Understanding Genocide Quotes

“[R]esearch on perceiver-induced constraint reveals that people do not always account for situational constraints on behavior, even when they themselves have constructed the situation. Thus, perpetrators could have focused on the degraded and pathetic state of their victims as justifica­tion for both their past and their future victimization, even though the per­petrators were actually responsible for their wretched state.”
― Leonard S. Newman, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

“Clearly, it is difficult for an observer to disentangle all the reciprocal influ­ences that people and situations have on each other. Perhaps more surpris­ing, though, is just how poorly people appreciate how their own behavior can shape their social contexts. Social actors do not always appreciate or acknowl­edge the extent to which they affect situations—including how they affect the
other people in those situations—even when their influence would seem to be obvious.”
― Leonard S. Newman, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

“[S]ituations do not only interact with dispositional factors to affect behavior, they
also shape and change those dispositions.”
― Leonard S. Newman, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

“Thus, social repre­sentations are believed because they are shared, not because they are inher­ently valid outside of our social reality.”
― Leonard S. Newman, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

“Often we believe certain things to be true simply because most, if not all, of the people around us believe and/or assert them to be true. With­ out any direct means to assess the validity of such beliefs, we infer their va­lidity based on consensus. Once we have these beliefs, and find that they are shared quite liberally within our social networks, we take them for granted and rarely think about them as needing validation. Moscovici (1984) has re­ferred to such generally shared beliefs as “social representations.” Such shared beliefs form the basis of a social aggregate’s shared reality and are often used to justify or substantiate other related beliefs or opinions.”
― Leonard S. Newman, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

“The social nature of anti-Semitic beliefs is substantiated by the fact that dur­ing the late nineteenth century, most Germans had little, if any, contact with Jews. Jews made up only about 1% of the total German population (Goldhagen, 1996). Because of the general anti-Semitic social representation associated with Volkstum, many Jews had left Germany for safer havens elsewhere. Thus, most of what people knew (or thought they knew) about Jews was based on social consensus, not actual experience. As Festinger’s (1954) social comparison theory argues, social reality becomes paramount when physical reality provides few, if any, cues upon which one can base an opinion.”
― Leonard S. Newman, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust

“[P]eople cannot be influenced by ideas to which they are not exposed.”
― Leonard S. Newman, Understanding Genocide: The Social Psychology of the Holocaust