Most genocide is committed by ordinary people in banal bureaucratic roles, not psychopaths.

Evidence

There is no more abhorrent form of political violence than the institutionalized mass murder of innocent men, women, and children. In an effort to bring the tools of experimental social psychology to bear on the question of how a catastrophe like the Holocaust could occur, Stanley Milgram’s (1974) studies of “obedience to authority” demonstrated how easy it was to get normal people to administer painful and potentially lethal electric shocks to others when directed to do so by a legitimate authority figure. The results of these experiments, in conjunction with even more compelling and detailed historical analyses of the Holocaust and other genocides (e.g., Arendt, 1963), led political psychologists to an extremely uncomfortable conclusion. The evidence suggested that many, if not most, instances of genocide and mass murder, are not committed by people with depraved, deranged, or pathological personalities, but rather by quite ordinary people placed in extraordinary, yet “banal” bureaucratic situations (Kelman & Hamilton, 1988; Staub, 1989). — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 150

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil and to the ‘Small acts of decorum toward corpses’ reading focus — the banality framing challenges easy demonization. — connects to: Bureaucratic ‘doing’ orientation enables genocide without personal hatred of victims. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1809
• ADDENDUM: Could support the sacrifice piece’s theme that mass violence is institutional/routine rather than only depraved.