How do ordinary men become mass murderers?
When we reflected on the reasons for which ordinary men can become such ruthless killers and mass murderers, I feel that there were two very important psychologists whose work wasn’t mentioned as a possible further explanation and those men are Albert Bandura, an eminent figure in the social psychology field, and Muzafer Sherif, another eminent figure in the social psychology field and in the study of conflicts.
So, how can they be useful to the topic at hand?
Albert Bandura, when discussing moral standards found that it’s not enough to be well educated and morally just, in order to act morally. There’s an in-between which can be crucial to the way a person acts towards another (Celia Moore, 2015). He defines this concept as moral disengagement. Which is a cognitive mechanism by which someone, who has actual moral standards, can step away from them and act immorally without the feeling of distress that usually follows such acts. Moral disengagement is divided into eight specific mechanisms:
- Distortion of consequences
- Diffusion of responsibility
- Advantageous comparison
- Displacement of responsibility
- Moral justification
- Euphemistic labeling
- Dehumanization
- Attribution of blame
I’ll now offer an example for each of those mechanisms.
When talking about the distortion of consequences one might of someone who doesn’t control the use of the water they use because “nothing’s going to happen, this is not going to change the climate change crisis”, whereas diffusion of responsibility often comes in the form of “I shot those innocent people, but so did all my fellow comrades”. Whenever you split your responsibility with somebody else, your guilt lessens, and the more the people you split it with, the less the guilt.
An example of an advantageous comparison is “at least I was quick with killing them, others would have taken them their time with it and maybe even tortured them”.
Then, there’s the one that most of the perpetrators of horrors against the Jew people used: displacement of responsibility, which we read in “it wasn’t my fault, I was just following orders”.
Moral justification is another tricky one, not uncommon during wars “I killed them to protect my people, so if I kill them first they can’t kill us”.
Euphemistic labeling comes near the distortion of consequences mechanisms, in this case, you dismiss your action as something not even worth blame, such as “I just merely insulted them, it was nothing”.
Dehumanization is one of the most dangerous mechanisms, fairly common during wars in general, and fundamental during the genocide of the Jew people: when you don’t see the other person as a human anymore, but as a mere object, or nothing more than an animal, you can easily become ruthless because you tell yourself that rules don’t apply anymore. You don’t feel guilty or horrified because you’re not really killing anyone, they’re just bugs, rats, snakes, they’re poisonous plants that need to be eradicated. When you don’t see one’s humanity, you don’t see the one thing you always share with everyone, the one thing that makes us all the same and that is the most dangerous thing.
And, finally, attribution of blame is pretty much self-explanatory. “They deserved this, they did this and brought all this upon themselves” (Celia Moore, 2015).
Sherif, on the other hand, becomes useful in explaining to us how easy can become to see someone as an enemy. A concept we already saw with Zimbardo’s experiment. We, as human beings, have a need to identify with something, in someone. We are our experiences, our relationships, and our roles in society. And we like to think the best of ourselves, regardless of our confidence, we’re like to think that between two groups, even if randomly chosen, our is the best, because that group, if we’re in it, automatically becomes part of ourselves and of how we define ourselves, so if that’s the best group there is, we’re the best.
Briefly put, the Robbers Cave experiment is set in a summer camp. Twenty-two eleven years old boys, with a similar background, were invited to a summer camp. For a while, they all slept in the same, big house, and relationships were allowed to prosper, friendships rose. After a few days, the boys were split into two groups, chosen randomly, and placed in two different camps. After a while, the two groups were put in competition with each other, using games in which they could confront one another. Almost immediately after, the competition and friction on the playfield escalated into mean and vengeful acts, which then escalated into violence. There was nothing that was dividing these groups, no morals, no race, no religion, no social-economic background, and yet, they started hating each other (Muzafer Sherif, O. J. Harvey, B. Jack White, William R. Hood, Carolyn W. Sherif, 1954/1961).
Sherif offers a further explanation of how conflict can literally birth out of thin air. And yet, Hitler did way more than just separate the groups. He yes, put these innocent people aside from society, but he also had laws created against them, he made sure people were indoctrinated against them, the regime taught people to hate them, to fear them. This only amplified the hatred, the mistrust in them, just because someone told them to.
I hope this can be useful to further consider other factors that can come into place when such horrific and tragic acts are committed.
References:
- Moore, C. (2015). Moral disengagement. Current opinion in psychology, (6), 199-204.
- Sherif, M., Harvey, O. J., White, B. J. (2013). Intergroup Conflict and Cooperation: The Robbers Cave Experiment. Literary Licensing.