EVIL

The complex phenomenon of humiliation has been approached from very different perspectives: as a social dynamic (Klein, 1991), in relation to egalitarian ethics (Lindner, 2006; see also www.humiliationstudies.org), from the perspective of moral transgression (Combs et al., 2010), from a political philosophy context (Margalit, 1996), emphasizing its clinical and evaluation aspects (Hartling & Luchetta, 1999; Torres & Bergner, 2012), analyzing its role in asymmetric intergroup conflicts (Ginges & Atran, 2008; McCauley, 2017), emphasizing the question of the very definition of the psychological construct as a distinctive emotion (Elison & Harter, 2007; Fernández et al., 2015, 2018) or as a more or less prototypical synergistic combination of other emotions such as anger and shame (Elshout et al., 2017; McCauley, 2017). Our team has also been incorporating an approach to humiliation from the perspective of aggression and evil (Gaviria, 2019; Maiuro, 2001; Quiles et al., 2014).

Many episodes of humiliation can be considered violent and as acts of evil, although there is a huge gradation in the severity of psychological damage that humiliators can inflict. In the most serious and violent cases, the intention of the perpetrator is total annihilation of the victim's ego:

Cruelty, lack of justification (at least from the point of view of the victim) and extreme severity of the harm inflicted are characteristics traditionally associated with acts of evil (e.g., genocide, terrorism). Current research traces signs of evil also in our most modest daily actions, identifying some dimensions that define the degree of evil within an act: willingness to destroy and cause suffering to another person; desire to humiliate them; planning the damage to be inflicted; lack of compassion; and satisfaction with the harm done to the victim (Quiles et al., 2010).

Although there are authors who emphasize the role of certain personal dispositions and their interaction with the situation in the study of evil, our work adopts a more psychosocial position and is aligned with those of Zimbardo (2007) and Bandura (1999), who suggest that, depending on the context, anyone can commit true acts of evil.