Applying Social Psychology: Genocide

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Genocide is defined as a systematic effort to wipe out a group of people. 

The word “Holocaust” comes from a Greek word meaning “sacrifice by fire”. 

The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of approximately six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators, who believed that Germans were racially superior and that Jews were a threat to their supreme race. Other groups were also targeted, including Roma Gypsies, disabled people, and some Slavic people. There were also people persecuted on political, ideological, and behavioural grounds, including Communists, Socialists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

The horrific actions that took place in WWII has inspired a lot of the early research and the start of social psychology.

However, despite the atrocities of human behaviour and social psychology’s development helping reduce the chance of this happening again, there is still genocide in our modern world, in the ‘90s there was reported genocide in Rwanda, Iraq and the former Yugoslavia. More recently, there has also been genocide in Darfur. This proves that any ordinary human in any situation…


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