RT Article
T1 Stigmatizing ‘evildoers’: how beliefs about evil and public stigma explain criminal justice policy preferences
JF Psychology, crime & law
VO 31
IS 10
SP 1366
OP 1389
A1 Silver, Jason R.
A1 Shi, Luzi
A1 Hickert, Audrey
A2 Shi, Luzi
A2 Hickert, Audrey
LA English
YR 2025
UL https://krimdok.uni-tuebingen.de/Record/1940116163
AB Characterizations of offenders as ‘evil’ appear in popular entertainment, political rhetoric, and scholarship and may be rooted in widely endorsed cultural narratives. Integrating psychological and criminological literatures, we argue that endorsement of good-and-evil myths may be associated with criminal justice policy support via stigmatizing attitudes about those who engage in crime. We partially tested these hypotheses in a preliminary study using an online convenience sample (recruited using Amazon MTurk in 2015), then tested the full theoretical model using more comprehensive measures in a survey of American adults conducted via Qualtrics Panel in 2021 (N = 1,162). We found that both belief in evil (i.e. belief in evil forces) and belief in redemptive violence (i.e. belief in a clash between good and evil) were positively associated with punitive policy support, and stigmatizing attitudes partially mediated the effects of both. While belief in redemptive violence was negatively associated with rehabilitative policy support and stigmatizing attitudes mediated that relationship, belief in evil was not associated with support for rehabilitation. We consider the implications of our findings for mitigating the harms of public stigma and punitive criminal justice policy.
K1 Rehabilitation
K1 Punishment
K1 policy preferences
K1 public stigma
K1 Beliefs about evil
DO 10.1080/1068316X.2024.2364286