I know the military desensitizes people, but do you think its capable of creating a sociopath?
Assuming that socios can be created. Psychos are people who have lost control of their mind completely, their emotions. Socios just have a disconnect from such things but also border into psycho tendencies. I don't believe socios can be created, but psychos can. Thus the military can make people psycho.
By the time someone's old enough to be in the military, aren't they a bit too mentally developed to be conditioned to that extent? Some institutions (not just the military) can cause people to exhibit more sociopathic traits, but I wouldn't say they can turn a human adult into a psycho. lol.
This makes me wanna research the psychodevelopment of child soldiers.
The human mind is plastic, it's constantly growing and rebuilding new neural pathways. Humans do not stop growing once they pass puberty, it is a continual process. This is how we can convert regular people into soldiers, train formerly innocent "good" people into beings capable of pulling a trigger. Conditioning works and is exploited in many ways by many people:schools, media, religions and other cults, militaries, extremist groups, etc and conditioning works because perceptions can be altered and manipulated. Perception is reality. and if you can manipulate perception you can manipulate ones reality. and perception is not difficult to manipulate.