Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.) — Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

245 published claims from this book.

• A correct minority wins when shared background knowledge lets it prove its case
• A father can invoke his own authority to order the act that kills him.
• A father reframes the son’s own death as the harm to be prevented.
• A tradition of aggression normalizes renewed group violence
• Allport distinguished two scapegoat variants that Glick replaces with an ideological model.
• An SS guard engineered a reunion killing to toy with a prisoner’s hope.
• Anti-Semitism emerged from group-identity processes and hardened into shared social representations.
• Antisemitic Christians could still rescue Jews due to belief-system logic
• Antisemitic propaganda accused Jews of malicious power and capacity to inflict harm.
• Antisemitism thrived where Germans had almost no contact with Jews
• Arendt privately revised the ‘banality of evil’ thesis she is famous for.
• Attributed causal power, not mere difference, produced the most lethal targeting
• Attributing Holocaust perpetration to authoritarian personality may itself be a fundamental attribution error.
• Authoritarian cognitive style is content-free, so situations alone steer it toward collaboration or resistance.
• Authoritarian thinking features closed-mindedness, rigidity, and intolerance of ambiguity
• Authoritarianism can manifest on the political left as well as right
• Authoritarianism is not a single coherent psychological construct
• Belief that blood groups define persons makes both prejudice and intergroup conflict appear natural.
• Believing groups are entitative makes groups morally responsible for events, not individuals.
• Blending individualist and collectivist values expands felt obligation to all humanity.
• Blocked aggression against a loved, powerful source gets displaced outward onto safer targets.
• Browning’s account of Holocaust perpetrators emphasized obedience and conformity
• Brutal genocide perpetrators need not hold longstanding eliminationist attitudes toward victims
• Bureaucratic destruction advances through defined, expropriation, ghettoization, then annihilation
• Bystander intervention must happen early to stop atrocity evolution
• Bystander passivity both legitimizes perpetrators and transforms the bystanders themselves
• Bystander passivity compounds through self-justification and victim devaluation.
• Bystanders sometimes prefer to be hated than dismissed as obstacles
• Career ambition, not hatred, drove Eichmann’s participation in genocide.
• Chansons de Geste projected internal violence onto imaginary pagan enemies
• Coerced killers can be left permanently unable to judge their own culpability.
• Cognition has been reconceptualized from an individual to a socially shared phenomenon
• Cognitive simplicity does not directly cause support for fascist genocide.
• Collective and individualistic frames disagree about where agency fundamentally resides.
• Collectivism, unchecked by individualism, hardens groups against compromise and invites violence.
• Collectivist Bosnian war survivors reported less distress than individualist ones
• Collectivist frames attribute causality to whole groups rather than individual actors
• Collectivist frames cushion the psychological toll of organized intergroup violence.
• Collectivist frames pair in-group generosity with out-group competition as one package.
• Collectivist self-definition buffers individual distress while amplifying shared family trauma.
• Collectivist values of obedience, tradition, safety, and order breed territorial group thinking.
• Conformity can intensify violence beyond what any individual would initiate alone.
• Conformity pressure cannot explain group-wide perpetration when most members oppose the act
• Controlling another’s acts should make one discount those acts as evidence of character
• Cruelty escalates through harm-doing that changes actors, not just prior hatred.
• Cultural superiority paired with felt weakness predisposes groups to violence against others.
• Cultural violence arises from superiority beliefs fused with underlying group vulnerability
• Culture change bears hardest on people in societies that are traditional and repressive
• Cultures can be primed for obedience by indoctrination and moralizing children’s tales
• Difficult conditions activate underlying weakness beneath nations’ superiority beliefs, motivating self-defense.
• Direct projection attributes one’s own disowned traits to another person.
• Disobedience to authority is cognitively costlier than compliance
• Each step of a destruction process contains the seed of the next
• Early Holocaust research blamed individual authoritarian personalities, not social processes
• Economic collapse and lost self-esteem make intergroup thinking salient and fuel extremist parties.
• Eichmann appeared socially adjusted and normal rather than bloodthirsty.
• Eichmann’s mass-murder participation was careerist, not hate-driven.
• Empirical scapegoat research collapsed in the late 1960s because evidence was inconsistent.
• Every functioning group requires some shared beliefs or value frames
• Evolutionary psychology explains present psychological processes as adaptations to ancestral environmental problems.
• Explaining a behavior through ordinary social processes does not excuse it morally
• Extreme physical weakness can spare prisoners the fate of those rounded up and shot.
• Family-centered collectivists treat kin ties as central to self and duty
• Focusing on obeying subordinates ignores genocidal initiators and degrees of evil
• Focusing on unique perpetrators obscures the social forces that define them
• For collectivists, group membership and relationships constitute personal identity
• Framing grievance through blood ties and kin sustains longer movement commitment
• Framing identity as impermeable group membership lets organizers subordinate personal goals to collective ones.
• Freud traced scapegoating to society’s inevitable repression of aggressive and sexual drives
• Frustrated basic needs drive groups to scapegoat others for destructive fulfillment.
• Frustration-aggression theory fused Freudian displacement and catharsis into the dominant scapegoating model
• Fusing a movement with a preexisting ascriptive group makes involvement feel permanent
• Genocidal escalations begin well before the genocidal regime takes power.
• Genocidal policy often originates with mid-level officials and is ratified from above.
• Genocide escalates from smaller harms that progressively change the perpetrators
• Genocide is a recurring feature of human history with a uniquely bloody twentieth century.
• Genocide produces a moral reversal where killing itself becomes a duty.
• German group identity was defined by being least like outgroups
• German nationalists defined Germanness as blood descent rather than civic choice.
• Germans believed Jews’ power and capacity to cause harm was colossal.
• Germany’s superiority claims coexisted with deep felt vulnerability from past devastation.
• Goldhagen argued antisemitic belief, not social pressure or conformity, drove perpetrator behavior.
• Goldhagen claimed anti-Semitism alone but sufficiently explains the Holocaust at every level
• Goldhagen claims anti-Semitism alone explains individual perpetrator motives, not the Holocaust’s occurrence.
• Goldhagen rejected conformity explanations of Nazi perpetrators as illogical
• Goldhagen’s Holocaust study is fundamentally a social-psychological analysis
• Goldhagen’s theory reduces genocide to individual anti-Semitic attitudes driving behavior
• Gradual escalation binds perpetrators to destructive roles they would reject in one step
• Gratuitous cruelty timed to victims’ holy days shows hatred originates within perpetrators
• Group conflict becomes tractable only through the local meanings groups assign each other
• Group embedment replaces individual decision making with a shared We that spreads emotion
• Group immersion and ideological training erode individual moral decision making in perpetrators.
• Group marginality enabled some Germans to resist joining communal devaluation of Jews
• Group violence against subgroups grows from frustrated basic human needs seeking fulfillment
• Group violence arises from interacting cultural, situational, and motivational influences, not single causes
• Group-based self-definition strips out-group members of perceived humanity
• Groups organized around personal benefits favor compromise and shed members who gain nothing
• Guards likely misattributed victims’ filth to the victims’ own nature, not their own doing
• Guards manufactured gratuitous cruelty for their own amusement, not under orders
• Harm-doing notoriously expands its circle of victims and target classes over time
• Harsh child-rearing produces an authoritarian personality supporting discriminatory politics.
• Himmler granted labor concessions solely to preserve total control over Jews
• Holding information shared across a group reads as expertise and confers influence
• Holocaust consciousness shaped Milgram’s identity before his research career
• Holocaust debates centered on perpetrator psychology without living social psychologists
• Holocaust killers volunteered eagerly rather than obeying reluctantly
• Holocaust social psychology requires both ideological attraction and conformity obedience
• Ideologies that gain enough support become self-sustaining social realities.
• In-group boundaries within collectivism are permeable only by birth, not achievement
• In-group extremists escape counterargument when their views extend majority representations.
• In-group minorities gain indirect influence because their views meet tolerance not rebuttal.
• In-group trust depends on denying trust to the out-group
• Individual attitudes and identities are produced by social groups, not held independently of them
• Individualism rests on independence, uniqueness, and achievement as its core value triad.
• Individualistic frames reduce group-focused activism to a personal-benefit calculation
• Individualists ground identity in personal autonomy and self-directed happiness
• Inferiority alone cannot justify genocide; danger claims are required
• Ingroup prejudice targets the different and stems from ancestral fear, not threat of harm.
• Instant post-9-11 blame explanations bypassed perpetrator psychology
• Instigators rise by offering hope in crises that relies on scapegoating.
• Left-wing progressives can score as authoritarian as right-wing extremists
• Mass killing emerged as a practical last resort once removal schemes failed
• Mass violence evolves progressively from lesser harms rather than erupting suddenly
• Merely categorizing people into us and them generates in-group favoritism and out-group devaluation
• Merely categorizing people into us and them produces discrimination against them
• Milgram and Arendt turned the obedience plea into an indictment of everyone
• Milgram framed his American studies as preparation for a German-character project
• Milgram reframed perpetrator compliance as situational deference, not coerced obedience
• Milgram’s family still had relatives in wartime Europe
• Milgram’s obedience findings displaced motivational and personality explanations of genocide
• Milgram’s obedience paradigm was designed to explain Holocaust perpetration
• Milgram’s obedience studies remain psychology’s dominant explanation of Holocaust perpetration.
• Milgram’s obedience theory locates harsh action in situational authority pressure, not internal hatred.
• Minorities aligned with the broader Zeitgeist exert more influence than those arguing against it
• Minority ideas inside a group can shape members’ thoughts even when uncommon
• Misdiagnosed scapegoat ideologies arise from incomprehension plus psychological need.
• Mobile killing units assembled, stripped, and shot entire Jewish communities by the ditch
• Moral and practical good judgment is assumed to require complex, open-minded thinking.
• Most normal people obey authority figures even to inflict harm
• Multiple psychological mechanisms can jointly explain mass-historical events rather than one correct cause.
• Mutual escalation between armed parties can enlarge victim circles far past the combatants.
• My Lai and Milgram’s findings prompted military films teaching soldiers to refuse illegitimate orders.
• Nazi antisemitism derived from existing German social representations
• Nazi atrocity arose from countless unsanctioned individual acts, not just top-down orders.
• Nazi guards could sincerely punish victims for conditions the guards themselves created
• Nazi Party followers faced the greatest uncertainty and self-esteem threats
• Nazi propaganda dehumanized Jews as disease-bearing animals.
• Nazi propaganda framed Jews as willful agents of social disorder, amplifying existing German fears.
• Nazi-era rescuers and persecutors frequently occupied both roles at once
• Nazism fused anti-Jewish hatred with a national regeneration fantasy
• Not all German killers internalized eliminationist anti-Semitism since many requested transfer.
• Only widely shared, large-scale frustrations produce consensual scapegoating of a group.
• Ordinary citizens can be transformed into willing perpetrators of genocide against former neighbors.
• Ordinary Germans, not a special kind of German, carried out the Holocaust
• Ordinary people administering shocks showed extreme, characteristic distress
• Ordinary people become destructive agents through duty, not hostility
• Ordinary reserve policemen murdered thousands on orders, confirming Milgram’s obedience findings.
• Ordinary, unselected Germans carried out mass killing when asked
• Past imperial glory activates fury when present conditions contradict it
• People and situations mutually influence each other rather than situations acting one-way on people
• People attribute successes internally but failures to external groups.
• People conform publicly to beliefs they privately reject
• People judge others based on behavior they themselves have constrained
• People over-attribute others’ behavior to personality and underweight situational constraints
• People who harm others escalate the severity of harm they inflict
• Perceived competence is necessary to translate motivation into rescue action
• Perceived downward status shift relative to a minority breeds intense relative deprivation and resentment.
• Perceived successful minorities face genocide more than disadvantaged ones
• Perpetrator and rescuer roles overlap rather than divide into pure good and evil.
• Perpetrators can overlook their own role in degrading victims even when they caused it
• Perpetrators cease being ordinary once they commit themselves to sustained atrocity.
• Perpetrators engineer coerced choices that force victims to destroy their own families.
• Perpetrators justify mass murder as defensive response to perceived existential threat
• Perpetrators of ideologically motivated aggression rationalize it by recasting victims as threats
• Perpetrators performed mass killing with zealous enthusiasm, as if it were their vocation
• Persistent societal life problems trigger dominant groups turning against subgroups
• Practiced violence systematically widens to ever-larger victim circles.
• Pre-existing antisemitism alone cannot explain perpetrators’ immediate comfort with atrocity
• Prejudice scales cannot measure readiness to participate in genocide.
• Professionals seamlessly absorbed Nazi doctrine into ordinary work routines.
• Projection lets hostile impulses be both safely vented and morally justified at once.
• Propaganda and institutes fused Germanness with Nazism and Jewry with its antithesis
• Psychological needs can outweigh material ones in guiding action during life crises
• Racial science hardened the German-Jewish boundary while dissolving other European distinctions.
• Rejecting a society’s core value makes a person seem foreign to it
• Religious duty to honor a father can directly conflict with it.
• Rescue behavior often begins from helping someone personally known
• Rescuers can evolve from enrichment-seeking profiteers into self-sacrificing lifesavers.
• Researchers never tested Holocaust perpetrators with the F Scale itself
• Resistance to ethnopolitical violence spans political, legal, and armed actions.
• Revised authoritarianism measures diluted the construct’s link to genocide.
• Rigid cognitive style drives authoritarianism but not prejudice directly
• Rigid distant fathers and self-sacrificing mothers raise children prone to authoritarian personality
• Routine bureaucratic procedures, not zealotry, enabled the Holocaust’s scale.
• Scapegoat ideologies win acceptance by serving psychological needs, not merely by explaining events
• Scapegoat stereotypes are rationalizations caused by aggression, not its cause
• Scapegoat targets must be stereotyped as both powerful and ill intentioned
• Scapegoat theory rests on obsolete drive-discharge assumptions the cognitive revolution discarded.
• Scapegoating ideology, not repressed psychic conflict, directly causes extreme group violence.
• Scapegoating is lay psychology’s default explanation for genocide.
• Scapegoating requires large shared frustrations plus a blaming ideology.
• Scapegoating theory stagnated academically while remaining popular in public discourse
• Scapegoats get accused of precisely the traits the accuser represses in himself.
• Scholars shifted Holocaust study from Hitler to the bureaucratic middlemen
• Self-interest, not frustrated needs, drives many genocides
• Silence transforms bystanders and emboldens perpetrators
• Situational deference to authority, not coercion, drives obedience to mass-murder regimes
• Social marginality freed some bystanders to resist joining group devaluation
• Social movements convert existing cultural frames into local meanings enabling organized violence
• Social movements meet individual uniqueness and belonging needs but can become organized violence.
• Social psychologists explain genocidal behavior through situational pressure plus unexamined psychological processes
• Social upheaval and felt vulnerability intensify prejudicial beliefs about outsiders.
• Societies differ in whether they treat individuals or groups as the basic social unit.
• Specific social, physical, and psychological cues activate prejudicial beliefs about out-groups.
• Stigmatizing a second out-group can win a party new donors and outside constituencies.
• Superordinate-subordinate conflicts have driven most post-WWII genocides
• Survivors of atrocity can feel crushing guilt over acts they were coerced into.
• Terror and confusion, not malice, produce the act that makes one a perpetrator.
• The 1960s shifted Holocaust explanation from individual psychology to group social psychology
• The cognitive revolution replaced drive-based explanations of prejudice with normal categorization processes
• The Frankfurt Institute’s own data told them to flee immediately in 1933
• The French occupation dissolved Germany’s inherited political structures.
• The Holocaust exceeds other twentieth-century genocides in cruelty and in lacking territorial motive.
• The Holocaust required mass obedience far more than it required a single architect’s will.
• The investigator who caught Eichmann independently echoed the banality thesis.
• The Milgram experiments deliberately recruited subjects to a sham obedience study.
• The Nuremberg Laws converted stigmatized group imagery into legal exclusion from the nation.
• The same authoritarian traits can enable both atrocity and heroic resistance depending on context.
• The same authoritarian traits that made perpetrators collaborate also marked some resisters.
• The same culturally scripted behavior reads as mature to insiders and dangerous to outsiders
• The same existential fear can drive either violence or rescue
• The Struwwelpeter boy disobeys his mother and is mutilated for it.
• Those least secure under industrialization were most drawn to the Nazi Party.
• Threatened group identity drives scapegoating and reassertion of superiority.
• Threatened identity and low collective self-esteem fuel out-group scapegoating.
• Threatened self-esteem plus uncertainty drives people into rigid group identity.
• Under individualism, groups are disposable instruments and people pursue uniqueness and personal happiness.
• Under perceived threat, ambiguous group membership is resolved by classifying people as outsiders.
• Visible success made Jews appear capable of causing Germany’s economic woes
• Volk nationalism defines the nation as a transcendentally destined natural people.
• Weak identity and uncertainty make anti-Semitic ideas easy to adopt and spread
• Weak, nearby groups become scapegoats because aggressing against the powerful is unsafe
• Weimar-era normative upheaval stripped Germans of cultural buffers against existential terror.
• West Point requires all cadets to study Milgram’s obedience findings.
• Western psychology assumes conformity and obedience cause violence while autonomy prevents it.