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The psychology of genocide attempts to explain genocide by means of psychology. Psychology of genocide aims to explain the preconditions of genocide and why some people become genocide perpetrators while others are bystanders or rescuers.
Psychologists have agreed that specific prerequisites stimulate the act of genocide:
Perpetrators are the individuals who carry out, facilitate or instruct the annihilation of a specific group. [1] Psychologists have historically debated whether dispositional or situational variables hold greater validity as explanations for the behaviour of perpetrators.
Adorno postulated that possessing an authoritarian personality is the most integral cause of perpetrators' violence. He concluded that the three integral components of authoritarianism are conventionalism, submission to authority and aggression. Perpetrators also share the behaviour of killing without remorse which enables them to repeat more violent atrocities. Adorno's findings were derived from the 30 item F scale, which measured the extent to which participants agreed with authoritarian statements. One of the items is “Respect for authority is the most important virtue children should learn”. [1]
Milgram contends that obedience plays a significant role in transforming ordinary humans into transgressive perpetrators. [5] His study measured the degree to which participants would administer shocks to learners just because the experimenter instructed them to do so. He found that, due to the effects of probing by the experimenter, 65% of participants obeyed instructions to the highest level (450 volts). Therefore, Milgram concluded that it is the result of precise situational arrangements which succeeded in muting perpetrators’ inner moral conflict. [2]
Solomon also hypothesised that the power of the situation constitutes the paramount reasoning for the behaviour of perpetrators. His research concluded that desensitisation directly implies the ongoing exposure to violence and bloodshed. The exposure greatly reduces their normative restraints (process A) and is substituted for norms accepting of mass brutalities (process B). Research has also shown a potential pleasure of aggression which can explain perpetrators’ excessive torture and violence. [6] For instance, Simpson, a soldier in the 1968 My Lai genocide, described cutting off the hands and tongues of his 25 victims. Later theorists concluded the divide between situational and dispositional variables is a false dichotomy as the power of the situation can result in a perpetual shift in an individual's personality. [7]
Bystanders are individuals who remain passive and silent when witnessing the ethnic cleansing of a target group. Bystanders have also been regarded as semi active as many freely accept the benefits of being a member of the in-group whilst actively avoiding the victims, [1] such as companies firing Jewish employees.
According to Zilmer and Harrower, bystanders are characterised as ambient, which is defined as individuals who lack sufficient emotional development and must rely on others for guidance. They also have lower levels of moral development, which leads to a more compliant and submissive personality. The same study found that a critical justification for limited emotional development is bystanders’ failing attachments with their primary caregiver, who becomes instrumental in foreshadowing their apathetic behaviour. [8] In McFarland-Icke's study of Nurses in Nazi Germany, she concluded that the lack of resistance to perpetrators results from the bystanders’ inability to engage in higher-order processes such as deductive reasoning and logic. [9]
Rescuers are individuals who actively pursue helping the victims survive by providing shelter, protection or a means of escape. [10]
Rescuers are identified as having internalised empathy and moral values, which serve as a diametric contrast to the growing presence of the perpetrators’ ideologies. Theorists have also claimed that a strong sense of individuality is a critical force in driving rescuers’ behaviour. [11] This means that they do not conform to the majority's views and reject movement towards enculturation. Historian Christopher Browning discovered that an estimated 10-20% of Nazi soldiers evaded killing Jews due to their empathy and belief in individual choice. [7]
Oliner's observations highlighted that the determining factor for the behaviour of rescuers is the role of the family. He found that mothers of rescuers transferred healthier moral competence and independence goals compared to mothers of non-rescuers. Rescuer families also embodied other codes of ethics, such as valuing collective responsibility and egalitarianism, irrespective of one's ethnicity or beliefs. [1]
Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part.
Beginning on August 7, 1961, a series of social psychology experiments were conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, who intended to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These sham or fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.
Stanley Milgram was an American social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.
The bystander effect, or bystander apathy, is a social psychological theory that states that individuals are less likely to offer help to a victim in presence of other people. First proposed in 1964 after the murder of Kitty Genovese, much research, mostly in psychology research laboratories, has focused on increasingly varied factors, such as the number of bystanders, ambiguity, group cohesiveness, and diffusion of responsibility that reinforces mutual denial. If a single individual is asked to complete the task alone, the sense of responsibility will be strong, and there will be a positive response; however, if a group is required to complete the task together, each individual in the group will have a weak sense of responsibility, and will often shrink back in the face of difficulties or responsibilities. The theory was prompted by the murder of Kitty Genovese about which it was wrongly reported that 38 bystanders watched passively.
Diffusion of responsibility is a sociopsychological phenomenon whereby a person is less likely to take responsibility for action or inaction when other bystanders or witnesses are present. Considered a form of attribution, the individual assumes that others either are responsible for taking action or have already done so.
This is a selected bibliography and other resources for The Holocaust, including prominent primary sources, historical studies, notable survivor accounts and autobiographies, as well as other documentation and further hypotheses.
Political psychology is an interdisciplinary academic field, dedicated to understanding politics, politicians and political behavior from a psychological perspective, and psychological processes using socio-political perspectives. The relationship between politics and psychology is considered bidirectional, with psychology being used as a lens for understanding politics and politics being used as a lens for understanding psychology. As an interdisciplinary field, political psychology borrows from a wide range of disciplines, including: anthropology, economics, history, international relations, journalism, media, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology.
Collective responsibility is the responsibility of organizations, groups and societies. Collective responsibility in the form of collective punishment is often used as a disciplinary measure in closed institutions, e.g. boarding schools, military units, prisons, psychiatric facilities, etc. The effectiveness and severity of this measure may vary greatly, but it often breeds distrust and isolation among their members. Historically, collective punishment is a sign of authoritarian tendencies in the institution or its home society.
Kristen Renwick Monroe is an American political scientist, specializing in political psychology and ethics. Her work on altruism and moral choice is presented in a trilogy of award-winning books in which Monroe argues that our sense of self in relation to others sets and delineates the range of choice options we find available, not just morally but cognitively.
Moral disengagement is a meaning from Developmental psychology, educational psychology and social psychology for the process of convincing the self that ethical standards do not apply to oneself in a particular context. This is done by separating moral reactions from inhumane conduct and disabling the mechanism of self-condemnation. Thus, moral disengagement involves a process of cognitive re-construing or re-framing of destructive behavior as being morally acceptable without changing the behavior or the moral standards.
German collective guilt refers to the notion of a collective guilt attributed to Germany and its people for perpetrating the Holocaust and other atrocities in World War II.
A social experiment is a method of psychological or sociological research that observes people's reactions to certain situations or events. The experiment depends on a particular social approach where the main source of information is the participants' point of view and knowledge. To carry out a social experiment, specialists usually split participants into two groups — active participants and respondents. Throughout the experiment, specialists monitor participants to identify the effects and differences resulting from the experiment. A conclusion is then created based on the results. Intentional communities are generally considered social experiments.
Moral blindness, also known as ethical blindness, is defined as a person's temporary inability to see the ethical aspect of a decision they are making. It is often caused by external factors due to which an individual is unable to see the immoral aspect of their behavior in that particular situation.
Prevention of genocide is any action that works toward averting future genocides. Genocides take a lot of planning, resources, and involved parties to carry out, they do not just happen instantaneously. Scholars in the field of genocide studies have identified a set of widely agreed upon risk factors that make a country or social group more at risk of carrying out a genocide, which include a wide range of political and cultural factors that create a context in which genocide is more likely, such as political upheaval or regime change, as well as psychological phenomena that can be manipulated and taken advantage of in large groups of people, like conformity and cognitive dissonance. Genocide prevention depends heavily on the knowledge and surveillance of these risk factors, as well as the identification of early warning signs of genocide beginning to occur.
John Michael Steiner was a Czech-American Sociologist and Holocaust researcher.
The question of how much Germans knew about the Holocaust whilst it was being executed is a matter of debate by historians. With regard to Nazi Germany, some historians argue that it was an open secret amongst the population, whilst others highlight a possibility that the German population were genuinely unaware of the Final Solution. Peter Longerich argues that the Holocaust was an open secret by early 1943, but some authors place it even earlier. However, after the war, many Germans claimed that they were ignorant of the crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime, a claim associated with the stereotypical phrase "Davon haben wir nichts gewusst".
In genocide studies, perpetrators,victims, andbystanders is an evolving typology for classifying the participants and observers of a genocide. The typology was first proposed by Raul Hilberg in the 1992 book Perpetrators Victims Bystanders: Jewish Catastrophe 1933–1945. Anthropologist Alexander Hinton credits work on this theory with sparking widespread public intolerance of mass violence, calling it a "proliferation of a post-cold war human rights regime that demanded action in response to atrocity and accountability for culprits.". The triad is also used in studying the psychology of genocide. It has become a key element of scholarship on genocide, with subsequent researchers refining the concept and applying it to new fields.
During a genocide, a rescuer or helper is someone who tries to help the genocide victims survive. In many cases, they are motivated by altruism and/or humanitarianism. The best-studied example of this phenomenon is the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust.
Genocide justification is the claim that a genocide is morally excusable/defensible, necessary, and/or sanctioned by law. Genocide justification differs from genocide denial, which is the attempt to reject the occurrence of genocide. Perpetrators often claim that genocide victims presented a serious threat, justifying their actions by stating it was legitimate self-defense of a nation or state. According to modern international criminal law, there can be no excuse for genocide. Genocide is often camouflaged as military activity against combatants, and the distinction between denial and justification is often blurred.
Prior to joining the Allied Powers late in the war, Turkey was officially neutral in World War II. Despite its neutrality, Turkey maintained strong diplomatic relations with Nazi Germany during the period of the Holocaust. During the war, Turkey denaturalized 3,000 to 5,000 Jews living abroad; between 2,200 and 2,500 Turkish Jews were deported to extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Sobibor; and several hundred interned in Nazi concentration camps. When Nazi Germany encouraged neutral countries to repatriate their Jewish citizens, Turkish diplomats received instructions to avoid repatriating Jews even if they could prove their Turkish nationality. Turkey was also the only neutral country to implement anti-Jewish laws during the war. Between 1940 and 1944, around 13,000 Jews passed through Turkey from Europe to Mandatory Palestine. According to the research of historian Rıfat Bali, more Turkish Jews suffered as a result of discriminatory policies during the war than were saved by Turkey. Since the war, Turkey and parts of the Turkish Jewish community have promoted exaggerated claims of rescuing Jews, using this myth to promote Armenian genocide denial.
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