Question: Why do people do horrible things?
Slave owners, and Nazis, any of the perpetrators of history's atrocities.
How do they so successfully dehumanize other people for so long?
At a smaller scale, how do bullies in the lunchroom manage to treat other kids with such cruelty and then go home and pet their dog and call their grandma and say "happy birthday"?
Most of what we've been studying so far has focused on the individual.
We've covered sub-fields of psychology like cognitive, personality, and clinical psychology, which tend to address the phenomena contained within a single person's mind.
But there's also social psychology, which focuses on the power of the situation.
It examines how we think about, influence, and relate to one another in certain conditions.
And it's better equipped to answer this question about people doing horrible things.
Social psychology can not only give us some of the tools we need to understand why people behave brutally, it can also help us understand why we sometimes act heroically.
