Hi readers! Let me introduce myself. My name is Jess Morgan and I am a 4th year student at Trent University. I have almost completed my Bachelor’s Degree in Forensic Science and Psychology, and I’m currently taking a course with Professor Geoffrey Navara called the Psychology of Evil. This course will be the foundation for this blog, as I will be discussing content and answering questions from the class.
While this blog is an assignment, I am very excited about it as I love all things criminology, law, crime and psychology (as my degree suggests). I can’t wait to discuss the topic of evil and why evil occurs. The purpose of this blog is to explore many aspects of evil psychology and how evil manifests while allowing others to comment and engage in the discussion. The benefit of publicly talking about evil psychology is to have access to many different opinions and perspectives to encourage a conversation.
I am going to be blogging once a week about the psychology of evil, so I hope you come back and join the discussion.
Our task this week in class was to come up with an operational definition of “evil” and find a way to measure it.
As a class, we came up with characteristics of evil in three tiers, the eye of the beholder, the individual, and the society. An evil individual is impulsive, wants to cause harm, is immoral, has no remorse, escalates in their actions and has an intent in mind. What matters in the eye of the beholder and the society are the norms, the context and the labels.
What stuck out to me was the concept that evil is truly in the eye of the beholder. The society in which an event occurs determines whether that event is evil. While an act in some societies is considered evil, other societies find it very average. For example, child marriages may be considered very wrong, immoral and maybe even evil in North America, however it happens every day around the world and is not seen as wrong. This is a similar concept to a court of law, and finding an individual guilty. An act is not criminal unless a judge (and a jury) find it wrong. If no one is there to find an act immoral, is it immoral? Arguably, no act is globally considered evil. It is very dependent on the society.
Context also matters. Generally, murder is seen as evil and wrong. Someone who takes the life of someone else, no matter what the goal is, is seen as wrong. It goes against the general morals that our society holds, which are to avoid taking the lives of others. On the contrary, death penalties exist. When a person is being killed as punishment for committing a crime, then it isn’t so bad, right? In another example, someone who commits manslaughter, killing someone without intending to do so, is not evil. This begs the question, “is evil an action or is it an intention?” Can we really find actions evil, or is the intent/mentality the part that is evil?
My group tried to come up with a way to measure evil, but again, can we measure someone’s thoughts and intents? An act of evil is generally something that is done with the intent harm someone else. It is the result of a lack of morals with the intention of committing the act to achieve a goal. We also discussed age as a factor in operationalizing the definition. Someone who is younger than 16, or someone who is a child, may not be able to form morals and intent though they may commit an evil act.
The moral of the story here is that the topic of evil is a MESSY one. There are a lot of blurred lines and nothing is truly clear.
Jessica's Evil Psychology 
Hello Jessica. That was a very good introduction.
I was wondering what your thoughts are on the death penalty. I simply want to raise a point that should be thought about.Do you think that perhaps the justice system is in a way evil as well for making people (the jury) collectively vote whether someone should be murdered and sometimes on evidence where the verdict of “guilty” or “non-guilty” can be achieved with very narrow margins between the two? While I do know that a hung jury may be achieved, I was wondering about the cases where a unanimous verdict is affected by societal and probably even peer pressure.
Since you mentioned you majoring in Forensic science in addition to Psychology I was wondering what your thoughts are on this issue.
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Hi Jessica, great post! I agree that one of the most difficult tasks in operationalizing evil is how to measure it. In contrast I relate this puzzling task to trying to measure happiness. Happiness and evil are both very subjective constructs in which only the “eye of the beholder” is truly able to determine. In both cases we are only able to narrow down on some type of definition through commonalities. For example, in general happiness is attributed to gratitude, acts of kindness, friendliness, etc. meanwhile; evil is typically attributed to things such as violence, anger, enemy/target etc. In general, I think that evil is clearly a hard label to define, and we may never find a concrete answer but that is OK – many labels and themes in psychology are in the same boat!
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