lay theories, mass atrocities, perpetrator behavior, attribution, banality of evil
Subject Categories
Social Psychology
Abstract
A consensus view within the literature on perpetrator behavior in mass atrocities holds that perpetrators tend to be psychologically typical rather than atypical and thus, that even “ordinary” people are capable of extreme acts of violence against civilians when the right combination of social-psychological forces is at work. Whereas much prior research speaks in some way to this claim’s validity, no prior study of which I am aware has directly investigated laypeople’s beliefs regarding the truth of this proposition. Here, I report findings from four preregistered studies (total N = 1,256) investigating the contents, correlates, and consequences of lay theories about perpetrators’ psychological (a)typicality. Challenging prior assumptions about these beliefs, I found them to be roughly normally distributed within nationwide U.S. samples, with approximately half of participants reporting relatively neutral or ambivalent views on this topic and similar-sized minorities endorsing clearer “exceptionalist” or “normalist” theories of perpetrator behavior. Variability in these beliefs was found to be related to phenomena including beliefs in pure evil, moral objectivism, the blatant dehumanization of perpetrators, and moral disengagement with respect to political outgroup members and perpetrators of atrocity crimes abroad; however, manipulations of these beliefs failed to yield clear causal effects upon intergroup cognition and behavior in two experiments. Collectively, these findings help address a surprising omission from the extensive literature on the “banality of evil” while opening up several promising avenues for future research on lay conceptions of collective violence and its perpetrators.
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Campbell, Dylan, "The Exceptionalist-Normalist Continuum: Contents, Correlates, and Consequences of Beliefs About the Psychological (A)typicality of Perpetrators of Mass Atrocities" (2024). Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present). 61.
https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/etd/61