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Social psychology operationalizes how cruel behavior emerges through mechanisms of moral disengagement, including empathic deficits, pseudospeciation, and the “myth of pure evil,” and how disgust can shape perceived evil via dehumanization and moral disgust. The work then states five predictions about the universal makeup of such villains and supports them with illustrative vignettes.",{"@graph":14,"@context":73},[15,34,56],{"@type":16,"itemListElement":17},"BreadcrumbList",[18,23,27,31],{"item":19,"name":20,"@type":21,"position":22},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",1,{"item":24,"name":25,"@type":21,"position":26},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":28,"name":29,"@type":21,"position":30},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/","Research & Report",3,{"item":32,"name":10,"@type":21,"position":33},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/evil-origins-a-darwinian-genealogy-of-the-popcultural-villain/608146/",4,{"url":32,"name":10,"@type":35,"image":36,"author":41,"headline":10,"publisher":44,"fileFormat":47,"inLanguage":8,"description":12,"dateModified":48,"datePublished":49,"encodingFormat":47,"isAccessibleForFree":50,"interactionStatistic":51},"DigitalDocument",{"url":37,"@type":38,"width":39,"height":40},"https://docshare.wps.com/thumbnails/evil-origins-a-darwinian-genealogy-of-the-popcultural-villain/608146.png","ImageObject",300,407,{"name":42,"@type":43},"Nguyễn Văn Học","Person",{"url":19,"name":45,"@type":46},"DocShare","Organization","application/pdf","2026-10-30","2026-10-17",true,{"@type":52,"interactionType":53,"userInteractionCount":55},"InteractionCounter",{"@type":54},"ViewAction",7,{"@type":57,"mainEntity":58},"FAQPage",[59,65,69],{"name":60,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":62},"What does the article claim evolutionary psychology contributes to understanding popcultural villains?","Question",{"text":63,"@type":64},"It supplies a blueprint for impactful villains as selfish, exploitative, and sadistic, standing against a society’s prosocial ethos.","Answer",{"name":66,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":67},"Which social-psychological mechanisms explain how cruel behavior is realized?",{"text":68,"@type":64},"The article focuses on moral disengagement mechanisms, including empathic deficits, pseudospeciation, and Baumeister’s “myth of pure evil.”",{"name":70,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":71},"How does disgust affect a character’s perceived evil nature?",{"text":72,"@type":64},"Disgust can contribute through dehumanization, and it may be intensified by blending cognitive disgust toward contaminants with moral disgust toward social transgressions.","https://schema.org",{"og:url":32,"og:type":75,"og:title":10,"og:site_name":45,"og:description":12},"article",{"robots":77,"canonical":32},"index,follow",{"doc_id":79,"site_id":7},608146,1792716038,{"code":4,"msg":82,"data":83},"success",[84,88,92,96,101,106,110,114,119,122,126],{"id":22,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":85,"show_sort_weight":86,"slug":87},"Story & Novel",90,"story-novel",{"id":26,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":89,"show_sort_weight":90,"slug":91},"Literature",80,"literature",{"id":33,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":93,"show_sort_weight":94,"slug":95},"Exam",70,"exam",{"id":97,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":98,"show_sort_weight":99,"slug":100},5,"Comic",60,"comic",{"id":102,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":103,"show_sort_weight":104,"slug":105},6,"Technology",50,"technology",{"id":55,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":107,"show_sort_weight":108,"slug":109},"Healthcare",40,"healthcare",{"id":111,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":29,"show_sort_weight":112,"slug":113},8,30,"research-report",{"id":115,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":116,"show_sort_weight":117,"slug":118},9,"Religion & Spirituality",20,"religion-spirituality",{"id":117,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":120,"show_sort_weight":117,"slug":121},"World Cup","world-cup",{"id":123,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":124,"show_sort_weight":123,"slug":125},10,"Lifestyle","lifestyle",{"id":127,"doc_module":4,"doc_module_name":25,"category_name":128,"show_sort_weight":97,"slug":129},19,"General","general",{"code":4,"msg":82,"data":131},{"doc_id":79,"user_id":132,"nickname":42,"user_avatar":133,"doc_module":4,"category_id":111,"category_name":29,"doc_title":10,"doc_description":12,"doc_content":134,"file_id":135,"file_url":136,"file_type":137,"file_size":138,"view_count":55,"is_deleted":4,"is_public":22,"is_downloadable":22,"audit_status":22,"page_count":139,"language":140,"language_code":8,"site_id":7,"html_lang":8,"table_of_contents":141,"faqs":142,"seo_title":143,"seo_description":12,"update_tm":144,"read_time":145},1374402739827,"https://ap-avatar.wpscdn.com/avatar/14000c97e7351f1a627?x-image-process=image/resize,m_fixed,w_180,h_180&k=1787885694763230660","This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers . This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly .  \nEvolutionary Behavioral Sciences © 2015 American Psychological Association  \n2016, Vol. 10, No. 2, 109–122 2330-2925/16/$12.00 [http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000057](http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000057)  \nEvil Origins: A Darwinian Genealogy of the Popcultural Villain  \nJens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen  \nAarhus University  \nThis article argues that the sciences of mind can inform analyses of narrative characters, including their motives, appearances, and other traits. In particular, it explores the popcultural villain through the lenses of evolutionary and social psychology. Evolutionary psychology supplies a basic blueprint for impactful villains: they are selfish, exploitative, and sadistic. They contravene the prosocial ethos of society. Social psychology embeds this blueprint in the interactions of characters by offering mechanisms through which cruel behavior may be realized. The main mechanisms behind moral disengagement are empathic deficits, pseudospeciation, and Baumeister’s notion of a ‘myth of pure evil’: an attributive stance whereby humans consider injurious actions the products of evil essences in others. Finally, disgust may contribute to a character’s perceived evil nature through dehumanization, likely compounded by a cognitive conflation of disgust toward potential contaminants and moral disgust toward social transgressions. Following the theoretical discussion, the article offers 5 predictions as to the universal makeup of popcultural villains. All predictions are complemented with illustrative vignettes on popcultural villains that embody the principles proposed.  \nKeywords: agonistic structure, Darwinian criticism, evil, evolutionary psychology,  \nnarrative  \nWhile nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.  \n—Fyodor Dostoyevsky (as quoted in Simon, 1995, p. xv)  \nThe concept of evil is ontologically problematic. It is so problematic that philosophers and theologians have offered different and often contradictory ideas about evil for thousands of years. Scholars now suggest that this is because their predecessors worked on an ill-posed problem (Baumeister, 2001; Greene, 2014) . Trying to square the existence of an absolute, reifiedevil with the post-Darwinian conception of life and the human condition is impossible; Darwinism has no use for such ethico-religious assumptions. In this article, by drawing on modern evolutionary and social psychology, I sketch a perspective on evil that breaks with metaphys-  \nThis article was published Online First November 2, 2015.  \nCorrespondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University, Jens Chr. Skous Vej 4, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. E-mail:  \n[Jenslyn87@live.dk](Jenslyn87@live.dk)  \nics. Evil from this perspective emerges as a folk-psychological construct whose unreal metaphysics has real implications. I argue that evolved cognitive dispositions inform and constrain the archetypical villain of popular literature, film, and video games. I proceed to draw up a set of empirical predictions toward fictional evil villains. Finally, I suggest that stories of good versus evil, in which the evil villain is often among the most salient characters, may have an adaptive function in carving out an imaginative space through which societies can affirm their prosocial values. The goal of the present thesis, then, is to offer a poetics of evil that is empirically tractable as well as vertically integrated with the sciences of human mind and kind.  \nA Very Brief Intellectual History of Evil  \nEvil has historically been conceptualized as something real, if somehow metaphysical (Vardy & Arliss, 2003) . It was thought to be some embodied or","cbCailF7pGzcWLAA","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCailF7pGzcWLAA","pdf",102679,14,"English","# A Very Brief Intellectual History of Evil\n# Darwin Among the Humanities","[{\"question\":\"What does the article claim evolutionary psychology contributes to understanding popcultural villains?\",\"answer\":\"It supplies a blueprint for impactful villains as selfish, exploitative, and sadistic, standing against a society’s prosocial ethos.\"},{\"question\":\"Which social-psychological mechanisms explain how cruel behavior is realized?\",\"answer\":\"The article focuses on moral disengagement mechanisms, including empathic deficits, pseudospeciation, and Baumeister’s “myth of pure evil.”\"},{\"question\":\"How does disgust affect a character’s perceived evil nature?\",\"answer\":\"Disgust can contribute through dehumanization, and it may be intensified by blending cognitive disgust toward contaminants with moral disgust toward social transgressions.\"}]","Evil Origins - A Darwinian Genealogy of the Popcultural Villain | PDF",1792218739,35]