Why Some People Approve of Lynching: Moral Reasoning Holds the Key

Lynching remains one of the most disturbing forms of collective violence in the modern world, and yet it persists in many countries, including Brazil, where crowds have repeatedly taken the law into their own hands against individuals accused of crimes. A new study published in the journal Trends in Psychology offers one of the most detailed psychological explanations to date of why ordinary people might find this practice favorable, and the answer lies less in raw emotion than in the way people reason about morality itself. The research, led by Maria Edna Silva de Alexandre of the Federal University of Campina Grande together with colleagues at the Federal University of Paraíba and the University of Lisbon, surveyed 536 Brazilian adults aged between 18 and 71 years, with an average age of 34.4 years, and used structural equation modeling to trace the psychological pathways that lead from moral judgment to approval of lynching.

The starting point of the investigation is the observation that lynching is not random chaos. It is a form of collective violence in which civilians aggressively target an individual or group accused of committing a crime or violating an implicit social contract. Scholars have documented lynchings across Latin America and Africa, and Brazilian researchers have recorded hundreds of cases in the metropolitan region of São Paulo alone between 1980 and 2009. With the rise of social media, rumors and calls for popular justice can now spread within minutes, amplifying the risk that an accusation will end in violence before any official investigation takes place. Understanding the psychological profile of people who view such violence favorably is therefore not an academic luxury but a public safety priority.

The theoretical backbone of the study is Lawrence Kohlberg’s influential account of moral development, which distinguishes three levels of moral judgment. At the pre-conventional level, people evaluate actions mainly in terms of punishment and personal gain. At the conventional level, morality is anchored in social approval, law and order, and the maintenance of existing norms. At the post-conventional level, individuals reason from universal principles of justice and human rights that can override both self-interest and the letter of the law. Because moral judgment is inherently ordinal, the researchers treated it as such in their statistical models, using dummy variables to compare the levels while testing the same pattern of results against both reference categories, a robustness check that confirmed the findings.

Alongside moral judgment, the team examined empathy, a construct that psychologists have long debated and that can refer to several related but distinct phenomena, from affective sharing of another person’s feelings to cognitive perspective taking and concern for others’ welfare. Previous work has suggested that cognitive empathy and genuine concern, rather than purely emotional contagion, predict sensitivity to injustice suffered by others. Empathy has also been promoted in interventions designed to reduce aggressive behavior, which made it a natural candidate for testing whether the capacity to feel with a potential victim might weaken the link between moral reasoning and support for mob violence.

The central innovation of the study, however, lies in the way it disentangles the motivations that drive favorability toward lynching. The researchers distinguished social motivations, which involve the relational and collective rewards of participating in or endorsing group punishment, from emotional motivations, which involve the anger, outrage and desire for retribution that a brutal act can provoke. Crucially, they also separated two very different categories of offense: heinous crimes, such as acts of extreme violence, and property-related offenses, which cause material harm but rarely the same visceral horror. This design allowed the team to ask whether the psychological machinery behind lynching approval changes depending on what the accused person is alleged to have done.

The results of the structural equation modeling were strikingly asymmetric. For heinous crimes, the influence of moral judgment on favorability toward lynching was transmitted through both channels: social motivations showed a strong mediating effect, with an unstandardized coefficient of 0.469 and a standard error of 0.099, significant at the 0.001 level, while emotional motivations also carried a significant but smaller effect, with a coefficient of 0.169, a standard error of 0.071 and a p-value of 0.017. In other words, when the alleged offense is horrifying, both the pull of the crowd and the heat of moral outrage help translate a particular style of moral reasoning into approval of collective violence.

For property-related offenses, the picture changed dramatically. Here the pathway through social motivations was even stronger, with a coefficient of 0.876 and a standard error of 0.092, highly significant at the 0.001 level, but the emotional pathway vanished entirely: the coefficient for emotional motivations dropped to 0.028 with a standard error of 0.058 and a non-significant p-value of 0.625. This means that when the alleged crime involves property rather than bodily harm, approval of lynching appears to be almost exclusively a social phenomenon, driven by the perceived collective function of punishment rather than by personal emotional arousal. People do not need to feel enraged to endorse a mob in these cases; they only need to believe that the group’s punitive response serves a social purpose.

Perhaps the most sobering finding concerned empathy. Contrary to what many intervention designers might hope, empathy did not moderate the influence of moral judgment on any of the lists of motivations, regardless of the type of crime. Being more empathic did not buffer the relationship between lower levels of moral reasoning and favorability toward lynching. This null result carries practical weight, because it suggests that programs aimed solely at cultivating empathic feelings may be insufficient to reduce support for mob justice. The authors argue instead that the results support interventions that consider the multifactorial nature of favorability to lynching, and they single out the promotion of post-conventional justice thinking as a promising strategy for reducing it.

The implications reach well beyond Brazil. Lynching and other forms of vigilante justice flourish where trust in formal institutions is low and where rumors circulate faster than due process. The study’s findings suggest that the psychological vulnerability to endorsing such violence is structured by the level at which a person reasons about justice. Individuals operating at conventional levels, who equate morality with order and group norms, may be especially receptive to the idea that a crowd punishing a transgressor is doing legitimate moral work, particularly when the alleged offense threatens the community’s sense of safety or property. Shifting that reasoning toward principled commitments to human rights, in which even a suspected criminal retains inviolable dignity, may be the most durable psychological safeguard against participation in or approval of mob violence.

The research, which was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Federal University of Paraíba and supported by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, also makes its data available through the Open Science Framework, allowing other researchers to scrutinize and extend the model. As social media platforms continue to accelerate the spread of accusations and the mobilization of crowds, the study offers a technically grounded warning: the fight against lynching will not be won by appeals to feeling alone. It requires cultivating a deeper form of moral reasoning, one in which justice is defined by universal principles rather than by the anger of the crowd or the comfort of belonging to it.

Subject of Research: Psychosocial mechanisms underlying favorability toward lynching

Article Title: Psychosocial Mechanisms of Favorability to Lynching

Article References: de Alexandre, M. E. S., Camino, C. P. D. S., Do Bú, E., Galvão, L. K. D. S., & Pereira, C. R. (2025). Psychosocial Mechanisms of Favorability to Lynching. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00502-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00502-7

Keywords: lynching, moral judgment, empathy, collective violence, social motivations, emotional motivations, Kohlberg, Brazil, vigilante justice, structural equation modeling, moral psychology, social psychology