Groups that become the object of mistreatment are seen as unworthy and morally inferior, with many undesirable characteristics. They are also seen as threats, as interfering by their very existence with important ideals, economically exploiting members of the dominant group, and striving for or plotting to gain power, which they will use to harm the dominant group. Identifying them as “evil” deepens the threat and calls moral outrage and the desire to punish evildoers into play.
Pluralistic and monolithic cultures
In a monolithic culture social agents and entities are organized around a single set of goals. In a pluralistic culture, “social agents and entities represent somewhat different expectations, sanctions and rewards for members of the society. These differences generate intergroup conflict which is largely regulated by a set of ‘ground rules’ (such as constitution) and a common commitment to integrative principles or goals.”51
Today there are few totally homogeneous societies with common goals and values and lacking all religious, ethnic, or class differences. In a pluralistic society, with a balance of diversity and consensus, greater tolerance for differences among groups of people can be expected. Counterreactions to initial steps along a continuum of destruction are more probable. Democratic societies with different racial and ethnic and religious groups free to express their differences are necessarily pluralistic, especially when these ethnic subcultures enter the mainstream. As a result, children conform less to authority.52 Moral development is advanced by cultural pluralism, because it requires people to resolve conflicting standards and expectations.
Orientation to authority
Most societies place value on obedience to leaders, institutions, and rules. Some obedience is essential for collective functioning. In some societies, obedience is a major cultural value; child rearing, schools, and other institutions are authoritarian. In other societies (although this is rare) questioning authority might be highly valued.
In the experiments of Milgram, as I noted earlier, certain kinds of moral reasoning reduced obedience, and an authoritarian orientation enhanced it (see the next chapter).53 If a culture inculcates strong respect for authority and places strong value on obedience,54 it is less likely that individuals will oppose leaders who scapegoat or advocate violence.
Unconscious motivation – individual and cultural
The unconscious is another source of motivation for harming others. Self-doubt, sexual feelings, anger and the desire to hurt, and even the experience of suffering can become unacceptable to people because of messages from their environment, especially their parents. These desires and feelings cause anxiety and must be defended against. The feelings and related thoughts are repressed, or denied. They become unavailable to consciousness. Later they may be projected onto other people. Anger may be displaced from parents onto people who are acceptable targets of anger. One characteristic of the authoritarian personality is such displacement and projection.55
While unconscious processes are recognized, the experimental evidence for the notion of psychological defense, displacement, and projection (originally proposed by psychoanalysts) has remained a subject of debate.56 Recent research shows individual differences in “defensiveness.” Some people are unaware of or deny having a high level of anxiety, but it shows in psychophysiological responses.57 Others suppress negative emotional memories and emotional experience in general.58
People repress anger if they were punished for expressing it. As a vivid example of repression and scapegoating, consider the following case presented by the German psychiatrist Alice Miller:
I know a woman who never happened to have any contact with a Jew up to the time she joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel, the female equivalent of the Hitler Youth. She had been brought up very strictly. Her parents needed her to help out in the household after her siblings (two brothers and a sister) had left home. For this reason she was not allowed to prepare for a career even though she very much wanted to and even though she had the necessary qualifications. Much later she told me with what enthusiasm she had read about “the crimes of the Jews” in Mein Kampf and what a sense of relief it had given her to find out that it was permissible to hate someone so unequivocally. She had never been allowed to envy her siblings openly for being able to pursue their careers. But the Jewish banker to whom her uncle had to pay interest on a loan – he was an exploiter of her poor uncle, with whom she identified. She herself was actually being exploited by her parents and was envious of her siblings, but a well-behaved girl was not permitted to have these feelings. And now, quite unexpectedly, there was such a simple solution: it was all right to hate as much as she wanted; she still remained (and perhaps for this very reason was) her parents’ good girl and a useful daughter of the fatherland. Moreover, she could project the “bad” and weak child she had always learned to despise in herself onto the weak and helpless Jews and experience herself as exclusively strong, exclusively pure (Aryan), exclusively good.59
Discrepancies between reality and what is valued occur in most cultures.60 An important motivation for change arises when individuals become aware of such discrepancies.61 It is thereforee important to look for aspects of the culture that are not acknowledged and are not incorporated into the cultural self-concept, and to analyze how discrepancies are dealt with. Deep-seated hostilities may be maintained by ongoing cultural arrangements that conflict with conscious values. Sometimes social movements arise when discrepancies come to the surface. In America, the civil rights movement of the 1960s arose when discrepancies between long-held ideals and national reality became a powerful motivation for change.
Recent thinking about family systems and the transmission of family patterns across generations helps us expand our understanding of unconscious motivations. Not only explict family rules but also powerful implicit rules allow the expression of certain feelings and inhibit others.
The influence of sociopolitical organization
Governmental system
The more repressive and dictatorial a government, the more will fear inhibit opposition. Opposition to early steps along
