socialized to avoid conflict and aggression with other members of their own in-group, so one way of overcoming that barrier to violence is to redefine who belongs to each group so that victims of genocide become excluded from the in-group and are no longer protected by this in-group bias. Social influence and social relations also constitute factors vulnerable to manipulation. Many cultures actively encourage conformity, compliance, and obedience in social relations and can have severe social "penalties" for those that do not adhere to the norms, so that group members can feel an intense pressure to engage in violence if other members are also engaging in it. This tendency for people to conform can be manipulated to induce "thoughtless behavior" in large groups of people at once. Research also shows that this pressure to conform, also known as the "conformity effect", increases when there is an authority figure present in the group, and when certain social and institutional contexts increase people's tendency to conform, like the loss of stability, as people tend to adapt to what is expected of them when stability disappears. Other tendencies of human social relationships can similarly push people towards violence, such as prejudice, altruism, and aggression. It is particularly relevant to understand the link between prejudice and violence, as prejudice is often one of the first starting points in the formation of genocidal behavior. The scapegoat theory (or practice of scapegoating) helps to explain the relationship, as it posits that people have a tendency to lash out on out-groups when they are frustrated, for example in times of political or economic crisis. Risk factors for genocide There are a variety of political and cultural factors that make states more at risk for movement down a path of mass violence, and an understanding and recognition of the existence of those factors can be crucial in genocide prevention efforts. While studies in this area find varying degrees of risk for each particular factor, there is widespread consensus on which kinds of environments present the greatest risk for the occurrence of genocide. First, certain situational factors like destabilizing crises and political upheaval make countries more vulnerable to genocide. Forms of political upheaval include civil wars, assassinations, revolutions, coups, defeat in international war, anticolonial rebellions, or any sort of upheaval that results in unconventional regime change or in elites with extremist ideologies coming to power. Almost all genocides of