Read "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society." The author, Dave Grossman, is an Army Ranger and a Psychology professor at West Point. He lays down an argument that most people have a strong, instinctual resistance to killing. In WWI, only about 20% on the front lines even fired their weapons. That rose during WWII and Korea until during Vietnam, it was closer to 95%. He attributes the change to modern training methods which are basically operant conditioning.
(He also has fascinating interviews with veterans about their experiences. But the book sometimes feels like someone's dissertation, and at the end, he tries to make the same claim with violent media, which I don't think holds. Watching something is very different from doing something.)
It improved with attempts to dehumanise the enemy (Germans -> krauts -> Gooks) and the distance with which you face them (hand-hand in a trench -> carpet bombing of jungle)
It has swung back the other way with soldiers have a live view of the target in a sight/TV picture - the proportion of willing to kill has reduced.
If modern training methods can be shown to quantitatively effect killing ratios, as he relates, I'm not sure why it is such a stretch to believe that continual bombardment of imagery or role playing (i.e. video games) would not have the same - although perhaps lessor - effect.
I realize this is an uncomfortable theory for many of us who believe we are masters of our environment, but it holds water.
You are right though, there is a difference between media and reality. The problem is that it doesn't manifest until after both situations have occurred. Ergo PTSD.
Post media saturation but pre-real life drama is a very unstable time for individuals, as the likelihood that they will confuse the media outcomes for the real ones is the highest. I think this is essentially Grossman's point, and I don't find it that far fetched.
Your environment affects you, whether you choose to believe it does or not. (Note that this is not to suggest that the same environment affects people in the same way).
The reason I draw the distinction is because modern training methods stress shooting an actual gun in certain circumstances. I think the fact that the training involves the physical act of shooting a real gun is important. This means that the only difference between training and combat is the stress level and what the solder is shooting at.
That's operant conditioning. If you remove a physical gun and replace it with a virtual gun, perhaps some operant conditioning can take place, but I doubt it will be enough to overcome our disinclination to kill another person. (I know the military actually use FPSes for training in some circumstances - but I think it's used more for communication practice than anything else, and it's used in combination with modern training methods.) The reason I stress virtual versus physical is that you want training to be as close to reality to get the desired behavior.
If you remove participant action completely, such as passively watching a movie, then I think you've lost operant conditioning entirely. Grossman spends much of the book arguing that humans' instinct not to kill other people is so large that we need operant conditioning to overcome it. He submits that the untrained combatant will sometimes literally die instead of firing their weapon. He ignores this argument at the end of the book.
but I doubt it will be enough to overcome our disinclination to kill another person
Clearly it isn't, in most cases. But then again, soldiers don't go around arbitrarily killing people either. The fact that the conditioning exists has little to do with whether or not it is exercised.
I think for certain individuals, simply watching the actions of others is enough to alter behaviour. As such, watching continuous murders may indeed be enough to alter behaviour for a select group of outliers in dramatic ways.
The conditioning norm remains subconscious until summoned, which would mean that for most of us, it would never be used. Extremely stressful situations would of course trigger the reaction - and this would fit with the crazed gunman incidents that seem so prevalent these days (historically, gunmen tended to have military experience, interesting side note).
untrained combatant will sometimes literally die instead of firing their weapon
I think he was using historical information to make this observation. It seems obvious to me however that most modern North Americans are not longer subject to this "limitation". Fighting back pirates is certainly a good supporter of this, and seems to lend some support to his point.
Read "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society." The author, Dave Grossman, is an Army Ranger and a Psychology professor at West Point. He lays down an argument that most people have a strong, instinctual resistance to killing. In WWI, only about 20% on the front lines even fired their weapons. That rose during WWII and Korea until during Vietnam, it was closer to 95%. He attributes the change to modern training methods which are basically operant conditioning.
(He also has fascinating interviews with veterans about their experiences. But the book sometimes feels like someone's dissertation, and at the end, he tries to make the same claim with violent media, which I don't think holds. Watching something is very different from doing something.)