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Professor and Chair of Psychology, New School for Social Research*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 August 2015
As a social and political psychologist, I have been doing research on issues of collective behaviour and collective identities for over fifteen years. One of my three lines of research focuses on conflict at the intergroup level, and specifically on the factors that allow individuals to behave in a violent manner or in violation of certain norms, such as international humanitarian law (IHL). My work has to do, among other things, with strategies of “moral disengagement”; in other words, all the psychological justifications that we give ourselves for our behaviour, particularly when it comes to immoral, unlawful and violent behaviour.
This interview was conducted in Geneva on 18 June 2014 by Mariya Nikolova, Editor of the International Review of the Red Cross.
1 Editor's note: The “People on War” project was launched in 1999 and constituted a series of consultations conducted with the general public in twelve conflict-affected contexts, in which people were asked to air their opinions on the many facets of war. The general report of the study is available at: www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/icrc_002_0758.pdf. Individual country reports are also available on the ICRC's website.
2 Emanuele Castano, Bernhard Leidner and Patrycja Slawuta, “Social Identification Processes, Group Dynamics and the Behaviour of Combatants”, International Review of the Red Cross, Vol. 90, No. 870, 2008, pp. 259–271.
3 Emanuele Castano, Alain Bonacossa and Peter Gries, “National Images as Integrated Schemas: Subliminal Primes of Image Attributes Shape Foreign Policy Preferences”, Political Psychology, forthcoming 2015.
4 Editor's note: See Emanuele Castano, “The Attack on Empathy”, Public Seminar, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2013, available at: www.publicseminar.org/2013/10/the-attack-on-empathy/#.VVw9HOkcTct.
5 Editor's note: See Daniel Munoz-Rojas and Jean-Jacques Fresard, “The Roots of Behaviour in War: Understanding and Preventing IHL Violations”, International Review of the Red Cross, Vol. 86, No. 853, 2004, p. 202: “We need to treat IHL as a legal and political matter rather than as a moral one, and to focus communication activities more on the norms than on their underlying values because the idea that the bearer of weapons is morally autonomous is inappropriate.”
