Writing a villain can be fun, particularly if you’re going for humor. Take a look at Alan Rickman’s performance as the Sheriff in “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.” It’s absolutely over the top. He portrays the Sheriff as totally evil. The audience ends up laughing. If you want that reaction from your readers, go for it, by all means. (Take a look at The best of Alan Rickman in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.)

The difficulty comes when we’re not writing humor. This brings us to the concept of “Cognitive Dissonance.” Back in 1957, Leon Festinger came out with a theory that posited that people strive to maintain internal, psychological consistency. In other words, we strive to make sense of ourselves to ourselves even when we maintain contradictory beliefs. For example: Your character believes himself to be a good person, but is a serial killer. To most of us, this is very contradictory. We often write off such a person as “a monster.” It reduces our own cognitive dissonance. But what about the villain herself? How does she live with herself?

There are several tactics that can be used. Your villain could simply ignore the dissonance or deny reality. She could even call the contradiction “fake news.” (Sorry, I just couldn’t resist.) She could use some sort of justification. “They deserved to die.” This seems to be fairly common across a range of horrendous behavior. The idea in reducing dissonance is to make those contradictory beliefs/behaviors somehow compatible.

Remember that few of us see ourselves as bad, evil. Some do, however.  I think this is often an issue of very poor self-esteem. Dissonance is reduced by agreeing with one side and rejecting the other. Our serial killer might just reject the idea she is basically good and accept that she is evil. I think (without any research), that she would still use some sort of justification such as genetics or upbringing. “I’m evil because it’s in my blood. I come from a long line of evil people.”

Profilers often talk about post-crime behavior as a possible tip-off. They note that after committing the crime, the perpetrator often displays a change in behavior. Maybe she starts drinking a lot, or becomes reclusive, or any of a myriad of behaviors that aren’t typical. I wonder if this change is driven by the dissonance and attempts to reduce it.

The bottom line here is that even your villain has to make some sense of herself to herself. She can do this through denial, justification or acceptance of one belief and rejection of the other. Her behavior may change as she grapples with her cognitive dissonance and this can be a tip-off to investigators or witnesses.

In this post, I have talked mostly about “villains,” but the concept applies to any and all of your characters. It applies to all people, though beliefs are likely to differ based on culture. In writing your characters, it might be helpful to try to get into the head of each of your major characters and think about how each justifies herself to herself. You might just end up with much more believable characters.