In Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killings, author and social psychologist Chris Waller focuses on how the everyday person has a hand in the brutal act of annihilation that is genocide. In his book, Waller analyzes the evolutionary forces responsible for shaping human nature and the psychosocial influences on individuals that make them more prone to engage in acts of extraordinary human evil. Waller offers readers a persuasive four-prong model for how everyday citizens become involved in such destruction, citing psychological experiment, studies of human characteristics, and evolutionary theory to argue that humans have an instinctive desire for social dominance and a genetic predisposition to divide into groups, thereby encouraging xenophobia and hatred of those outside the group.
This idea of “othering,” this cognitive bias of the in-group vs. out-group, is explained in the first part of Waller’s model where he discusses how ethnocentrism and xenophobia is a result of evolutionary psychology and are universal forces that makes us the same, what he calls our “ancestral shadow” (Waller, 134). For this analysis, I will be focusing on Waller’s model’s first-prong, and discussing the three tendencies that it focuses on: ethnocentrism, …show more content…
The term, first coined by anthropologist W. G. Sumner in 1906, describes how each group will feed its own pride and self-importance, regard itself as superior to others, speak highly of its own adherence to religious doctrine, and look with contempt on outsiders (Waller, 154). This idea of ethnocentrism can be found in the United States today, with a large population of American citizens adamant in the idea that our country and its people are superior to those outside our borders, with many voicing their disdain specifically towards those in the Middle East, for
This idea of “othering,” this cognitive bias of the in-group vs. out-group, is explained in the first part of Waller’s model where he discusses how ethnocentrism and xenophobia is a result of evolutionary psychology and are universal forces that makes us the same, what he calls our “ancestral shadow” (Waller, 134). For this analysis, I will be focusing on Waller’s model’s first-prong, and discussing the three tendencies that it focuses on: ethnocentrism, …show more content…
The term, first coined by anthropologist W. G. Sumner in 1906, describes how each group will feed its own pride and self-importance, regard itself as superior to others, speak highly of its own adherence to religious doctrine, and look with contempt on outsiders (Waller, 154). This idea of ethnocentrism can be found in the United States today, with a large population of American citizens adamant in the idea that our country and its people are superior to those outside our borders, with many voicing their disdain specifically towards those in the Middle East, for