7. In the face of persistent frustrations or threats, an important motive is gaining hope for control over events and renewed faith in the future goodness or benevolence of life itself. Ideologies can offer this renewed hope and faith. Being part of a movement to fulfill an ideology offers both hope and a feeling of significance.
8. Humans have a profound need for connectedness to others, belongingness, and community. This need coexists with a need for independence and self-sufficiency. Socialization and experience determine the relative importance of these two motives and decide to what extent they are consciously acknowledged and accepted. Under stressful conditions, the desire for belonging grows in intensity, yet is constantly frustrated.
Research shows that after a positive experience (success in a task, material gain through luck, a friendly act by another person, even thinking about positive past experiences) people are more helpful to others. Positive experiences diminish self-concern and self-preoccupation and increase attention and sensitivity to others.25 After negative experiences, helpfulness may be unaffected or may increase, but more often it declines. The effect of the experience depends on its nature and on circumstances. For example, when a child fails in the presence of others on a task, he or she will later be more helpful in their presence, as if to improve his or her tarnished image.26
When goals are unfulfilled and people feel frustrated and threatened, it is likely (though not inevitable) that they will become preoccupied with their own needs. When resources are scarce, competition for them increases. As a result, connection to others, community support, and the experience of a shared identity will diminish. Just as importantly, difficult life conditions are often seen as a personal as well as a collective failure that threatens a collective or national self-concept. When the difficulties are severe and persistent, the feeling of identification with the group may lessen.
This need for belonging and community is frustrated just when it is greatest. Shared antagonism to a subgroup of society or an external enemy can create or enhance a sense of community. Erich Fromm’s idea of “escape from freedom” in Nazi followers implies both a search for guidance and leadership and a desire for attachment and belonging.27 By giving up the self to a leader and a group, the need for community was fulfilled and a burdensome identity was relinquished for a new group identity.
9. These considerations suggest that the motivation for a positive social identity can also be served by joining groups and adopting ideologies. Human beings gain much of their identity from groups and incorporate the systems they are part of into their self-conceptions. That is why changes in society, and in smaller groups such as the family (e.g., divorce) are so wrenching. As the primary group fails economically or loses status and power or moral influence, as it is diminished in its members’ eyes, it loses the power to confer a positive social identity.c
10. The aim of instrumental aggression is not to harm but to serve other goals. When goals are persistently frustrated, it becomes more likely that people will try to fulfill them by aggressive means.
11. Obedience to authority is another important source of aggression. Stanley Milgram’s research demonstrated that many people were willing to obey an experimenter and administer what they believed were life-threatening electric shocks to another person. Each participant acted as a teacher who was supposedly punishing a learner’s mistakes. College students at Yale and people living in New Haven administered what they believed to be increasing levels of electric shocks, including extremely intense and dangerous ones, to a person who worked on a task in an adjoining room. They did so simply in response to the demands and insistence of the person in charge of the experiment. A substantial number (62.5 percent) administered the highest levels of shock, even though they could hear the victim’s distress and intense complaints. Many did so even when the victim was with them and they had to place his hand on the shock apparatus (30 percent).29
Milgram noted that under the influence of authority people can enter an agentic mode. When this happens they no longer evaluate the morality of an action independently, but see themselves as agents carrying out the commands of superiors. However, as I noted in Chapter 2, obedience to authority involves more than the desire to be rewarded and not punished. Often people obey because, starting with shared motives, they join leaders; they identify with them and adopt their views and wishes.
From the perspective of my theory of personal goals, we can say that conflicting moral considerations may not arise when the motive to obey is dominant. As “agents” people will accept the reasons for violence provided by authority, especially if they share with those in authority life problems and culture and therefore also share the motivations underlying violence. One of the followers’ motivations may be to receive the guidance of authority. Since human beings tend to strive for goal or motive integration, other motives will join or be integrated with the motive for obedience; for example, Nazi doctors took pride in the professional skills they displayed during inhuman medical experiments conducted in concentration camps.30
Difficult life conditions and aggression
Difficult life conditions affect both individuals and groups. For example, the loss of World War I and what many saw as a humiliating peace treaty profoundly threatened the Germans’ collective self-concept as a strong, superior, proud nation. The war was followed by a revolution and then by a devastating inflation, depression and joblessness, and political chaos and violence. There was a breakdown of sexual and social mores.31 People felt their physical survival, their ability to support a family, their way of life and values,
