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

by Ervin Staub

  Crosscutting relations (a term proposed by Morton Deutsch) among subgroups of society and between nations can overcome these tendencies.1 To evolve an appreciation of alikeness and a feeling of connectedness, members of subgroups of society must live together, work together, play together; their children must go to school together. Members of different nations must also work and play together. Social psychologists found in the 1950s that given existing prejudice, it was not enough for blacks and whites simply to live near each other. To reduce prejudice requires positive contact. Later, as schools were integrated, minority children continued to do less well academically and had poor self-esteem. Cooperative learning procedures, which led to extensive interaction on an equal footing, increased the prosocial behavior of all children and the academic achievement and self-esteem of minority children. Real interaction in a framework of equality is essential for people to come to know and accept each other.

  Ideally, people will join in the pursuit of shared goals. “Superordinate goals” are goals that are shared by individuals or groups and that are higher in the hierarchy than other potentially conflicting goals.2 Such goals express and further generate shared values and ideals. For example, in the civil rights movement in the United States, whites and blacks joined. In many other grass-roots movements in the United States diverse groups of people work together.a Economic well-being, protection of the environment, the creation of community, and working against nuclear destruction may become shared, superordinate goals.

  We can begin in a small way. For example, in 1985 in Amherst, Massachusetts, old and young residents, members of the local police, and university professors and students joined to build a playground at one of the local elementary schools. For four days they worked, talked, and ate together. Those present were transported by the experience. People who came on the first day to work a four-hour shift remained until the end. A shared goal provided an opportunity and the permission to be part of a community. Similar events have occurred in other towns of the Northeast, under the direction of the same architect.

  An outgrowth of this community action was a larger-scale collaborative effort at the nearby campus of the University of Massachusetts. The graduating class of 1985 cleaned, repaired, and painted one floor of the library building. The project was initiated by the director of the university’s physical plant, who had participated in building the playground. In the fall of 1986, students, faculty, administrators, staff members, and some Amherst residents, under the leadership of volunteers from the physical plant, repaired and repainted in four days the remaining 23 floors of the huge library. I believe this joint effort greatly improved cohesion within subgroups, such as students and faculty from the same department who participated together, improved ties across group lines, and generated a greater feeling of community.

  Groups must have some trust in each other to adopt superordinate goals. Moreover, the strength of existing group identities and previous successes in achieving joint goals affect the extent to which intergroup cooperation reduces conflict and results in positive ties.3 However, joint goals can be wisely selected, starting with less demanding ones.

  Preparation for interaction can increase acceptance of the other group’s values and perspective on life and acceptance of differences in everyday customs and behaviors that, even when they have little practical significance, have great emotional impact. Differences in culture can be a source of irritation, conflict, and mutual devaluation. People have different nonverbal cues or degrees of openness and emotional expressiveness, different rules of interpersonal relations and different work habits, beliefs, and values. Preparatory education in diversity and actual contact with different groups from an early age can make intergroup relations satisfying rather than frustrating.b

  Learning by doing and steps along a continuum of benevolence

  Starting with common everyday acts and moving on to acts requiring greater sacrifice while producing greater benefits, helping others can lead to genuine concern and a feeling of responsibility for people. To reduce the probability of genocide and war, helping must be inclusive, across group lines, so that the evolving values of caring and connection ultimately include all human beings.

  We devalue those we harm and value those we help. As we come to value more highly the people we help and experience the satisfactions inherent in helping, we also come to see ourselves as more caring and helpful. One of our goals must be to create societies in which there is the widest possible participation in doing for others.

  We need to greatly expand the opportunities of both children and adults to act on others’ behalf. We could provide children with the opportunity to visit sick children in hospitals (contrary to current hospital policies), to help older people, and to collect and send needed items to people in other countries. Both schools and community organizations could establish such projects and guide children to participate in them.c My experience with a number of relevant experiments suggests that children would willingly do a great deal in others’ behalf, given the proper opportunity, guidance, and some choice, so that their activities fit their inclinations.

  Adults must also help others if they are to guide children and must themselves develop more the values of caring and connection. As I noted, many Americans are involved in volunteer activities.9 In England volunteering to donate blood is widely practiced.10 We ought to create wide-ranging opportunities for service to others and promote the spirit that leads people to use them, including cooperative activities in which we receive less than our partners. Cooperation connects people. Research with young children has shown that when they work cooperatively rather than competitively, with joint rewards, they like one another and children outside the group better.11

  Business people and engineers can give up some profits to train unskilled youth. Many people could “adopt” teenage mothers (or fathers) and help them learn what infants require for healthy development. The helpers could impart skills and awareness of the infants’ needs and at the same time provide the mothers with desperately needed emotional support. Although concern with societal problems like unemployed youth and teenage parenting has long existed, the motivation to help might increase if people realized that, as they promote humanitarian ideals like greater justice and improved quality of life for many, their actions also contribute to a longterm evolution of caring and nonaggression. This makes such concerns relevant also to peace activists and human rights advocates.

  How we help others is crucial. Helping can be divisive if helpers use it, perhaps unconsciously, as a means to elevate themselves over the people they help. Welfare recipients in the United States often feel diminished, powerless.12 We must strive to treat recipients of both government and private help with respect, as full members of the community. Only this way will helpers (and recipients) experience the connection to others that helping can promote.

  Creating positive connections between groups

  Much of the preceding as well as following discussion applies to relationships between both subgroups of societies and nations. Positive reciprocity, crosscutting relations, superordinate goals, and unilateral and mutual help are all important. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, starting with Freud’s dictum that anatomy is destiny, adds that social structure is destiny as well.13 Anatomy is less destiny than Freud thought; social structure more than we usually recognize. Change in individuals, unless it leads to changes in culture and social structure, will remain unstable and will not spread. Changes in individuals and societal institutions must be followed by changes in international structures.

  Uri Bronfenbrenner, a U.S. psychologist who has studied the socialization of children in the Soviet Union, noted the mutual devaluation in the United States and the Soviet Union. The two societies’ attitudes toward each other were mirror images. While he was in the Soviet Union, his views of the country and its people were positive. A few weeks after coming home and after talking to people in the United States, he began to doubt his own experience.14 For ch
ange to persist and spread, groups need a minimum mass- of people sharing an attitude, of the culture expressing it, and of the institutions embodying it.

  A first step is expanding contact between nations. Without real human contact, tourism has limited value. Tourists are likely to interpret the behavior of foreigners according to stereotypes, and strong devaluative stereotypes tend to be self-fulfilling. Real contact is important for the beginnings of positive connection.

  Crosscutting relations that bring people from different groups to work and play together are also essential. Educational, cultural, and scientific exchanges between nations can provide such contact. Joint projects are a further step. Joint manufacturing and joint work in technology and science create positive ties and increase the cost of aggression. The world is already moving in this direction. The United States produces movies cooperatively with many countries; Japanese and American manufacturers work together, even build plants together.

  Service by people as volunteers in each others’ countries – a kind of mutual peace corps – would be a vehicle for both crosscutting relations and the learning of benevolence. If people in one country do not have technical skills to impart to another, they can make other contributions. They can teach about their own culture: their art, their values, their perspective on reality.

  Cooperation should progress from small projects to highly significant ones, such as the development of new energy sources, AIDS research, and the exploration of space. All such projects represent potentially significant superordinate goals. An overarching superordinate goal would be an international economic and political order in which all countries have significant stake. Third world countries need aid in development from industrial countries, to create connection and diminish the chance of international conflict. Superordinate goals have already been thrust upon nations: dealing with the nuclear threat and environmental destruction.

  The processes and practices that I have described can build trust and the valuing of connection, produce a redefinition of national interest in minimalist terms, and lead members of the international community to regard it as an obligation to be active bystanders. Comparable practices can focus on creating caring and connection among subgroups of societies.

  Some progress toward international institutions has been made in recent years, although not along the lines discussed above. A large and increasing number of binational and multinational treaties have been concluded. Multinational corporations, although they tend to be exploitive in their present form (of the resources and populations of countries where they operate), have the potential to function as collaborative enterprises that embody superordinate goals and establish crosscutting relations among citizens of different countries.

  Positive socialization: parenting, the family, and schools

  All along I have discussed the importance of how we raise children. Certain experiences children have in their interaction with others shape their dispositions for antagonism or for caring and connection. They contribute to their prosocial orientation, empathy, positive self-esteem, and a sense of security, which are the sources of both benevolence and the capacity to act in one’s own behalf. The positive socialization practices that contribute to the development of these characteristics include affection; responsiveness to the child’s needs; and reasoning with the child, explaining rules both for the home and for the outside world and the impact of the child’s actions or inaction on others.15 Parents also need to focus responsibility on the child for others’ welfare: their siblings, pets, and, when appropriate, people outside the family. Parents must exercise reasonable control and make sure that the child adheres to moral and social standards they regard as essential. They need to use “natural socialization,” guiding the child to participate in worthwhile activities, including helping. Substantial learning and change result from participation rather than from direct tuition or reward and punishment.16 Finally, parents themselves must show concern for others.

  Children so raised will be both caring and “enabled,” capable of using the opportunities society offers for education and achievement. If parents allow the child increasing autonomy, if families are reasonably democratic, and if they allow the expression (and thus the experience) of the full range of human emotions, children are also likely to gain the self-awareness, emotional independence, and security required for independent judgment and critical loyalty.

  At least minimally supportive social conditions are also required, that is, reasonably secure and ordered life circumstances. The benevolence and care that are necessary for positive socialization may be impossible for parents who cannot fulfill their basic needs for food, shelter, stability, and psychological support. Minimal social justice is therefore necessary.

  Families are systems, with varying rules. Some families do not allow the expression of sadness or pain, feelings that are inevitable. Others do not even allow joy to be expressed. The practice of diagnosing family systems would help families see themselves and the systems they have created. Being made aware of research showing that children respond well to positive parenting from birth on could change assumptions that contribute to physical punishment and other destructive practices.17 Education about children and child-rearing techniques, possibly starting before birth, can provide parents with feelings of expertise and control and increase their affection and benevolence toward their children.18 Social scientists and interested citizens can provide an important service by systematically disseminating such information, which now reaches the public in a haphazard manner.

  The schools can also make an important contribution. Beyond teaching skills and substantive knowledge, schools inevitably shape children’s personalities. Teachers, like parents, should employ positive discipline practices. The schools should not be authoritarian systems, but democratic ones in which children learn the capacity for responsible decision making. It is important to introduce cooperative learning procedures in which children work together, teach each other, and coordinate their activities. Such programs improve academic performance and self-esteem in minority children and increase prosocial behavior toward peers and the capacity to cooperate in all children.19 The schools can guide children to participate in prosocial behavior outside the school and provide them with opportunities to assume responsibility and be helpful to others within the school. By guiding children to concern themselves with the world around them and contribute to the social good, the schools (and parents) can help children become socially responsible citizens.

  By their rules, schools help determine whether children interact with each other aggressively or cooperatively, and thereby the behavioral skills and tendencies they develop. This is highly important, because the child’s socialization becomes self-socialization: the child’s behavior shapes others’ behavior toward the child, and the child’s responses to others create the cycle of interaction that further shapes the child’s personality, motives, and world view.20

  Schools can teach about diversity and commonality. George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia, described his profound change in attitude toward the enemy when during the Spanish Civil War he saw from his trench an enemy soldier pull down his pants and relieve himself. Schools (and universities) can teach their students about differences in customs, ways of life, and values of people in different groups and their shared humanity and shared needs and yearnings. To accomplish this, it helps to move beyond abstractions and concretize and particularize human beings.

  By helping students enter the framework of other cultures, schools can let them see how cultures and subcultures evolved differently because of different circumstances and different choices. By coming to see cultures as modes of adaptation and to appreciate the functions of different customs, especially if this is combined with a wide range of personal experience, students may come to accept quite varied ways of life.

  Finally, parents, schools, and universities can teach children to recognize in themselves and others the psychological processes that lead to des
tructive acts. To realize that seeing others as of lesser value or blaming them might represent devaluation and scapegoating is significant progress. Further progress is achieved by learning to catch oneself devaluing others or deflecting self-blame to others and by acquiring the capacity to become an observer not only of others’ but of one’s own psychological processes.

  Avenues for change

  Social change requires highly committed citizens. Groups of citizens can set for themselves such goals as building playgrounds, renovating neglected neighborhoods, or helping the homeless, as well as cultural or business ventures with members of other groups or nations. They can spread information and ideas. We need a vision of long-term change and specific, small ways in which people can contribute. Most people will do nothing unless they lose the feeling of powerlessness through the understanding that small changes are not only important in themselves but part of an evolutionary process.

  Language and ideas

  Ideas can be destructive or prepare us for caring and benevolence. Negative realities like dangers to the environment, scarcity of resources, the threat of nuclear winter, and the state of the world economy all suggest our inescapable global interdependence.

  Language shapes experience. Those who destroy often use euphemisms. The language of nuclear policy creates illusions: by referring to shields, umbrellas, deterrence, and “defense,” it implies a security that does not exist.21 A language true to reality will motivate people to join in efforts to eliminate the potential of nuclear destruction. Presenting to people the realities of torture and atrocities will motivate them to work against their practice.

  Writers, artists, the media, leaders, all citizens

  Books, films, and other cultural products sometimes have substantial influence on whole societies. The films Dr. Strangelove and The Day After shaped and mobilized the public spirit. A BBC television report on starvation in Ethiopia resulted in a worldwide effort to help. The novel (and film) Gentlemen’s Agreement brought anti-Semitism to the public awareness in the United States. Artists, writers, reporters, and others who work in the public domain can make powerful contributions to social change. We must engage them and discuss with them the individual and cultural bases of violence and benevolence and their potential to shape public awareness and influence policy.