What exactly explains mobs emboldened by the smell of blood?

If you had asked a Western progressive Palestinian activist last week, before the attacks, if they would support Hamas massacring a thousand civilians, including women and children, nearly all would have unambiguously answered, “No.”

But, after Hamas did exactly that, a large fraction of Palestinian activists not only didn’t publicly condemn the massacre, but instead embraced and justified the massacre, and many even agitated for more of it.

I’m struggling to fully understand this (sick) psychological phenomenon, but the fact that Hamas appeared to have had a big “win” and was “strong” engendered a sudden rise in confidence in activists’ righteous beliefs in the evil of the unclean out group (namely Jews), allowing them to hold murderous beliefs they would have rejected a week before.

On the one hand, this “smell of blood” mob mentality is familiar.

But I want to make sense of it in terms of our human psychology and the dynamics of social groups. How EXACTLY, consistent with the work in my EXPRESSLY HUMAN, does this work?

More to come…