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"On
Killing II: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill"
Overcoming
The Resistance
By
1946 the US Army had accepted Marshall’s conclusions. The
Human Resources Research Office of the US Army subsequently
pioneered a revolution in combat training which eventually
replaced firing at bull's-eye targets with deeply ingrained
“conditioning” using realistic, man-shaped, pop-up targets
that fall when hit. This kind of powerful operant conditioning
is the only technique which will reliably influence the
primitive, midbrain processing of a frightened human being.
Fire drills condition terrified school children to respond
properly during a fire. Conditioning in flight simulators
enables frightened pilots to respond reflexively to emergency
situations. Similar application and perfection of basic
conditioning techniques increased the rate of fire to approximately
55 percent in Korea and around a 95 percent in Vietnam.
While
serving as an assistant professor of psychology at the US
Military Academy at West Point, I was told by my boss, Col.
Johnston Beach, that the military’s marksmanship training
program, with its pop-up targets and intricate reinforcement
schedule, was identified by B. F. Skinner, during a visit
to West Point, as an “almost perfect example of operant
conditioning.”
Equally high rates of fire resulting from modern conditioning
techniques can be seen in Holmes’ observation of British
firing rates in the Falklands, and FBI data on law enforcement
firing rates since the nationwide introduction of modern
conditioning techniques in the late 1960s.
(I should note here that I outlined the above affirmation
of Marshall’s research, and the US military’s successful
mechanisms to bypass this resistance, in several peer reviewed
encyclopedia entries, and in my peer reviewed entry on “Aggression
and Violence” in the definitive Oxford Companion to American
Military History published in the spring of 2000.)
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