There has been little direct study of either decision makers or direct perpetrators. Once they lose power, not surprisingly, they tend to avoid scrutiny. Social scientists have rarely approached them. When they are studied, their responses must be “translated,” because they need to justify themselves in their own and others’ eyes. Indirect approach by the assessment of personality is perhaps a better way to study them.
The Nazis tried at Nuremberg, mostly decision makers, provided such opportunity. Unfortunately, their psychological assessment was based on the questionable hypothesis that they were mentally ill, and used materials such as Rorschach inkblot patterns. Not surprisingly, no mental illness was evident.2
In psychological experiments it is possible to study influences that lead people to harm others but difficult to study how people become genocidal leaders. The study of real genocidal leaders is also difficult, and their numbers are small. We will focus on followers, which is appropriate because they give power to leaders (together with accepting bystanders). Moreover, the leaders and the followers who become perpetrators appear to share psychological processes and motivations that lead to genocide.
Certain personal characteristics seem to enter into self-selection by perpetrators. Occupying certain social roles, as a result of self-selection and personal choice, further shapes personality and attitudes. Although personal characteristics create predispositions, otherwise quite different people may become perpetrators of massacre and genocide by moving along a continuum of destruction (see next chapter). Social change can diminish the strength of values and rules that prohibit harm-doing. The perpetrators may be changed by first passively accepting the mistreatment of victims or by participating in small, even seemingly innocuous hostile acts. After joining an ideological group, they are under pressure to accept its definition of what is right.
Psychological research, interviews with criminals, and evidence from psychotherapy tell us something about situations that lead people to harm others, the personal characteristics that lead to violence, and the origins of such personality. These different sources provide a fairly coherent, although as yet incomplete, picture, supported by a limited number of studies of perpetrators of torture, genocide, and mass killing. This mosaic of information suggests that perpetrators often have one or both of two constellations of characteristics: I will call them potentially antisocial and authority oriented.
A single characteristic, for example, an extreme incapacity for empathy, may be enough, although usually it accompanies other predisposing characteristics. Consider, for example, Suchomel, an SS guard in Treblinka. In the documentary film Shoah, he sings the song that all Jewish prisoners who were not immediately killed had to learn on their first day in the camp.
“Looking squarely ahead, brave and joyous,
at the world,
the squads march to work.
All that matters to us now is Treblinka.
It is our destiny.
That’s why we’ve become one with Treblinka
in no time at all.
We know only the word of our Commander,
we know only obedience and duty,
we want to serve, to go on serving,
until a little luck ends it all. Hurray.”3
Then, he says, “Satisfied. That’s unique.” He adds with seeming nostalgia and regret, “No Jew knows that today.” He seems blind to what this song must have meant to Jews. We do not know how much of this incapacity for empathy is the result of his SS training and guard experience or how much existed before. Nor do we know whether the incapacity is general or applies only to Jews.
Roles and other social processes as origins of harm-doing
Perpetrators can be ordinary people who have long filled certain roles – prison guards, combat soldiers – in which the devaluation of some other people is inherent. If the definition of their role comes to include acts of cruelty, many will adapt. In a study at Stanford, normal college students were randomly assigned to be either “guards” or “prisoners.” The prisoners were “stripped naked, skin searched, deloused"; they had to memorize and follow rules restricting their freedom of speech and movement and had to ask permission to do the simplest activities, such as writing letters or going to the toilet.4
People so treated must seem inferior not only in power but in their basic humanity. Being in roles that grant power can lead to “us” and “them” separation, devaluation, and cruelty, particularly when the powerless are degraded. Some of those assigned the role of guards became extremely punitive and aggressive. They reacted to a “rebellion” by harassing and intimidating prisoners and putting “ringleaders” into solitary confinement. They made prisoners gather at any time of day or night for the “count,” the “duration of which they increased from the original perfunctory ten minutes to seemingly interminable several hours.”5 This re-created a practice used in both Russian labor camps and German concentration camps. Guards who did not themselves engage in such conduct remained passive. The mistreatment became so severe that the experiment had to be discontinued.
Often those who become perpetrators occupy roles that require obedience. In Milgram’s research the relationship between the person who administered the shock and the person in authority was transient. The pressures are stronger in prisons, armies, and other hierarchical institutions, systems that stress authority and obedience.
Self-selection and the personality of perpetrators
Even people without significant predispositions may evolve into perpetrators through “us”-“them” differentiation, devaluation, scapegoating, ideology, and submerging themselves in a group. But there is also self-selection and selection by authorities of those who possess at least part of a predisposing pattern, especially when the need for violence is evident from the start.
Scott Peck describes self-selection for the police:
It is only because particular kinds of people want to become policemen that they apply for the job in the first place. A young man of lower-middle-class origins who is both aggressive and conventional, for instance, would be quite likely to seek a position on the force. A shy, intellectual youth would not. The nature of police work.. .fits the psychological needs of the first young man. He quite naturally
