anonymity seems to facilitate a kind of atavistic killing hysteria that can also be seen in the animal kingdom. Kruck’s 1972 research describes scenes from the animal kingdom that show that senseless and wanton killing does occur. These include the slaughter of gazelles by hyenas, in quantities way beyond their need or capacity to eat, or the destruction of gulls that could not fly on a stormy night and thus were “sitting ducks” for foxes that proceed to kill them beyond any possible need for food. Shalit points out that “such senseless violence in the animal world — as well as most of the violence in the human domain — is shown by groups rather than by individuals.”
Konrad Lorenz tells us that “man is not a killer, but the group is.” Shalit demonstrates a profound understanding of this process and has researched it extensively:
All crowding has an intensifying effect. If aggression exists, it will become more so as a result of crowding; if joy exists, it will become intensified by the crowd. It has been shown by some studies… that a mirror in front of an aggressor tends to increase his aggression — if he was disposed to be aggressive. However, if this individual were not so disposed, the effect of the mirror would be to further enhance his nonaggressive tendencies. The effect of the crowd seems to be much like a mirror, reflecting each individual’s behavior in those around him and thus intensifying the existing pattern of behavior.
Psychologists have long understood that a diffusion of responsibility can be caused by the anonymity created in a crowd. It has been demonstrated in literally dozens of studies that bystanders will be less likely to interfere in a situation in direct relationship to the numbers who are witnessing the circumstance. Thus, in large crowds, horrendous crimes can occur but the likelihood of a bystander interfering is very low. However, if the bystander is alone and is faced with a circumstance in which there is no one else to diffuse the responsibility to, then the probability of intervention is very high. In the same way groups can provide a diffusion of responsibility that will enable individuals in mobs and soldiers in military units to commit acts that they would never dream of doing as individuals, acts such as lynching someone because of the color of his skin or shooting someone because of the color of his uniform.
Death in the Crowd: Accountability and Anonymity on the Battlefield
The influence of groups on killing occurs through a strange and powerful interaction of accountability and anonymity. Although at first glance the influence of these two factors would seem to be paradoxical, in actuality they interact in such a manner as to magnify and amplify each other in order to enable violence.
Police are aware of these accountability and anonymity processes and are trained to unhinge them by calling individuals within a group by name whenever possible. Doing so causes the people so named to reduce their identification with the group and begin to think of themselves as individuals with personal accountability. This inhibits violence by limiting the individuals’ sense of accountability to the group and negating their sense of anonymity.
Among groups in combat, this accountability (to one’s friends) and anonymity (to reduce one’s sense of personal responsibility for killing) combine to play a significant role in enabling killing. As we have seen so far in this study, killing another human being is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do. But if a soldier feels he is letting his friends down if he doesn’t kill, and if he can get others to share in the killing process (thus diffusing his personal responsibility by giving each individual a slice of the guilt), then killing can be easier. In general, the more members in the group, the more psychologically bonded the group, and the more the group is in close proximity, the more powerful the enabling can be.
Still, just the presence of a group in combat does not guarantee aggression. (It could be a group of pacifists, in which case pacifism might be enabled by the group!) The individual must identify with and be bonded with a group that has a legitimate demand for killing. And he must be with or close to the group for it to influence his behavior.
Chariot, Phalanx, Cannon, and Machine Gun: The Role of Groups in Military History
These processes can be seen throughout military history. For example, military historians have often wondered why the chariot dominated military history for so long. Tactically, economically, and mechanically it was not a cost-effective instrument on the battlefield, yet for many centuries it was the king of battle. But if we examine the psychological leverage provided by the chariot to enable killing on the battlefield, we soon realize that the chariot was successful because it was the first crew-served weapon.
Several factors were at play here — the bow as a distance weapon, the social distance created by the archers’ having come from the nobility, and the psychological distance created by using the chariot in pursuit and shooting men in the back — but the key issue is that the chariot crew traditionally consisted of two men: a driver and an archer. And this was all that was needed to provide the same accountability and anonymity in close- proximity groups that in World War II permitted nearly 100 percent of crew-served weapons (such as machine guns) to fire while only 15 to 20 percent of the riflemen fired.
The chariot was defeated by the phalanx, which succeeded by turning the whole formation into a massive crew-served weapon. Although he did not have the designated leaders of the later Roman formations, each man in the phalanx was under a powerful mutual surveillance system, and in the charge it would be hard to fail to strike home without having others notice that your spear had been raised or dropped at the critical moment. And, of course, in addition to this accountability system the closely packed phalanx provided a high degree of mob anonymity.
For nearly half a millennium the Romans’ professional military (with, among other things, their superior application of leadership) eclipsed the phalanx in the Western way of war. But the phalanx’s application of group processes was so simple and so effective that during the period of more than a thousand years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the full integration of gunpowder, the phalanx and the pike ruled infantry tactics.
And when gunpowder was introduced, it was the crew-served cannon, later augmented by the machine gun, that did most of the killing. Gustavus Adolphus revolutionized warfare by introducing a small three-pound cannon that was pulled around by each platoon, thus becoming the first platoon crew-served weapon and presaging the platoon machine guns of today. Napoleon, an artilleryman, recognized the role of the artillery (often firing grapeshot at very close ranges), which was the real killer on the battlefield, and throughout his years he consistently ensured that he had greater numbers of artillery than any of his opponents. During World War I the machine gun was introduced and termed the “distilled essence of the infantry,” but it really was the continuation of the cannon, as artillery became an indirect-fire weapon (shooting over the soldiers’ heads from miles back), and the machine gun replaced the cannon in the direct-fire, mid-range role.
Britain’s World War I Machine Gun Corps Monument, next to the Wellington Monument in London, is a statue of a young David, inscribed with a Bible verse that exemplifies the meaning of the machine gun in that terrible war that sucked so much of the marrow from the bones of that great nation:
Sol has slain his thousands
And David has slain his tens of thousands.
“They Were Killing My Friends”: Groups on the Modern Battlefield
The influence of groups can be seen clearly when we closely examine the killing case studies outlined throughout this book. Note the absence of group influence in many of the situations in which combatants chose
