Mauro, RobertDimakis, Sarah2024-12-192024-12-192024-12-19https://hdl.handle.net/1794/30300In response to a complex and information dense world, we organize related information into categories (e.g., furniture, animals) to make it easier to apply existing knowledge to newly encountered objects and situations (Rosch, 1978). Categories are represented in the mind as cognitive prototypes: examples that possess common features of category members (Posner & Keele, 1968; Reed, 1972; Rosch & Mervis, 1975). A key feature of prototype-based categories is that unobserved characteristics are inferred to category members once the prototype is activated (Cantor & Mischel, 1977; Osherson et al., 1990). I propose in this dissertation that we use moral person categories to make inferences about the unobserved or unobservable immoral characteristics of others, which influences our decisions about with whom to interact and how to interact with them. In a series of studies, I demonstrated that people perceive multiple bad person categories, examined their properties, and tested a prototype model of moral character evaluation against dimensional models. This dissertation is the first rigorous investigation of the structure and properties of perceived bad person categories. In Study 1, fifty prototypical characteristics of a bad person (e.g., lacking empathy, selfishness, racism) were gleaned from previous literature and augmented with additional characteristics generated by participants in a free-listing task. In Study 2, participant sorting data of characteristics from Study 1 revealed that respondents distinguished between multiple types of bad people (e.g., psychopath, abuser, narcissist, bigot). Additionally, categorical and dimensional models of bad person characteristics were generated from the responses in Study 2 and tested with new data in Study 3. Consistent with prototype-based categories, unobserved immoral characteristics that were prototypical of a category were more likely to be attributed to exemplars of that category compared to exemplars of competing bad person categories. Further, prototype models outperformed dimensional or multidimensional models, but prototype-unidimensional dual models performed the best. Thus, people infer prototype-consistent immoral characteristics to exemplars of a category, and additionally infer prototype-inconsistent immoral characteristics that are similar in morality to the exemplar (but not similar on other social dimensions such as intelligence or sociability). Additionally, further providing support for multiple bad person prototype-based categories, large differences were observed in the perception of four bad person prototypes regarding their morality, competence, sociability, gender, race, age, physical appearance, the innateness and permanence of their immoral characteristics, and the ways respondents prefer to interact with them. Overall, this dissertation provides strong evidence against the unidimensional model of morality commonly used in the moral character evaluation literature and in support of a model of moral character evaluation that includes cognitive prototypes. This research may have significant implications for why we make errors that others are bad based on harmless or morally irrelevant characteristics (e.g., physical appearance, harmless behaviors), including in criminal justice contexts. In the future, the methods presented in this paper should be replicated with diverse samples to assess commonalities and differences in the cognitive prototypes of bad people across relevant subgroups (e.g., liberals versus conservatives, experts versus novices).en-USAll Rights Reserved.Moral CharacterMoral PsychologyMoralityPerson PerceptionSocial JudgmentElectronic Thesis or Dissertation