The roots of evil: The origins of genocide and other group violence

by Ervin Staub

  Institutions creating societal climate. A society’s institutions help determine whether its spirit is one of harmony, cooperation, and altruism or one of disharmony, conflict, and harm-doing; for example, compare the English system of voluntary blood donation with the widespread buying and selling of blood in the United States.67 In schools, emphasis on competition (as opposed to cooperative learning) greatly affects the experience of self and others (Chapter 17). Unfortunately, even cooperative and harmonious institutions may exclude some groups. There is a sharp turn towards group violence when institutions are created or existing institutions assigned the task to harm a subgroup of society. In Germany the Ministry of Propaganda and the SS were such institutions.

  In sum, a constellation of characteristics makes a society likely to respond to difficult life conditions in ways that ultimately lead to violence against a subgroup (or another country). All the components need not exist for a society to start along the continuum of destruction; part of a pattern is sufficient. Nevertheless, the absence of a crucial characteristic can inhibit mistreatment or violence or lead to counterreactions that stop its progression. For example, in a pluralistic system, people can speak out against and prevent progress toward genocide.

  * * *

  a There is a great deal of controversy about sociobiological views on the genetic basis of human social behavior,9 and my own views differ from Wilson’s. For example, I regard Mundurucú culture as demonstrating the role of culture in aggression. Sociobiologists’ proposals concern the sources of human behavior in the gene pool, in the shared human genetic heritage. Philip Rushton and his associates have suggested that individual genetic variation exists in altruism and aggression.10 Their conclusions are based on self-reports in questionnaires, not direct information about behavior. They found greater similarity between more genetically related individuals (e.g., identical twins in contrast to fraternal twins). It is unlikely that certain genes directly result in more or less aggression or altruism. More likely, genetically based temperamental differences (e.g., in infants’ activity levels, intensity of emotion, and social responsiveness) affect the way parents and others relate to infants. This shapes the child’s altruistic and aggressive behavior, or, what Rushton and his associates actually measured, verbal self reports related to altruism and to self-other relations. (When reared together, identical twins are also treated more alike than fraternal twins.)

  5 The psychology of perpetrators: individuals and groups

  Who become the direct perpetrators of violence and the policymakers, and how? It is decision makers who initiate, lead, give orders, and in most cases assume responsibility. Irving Janis found that decision-making groups engage in “groupthink.”1 Members are reluctant to contradict each other. Once an idea has gained any support, especially by the leader, members refrain from criticism or the introduction of new ideas, which limits alternatives.

  Groupthink often leads to unintended outcomes. However, genocide and mass killing frequently fulfill the decision makers’ intentions and goals. In some instances, as in the case of Hitler and the Holocaust, the ideas that led to genocide evolved well before the killers gained power. Inevitably, preexisting beliefs limit the alternatives considered by decision makers. In other instances, as in Cambodia, the genocidal intention evolved during the chaos and turmoil that preceded the genocide.

  There has been little direct study of either decision makers or direct perpetrators. Once they lose power, not surprisingly, they tend to avoid scrutiny. Social scientists have rarely approached them. When they are studied, their responses must be “translated,” because they need to justify themselves in their own and others’ eyes. Indirect approach by the assessment of personality is perhaps a better way to study them.

  The Nazis tried at Nuremberg, mostly decision makers, provided such opportunity. Unfortunately, their psychological assessment was based on the questionable hypothesis that they were mentally ill, and used materials such as Rorschach inkblot patterns. Not surprisingly, no mental illness was evident.2

  In psychological experiments it is possible to study influences that lead people to harm others but difficult to study how people become genocidal leaders. The study of real genocidal leaders is also difficult, and their numbers are small. We will focus on followers, which is appropriate because they give power to leaders (together with accepting bystanders). Moreover, the leaders and the followers who become perpetrators appear to share psychological processes and motivations that lead to genocide.

  Certain personal characteristics seem to enter into self-selection by perpetrators. Occupying certain social roles, as a result of self-selection and personal choice, further shapes personality and attitudes. Although personal characteristics create predispositions, otherwise quite different people may become perpetrators of massacre and genocide by moving along a continuum of destruction (see next chapter). Social change can diminish the strength of values and rules that prohibit harm-doing. The perpetrators may be changed by first passively accepting the mistreatment of victims or by participating in small, even seemingly innocuous hostile acts. After joining an ideological group, they are under pressure to accept its definition of what is right.

  Psychological research, interviews with criminals, and evidence from psychotherapy tell us something about situations that lead people to harm others, the personal characteristics that lead to violence, and the origins of such personality. These different sources provide a fairly coherent, although as yet incomplete, picture, supported by a limited number of studies of perpetrators of torture, genocide, and mass killing. This mosaic of information suggests that perpetrators often have one or both of two constellations of characteristics: I will call them potentially antisocial and authority oriented.

  A single characteristic, for example, an extreme incapacity for empathy, may be enough, although usually it accompanies other predisposing characteristics. Consider, for example, Suchomel, an SS guard in Treblinka. In the documentary film Shoah, he sings the song that all Jewish prisoners who were not immediately killed had to learn on their first day in the camp.

  “Looking squarely ahead, brave and joyous,

  at the world,

  the squads march to work.

  All that matters to us now is Treblinka.

  It is our destiny.

  That’s why we’ve become one with Treblinka

  in no time at all.

  We know only the word of our Commander,

  we know only obedience and duty,

  we want to serve, to go on serving,

  until a little luck ends it all. Hurray.”3

  Then, he says, “Satisfied. That’s unique.” He adds with seeming nostalgia and regret, “No Jew knows that today.” He seems blind to what this song must have meant to Jews. We do not know how much of this incapacity for empathy is the result of his SS training and guard experience or how much existed before. Nor do we know whether the incapacity is general or applies only to Jews.

  Roles and other social processes as origins of harm-doing

  Perpetrators can be ordinary people who have long filled certain roles – prison guards, combat soldiers – in which the devaluation of some other people is inherent. If the definition of their role comes to include acts of cruelty, many will adapt. In a study at Stanford, normal college students were randomly assigned to be either “guards” or “prisoners.” The prisoners were “stripped naked, skin searched, deloused"; they had to memorize and follow rules restricting their freedom of speech and movement and had to ask permission to do the simplest activities, such as writing letters or going to the toilet.4

  People so treated must seem inferior not only in power but in their basic humanity. Being in roles that grant power can lead to “us” and “them” separation, devaluation, and cruelty, particularly when the powerless are degraded. Some of those assigned the role of guards became extremely punitive and aggressive. They reacted to a “rebellion” by harassing and intimidating prisoners and putting “rin
gleaders” into solitary confinement. They made prisoners gather at any time of day or night for the “count,” the “duration of which they increased from the original perfunctory ten minutes to seemingly interminable several hours.”5 This re-created a practice used in both Russian labor camps and German concentration camps. Guards who did not themselves engage in such conduct remained passive. The mistreatment became so severe that the experiment had to be discontinued.

  Often those who become perpetrators occupy roles that require obedience. In Milgram’s research the relationship between the person who administered the shock and the person in authority was transient. The pressures are stronger in prisons, armies, and other hierarchical institutions, systems that stress authority and obedience.

  Self- selection and the personality of perpetrators

  Even people without significant predispositions may evolve into perpetrators through “us”-“them” differentiation, devaluation, scapegoating, ideology, and submerging themselves in a group. But there is also self-selection and selection by authorities of those who possess at least part of a predisposing pattern, especially when the need for violence is evident from the start.

  Scott Peck describes self-selection for the police:

  It is only because particular kinds of people want to become policemen that they apply for the job in the first place. A young man of lower-middle-class origins who is both aggressive and conventional, for instance, would be quite likely to seek a position on the force. A shy, intellectual youth would not. The nature of police work.. .fits the psychological needs of the first young man. He quite naturally gravitates toward it. Should he find during the period of his training and early duty that the work is not satisfying or that he is somehow not compatible with the rank and file of other policemen, he will either resign or be weeded out. The result is that a police force is usually a quite homogeneous group of people who have much in common with each other and who are distinctly different from other types of groups, such as antiwar demonstrators or college English majors.

  ... the society at large – partly through the self-selection process described – employs specific types of people to perform its specialized roles – as, for instance, it employs aggressive, conventional men to perform its police functions.6

  Selection by authorities was evident in a study of twenty-five Greek men who became torturers under the military junta that ruled Greece in the 1970s. They were selected as members of the military police and torturers early in their military training because of their total obedience to authority and because they came from fervent anticommunist families who saw leftists as enemies of Greece.7

  In Nazi Germany, many of the perpetrators – for example, doctors in the “euthanasia” program and the death camps – were selected on the basis of their ideology, their devotion to the Nazi cause.8 Some Nazis were pressed into the role of killer or into indirect involvement with killing, but even they had joined the movement and the party voluntarily and had advanced in it through their commitment and devotion.9

  Self-selection may have played a role in the prison study I discussed earlier. The participants were recruited through “ads in city and campus newspapers” and offered fifteen dollars a day to participate in a study of prison life. Not everyone would want to participate in such a study; the personal characteristics of those who answered the advertisements may have been one reason for the intensifying hostility.

  Earlier I identified characteristics predisposing societies or individuals to violence. I will briefly summarize those most relevant to individuals.

  The potentially antisocial person

  Self-concept and world view. A poor or shaky self-image, easily threatened, and a tendency to see the world, other people, or institutions as hostile may cause a constant need for self-defense and elevation of the self. People with such characteristics may be especially sensitive to life problems. A low level of well-being and much frustration and pain – a negative hedonic balance – heighten the desire to enhance the self.10 Diminishing others raises at least one’s relative well-being.

  Moral values and empathy. A person’s values determine his or her orientation to others’ welfare. In extreme cases, harming others can become a value in itself. We can call this an antisocial value orientation, the devaluation of human beings and the desire to harm them, whether conscious or unconscious. It makes empathy with victims unlikely.

  Moral exclusion. People who devalue other groups will tend to regard moral values as inapplicable to them and exclude their members from the moral realm. An important characteristic of Christians who risked their lives in Nazi-occupied Europe to save Jews was their inclusiveness: “a predisposition to regard all people as equals and to apply similar standards of right and wrong to them.”11

  Competence and a cognitive orientation to aggression. Some people learn strategies of resolving conflict by aggressive means. Research indicates that aggressive behaviors persist from childhood (as early as age eight) into adulthood. Some researchers believe that aggression becomes self-perpetuating because children learn aggressive “scripts” or cognitive schemas, representations of reality that serve as blueprints for aggressive behavior.12 Fantasies may also fuel aggression.a

  People with this constellation of characteristics may be called potentially antisocial. These characteristics can give rise to the motivation to harm or reduce inhibitions against aggression whatever motive it serves, and provide the competencies required for aggression. Aggression becomes a possible avenue to satisfy varied motivations, even a desire for stimulation and excitement.14

  Lack of self-awareness and self-acceptance. This is part of both the potentially antisocial and the authority-oriented patterns. One effect is difficulty in accepting other people.

  Often lack of self-awareness serves a positive self-concept, maintained by rigid defenses, especially denial and projection. Scott Peck regards as “evil” people who must find themselves faultless and blameless and must appear so in others’ eyes, but who have an “unacknowledged sense of their own evil nature.”15 As a result they “attack others instead of facing their own failures.”16 I noted in Chapter 3 another reason for scapegoating: the illusion of understanding and control that arises from identifying the cause of one’s problem.

  Most of us have some difficulty in recognizing and confronting our faults and failures. Greater difficulty contributes more to an antisocial potential, especially under hardship and stress. A person whom Peck regards as evil – someone who in our schema has one strong predisposing characteristic for harming others – may behave in beneficial and helpful ways in ordinary times, as a responsible member of the community, for example, in civic organizations. But when circumstances are complex and threatening and guidance by social rules is unavailable, people who must remain blameless will blame others. When group norms allow violence and even make it socially respectable, such people are likely to engage in conduct that harms others.

  Family origins of the potentially antisocial personality

  Research identifies certain parental socialization practices related to aggression. Punitiveness (especially frequent physical punishment), rejection of the child, hostility between parents and children (especially boys and their fathers), and violence in the home contribute to boys’ aggressiveness.17 Family disorgaization, the loss of structure and rules, or a coercive, aggressive family system are additional contributors.18 In a coercive family the child is both the object of hostility and is hostile and aggressive toward others.

  These conditions make a child feel hurt and angry, vulnerable and worthless. The home provides a blueprint for human relationships. The child may begin to regard people in general as hostile and dangerous, and view aggression as the best, if not the only, mode of conflict resolution. The child’s capacity to fulfill goals by nonaggressive means, and even the development of nonaggressive goals, will be limited.

  It is not only physical punitiveness that lessens children’s regard for others’ welfare. One st
udy by Martin Hoffman indicates that when parents use withdrawal of love as punishment, their children come to focus on conventional rules rather than the needs and welfare of others.19

  Other research shows that upbringing can also create a predisposition for helping other people. Nurturance and responsiveness by parents contribute to secure attachment in infants, which is the basis of a positive orientation toward others. Reasoning with the child and explaining to the child the consequences of his or her behavior on other people, both negative and positive, are also important. So is firmness in guiding the child to act according to important values and standards, firmness that is flexible, democratic rather than authoritarian, and takes the child’s point of view into consideration.20 These practices contribute to self-esteem and a prosocial value orientation, especially if the parents also guide their children to be helpful and generous in action.21

  Authority orientation and its sources in the family

  Certain people are inclined to obey authority and to act punitively toward people not in authority. This is an aspect of what some psychologists call “authoritarian personalities.”22 Authority-oriented persons prefer hierarchical relationships with a clear delineation of spheres of power. They enjoy obeying authority and enjoy exercising power over those below them. Authoritarian individuals were more obedient than average in Milgram’s experiments.b23

  Certain child-rearing practices produce submissiveness to authority and a tendency to devalue the powerless. These practices usually stress conventional values and make children unwilling to acknowledge in themselves impulses or feelings regarded by society and thus by their parents as undesirable-anger, hostility, sexual desire. All human beings have these feelings, and it is destructive to lose awareness of them. People who do not acknowledge these feelings in themselves tend to project them onto others and experience hostility or moral outrage.