Ordinary citizens can be transformed into willing perpetrators of genocide against former neighbors.

Evidence

Why did this mother feel threatened by her fellow Hungarians at that moment, but if her child (who is the author of this chapter) would have made the same remark before the war, she probably would not have taken evasive action? This question, in more general form, is, I believe, one of the primary psychological puzzles underlying the mass destruction of European Jewry: What psychological mechanism transformed the average, and presumably normal, citizens of Germany and its allies into people who would carry out or tolerate unimaginable acts of cruelty against their fellow citizens who were Jewish, resulting in the death of 6 million of them? — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 586

Categorization

• QUESTION: The chapter sets this transformation puzzle as its organizing question; the answer will come from Glick’s envied-outgroup mechanism rather than Milgram’s obedience framework.
• XREF: Connects directly to the reader’s bridge interest between inclusion-need/small-exclusive-subgroup mechanisms and powerful-minority scapegoating. — connects to: Ordinary people can commit extreme brutality under the right circumstances — Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone- Memoirs of a Boy…, 1; Ordinary considerate people can commit atrocities under dehumanizing conditions — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 599; Genocide is mostly committed by ordinary people in banal bureaucratic contexts — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 150 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Ordinary people can commit extreme brutality under the right circumstances #corroborates (0.95) — Farrar, Straus and Giroux Ishmael Beah, A Long Way Gone- Memoirs of a Boy…, 1
• Ordinary considerate people can commit atrocities under dehumanizing conditions #corroborates (0.95) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 599
• Ordinary healthy people become cruel perpetrators under conducive social roles. #corroborates (0.95) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 681
• Genocide is mostly committed by ordinary people in banal bureaucratic contexts #expands (0.85) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 150
• Believing absurdities enables ordinary decent people to commit atrocities #expands (0.85)
• Ordinary decent people commit atrocities when ideologies authorize the harm #expands (0.85) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 347
• Ordinary people become destructive agents through duty, not hostility #expands (0.85) — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide, 606