It is not only physical punitiveness that lessens children’s regard for others’ welfare. One study by Martin Hoffman indicates that when parents use withdrawal of love as punishment, their children come to focus on conventional rules rather than the needs and welfare of others.19
Other research shows that upbringing can also create a predisposition for helping other people. Nurturance and responsiveness by parents contribute to secure attachment in infants, which is the basis of a positive orientation toward others. Reasoning with the child and explaining to the child the consequences of his or her behavior on other people, both negative and positive, are also important. So is firmness in guiding the child to act according to important values and standards, firmness that is flexible, democratic rather than authoritarian, and takes the child’s point of view into consideration.20 These practices contribute to self-esteem and a prosocial value orientation, especially if the parents also guide their children to be helpful and generous in action.21
Authority orientation and its sources in the family
Certain people are inclined to obey authority and to act punitively toward people not in authority. This is an aspect of what some psychologists call “authoritarian personalities.”22 Authority-oriented persons prefer hierarchical relationships with a clear delineation of spheres of power. They enjoy obeying authority and enjoy exercising power over those below them. Authoritarian individuals were more obedient than average in Milgram’s experiments.b23
Certain child-rearing practices produce submissiveness to authority and a tendency to devalue the powerless. These practices usually stress conventional values and make children unwilling to acknowledge in themselves impulses or feelings regarded by society and thus by their parents as undesirable-anger, hostility, sexual desire. All human beings have these feelings, and it is destructive to lose awareness of them. People who do not acknowledge these feelings in themselves tend to project them onto others and experience hostility or moral outrage.
Lack of warmth and punitive authoritarian discipline promote this tendency. Alice Miller has shown that historically in Germany (but not only there) children were seen as naturally willful and potentially evil; all means were acceptable, including severe physical punishment, to break the child’s will and instill obedience.
When obedience is the highest value, self-guidance becomes impossible. People reared this way look for external guidance. “For how could someone whose inner development has been limited to learning to obey the commands of others be expected to live on his own without experiencing a sudden sense of inner emptiness. Military service provided the best opportunity for him to continue the established pattern of taking orders.”24
A likely consequence of such treatment, also described in books such as Lloyd DeMause’s The History of Childhood and Stone’s writing on England, is deep hostility toward parents.25 However, the child is taught that these feelings are unacceptable; expressing them provokes the strongest punishment. The feelings therefore become unconscious; paradoxically, the young child’s dependence on the parent becomes especially great, and the need for care and affection especially strong.
But displacement and projection are not the only reason why others are seen as hostile. Parents are prototypes for children, who learn about human beings from their family experience. If parents are punitive, if they make the child suffer, the child will expect and see people in general as hostile, threatening, and dangerous. Children growing up in such families learn the importance of having power and allying themselves with the powerful. As a consequence, they identify with the powerful and are relatively easily turned against the powerless. There is evidence from postwar interviews, from books of child-raising advice, and from other research that these practices were widespread in Germany (see Chapter 8).26
Warmth and affection can also be used to limit children’s independence, initiative, and deviation from rules. Even obedience generated in an affectionate context can restrict the permissible range of feelings and generate hostility. This is consistent with the research finding that parents who extensively use love withdrawal to indicate disapproval raise conventional children who inhibit their feelings.27 Affection can be used, and it can be part of different patterns of child-rearing practices that modify its meaning and impact.
Most of us have a tendency to respect people with authority or power and follow their lead. As small children, we are all at the mercy of our parents and other adults. We all grow up under the influence of parents, schools, and the state. Most such authorities are in part and at times arbitrary or punitive or threatening.c Most of us continue to carry within us a feeling that avoiding confrontation with and attaining closeness to people in authority will give us security and confer value on us. Because we are often unaware of this feeling, its influence is difficult to control. The extent of this tendency varies with the experience of the child in and out of the home.
The original research identified repression, projection, and hostility as components of the authoritarian personality. These are likely to be, but are not inevitably, part of an “authority orientation,” which refers, as I use the term, to a person’s tendency to order the world and relate to people according to their position and power in hierarchies. It depends on the total pattern of socialization practices what else becomes part of this orientation.
The origins of destructiveness in personality and in the situation
Our knowledge of personality dispositions and their childhood origins is not specific enough to identify the sources of different types of aggressive behavior: in personal interactions, in criminal violence, in political violence, or in the service of genocide. Circumstances may join with common rudimentary dispositions to shape specific types of hostility and aggression.
There has been much concern about the relative influence of personality as opposed to situation. I believe that the situation – life problems in society and the conditions created by the culture – is highly important. Immediate circumstances – for example, who the perpetrators associate with, what groups they are part of- are also influential. However, these are normally the result of choices people make. When life problems are intense
