What is Evil. Let’s Define It.

My definition of evil that I would apply at the end of the course: psychological or physical harm done onto someone or people due to dispositional, personality, and environmental factors. This can be done with the intent to cause harm, with intent to do harm for some greater good to occur, or with no intent to harm and an inability to see what is harmful and what isn’t.

I know this definition is very broad, but I’ve found that acts of evil are not just severe acts such as murder, rape, or war crimes, but also the smaller things like revenge, bullying, withholding important information. With so much to define under one word, I would recommend a broader definition. Another reason for the definition to be so broad is because there are many factors that are considered to contribute to an individual or group of people partaking in evil.

What I have learned over the span of this course is not everyone who commits an evil act is an evil person, an evil person – if one exists – is hard to define and identify, the myth of pure evil is alive and real, and its very easy to place blame on someone who is doing an evil act until you consider things that are at play like environmental factors or an inability to see that harm is being done (like an inability to partake in empathy).

Most of what I learned throughout the course can be connected to the myth of pure evil. We are built by media and schemas built from those around us that there are evil people, what those evil people do, and that they do it because they are evil. And mostly everything we learn about evil in a course like this is contradicting the myth of pure evil. Not only do we look at evil as something other than horrid atrocities, but things we consider minor in life that still cause harm onto others. We also consider that not everybody who does an evil act is evil (majority aren’t), and not every evil act that is done can be contributed to someone just being evil; there are reasons for acts of evil occurring.

“It is difficult and perhaps impossible to understand any human phenomenon at the same time that one is condemning it. Setting aside one’s moral values, however risky that may be, is helpful when one attempts to understand the perpetrators of evil.”

In order to understand why an evil act occurs you need to be able to look at what is going on with the perpetrator. Situational factors, personality traits, state emotions, etc., all add to what could drive an individual to do an evil act. The take home message that we find at the very end of Baumeister’s Evil is that evil needs to be examined without assuming value or morality of the situation.

“But knowledge about evil ultimately can be fully useful only if it is used with the moral sense that had to be silenced for the sake of gaining knowledge”

This relates to how many women (and probably men too) don’t put full blame onto the person who sexually assaulted them. An example to explain this can be seen in an episode of Switched at Birth. While the show finished airing a few years ago the problem is still relevant and prevalent. The victim of rape can’t remember what actually happened and only has a few faded memories of the conversation leading up to the incident. She remembers being so drunk that she blacked out and so drunk that she could not have properly consented. But since her memory was not fully intact and he was also very drunk she considers possibilities like, ‘did I actually say no to him.’ She also doesn’t know what to trust since he was saying a different conversation happened than what she remembered in her faded memories. While everyone else saw a drunk girl getting taken advantage of, she saw a close and intimate friend whom she trusted who was also drunk. She saw a grey area rather than the hurt that was done onto her.

Women in some cases try to look at the situation of rape and sexual assault through a considerate basis. They look at what happened leading up that may have made a grey area. In other words, what was going in the perpetrators experience that made the act of evil occur? While they know that something wrong did happen, they don’t want to assume 100% blame to the perpetrator as while the action was 100% the perpetrators, influencing factors that make logical sense may have been at play. An influencing factor at play in situations like these may be that the perpetrator thought there was no way in which consent was not given, or they simply thought they had consent even though they didn’t. Situations like these do occur and while there is no ethical excuse behind this act of evil, these victims find themselves looking into the grey areas to explain the perpetrator’s decision.

To relate back to the second quote from the reading – these women set out to gain knowledge, and in doing so, they ignored the plain immorality of the situation and instead, turned of their sense of morality to look at the bigger picture. It is not just women as victims who recognize the grey area, men who think about preventing a sexual assault where they are the perpetrator recognize that they themselves have a grey area as to what is consensual.

Brockbank (2019) addressed a gap in the literature on how straight white men talk about how they understand sexual assault. Seven men were recruited through social media groups for the university. Ten questions were asked and discussed in an interview format. It was found that the men found that between consent and sexual assault, are actions, words, and behaviours that lead to a grey area in which they cannot see whether something is consent or sexual assault. Alcohol was thought to either be something that made the examination of these actions, words, and behaviours more difficult, either through the intention to make it more difficult, or unintentionally making it more difficult. The concept of mixed signals was also addressed as being in the grey area. The men noted that consent was difficult to define.

Potentially it is through the grey area perceived through both perpetrators and victims, that people acknowledge the harm done to the victim, but take away the moral judgement and seek for information of what happened in that grey area.

Overall, seeking knowledge by acknowledging the grey area shows an example of what Baumeister was aiming to tell people; in order to understand evil we must put aside our moral judgement and look at what is going on with the perpetrator.

Brockbank, M. (2019). The myth of the “grey area” in rape: fabricating ambiguity and deniability. Dignity: A Journal on Sexual Exploitation and Violence, 4(4).

What I found most surprising about the reading this week was that right away two points were made about abuse that did not get addressed properly in a military setting. One was that ends justify the means when it comes to making decisions to do evil acts that are legal but not ethical. In other words, when evil acts are considered legal, its mostly because the cost and benefit weighing shows that benefit is more than the cost of not doing it. What surprised me was that it never occurred to me before that when talking about evil there are evil acts where the benefit is more than the cost and that it can be legal. Looking at it more closely it makes sense as certain punishments for those doing – most likely – a much greater evil, could prevent more greater evil acts from happening. Things like the death penalty or killing in war are seen as more acceptable and are actually legal compared to other evils because they are for protection.

The second point was that evaluation of the cause of abuse never looked at how conditions were conducive; the evaluation never looked at people higher in command to see why this was being allowed in one way or the other. This really surprised me because to me it has always been clear that those acting inappropriately either do so because they are in a situation where they can or continue to do so because nothing is happening or in place to stop them. This can translate to evil acts as well and not just inappropriate acts. But what I found in the reading that the justice system is much more concerned with having those who did the act punished than looking at who let this happen, how, and why were these situations conducive of the abuse occurring.

When people think of abuse in a home they may think that conditions in the home were conducive such as another adult in the household not reporting or stopping the abuse in any way, but it often is much more than that. Many countries acknowledge that abuse needs to be stopped not just directly in the home through other people living there (through reports to specific organizations) but also through home visits, programs for children to attend to cope with and prevent abuse from occurring, and resources at school, as well as many other resources countries like Canada have.

During the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak, officials of different levels are realizing that shutting down “non-essential” services – although necessary for social distancing to occur – eliminates at home visits, social programs, school, as resources that prevent abuse from occurring. These officials are acknowledging that with this elimination, more children at risk of abuse, and it mainly because these officials can not do much to help the situation not be allowed.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theglobeandmail.com/amp/canada/article-increase-in-child-abuse-a-big-concern-during-covid-19-pandemic/

The academic article by Lei, Cai, Brown, and Lu (2019) shows that the resources such as agencies for child abuse, reporting systems, and other institutional care are not present in China and result in a lack of report of child abuse that literature has indicated is occurring. A section of the article highlights how the allowance of family structure to see abuse as part of the culture of family care allows for more abuse to take place and normalizes it. The study aims at showing how introducing a community approach to stopping child abuse will prevent a good amount of child abuse currently happening in China. A challenge found when trying to put in community supports for child abuse was that there was a lack of legal power to ensure the children ended up safe.

This study along with the news article show that community services are necessary in preventing a great number of child abuse cases, and that these community services need to be supported by the justice system, in that people who partake in abuse are legally dealt with in order to bring a stop to the abuse, and that people who are stopping abuse of a child are legally able to take actions to ensure the safety of the child

Lei, J., Cai, T, Brown, L, & Lu, W. (2019). A pilot project using a community approach to support child protection services in China. Child and Youth Services Review, 104.

While I recognized many of the studies talked about early in the first chapter, one study stood out to me which I would not have expected. The one study talked about how 100% of women went to the highest level of shocking to train a puppy who was showing obvious signs of distress from the shocks occurring. This study was demonstrating that they did so to be obedient to authority. To me that showed me that I was somewhat biased into thinking a few things. I thought people wouldn’t continue to shock a dog that is already distressed. I also thought that if people were to continue shocking that almost nobody would go to the highest level. A part of me probably wanted to keep faith in my own gender and assume that women, if anyone, wouldn’t go to the highest level. I also thought a lot of this because, while I can see why almost anyone can do an evil act due to environmental influences (as well as psychological traits), I assumed that less people would be the type of person to cause distress or harm to an animal – specifically a dog. Even after talking about evil for so many weeks I see that some biases still lie about how women would cause distress or harm, as well as the bias that people are less likely to cause distress or harm to a dog than another human.

A news article addressed a pet salon owner that was charged with multiple cases of animal cruelty for the abuse of dogs by her employees. This gives an example of a situation where abuse of dogs occurred simply because those who were okay with doing so started abusing dogs were given no indication that their actions were not approved of by the most immediate person of authority, so they continued.

The academic article done by Richard and Reese (2019) looked at the different types of abuse and motivations for abuse in individuals who were either owners of a dog had some type of relationship with the owner. Individuals were owners, partners, family members, or neighbours. All measures were looked at through coding schemes of patterns of phrases that appeared in police reports for type of abuse and motivation. A result of interest was that partners of the owners were seen to have motivations to hurt the owner’s dog in order to hurt and intimidate the owner. This indicated that the owner who was subject to domestic violence allowed abuse to happen to their animal because it was emotional abuse towards them, and they were also the victim.

Richard, C., Reese, L. A, (2019). The interpersonal context of human/nonhuman animal violence. Anthrozoös, 32(1), 65-87.

The owners whose partners are abusing the dog were subjecting the dog to maltreatment not through abuse themselves but by acknowledging the distress of the animal and not stopping the distress from occurring. This can be compared to the reading in that the abuser has power over the owner in order for the owner to be hurt by the harm of the dog and still not stop the abuse. This person has authority over the owner because authority can either be the right to enforce obedience or the power to do so. In other words, the owner is allowing abuse to happen to the dog due to the authority of their partner.

These all seem to show that there are a few different reasons for abuse of dogs to occur, ranging from simply having authority present and not stopping the actions, having authority present and enforcing the actions, and the emotional manipulation leading to the lack of stopping the abuse from occurring.

In the reading, one of the guards of the Stanford Prison Experiment after the experiment was over talked about how when one enters such experiment as a guard they create themselves as a guard defining who they are and yet they want to say that the person they are during such experiment is not them and they don’t actually enjoy doing these things.

As a small group in class, we discussed how could possibly differentiate between when a person is evil versus when a person isn’t evil (but the act they do is). We decided that a possible way to differentiate between the two is that a person is evil when they know the act(s) they are committing to be evil and they still do it, and when the act is evil and the person isn’t it is because they do not know the act is evil when they are doing it.

Throughout the year we have been struggling as a class to define the difference between what makes someone evil versus what makes someone not evil. The distinction my group came up with provided some clarity as to how this distinction might/could be made. Looking back at the readings this distinction seemingly was supported by the guards saying the study defined who they were and that even though they wanted to deny it they did enjoy doing what they did. They also all acknowledged that what was going on was wrong which further supports our idea.

Having this possible distinction allowed for me along with others in my group to have some clarity -finally – about a question we all had thought about throughout the content of the course that never seemed to be answered.

In a news article, the person the article is about tries to murder a child while drunk, and the stance that the author of the article takes is that being drunk and that being out of the persons usual normal mind made the person not evil (but the act still evil).

This supports the idea my group had since the author decided that being drunk means they did not/could not be in their right mind and know fully what they are doing. I find what helped me understand how this might be is thinking about how when someone is drunk they cannot consent because for various reasons, one of them being that they might not fully know what they are agreeing to. So when a person is not drunk, they cannot always know that their acts are evil and if they are clearly not thinking straight, they do not know and are not an evil person.

https://www.thesun.ie/news/5176053/drunk-woman-screamed-hes-evil-and-held-friends-boy-7-under-water-in-paddling-pool-until-his-lips-turned-blue/

The academic article by Hellzen et al. (2004) aimed at looking at what is it means to be a nurse with a patient with learning disabilities and provoking behaviours (aggressive behaviour). Interviews were done with the nurses asking about the nurses view of the patient, a normal day with them, and situations in which they cared for them (either ending well or badly). Results showed that patients were seen as nice and gentle and then suddenly a monster, which was seen under the being tormented theme seen from the nurses. It was discussed that the nurses, seeing these evils acts in what should be a good person, tried to explain the evil acts through things such as pathological explanations (brain damage).

In other words the nurses did not want to define them as evil but rather define their evil acts. In the nurses’ opinion this was because they were not themselves when they were acting out due to some pathological reason. They were acting this way because of some type of brain damage or something alike that caused them to not be themselves.

Both the news article and the academic article seem to show that there are conditions to the human life such as brain damage and getting drunk that make someone not evil because they are not thinking straight and therefore do not fully know what they are doing is evil because it isn’t really them thinking to do these things (not them in their normal state of mind). This showed some versions of a person not being evil that I would not have/did not consider when discussing the idea of how to make the distinction between those who are and are not evil.

Hellzen, O., Asplund, K., Sandman, P., & Norberg, A. (2004). The meaning of caring as described by nurses caring for a person who acts provokingly: an interview study. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 18(1), 3-11.

In the reading for this week it was talked about how in the Stanford Prison experiment, when visitors came there was reduced contact, talks of not being allowed to leave, and a perceived rushed/limited amount of time to visit.

In class we talked about how prisoners felt there were not able to leave. One of the reasons that was suggested for why prisoners felt they could not leave was because they had taken on being a prisoner as their reality.

This makes a lot of sense to me that the prisoners felt they could not leave because being the prisoner was now their reality. To me, what really made them feel as though they were now a prisoner or simply just obligated to be a prisoner was when they were arrested by the real policeman. Whether that sparked them feeling like a prisoner, or feeling like they had no choice (because at the start when a real policeman, to me that seems as though they were truly given no choice to back out because doing so would be resisting an arrest) this started the study off by showing them the reality of them becoming a prisoner. This was reinforced by things such as guards not allowing them trips to the bathroom and calling them by numbers and taking away the person that they truly are.

In a news article that highlights problems in women’s prisons, I decided to focus upon the last bit of the article that talks about having visitors and how there is a problem with the visitations. While visitations for their own reasons (such as lack of transportation to the prison) are not as plentiful as they should be, it is emphasized in the article that there are problems within the visitations as well. In the opinions of the group pointing out these problems, visiting hours and the rules of noncontact are problematic. To them they are discouraging.

While the article seems to focus on how these qualities prevent visitations, I’d like to point out how in the Stanford Prison experiment this reduces the quality of the visits as well, because the visitors are discouraged even once there to not have contact with their family members and are encouraged to leave quickly based on the assumption that staying longer takes time away from other prisoners and their visitation. This is really important when considering a specific finding of the academic article I have chosen.

https://www.inquirer.com/news/pennsylvania-women-prison-mass-incarceration-us-civil-rights-commission-20200226.html

The study done by Dixey and Woodall (2012) was concerned with the visits made by family members of prisoners and how those visits affect the prisoners. Interviews were conducted of family members who visit the prison, and focus groups were used for prisoners. Each of these were used to look at how prisoners are affected by these visits. The result of interest was that visits provided prisoners was a chance to stay in contact with the world outside of the prison and to have a reality check.

This result is important to consider when looking at families visiting prisoners in the Stanford prison experiment because if the prisoners really aren’t leaving because becoming a prisoner has become a reality the prisoner, these visitations might do one of two things. One thing might be that prisoners are treated as prisoners by their own family by the reduced contact, and rushed visits, and the reality check might be that the outside world (their family) sees them as a prisoner. Another thing might be that the lack of quality and time of visitation does not allow them to think about the outside world. The lack of connection to the outside world in these visitations could be because of the poor quality as talked about in the news article and in the book, and also that the visitations were interfered with by the prisoners feeling obligated to keep the nature of this prison a secret to their family (as talked about in the book).

Dixey, R., & Woodall, J. (2012). The significance of ‘the visit’ in an English category-B prison: views from prisoners, prisoners’ families and prison staff. Community, Work & Family, 15(1), 29-47.

The reading and the class discussed how when people were being recruited for the Stanford prison experiment to participate as prisoners the study was started by police bringing them into police cars to bring them to the location of the study. This set fear into the participants before they even were treated as prisoners by the “guards” especially since the participants were “hippies” who were probably doing illegal things such as smoking weed. 

What I found interesting was that out of all the times this study has been discussed in my previous classes, this was never brought up. It seems to be very important into considering why prisoners so easily took on the role of prisoners. Especially when that consideration was the purpose of the study. 

This fear instilled into people by police can be seen in many cases of police confronting minorities when they are not even doing anything illegal. Just this week a black student decided to file a lawsuit against police who, when he was just walking down a street, surrounded him, held guns up at him, restrained him, and then put a gun up against his forehead and said they were going to blow his brains out if he kept moving even though he wasn’t moving and was listening to commands and acting appropriately. 

People who are minorities and are targeted even when they are not doing anything wrong. Being targeted by police has been demonstrated to instill fear, so people who are targeted by police because they tend to do something illegal (like who use drugs and can often be identified promoting paraphernalia like hippies) must be instilled with a similar amount of fear. 

A study done by Bolger and Bolger (2019) looked at the predictors of the amount of fear of crime in individuals based on the vulnerability and incivilities models. The vulnerability model addresses how females and elderly people are more fearful of being convicted of a crime. A subsectional of this model is the social vulnerability which addresses minorities being fearful of being convicted of a crime. The incivilities model addresses fear of being convicted of a crime when the individual lives in a neighbourhood that does not look well taken care of or is home to bad or reckless behaviour. Two measures were questionnaires that looked at fear of crime based on the neighbourhood one lives in. Another measure was a questionnaire that looked at how people felt about your neighbourhood. The last measure took a person’s zip code and determined the disadvantages of living in that neighbourhood. It was found that both people of colour in general as well as women of colour were more fearful of being convicted of a crime. The more a neighbourhood did not look like it was being well taken care of, the more a neighbourhood was home to bad or reckless behaviour, and the less favourable views individuals had of the police, the more individuals had a fear of being convicted with a crime. 

This gives evidence that people are fearful of the police, and the things that predicted people being fearful were not things people were doing that were illegal, but rather just being a person of colour, a woman, elderly, or being in a bad neighbourhood. This shows that people are in fact instilled with fear by police even when they are not doing anything illegal (like what happened to the male black student mentioned before). Then if people are in fact doing illegal things, or know that their presence makes people think they are doing illegal things (like the hippies in the Stanford prison experiment), they definitely would also feel fearful of the police (in this case bringing them to the experiment). This sets the foundation of people feeling scared and like someone breaking the law in the experiment, and helps these individuals get into the roles they were given. Bolger, M. A., Bolger, P. C. (2019). Predicting fear of crime: results from a community survey of a small city. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 44(2), 334-351.

In this weeks reading we read about how when people are told to do something evil, it creates a confusion about what the line between good and evil is, and that when there is confusion for the line between good and evil, the person is more likely to do the evil act. As well, we read about how people will come up with a argument against an evil act that doesn’t state that it is an evil act but is valid to the person asking them to do evil such as I don’t have the right tool to do this act.

I agree that this happens. It makes sense that people would be more likely to do an evil act if they aren’t even positive that it is an evil act. It also makes sense that people would try to say something valid to authority rather than telling authority. No this is wrong. The author says though that everyone would do this if presented in this scenario. While I cannot see myself doing this, there is no way for me to say whether I or any other person never presented with a scenario like this would do it. But it seems logical given the nature of these situations that these thoughts on how people act would happen.

We also talked about when it is/if it is okay to control someone because we think they have the capacity for evil. A consensus was not made but we talked about different factors like medication, and eugenics.

While medication makes sense to me because, as it is now with medication, there would need to be proper consent given to start someone on medication (a proper procedure), eugenics to me is not acceptable. The blurred line for eugenics already exists and eugenics isn’t even occurring yet. There are already people who argue that eugenics should be used to remove deafness, to which the deaf community responds by saying that doing that would be removing a group of people, a community, a culture – essentially genocide. If this act of evil is already being debated as whether it is in fact evil or not, how could we justify using eugenics the same way to control for people who are evil? A predisposition does not mean they WILL be evil. Thus, we may be taking away an element of society that we don’t need to. For example, people who are less phased by seeing gruesome things, such as doctors, might have qualities that in utero would look similar to someone who is going to be evil. When do we decide that someone is going to contribute to society or that someone is going to be evil? Is taking away evil really worth taking away these productive people at the same time?

In Netflix’s Black Mirror, an episode called Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too, the character Ashley is being prescribed illegal medication by a doctor on her Aunt’s behalf in order to keep her from acting in a dark demeaner. When Ashley does not take this medication, she has a negative outlook on life, she writes about how angry she is, and lashes out at her aunt for doing the things she is doing to her.

Her Aunt probably gives her this medication thinking it is okay to do so because she is keeping Ashley money and therefore there is money coming in to provide for them. More importantly, she is being given this opportunity to give these pills by a doctor that knowingly knows what is being done with them. Although the Aunt knows that they are illegal, she probably does not think that giving them to her is bad when a doctor is enabling her to do it. Then when she can no longer control Ashley, she forces Ashley to overdose on the pills she hasn’t taken because the doctor said it will put her in a coma.

She probably does not see the act of forcing her into a coma as evil because the doctor agrees with her actions. As being a person with power over this situation (to give the medication and knowledge of the coma without acknowledging the evil to this action) the doctor is probably allowing the line of evil and not evil to be blurred. If the Aunt was not provided with the knowledge that it would just be a coma or the medication in the first place, she would probably think to herself, I don’t have access to this resource, so I won’t. A thought talked about in the reading for this week – an objection that is thought to be valid to, in this case, the doctor with the ability to enable and start the actions of the aunt.

This could relate to the idea of controlling someone with the potential for evil so that they cannot commit evil. If Ashley’s Aunt thought that Ashley’s negative attitude could result in evil, the outcome still probably would have been the same: medication being given to Ashley, and a grasp for control by overdosing Ashley when she stops taking the pills and endangers the “happy Ashley.”

An article by Campbell and Vollhardt (2014) hypothesized that there would be a relationship between believing in evil and endorsement of violence to be used to stop evil acts. Measures were responded to online about good and evil, endorsement of using violence to stop evil acts, and questions about the policy of conflicts within groups. The results showed a correlation between believing in evil and endorsement of violence to be used to stop evil acts. It was also shown that belief in evil was a predictor of endorsement of violence to be used to stop evil acts. In other words, having the belief that there is evil in the world predicts that there will be endorsement of violence to be used to stop evil acts.

This shows that if people could control evil that they see in society, they would control it. The line of when to control it seems to be when someone shows evidence that they are going to commit an evil act or are in the midst of an evil act. This act of control does not impose on the internal workings of a person but rather the external actions of a person doing evil. This adds a new element to the discussion of how to control evil and offers one that does not impose on the person’s free will, or human rights.

In relation to the Netflix show, this article can be used to say that the Aunt could have used external controls, such as amendments to Ashley’s contact, in order to keep Ashley as “happy Ashley” producing and performing upbeat happy content for her fans.

Campbell, M., & Vollhardt, J. (2014) Fighting the good fight: the relationship between belief in evil and support for violent policies. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 40(1), 16-33.

In the reading, it was said that people laugh while doing an evil act out of sadism – taking pleasure in harm. During the discussion in class it was pointed out that people may laugh while doing something evil for other reasons such as laughing as a coping mechanism.

This stood out to me because many people do laugh out of nervousness or at inappropriate times such as a funeral. From this perspective it is important to not think that someone laughing at evil is automatically taking pleasure in the act. It could be that the person is fighting against their morals, knowing deep down that what they are doing is wrong. But for whatever reason, they find themselves doing this act anyways and have to cope with the evil they are acting out.

It is possible though, that laughing as a coping mechanism while doing something evil could go against what some people consider to be evil. For example, one of the books we read looked at having zero empathy in order to do an evil act. If someone had zero empathy, I would argue that the person would not have to cope with the evil act they are doing. The person does the evil act because they do not see how they are emotionally affecting the other person, so they may not understand at all that what they are doing is wrong and have nothing to cope with. For these people (psychopaths, narcissists, and borderline) it would be safe to assume that sadism would be the reason for laughing during an evil act. The other group with zero empathy talked about in this group might be the people who would laugh out of coping while doing an evil act.

https://www.oxygen.com/crime-news/justyn-pennell-elderly-man-ran-over-veteran-evil-florida

In this article, it is assumed that sadism is the reason for the person laughing while doing an evil act, murdering someone. It seems very well possible given the other facts provided, such as smiling and reporting the incident himself saying it was in fact his intent to murder. It was also explicitly said that his actions showed that he got pleasure out of doing this act. This article shows that sadism can be perceived to occur through acts of laughter plus other concurrent acts. It is possible that this article suggests that other actions other than laughter need to also be considered. Maybe it is the smiling/facial expression that takes place that makes the difference with the laughter.

It is possible that sadism was the cause here. This is very convincing in this case. But coping should be considered if the person is not clearly narcissistic, psychopathic, or borderline (but even then, I think it should still be considered as zero empathy might not be an absolute zero all of the time).

It was predicted in the study by Ziegler-Hill, McCabe, and Vrabel (2016) that self-enhancing humour would negatively associate with negative affectivity, detachment, and antagonism, and that aggressive humour would be positively associated with negative affectivity, detachment, antagonism, disinhibition, and psychoticism. It was found that self-enhancing humour had negative effects for negative affectivity and detachment, which meant that having less of these personalities would mean more of this humour. Aggressive humour had positive effects for antagonism and disinhibition, which meant that having more of these personalities would mean more of this humour.

Self-enhancing humour would arguably be used when coping because coping is enhancing the self – making yourself feel better – at negative times. Aggressive humour would arguably be used when laughing because of sadism in acts of evil because sadism gives pleasure, which enhances the self and injures the victim. This academic article is showing that in people with these personalities and therefore problems in interpersonal relationships (which by past readings would mean they are more susceptible to evil acts) are going to have no, or less humour out of coping, and no or more laughter out of sadism.

From both this academic article and the news article it can be inferred that sadism is a reason for laughter when it comes to evil acts. Interestingly enough, people with interpersonal problems are not going to respond with self-enhancing humour. What can be inferred from this is that people with interpersonal problems are not going to cope with laughter while doing an evil act – as talked about in my reflection.

Ziegler-Hill, V., McCabe, G. A., & Vrabel, J. K. (2016). The dark side of humour: DSM-5 pathological personality traits and humor styles. Europe’s Journal of Psychology, 12(3), 363-376.