All humans are potential torturers

I don't know if the following article applies to real Christians but after my experience in the COG it seems that it very well may at least to most.

http://www.newkerala.com/news-daily/news/features.php?action=fullnews&id=44471

All humans are potential torturers:
[World News]: London, Nov 26 : A shocking new study, conducted by a team of psychologists at the Princeton University in New York, has found that almost all of us are capable of torturing people and committing acts of extreme cruelty.

The study, which was spurred by the activities that took place at the Abu Gharib prison in Iraq where some US Army troops had subjected the Iraqi prisoners of war to inhuman torture, said that there are only very few people who are absolutely incapable of cruelty.

According to them, many forms of behaviour, including acts of cruelty, are influenced as much by authority figures, peer pressure and other social interactions as by the psychology of the individual, reports the New Scientist.

The researchers said that situations where individuals feel provoked stressed or taunted are conducive to causing aggressive acts. It is also the need to conform to their peer group and obey those in authority, or act in a way that they believe their superiors would approve of which could lead individuals to behave in a way that they would usually consider unacceptable.

They said that often people are first made to commit smaller acts of cruelty like an occasional slap, and then over time these acts of abuse are built up to levels of extreme torture.

It also happens when the alienation and exclusion of certain groups renders them "contemptible, subhuman and disgusting" in the eyes of the torturer, making abuse of such dehumanised victims far easier to carry out.

"If we don't understand the importance of social context and accept that almost anybody could commit acts of torture under certain circumstances, then we are setting ourselves up for situations where Abu Ghraib [atrocities] will occur again," the researchers wrote in their study. (ANI)