The Psychology Behind War Crimes: Why Soldiers Follow Orders, Dehumanize Enemies, and Commit Atrocities Against Their Conscience
Explore the dark psychological forces-obedience, deindividuation, moral disengagement, groupthink, and in‑group bias-that enable ordinary soldiers to commit atrocities. A deeply human investigation grounded in science and history.
We like to think morality is fixed. That in the heat of the moment, we'd still know right from wrong-and act on it. But history disagrees. Again and again, we see ordinary people-neighbours, classmates, sons and daughters-carry out acts that make the rest of us shudder.
The headlines call them "atrocities." The courts call them "war crimes." But neither label explains the mechanism: the quiet shift inside a person that allows them to harm, humiliate, and kill even when they know it's wrong. That shift is what this piece is about.
It matters because the forces that make soldiers cross the moral line aren't confined to battlefields. They exist in workplaces, in politics, in online mobs. The military just amplifies them to lethal scale. Understanding them isn't just about war, it's about seeing the blueprint of obedience and manipulation before it's used on us.
Matt Hussey
Psychologist Stanley Milgram showed us the first draft of that blueprint. In 1961, he asked volunteers to deliver electric shocks to strangers. The screams were staged; the shocks weren't real. But the obedience was. Sixty-five percent went all the way to the maximum-450 volts-because a man in a lab coat told them to keep going. Their conscience wasn't absent. It was overridden.
On the battlefield, that same override is built into the chain of command. Orders are framed as necessity. Killing becomes "mission success." And morality is left behind in the dust kicked up by the march.
This isn't a story about monsters. It's a story about us, and how quickly we can be taught to silence the voice that says stop.
When the Self Dissolves: Deindividuation in Uniform
In civilian life, you carry a name. A wardrobe. A history. Each choice you make is tethered to the "you" who will have to live with it.
In war, those tethers are cut. The uniform flattens individuality. The helmet hides your face. Your voice is one in a chorus. The pronoun shifts from I to we-and we is harder to hold accountable.
Psychologists call this deindividuation: a state where personal identity fades, and you act as the group acts. Philip Zimbardo made the term famous after the Stanford Prison Experiment. Ordinary students, assigned to play guards, slid into cruelty within days. The mirrored sunglasses and matching uniforms didn't just hide their eyes; they hid their selves.
In combat, the effect multiplies. Everyone looks the same. Moves the same. Faces the same enemy. You operate under call signs, not names. And when the group acts - whether that means firing a weapon or abusing a prisoner - you act with it. The violence becomes "ours" rather than "mine," and the moral sting is diluted in the bloodstream of the collective.
Matt Hussey
Abu Ghraib burned this into the public record. U.S. soldiers photographed themselves grinning beside hooded, naked detainees. Later, many claimed they'd never have done it alone. That's the point: they didn't. They did it as part of a we-a unit, a role, a collective identity where cruelty had become the norm.
Deindividuation doesn't plant cruelty where none exists. It just lowers the cost of acting on it. It offers a mask you can hide behind. And masks, in war, are as dangerous as any weapon.
Thinking Is Optional: Moral Disengagement at War
Even when you're obeying orders and moving as part of the group, something inside still protests. The conscience flinches. The hand hesitates.
Moral disengagement is how that hesitation gets dismantled. Psychologist Albert Bandura described it as the cognitive trickery we use to make harmful acts feel acceptable-or at least survivable. It's not about erasing morality, it's about putting it on mute.
On the battlefield, this muting takes many forms:
- Displacement of responsibility - "It wasn't my choice. It was the order."
- Euphemistic labeling - "Collateral damage" instead of civilian deaths.
- Advantageous comparison - "What we did wasn't as bad as what they did."
- Dehumanization - Thinking of the enemy as less than human, so empathy never has a chance to spark.
Each mechanism scrapes away at empathy, reframes violence as necessity, and turns killing into a task-no more personal than refueling a truck.
The Abu Ghraib soldiers didn't just act under orders or as part of a group; they operated inside a story that made their actions feel justifiable. Detainees became "the enemy," "the terrorists," "the other." Abuse was reframed as "softening them up." Every reframing was a brick in the wall between action and remorse.
Moral disengagement is why atrocities don't always look like atrocities to the people committing them. It's a cognitive armor, forged in necessity and fear, that allows you to walk away from the worst thing you've ever done-and still salute in the morning.
Chorus of Compliance: Groupthink and Routinized Cruelty
Obedience hands you the order. Deindividuation gives you the mask. Moral disengagement writes you the excuse.
Groupthink makes sure you never speak against it.
Irving Janis coined the term in 1972 to describe the silent suffocation of dissent inside tight-knit groups. In this state, the desire for cohesion outweighs the will to challenge bad decisions. The result isn't just agreement-it's conformity at all costs.
In military units, the pressure is relentless. Lives depend on trust. Trust depends on unity. And unity can quickly mean don't question the mission. Disagree too loudly and you're not just "difficult", you're dangerous to the group. So you stay quiet.
Once cruelty becomes part of the group's behavior, it routinizes. Tasks are split, orders repeated, violence broken into procedural steps that feel less like atrocities and more like paperwork. This is what Herbert Kelman and V. Lee Hamilton called "crimes of obedience" - atrocities carried out as if they were standard operating procedure.
Abu Ghraib again provides the case study. Abuse wasn't a one-off act; it became a daily rhythm. Hooding, stress positions, humiliation-performed like clockwork. Guards photographed it not to hide it, but to show it off within the unit. This was no longer rogue behavior. It was the culture.
Groupthink doesn't just keep you silent-it makes cruelty ordinary. It turns each act into a verse in a larger song, sung in unison, until no one remembers how to stop.
Enemy as Object: In-Group / Out-Group Dehumanization
War needs an enemy. Not just strategically-psychologically.
It's easier to harm someone if you stop seeing them as fully human. This is in-group/out-group bias at its most corrosive: the reflex to favour your own group while stripping the other of complexity, dignity, even identity.
Social psychologists have shown how easily this divide can be manufactured. In Muzafer Sherif's Robbers Cave experiment, mere competition over resources was enough to turn two groups of boys at summer camp into rivals who vandalized each other's cabins. In war, the stakes aren't a tug-of-war rope-they're life and death.
Dehumanization operates on many levels:
- Language - Calling people "targets," "rats," or "collateral damage."
- Visual cues - Uniforms, armbands, and other markers that reduce individuality.
- Propaganda - Stories that paint the enemy as barbaric, diseased, subhuman.
Once the enemy is "less than," empathy switches off. Killing feels less like ending a life and more like removing an obstacle.
At Abu Ghraib, detainees weren't called by name-they were numbers. Hooded, naked, made to crawl. Every act chipped away at their personhood until abuse felt less like cruelty and more like "breaking" an object.
This bias isn't a military invention. It's a human default, honed over millennia of tribal survival. But in war, it's sharpened to a blade-and handed to people already stripped of their own individuality.
When "they" become an object, anything can be done to them. And history shows: it often is.
Inside the Atrocity-Producing Situation
R.J. Lifton coined the term "atrocity-producing situation" to describe environments so charged, so morally warped, that cruelty becomes almost inevitable. These aren't random acts of evil. They're engineered outcomes.
On the ground, the ingredients are brutally consistent:
- Relentless stress - Sleep deprivation, constant threat, and sensory overload.
- Emotional numbing - Daily exposure to suffering and death until it feels routine.
- Dehumanizing conditions - Enemy reduced to an obstacle; civilians caught in crossfire treated as collateral.
- Ambiguous orders - "Do what it takes" becomes a license for anything.
Under these conditions, the psychological levers we've explored: obedience, deindividuation, moral disengagement, groupthink, in-group bias don't just coexist. They reinforce one another. Orders are followed without question. Masks of anonymity hide the self. Cognitive tricks soothe the conscience. The group sets the rhythm. The enemy is no longer a person.
The My Lai massacre in Vietnam is often cited as the archetype: more than 500 civilians killed by U.S. soldiers in 1968. Testimonies revealed confusion over orders, months of guerrilla attacks that blurred the line between combatants and villagers, and a command climate that rewarded aggression over restraint. It was an atrocity-producing situation in full form.
These environments don't just destroy victims-they fracture the perpetrators. Many soldiers experience perpetrator trauma: a haunting guilt that surfaces long after the war ends. The act may be rationalized in the moment, but memory has a way of stripping away those justifications over time.
An atrocity-producing situation isn't just a place or a moment. It's a system. One that transforms ordinary people into instruments of harm-and then leaves them to live with what they've done.
The Aftershock: Collective Memory and Ethical Amnesia
The gunfire stops. The war ends. But the story isn't over.
How an atrocity is remembered - or forgotten - can be as telling as the act itself. Nations tend to curate their histories, keeping the victories polished and the crimes buried. What doesn't fit the heroic narrative gets softened, reframed, or erased altogether.
Psychologists call this motivated forgetting, the selective memory that shields our self-image. Research shows that people recall details of atrocities more clearly when they absolve their own side, and forget them when they don't. The same bias operates on a national scale.
Sometimes the forgetting is deliberate: official reports redacted, archives sealed, images censored. Other times it's cultural osmosis-atrocities get mentioned less each year, replaced by myths of noble sacrifice. Victims fade into statistics. Perpetrators become shadows in old photographs.
This ethical amnesia isn't just about protecting reputations. It's about avoiding the mirror. To admit what was done means facing the truth that ordinary people, our people, were capable of it. And if they were, so are we.
The aftershock is twofold: survivors carry wounds the nation won't acknowledge, while perpetrators live in a society that quietly rewards forgetting. In that silence, the conditions for the next atrocity remain intact.
Reclaiming Accountability: Structural Safeguards Against Evil
If atrocity can be engineered, it can also be interrupted.
Albert Bandura argued that morality doesn't stand alone-it needs guardrails. In the military, that means building systems that resist the psychological currents we've traced:
- Checks on authority - Independent oversight that can counter unlawful orders before they become action.
- Ethics embedded in training - Not as a footnote, but as a core competency, reinforced under stress.
- Protected channels for dissent - Ways to raise alarms without ending a career.
- Exposure to the humanity of the enemy - Language and imagery that resist dehumanization.
Some armed forces have begun experimenting with scenario-based moral decision-making, where soldiers practice resisting unethical commands in realistic simulations. Others rotate duties to reduce the anonymity and monotony that feed deindividuation. None of it is perfect-but it's a recognition that conscience needs reinforcement, not assumption.
Accountability isn't just the work of military structures. It's cultural. It's the public refusing to let atrocities fade into euphemism or amnesia. It's survivors being heard without their testimony being filed away as "history." It's media, art, and scholarship keeping the mirror held high even when the reflection is unbearable.
Because the forces that strip away morality in war aren't confined to war. They're here, in boardrooms, in police units, in online mobs. The lesson of military atrocity is that under the right conditions, the slide from ordinary to unthinkable is frighteningly short.
The safeguard is vigilance. Not just against "them," but against what any of us could become.
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