Demons with guns: How belief in pure evil relates to Attributional judgments for gun violence perpetrators

Summary People who report greater belief in pure evil (BPE; the tendency to attribute harmdoing to dispositionally sadistic perpetrators) generally punish criminal perpetrators more regardless of mitigating circumstances (e.g., having a brain tumor). What attributional/cognitive processes underlie such punishment? A national sample (final N = 302) read an alleged USA Today article about a mall shooting. We manipulated whether the shooter...