When their group is functioning poorly and not providing protection and well-being, people’s respect for and valuing of the group diminish; their societal self-concept is harmed. Because people define themselves to a significant degree by their membership in a group, for most people a positive view of their group is essential to individual self-esteem – especially in difficult times. The need to protect and improve societal self-concept or to find a new group to identify with will be powerful.
Persistent difficulties of life also disrupt the relationships among members of the group. They disrupt human connections. People focus on their own needs, compete with others for material goods, and feel endangered by others. The need for connection, enhanced by suffering, will be powerful.
These psychological reactions and motivations are natural and often adaptive. People are energized by a sense of personal value and significance, connection to other people, the feeling of mutual support, and a view of the world that generates hope. However, when these motivations are very intense and fulfilled in certain ways, they become likely origins of destruction.
Threats and frustrations give rise to hostility and the desire to harm others. The appropriate targets of this hostility are, of course, the people who caused the problems, but usually they cannot be identified. Often no one is to blame; the causes are complex and impersonal. At other times those responsible are too powerful, or they are leaders with whom people identify too much to focus their hostility on them. The hostility is therefore displaced and directed toward substitute targets. Hostility is especially likely to arise if people regard their suffering as unjust, as they often do, and especially if some others are not similarly affected.
Ways of coping and fulfilling needs and goals
Constructive actions have beneficial, practical effects and also help a person cope with the psychological consequences of life conditions. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to find and to follow a practically beneficial course of action. When this is the case, it is easy for psychological processes to occur that lead people to turn against others. The psychological needs must be controlled, or satisfied in other ways. People must unite without creating a shared enemy or an ideology that identifies enemies. Wisdom, vision, the capacity to gain trust, and effective institutions are needed to strike out on a constructive course of action.
Certain ways of seeing and evaluating events and people require no physical action (and any actions that follow from them usually do not change life conditions), but they help people satisfy at least the psychological needs and goals that arise from difficult life conditions. Some of these internal processes are basic psychological tendencies common to all human beings: differentiation of ingroup and outgroup, “us” and “them"; devaluation of those defined as members of an outgroup; just-world thinking, which is the tendency to believe that people who suffer, especially those already devalued, must deserve their suffering as a result of their deeds or their characters; and scapegoating, or blaming others for one’s problems. Individuals differ in such psychological tendencies depending on their socialization and experience and resulting personality; societies differ depending on their history and the resulting culture.
Blaming others, scapegoating, diminishes our own responsibility. By pointing to a cause of the problems, it offers understanding, which, although false, has great psychological usefulness. It promises a solution to problems by action against the scapegoat. And it allows people to feel connected as they join to scapegoat others. Devaluation of a subgroup helps to raise low self-esteem. Adopting an ideology provides a new world view and a vision of a better society that gives hope. Joining a group enables people to give up a burdensome self, adopt a new social identity, and gain a connection to other people. This requires action, but it is frequently not constructive action.
Often all these tendencies work together. The groups that are attractive in hard times often provide an ideological blueprint for a better world and an enemy who must be destroyed to fulfill the ideology. Sometimes having a scapegoat is the glue in the formation of the group. But even if the ideology does not begin by identifying an enemy, one is likely to appear when fulfillment of the ideological program proves difficult. Thus these psychological tendencies have violent potentials. They can bring to power a violent group with a violent ideology, as in Germany, or shape an ideology, as they probably did in the case of the Pol Pot group that led the Khmer Rouge to genocide in Cambodia.
The continum of destruction
Genocide and mass killing do not directly arise from difficult life conditions and their psychological effects. There is a progression along a continuum of destruction. People learn and change by doing, by participation, as a consequence of their own actions. Small, seemingly insignificant acts can involve a person with a destructive system: for example, accepting benefits provided by the system or even using a required greeting, such as “Heil Hitler.” Initial acts that cause limited harm result in psychological changes that make further destructive actions possible. Victims are further devalued; for example, just-world thinking may lead people to believe that suffering is deserved. Perpetrators change and become more able and willing to act against victims. In the end people develop powerful commitment to genocide or to an ideology that supports it.
Deeply ingrained, socially developed feelings of responsibility for others’ welfare and inhibitions against killing are gradually lost. Often the leaders assume responsibility, and accountability is further diminished by compartmentalization of functions and the denial of reality. The most terrible human capacity is that of profoundly devaluing others who are merely different. Often there is a reversal of morality, and killing them comes to be seen as good, right, and desirable. In the course of all this, new group norms evolve, and institutions are established in the service of genocide or mass killing. The progression may occur
