| Good question, but seriously, no. You can actually test that hypothesis yourself very easily. Go look at some of the more gory scenes from Saw, or the Aliens movies. If you're like many typical internet people they won't even phase you. Now go and find some of the typical rotten.com / liveleak content and see how much you can stomach of that. Likely not a lot and not easily at all. Knowing that something is real makes a MASSIVE difference. Further, being on the ground with a gun, facing armed and active enemies² makes you more likely and less inhibited to recklessly kill people, because while there may be consequences to killing, the consequence to being killed is FAR greater. Soldiers need to be trained to not go full auto with their rifles for a reason. ² Just a note to make clear that i edited that part in as clarification. vvvv For one, that book doesn't seem to cover direct vs remote combat, which is the comparison i was making, and further: Read the reviews underneath. |
It's actually the exact opposite. Seeing the person you're about to kill makes it harder to pull the trigger (given a normal psychology, for whatever that's worth). If you're interested, the book linked to below goes into great detail about this.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0316040932/