Political Psychology Darly

Darley writes, “Individual-level psychology is largely irrelevant to the occurrence of a much more common source of evil actions – produced by what I call ‘organizational pathology” (p. 406)

a) Discuss one individual-level approach to understanding “evil” actions and explain the shortcomings of this individual-level approach a. Individual-level i. Personality traits 1. authoritarian personality or SDO a. auth – willingly to submit i. altemeyer: - emotional need to submit - think views are commonly held b. SDO i. hierarchy( groups of people who believe they are better than others

ii. looks at these for indicators of potential to do evil things, but that doesn’t work all the time 1. can’t just look at auth. And sdo to understand why people commit evil acts shortcoming: the reason you can’t look at ind level….situation and env has a lot to look at people and how they behave ..therefore so you have to look at the whole group to see how those people will react , look at their surrounding such as people who affect them

b) Discuss group or organizational approaches or research and explain what they add to our understanding of mass killing or genocide. a. Complex social forces- social forces and groups you’re in and how they affect your actions b. Evil actions due to societal forces/products c. Reasoning/justification- with milgram’s experiment—someone who holds a high respect for science, who wants to get the end result of the exp, will justify hurting the person…Nazi germany- rid of jew so there can be peace=REASONING…by killing them there would be no more unrest d. LIFTON: i. Division of the self