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"Behavioral
Psychology"
The
Problem: A Resistance To Killing
Much
of human behavior is irrefutably linked to a mixture of
operant and classical conditioning. From one perspective,
grades in school and wages at work are nothing more than
positive reinforcers, and grades and money are nothing more
than tokens in a token economy, and the utility of behaviorism
in understanding daily human behavior is significant.
Yet
the purist position (which holds that behavioristic processes
explain all aspects of human behavior), is generally considered
to be flawed in its application to humans, since humans
are able to learn by observational learning, and humans
tend to strongly oppose and negate blatant attempts to manipulate
them against their will. But in emergency situations, or
in the preparation of individuals for emergency situations,
behaviorism reigns supreme.
Those
in power have always attempted to utilize the basic behavioral
concepts of rewards, punishments, and repetitive training
to shape or control, and in many cases they would hope,
predict the responses of military and law enforcement personnel
throughout history. Certainly in ancient times when there
was no formal understanding of the underlying precepts of
conditioning, military leaders nevertheless subjected their
troops to forms of conditioning with the intention of instilling
warlike responses.
Repetition played heavily in attempting to condition firing
as seen in Prussian and Napoleonic drills in the loading
and firing of muskets. Through thousands of repetitions
it was hoped that under the stress of battle, men would
simply fall back on the learned skill to continue firing
at the enemy. While this may have accounted for some increase
in the firing of muskets in the general direction of the
enemy, statistics from the Napoleonic era do not bear out
the hit ratios that would indicate success in the method,
success being determined by increased kill ratios.
In tests during this era it was repeatedly demonstrated
that an average of regiment of 250 men, each firing a musket
at a rate of four shots per minute, could hypothetically
put close to 1000 holes in a 6-foot-high by 100-foot-wide
sheet of paper at a range of 25 yards. But Paddy Griffith
has documented in his studies of actual Napoleonic and American
Civil War battles that in many cases the actual hit ratios
were as low as zero hits, with an average being approximately
one or two hits, per minute, per regiment, which is less
than 1% of their theoretical killing potential. While these
soldiers may have been trained to fire their weapons, they
had not been conditioned to kill their enemy.
In
behavioral terms, to prepare (or train, or condition) a
soldier to kill, the stimulus (which did not appear in their
training) should have been an enemy soldier in their sights.
The target behavior (which they did not practice for) should
have been to accurately fire their weapons at another human
being. There should have been immediate feedback when they
hit a target, and there should have been rewards for performing
these specific functions, or punishment for failing to do
so. No aspect of this occurred in their training, and it
was inevitable that such training would fail.
To truly understand the necessity for operant conditioning
in this situation it must first be recognized that most
participants in close-combat are literally "frightened out
of their wits." Once the arrows or bullets start flying,
combatants stop thinking with the forebrain (which is the
part of the brain that makes us human) and thought processes
localize in the midbrain, or mammalian brain, which is the
primitive part of the brain that is generally indistinguishable
from that of a dog or a rat. And in the mind of a dog the
only thing which will influence behavior is operant conditioning.
In
conflict situations the dominance of midbrain processing
can be observed in the existence of a powerful resistance
to killing one's own kind, a resistance that exists in every
healthy member of every species. Konrad Lorenz, in his definitive
book, On Aggression, notes that it is rare for animals
of the same species to fight to the death. In their territorial
and mating battles animals with horns will butt their heads
together in a relatively harmless fashion, but against any
other species they will go to the side and attempt to gut
and gore. Similarly, piranha will fight one another with
raps of their tails but they will turn their teeth on anything
and everything else, and rattlesnakes will wrestle each
other but they have no hesitation to turn their fangs on
anything else. Lorenz suggests that this "non-specicidal"
tendency is imprinted into the genetic code in order to
safeguard the survival of the species.
One major modern revelations in the field of military psychology
is the observation that this resistance to killing one's
own species is also a key factor in human combat. Brigadier
General S.L.A. Marshall first observed this during his work
as the Chief Historian of the European Theater of Operations
in World War II. Based on his innovative new technique of
postcombat interviews, Marshall concluded in his landmark
book, Men Against Fire, that only 15 to 20% of the
individual riflemen in World War II fired their weapons
at an exposed enemy soldier.
Marshall's findings have been somewhat controversial, but
every available parallel, scholarly study has validated
his basic findings. Ardant du Picq's surveys of French officers
in the 1860s and his observations on ancient battles, Keegan
and Holmes' numerous accounts of ineffectual firing throughout
history, Paddy Griffith's data on the extraordinarily low
killing rate among Napoleonic and American Civil War regiments,
Stouffer's extensive World War II and postwar research,
Richard Holmes' assessment of Argentine firing rates in
the Falklands War, the British Army's laser reenactments
of historical battles, the FBI's studies of nonfiring rates
among law enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and
countless other individual and anecdotal observations, all
confirm Marshall's fundamental conclusion that man is not,
by nature, a close-range, interpersonal killer.
The
existence of this resistance can be observed in its marked
absence in sociopaths who, by definition, feel no empathy
or remorse for their fellow human beings. Pit bull dogs
have been selectively bred for sociopathy, bred for the
absence of the resistance to killing one's kind in order
to ensure that they will perform the unnatural act of killing
another dog in battle. Breeding to overcome this limitation
in humans is impractical, but humans are very adept at finding
mechanical means to overcome natural limitations. Humans
were born without the ability to fly, so we found mechanisms
that overcame this limitation and enabled flight. Humans
also were born without the ability to kill our fellow humans,
and so, throughout history, we have devoted great effort
to finding a way to overcome this resistance.
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© 1999 by Academic Press. All rights of reproduction
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