A psychologist explains why humans are so terrible to each other.
By Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@v
Why are human beings so cruel to each other? And how do we justify acts of sheer inhumanity?
The conventional explanation is that people are able to do terrible things to other people only after having dehumanized them. In the case of the Holocaust, for example, Germans were willing to exterminate millions of Jews in part because Nazi ideology taught them to think of Jews as subhuman, as objects without the right to freedom, dignity, or even life itself.
Paul Bloom, a psychology professor at Yale, thinks this explanation of human cruelty is, at best, incomplete. I spoke to him about why he thinks its wrong to assume cruelty comes from dehumanization — and about his grim conclusion that almost anyone is capable of committing staggering atrocities under the right circumstances.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
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