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 a

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.