Interview with Emanuele Castano Professor and Chair of Psychology, New School for Social Research

As a social and political psychologist, I have been doing research on issues of collective behaviour and collective identities for over fifteen years. One of my three lines of research focuses on conflict at the intergroup level, and specifically on the factors that allow individuals to behave in a violent manner or in violation of certain norms, such as international humanitarian law (IHL). My work has to do, among other things, with strategies of moral disengagement; in other words, all the psychological justifications that we give ourselves for our behaviour, particularly when it comes to immoral, unlawful and violent behaviour.