Psychology of Violence
By
Student Id# CPSY-2009-0884: Yinka L. Humes
MGC5311: Psychology of Violence
Lecturer: Dr. Pansy Brown
15thNovember2010
Violence is the exertion of physical force so as to injure or abuse. The word describes forceful human destruction of property or injury to persons, usually intentional, and forcefulverbalandemotional abusethat harms others.The causes of violent behavior in humans are often research topics inpsychologyandsociology. Neurobiologist Jan Volavka emphasizes that for those purposes, “violent behavior is defined as overt and intentional physically aggressive behavior against another person.”Scientists disagree on whether violence is inherent in humans. Among prehistoric humans, there is archaeological evidence for both contentions of violence and peacefulness as primary characteristics.Riane Eisler, who describes early matriarchal societies, andWalter Wink, who coined the phrase “the myth of redemptive violence,” suggeststhat human violence, especially as organized in groups, is a phenomenon of the last five to ten thousand years.The “violent male ape” image is often brought up in discussions of human violence. Dale Peterson andRichard Wranghamin “Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence” write that violence is inherent in humans.However, William L. Ury, editor of a book called “Must We Fight? From theBattlefield to the SchoolyardA New Perspective on Violent Conflict and Its Prevention” debunks the “killer ape” myth in his book which brings together discussions from twoHarvardLawSchoolsymposiums. The conclusion is that “we also have lots of natural mechanisms for cooperation, to keep conflict in check, to channel aggression, and to overcome conflict. These are just as natural to us as the aggressive tendencies.”James Gilligan writes violence is often pursued as an antidote to shame or humiliation. The use of violence often is a source of pride and a defense of honor, especially among males who often believe violence defines manhood.
Stephen Pinker in aNew Republicarticle “The History of Violence” offers evidence that on the average the amount and cruelty of violence to humans and animals has decreased over the last few centuries.
This viewof a situationist, which hasboth influenced and been informed by a body of social-psychological researchand theory, contrasts with the traditional perspective that explainsevil behavior in dispositional terms: Internal determinants of antisocial behaviorlocate evil within individual predispositionsgenetic “bad seeds,”personality traits, psychopathological risk factors, and other organismicvariables. The situationist approach is to the dispositional as public healthmodels of disease are to medical models. Following basic principles ofLewinian theory, the situationist perspective propels external determinantsof behavior to the foreground, well beyond the status as merely extenuatingbackground circumstances. Unique to this situationist approach is theuse of experimental laboratory and field research to demonstrate vital phenomena that other approaches only analyze verbally or rely on archival orcorrelational data for answers. The basic paradigm presentedillustrates the relative ease with which ordinary, “good” men andwomen can be induced into behaving in “evil” ways by turning on or off
one or another social situational variable.
Inreligion,ethics, andphilosophy, the phrase,good and evilrefers to the location of objects, desires, andbehaviorson a two-wayspectrum, with one direction being morally positive (“good”), and the other morally negative (“evil”). “Good” is a broad concept but it typically deals with an association withlife,continuity,happiness, andprosperity.Evilis more simply defined: the opposite of good. The nature ofgoodnesshas been given many treatments; one is that the good is based on the naturallove, bonding, and affection that begins at the earliest stages of personal development; another is that goodness is a product of knowingtruth.Evilcan be defined as intentionally behaving, or causing others to act,in ways that demean, dehumanize, harm, destroy, or kill innocent people.This behaviorally focused definition makes the individual or group responsiblefor purposeful, motivated actions that have a range of negative consequencesfor other people. The definition excludes accidental or unintendedharmful outcomes, as well as the broader, generic forms of institutionalevil, such as poverty, prejudice, or destruction of the environment byagents of corporate greed.We might also consider a simplerdefinition of evil, proposed by my colleague, Irving Sarnoff: “Evil is knowingbetter but doing worse.”My concern centers on how good, ordinary people can be recruited,induced, seduced into behaving in ways that could be classified asevil.Decent people have sought to identify the roots of evil since the first indecent person inflicted cruelty on an innocent person. And people have come up with one or more of nine explanations, mostof which are indeed valid.The Devil (or whatever name the devil goes by in any given culture). I do not believe in a devil, but when one observes the seemingly inexplicable cruelty engaged in by some people, it is understandable that people have attributed it to some evil being thathas taken over that person. The contemporary term for devil is “genes.” Just as with the devil, when we observe a person engaging in evil behavior for which we have no rational explanation, we speak of it as coming from the person’s genes.Parents, after genes, parents have become another popular explanation for much evil. “How was he raised?” we wonder when we read about evildoers, especially those who deliberately hurt children. There is no question that parental upbringing has both good and ill effects on children. But there are too many bad people raised in homes that did not abuse them, and too many good people who were raised in awful homes to allow us to make parents the primary explanation for evil.Religion is a popular culprit these days. And it is undeniable that religion can be a source of evil it certainly is in the case of the true believing Islamic terrorist. And it was in the wars over theology that rackedEuropefor centuries. But two facts mitigate against regarding religion as the primary explanation for evil. One is that religion itself was often developed precisely in order to reduce human evil. Whatever evil individual Christians may have ever engaged in, it is hard to find advocacy of evil within Christian Scriptures. The other is that secular ideologies and regimes — Nazism and Communism, for examplehave murdered and tortured far more people than any religion has.Money and greed are so widely regarded as causes of evil that the phrase “Money is the root of all evil” has become a cliche. And there is no doubt that people seeking what money can buyluxury, status, women and excitement, to name but a few thingshave engaged in much evil. But flawed human nature and a lack of self-control, not money per se, are the causesof evil in these instances. Power, like money, many who seek power will do anything, no matter how evil, to attain power. However, it is a relatively small number of people that seeks such power andcommits evil in its pursuit. Persons in the pursuit ofgood. The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions. One should never underestimate the amount of evil caused by people thinking they were doing good. Far more evil has been perpetrated by idealistic peoplethan by cynical criminals. Sadism., there are people who simply enjoy seeing others in pain and inflicting it on them. But sadism accounts for few, if any, large-scale evils. It accounts for manyindividual acts of cruelty.Boredom is widely underrated as a source of evil. Yet, it most certainly is. Lack of purpose, not a lack of things to do, is the source of nearly all boredom. People need meaning in their lives. And if they don’t, they will pursue visceral excitement instead of meaning or seek meaning in evil causes.I believe there is anexplanation that is greater than all the others and is particularly widespread today.Victimhood. A lifelong study of good and evil has led to me conclude that the greatest single cause of evil is people perceiving of themselves or their group as victims. Nazism arose from Germans’sense of victimhoodas a result of the Versailles Treaty, of the “stab in the back” that led to Germany’s loss in World War I and of a world Jewish conspiracy. Communism was predicated on workers regarding themselves as victims of the bourgeoisie. Much of Islamic evil today emanates from a belief that the Muslim world has been victimized by Christians and Jews. Many prisoners, including those imprisoned for horrible crimes, regard themselves as victims of society or of their upbringing. The list of those attributing their evil acts to their being victims is aslong as the list of evildoers.This is also true in the micro realm. Family members whose primary identity is that of victim usually feel entirely free to hurt others in the family. That is why psychotherapists who regularly reinforce the victim status of their patients do the patient and society great harm.Much of the evil we see “out there” in the world, and in others, is in some measure a reflection of ourselves,our own human potential for, and unavoidable participation in evil. The myth counsels that the only meaningful–and ultimately, viableway of comprehending and combating evil is to understand it as a mirroring of the demonic elements eternally present in nature and in all humanity. We are the primary progenitors of evil: we not only define it, but, as we shall see, we wittingly or unwittingly create and perpetuate it. Therefore, it is we who are responsible for much of the evil in the world; and we are each morally required to accept rather than project that ponderous responsibility.
Refrences
Shermer, M. (2004).The Science of Good & Evil.New York: Time Books.ISBN 0-8050-7520-8
Wilson, William McF., and Julian N. Hartt. “Farrer’s Theodicy.” In David Hein and Edward Hugh Henderson (eds),Captured by the Crucified: The Practical Theology ofAustin Farrer. New York and London: T & T Clark / Continuum, 2004.ISBN 0-567-02510-1
Liliane Frey-Robin, “Evil from the Psychological Point of View,” inEvil, Studies in Jungian Thought Series (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 153.
N. Sanford, C. Comstock, and associates,Sanctions for Evil: Sources of Social Destructiveness(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1971), p. 5.
Frey-Rohn, “Evil from the Psychological Point of View,” p. 160.
See Jung’s excellent essay “Good and Evil in analytical Psychology” (1959), inCivilization in Transition, 2d ed., vol. 10 ofThe Collected Works of C. G. Jung, trans. R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series XX (Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), as well as my discussion ofdiscernmentin the closing chapters of this volume.
