Are Violent Acts Human Nature?

June 2, 2006 — -- My Lai, Abu Ghraib and now Haditha. Reading the news from Iraq this past week, one has to wonder whether we have just witnessed another infamous event that will live on in history long after the punishment is doled out. How is it possible that people could do these things? Why do soldiers sometimes kill innocent people?

During Vietnam, psychologists wondered if any human was capable of just snapping and behaving in criminal ways while fighting a war. "The conclusion used to be that if you take an ordinary guy, put him under certain social situations, he could act with sadistic behaviors," says Dr. Randall D. Marshall, director of Trauma Studies and Services at New York State Psychiatric Institute, and associate professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University.

Now, though, psychologists and psychiatrists believe that not all people act sadistically in those situations. "Some are more vulnerable to persuasion, and others have more aggressive behavior," he says. He also acknowledges an indisputable notion: "Some people certainly do get gratification from doing violence. Some people who enter war will have sociopathic tendencies."

Some psychologists believe certain people enter war with a psyche preprogrammed to hurt, damage and kill. According to Marshall, military training can induce a soldier to process violence differently in his or her mind. "Much of a soldier's training is mental. They're trained to take a disciplined, organized and intentional course of action, one that should be different than random violence," he said.

No matter how solid the mental training is, at day's end, a soldier is still human and, Marshall says, all people have a breaking point. That's the moment when people snap, when they do things that might have seemed unimaginable. According to Marshall, people who snap in a war situation react in three ways: Some become aggressive, some put themselves in another place, and others experience an extreme flood of anxiety that drives them to commit barbaric acts.