The Social Psychology of Good and Evil

Note: This pdf was created from scanned book pages that were then run through OCR software. It therefore is likely to contain some errors not in the original. It is provided to you as a courtesy of the authors. Please do not post or distribute this version in any form that would violate the copyrights of the authors, the book editor, or the publisher. coordinated attack, terrorists hijacked four commercial jets and succeeded in flying two of them into the World Trade Center Towers in New York City, and one into the Pentagon. The fourth, apparently targeted for the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC, crashed in a Pennsylvania field when passengers attacked the hijackers. The final death toll was over 2,800 (The National Obituary Archive, 2002). We label the most extreme forms of aggression as "violent evil" in this chapter. Hopes that the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust would produce a worldwide rejection of such inhuman actions and a resulting end of genocidal practices, a cessation of wars among nations, and a reduction in homicide rates have been dashed by the realities of war, homicide , and genocide in the last half of the 20th century. The litany of recent genocidal events is both long and depressing, including major massa-The beginning of the 21st century has not provided much relief either, as dearly illustrated by the September Violent Evil and the General Aggression Model 169 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the subsequent "war on terrorism" in Afganistan, the escalating conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, the ethnic/religious massacres in India, and the recent (and continuing) war in Iraq. Of course, human violence is not new. Archeological and historical evidence makes it dear that violence was prevalent among our hunter/ gatherer ancestors 25,000 years. ago, among the Greek, Egyptian, and Roman societies 2,000-3,000 years ago, among most societies in the last two centuries, and in almost every society today. Although technological advances have made mass violence easier to accomplish, "people" today are not more violence-prone than they were thousands of years ago. Nonetheless, the prevalence of violence in contemporary society, the efficiency of modern weapons, and differences in violence rates between societies have collectively inspired a resurgence of interest in understanding such behavior at individual, group, and societal levels. The hope, of course, is that such understanding will lead to significant reductions in future rates of violence at each …