ABSTRACT
Psychologists have shown that people naturally have a self-serving bias that they use when they explain life's ups and downs. While people usually take credit for accomplishments, they frequently assign blame for failure to others. People are less likely to buy into extremist agendas of the left or right because they believe that today's poverty might be followed by tomorrow's prosperity and today's electoral defeat by tomorrow's assumption of power. Civilized people cannot observe the horrible suffering that results from mass hatred without asking whether somehow the Western nations might have done something to mitigate or prevent the disasters. The Western nations might have made it immediately clear that any perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda would occupy pariah status, at least equivalent to that of South African leaders during the years of apartheid. Several common explanations of why people take part in mass atrocities are inadequate.
