Question

What are three social psychological theories/concepts to critically analyze how similar massacres like My Lai be prevented in the future?

Answer 1

Obedience to authority:

When looking at Milgrams study on obedience to authority, we found that the participants in the experiment, who were average people, obeyed the authority figure and were therefore able to inflict pain on other human beings. Since the participants in the experiment were able to defy their own values and go as far as inflicting a great level of shock to the victims when instructed to by an authority, we were able to relate this to the soldiers killing, not only their enemies, but also innocent civilians. The impact that the psycological stress of disobeying an authority had on the soldiers was overwhelming, which is why we can conclude that obedience to authority is a relevant theory when looking at what influenced the soldiers to commit atrocities.

Group Conformity :

The experiments conducted by Solomon Asch and Muzafer Sherif showed that the participants of their experiments who conformed in groups, conformed for two reasons : Normative influence and informational influence. The studies on group conformity are relevant to this project because the soldiers to avoid rejection from the group. According to the studies on group conformity, people are more likely to follow the acts of others in the same group; in this case, soldiers follow the acts of their comrades in their unit. The soldiers conformed under the impression that the majority was right. Because the soldiers internally depend on each other for survival, exclusion from the unit is too great a consequence.

Dehumanization :

Through the studies conducted by Nick Haslam and Herbert C Kelmann a definition of dehumanization has been put in place. By distinguishing between two different concepts of human characteristics, we are able to determine two corresponding types of dehumanization. It is described how dehumanization, through various methods, allows the soldier a moral justification for killing who he percieves as being the enemy. Dehumanization allowed the soldiers in the Vietnam war to percieve the Vietnamese as being sub-human, thereby seeing them as objects rather than human beings.