ABSTRACT
Analysts of evil and violence express the concern that to explain harmdoing may result in a condoning attitude toward perpetrators. An examination of research relevant to this hypothesis suggests that there are a variety of cognitive and affective processes that, in fact, may produce a relatively condoning attitude toward perpetrators as a result of explaining their actions. In contrast, implicit judgments consist of largely automatic or nonconscious reactions to behavior and are likely to produce correspondent, relatively harsh inferences about perpetrators. Explanations that focus on situational factors are expected to be viewed as more condoning toward perpetrators than are explanations that focus on dispositions of the harmdoer. A voluminous literature on the correspondence bias suggests that the lay observer typically, and implicitly, will explain an act of harm in terms of dispositional attributes of the perpetrator--for example, aggressive, violent, sadistic, evil.
