RELS 331 Lecture Notes - Ebsco Information Services
19 Mar 2014
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Document Summary
Becoming evil: how ordinary people commit genocide and mass killing : how. This chapter thoroughly describes the moral and psychological methods by which ordinary people justify committing and turning a blind eye to extraordinary acts of evil. It explains how when a victim has already died a social death , the perpetrator"s perception of the individual or group is altered and enables him/her to kill. The concept of a social death is used commonly to remove any emotional connection between the perpetrator and the target. The author describes how people being placed into social categories based on religious beliefs, nationality, culture, appearances, and even personality traits is a natural human thought process. People employ something called the accentuation effect, which is defined as the exaggeration of similarities within one"s own group as well as the exaggeration of slight differences in the out-groups to create separations in society.
