It's also very important to understand that people are more alike than different.

The "not the same" thing I've found to be mostly based on superficial differences, whereas all the basic imperatives (sex drive, evolutionary instincts, core cultural values, etc are mostly the same wherever).

There are people who can torture a child to death without feeling the smallest amount of guild (maybe they even find it funny or satisfying), others who could do it with the right amount of indoctrination, others who would only do it if their life is in danger (and would feel horrible afterwards) and others who would rather die than doing it.

And it's not possible to shift a person people into all of those categories, it's mostly inborn (like sexual orientation, hair color, etc).

Sure, all those people have lots of other "basic imperatives" in common, but the small difference that some could inflict as much pain as possible to others without feeling even a little bit guilty is a difference with should have quite severe consequences for society as a whole.

So if we try to understand why there is so much violence in the world, it would be quite an oversight to not take those kind of differences into account.

You're making a helluvan assertion there. You're going to need a citation, because psychology has no clue about this.

-signed, A Psychopath

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

And another 90% have herd mentality, people that can easily mold their personality to match the dominant type in their in-group. There have been numerous studies that show that group mentality can override people's personal moral boundaries.

Non-psychopaths simply dehumanize their victims to suppress that empathy.

I think we all have the ability to not feel another's pain. For instance, dehumanization is a classic technique in war propaganda.