Title: Genocide prevention - Wikipedia
Headings: Genocide prevention
Genocide prevention
Contents
The psychological basis of genocide
Social psychological factors
Risk factors for genocide
Early warning signs of genocide
The role of the United Nations
The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
International criminal tribunals
The Responsibility to Protect
Criticisms of the United Nations on genocide prevention and intervention
Types of prevention
Upstream prevention
Mid-Stream prevention
Downstream prevention
Genocide prevention and public health
Ongoing prevention efforts
Genocide Watch
The Alliance Against Genocide
United Nations Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility to Protect
Early warning project
Genocide task force
References
External links

Content: Social psychological factors
In addition to individual-level cognitive "moves," there are also many social psychological factors that influence an "ordinary" group's transformation into killers. First, the concept of social cognition explains the ways in which people think about themselves and those around them. People's social cognition is divided into thinking about others as belonging to in-groups and out-groups, which are defined by collective identity and social bonds. Everyone has a bias for their own group called an In-group bias, but this bias only has negative consequences when people simultaneously hold both extremely positive views of themselves and their in-group and extremely negative views of out-groups. People are also generally 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.