Quotes from James Waller

Being in a group reveals who individuals are just as much, if not more, than being in a group alters who they are. In this way, groups can reflect some of the baser characteristics of the individuals within them as well as some of the more noble.

Hohne concludes: "The system and the rhythm of mass extermination were directed not by sadists . . . [but by] worthy family men brought up in the belief that anti-semitism was a form of pest control, harnessed into an impersonal mechanical system working with the precision of militarised industry and relieving the individual of any sense of personal responsibility.

As Browning writes, "If ordinary Serbs, Croats, Hutus, Turks, Cambodians and Chinese can be the perpetrators of mass murder and genocide, implemented with terrible cruelty, then we do indeed need to look at those universal aspects of human nature that transcend the cognition and culture of ordinary Germans.

Further evidence of perpetrators' lack of overt psychopathology is found in reports of their early reactions to the human suffering caused by their extraordinary evil. A wide range of perpetrator accounts reveal that initial involvement in killing often led to nightmares, anxiety attacks, debilitating guilt, depression, gastrointestinal problems, temporary impotence, hallucinations, substance abuse, numerous bodily complaints, and many other signs of stress reactions.

As historian Dick de Mildt argues, "By converting the criminal actors of the story into demon-like lunatics, we distance ourselves from them in a radical fashion, assuming them to belong to a different species which only remotely resembles us in physiognomy.

A myopic focus on the proposed psychopathology of perpetrators, or on their alleged extraordinary personalities, tells us more about our own personal dreams of how we wish the world to work than it does about the reality of perpetrator behavior. In that role, such explanations satisfy an important emotional demand of distancing us from them.

A myopic focus on the proposed psychopathology of perpetrators, or on their alleged extraordinary personalities, tells us more about our own personal dreams of how we wish the world to work than it does about the reality of perpetrator behavior.

The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men. It is not a problem of physics but of ethics. It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man. Albert Einstein

There is a dark side to religious belief systems, which are often fused with ethnic and national identities. In this sense, religion is epiphenomenal—attached to and living off other phenomena. As such, religious belief systems do not always liberate humanity from extraordinary evil. Rather, they are often part of the problem—if not as a primary cause, certainly as something that worsens rather than mitigates conflict.

Apparently, according to the criterion of consistency across targets, a prejudiced personality does indeed exist. Prejudice appeared to be less an attitude specific to one group than a general way of thinking about those who are different.

What else do we know about a person when we know his or her score on the F scale? Research utilizing the F scale suggests people who are high on authoritarianism do not simply dislike Jews or dislike blacks, but, rather, show a consistently high degree of prejudice against all minority groups (including, recent studies indicate, AIDS patients). Any selection of a particular hate target is guided by convenience and social convention.

The problem of response set is particularly relevant to the F scale because all of the items were worded in the same direction. In other words, all items were worded so that agreement indicated a high (or prejudiced, fascist, authoritarianism) score. As a result, it was easy for researchers to demonstrate that the scale did not measure ideological content but only a tendency to agree—with anything.

In short, the scale encouraged a response set of positive answers. Instead of identifying genuine authoritarians, perhaps the F scale simply singled out some very agreeable persons without strong opinions.

Thus, we are wise to at least consider orientation to authority as one of several factors—including low intelligence, low education, lack of political sophistication, and external threats of specific kinds (for example, economic threat)—predisposing people to accept fascist ideology.

To bluntly suggest that all Nazis had a common, homogenous extraordinary personality that predisposed them to the commission of extraordinary evil is an obvious oversimplification.

In the particular study reviewed by Blass that focused on religious dispositional variables, those that scored high on many of the religious variables were more accepting of the commands of an authority than were those who scored lower or were indiscriminately antireligious.

The finding that enduring religious belief systems make us more amenable to the commands of authority also is affirmed by the historical realities surrounding many cases of mass killing and genocide.

In summary, those who have cultural belief systems that see control as external tend to react passively to authoritative orders rather than proceed on the assumption that they can redefine situations through their own actions.

As one example, David Norman Smith, a sociologist at the University of Kansas, points out that exceptionally intense violence occurs with significantly greater frequency in cultures where children are routinely physically or emotionally abused or denied affection.

Journalist Philip Gourevitch reports an interview with a Rwandan lawyer who said: "Conformity is very deep, very developed here. In Rwandan history, everyone obeys authority. People revere power, and there isn't enough education. You take a poor, ignorant population, and give them arms, and say, 'It's yours. Kill.' They'll obey.

In his conclusion, Zajonc maintains that he has "not encountered a single instance of massacre that was not preceded by extensive development of moral imperatives.

In Cosmides and Tooby's words, "Our modern skulls house a stone age mind."20 They continue: "In many cases, our brains are better at solving the kinds of problems our ancestors faced on the African savannahs than they are at solving the more familiar tasks we face in a college classroom or a modern city.

There is no gene for genocide. Ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and our desire for social dominance are tendencies, not triggers that lead to mechanical causation or reflex action.

For example, automobiles kill far more people today than do spiders or snakes. But people are far more averse to spiders and snakes than they are to automobiles. Why? Because in our EEA spiders and snakes were a serious threat to our survival and reproduction, whereas automobiles did not exist. Thus, it was possible—not to mention advantageous for our survival and reproduction—for us to evolve an innate aversion to spiders and snakes, but not to automobiles.