ABSTRACT
A broad and strong consensus prevails in the human sciences about the personality traits that distinguish genocidal perpetrators from other human beings: there are none. A small percentage of the killers, roughly the same as in society at large, say five percent, may indeed show psychopathologies that make them impervious to the suffering of others and even cause them to enjoy it. The vast majority, however, displays the same variety of traits and in roughly the same frequencies as the population at large. There is near unanimity among scholars, a rare exception in the human sciences, that nothing in their personality predisposes the perpetrators to commit their deeds more than anyone else. In the very titles of their books, the adherents of this view announce their conclusion: the killers are ‘ordinary men’. 1 What must be explained is ‘how ordinary people commit extraordinary evil’.
