Group violence can erupt without any prior history of animosity

Evidence

Other researchers have demonstrated that, contrary to Allport’s argument, violence does not require a history of animosity at either the group or individual level. Weingast (1997) has shown that social groups can become poised for armed conflict, even when they have a history of good relations and a preference for peace, if political institutions fail to safeguard each group’s interests and mutual trust is undermined. At the individual level, experimental research has shown that organizational factors alone transform ordinary people with no personal pathologies or prior hostility into demons who torture and punish their victims for minor infractions or for no reason at all (e.g., Milgram, 1974; Zimbardo, 2004). Such organizational factors include instructions that permit or legitimize the use of violence, a chain of command that relieves perpetrators of responsibility for their acts, the assignment of anonymous identities to perpetrators, and granting pervasive powers to perpetrators without threat of retaliation or sanctions. Experimental results were validated by the revelations in 2004 of widespread torture, abuse, and humiliation of detainees in Iraqi prisons under the supervision of ordinary young American men and women during the American occupation of Iraq. — , Rudman, Laurie A - On the Nature of…, 655

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the Abu Ghraib parallel from the author’s knowledge of the Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments, and resonates with the ‘banality of evil’ tradition. — connects to: Mass violence evolves progressively from lesser harms rather than erupting suddenly; Group violence arises from interacting cultural, situational, and motivational influences, not single causes — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 174; First-contact resource wars begin unrecognized as violence with no dramatic announcement — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 216 (+3 more)
• SEED: Article angle: ‘The Banality of Atrocity’ — how institutional design, not pathology, manufactures torturers, using the 2004 Abu Ghraib disclosures as the load-bearing case.