Psychologists studying intergroup conflict are trying to understand the atrocities humans are capable of committing. Is evolution to blame?
Why do humans do such terrible things to each other? What makes us capable of torture, war, and genocide? These kinds of questions aren't just broad, rhetorical inquiries for Sabina Cehajic-Clancy, a Bosnian psychologist who studies the science of conflict between different groups of people. In a recent story for the Chronicle of Higher Education, writer Tom Bartlett explores the science of hatred through Cehajic-Clancy's work, which mainly covers the ethnic cleansing of Muslims that occurred during her childhood in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the early '90s.