ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with a variety of attempts to explain or at least understand evil, either in terms of psychology or social science or with some combination of these approaches. Human need theory posits that certain fundamental human needs motivate human behavior, and these needs must be satisfied if we are to prevent or resolve destructive conflicts. Zukier asks the important question of how millions of ordinary people in Germany could have been transformed into evildoers. Psychoanalytic self-psychology suggests that a cohesive sense of self might form around a fundamentally evil ideology that is used to stabilize and energize the self. Authoritarian personalities are particularly prone to develop irrational, destructive social attitudes, ethnocentrism, and prejudices such as anti-Semitism. In his early work, M. Scott Peck defines evil as the use of power to impose one's will on others by overt or covert coercion, in order to protect a sick, unloving self.
