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[abaris]

I have always been interested in why people hurt each other. It doesn't make any sense, to me, to hurt someone who isn't a threat to you. How do you turn off your empathy and humanity?

The Milgram experiment, conducted in 1961, gives a pretty good answer to that question. For most of the killers it's about authority asking them to do it. So their personal sense of responsibility is lifted.

http://psychology.about.com/od/historyof...ilgram.htm

Also there's a book by an army psychologist called "On killing". In there he examined soldiers and how they react to the acts of violence and their feelings when they have to kill. The goal of that study of course was to create more efficient killers, but what the author found out is actually pretty interesting. About 3 percent of probands actually enjoyed the act of killing.