As psychologists Professors Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam write: ‘People do great wrong, not because they are unaware of what they are doing but because they consider it to be right. This is possible because they actively identify with groups whose ideology justifies and condones the oppression and destruction of others.’ Elsewhere anthropologists Professors Alan Page Fiske and Tage Shakti Rai find that ‘when people hurt or kill someone, they usually do so because they feel they ought to: they feel that it is morally right or even obligatory to be violent’. When the victim is ‘perceived as a
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