What We Call Behaviour

Panem Under Pressure: trauma, power, identity and moral choice in The Hunger Games

Gale Hawthorne is easy to reduce to the worst thing associated with him.

By the end of The Hunger Games trilogy, he has helped develop a weapon built around a particularly brutal logic: an initial attack draws people towards the wounded, and a second strike targets those who come to help. When a version of that strategy is eventually used outside President Snow’s mansion, Primrose Everdeen is among those killed.

It becomes tempting, retrospectively, to read Gale’s entire character as though this moment was inevitable, but that version of Gale is incomplete. This is also the boy who helps keep two families alive in District 12. The young man who gets hundreds of people out when the district is destroyed. Someone capable of loyalty, courage, affection and considerable personal sacrifice. He does not begin the story indifferent to human suffering, and that is precisely what makes him interesting.

The psychological question is not how a cruel person eventually came to support cruel methods. It is how somebody who is capable of caring deeply about other people can gradually become willing to exclude certain people from the circle in which that care applies.

Albert Bandura’s work on moral disengagement provides one way into that question. Bandura (1999) argued that people do not necessarily need to abandon their moral standards before participating in harmful behaviour. Instead, psychological mechanisms can allow those standards to be selectively disengaged. Harm can be reframed as serving a worthy purpose; responsibility can be displaced or diffused; consequences can be minimised; and those harmed can increasingly be understood as deserving, culpable or somehow less worthy of moral concern. Gale’s development increasingly contains elements of this logic.

His hatred of the Capitol is not irrational. The Capitol maintains the poverty in which he grows up. Its political system takes children from their families and makes their deaths a public spectacle. His father dies in the mines of a district whose labour exists to serve people elsewhere. Later, Gale watches his home burn. His anger has an object, a history and a reason, but justified anger does not guarantee justified conclusions.

As the rebellion progresses, Gale’s definition of who counts as the enemy appears to widen. The distinction between the people who operate the Capitol’s machinery and the people trapped somewhere inside that machinery becomes increasingly difficult for him to sustain. That is where Gale becomes dangerous. Not because he suddenly stops caring about people, but because he increasingly decides which people count.

The making of an enemy

Gale does not need to be taught that the Capitol is his enemy. He grows up with the evidence around him. His district is poor while the Capitol consumes in excess. His father dies in the mines. Every year, children are selected for the Games. Later, District 12 itself is destroyed, leaving Gale to help hundreds of people escape the place that had been their home. His anger is therefore not created by District 13. What District 13 gives that anger is structure, legitimacy and purpose.

McCauley and Moskalenko (2008) argue that political radicalisation is often better understood through the dynamics of intergroup conflict than through assumptions about something inherently unusual within the individual. Across the mechanisms they identify, perceived threat to a group and increasing identification with that group can contribute to progressively more extreme attitudes and behaviour.

That distinction is useful for Gale. He does not arrive in District 13 as somebody searching for a cause. He already has one. What he finds is an environment in which the qualities he has developed in District 12 — anger, protectiveness, practical thinking, willingness to take risks and a fierce distinction between us and them — suddenly have military value and as the conflict intensifies, “the Capitol” begins to mean more than the government responsible for his oppression. It begins to absorb the people inside it.

This is where dehumanisation becomes relevant. Haslam (2006) describes dehumanisation not simply as openly declaring another group less than human, but as a broader psychological process through which aspects of another person’s humanity can become less visible or less relevant to how we think about them. It can occur through ordinary social-cognitive processes, particularly when people are understood primarily as members of a category rather than as individuals. Gale increasingly reasons in categories.

If someone is part of the Capitol’s operation, their individual circumstances matter less. Whether they chose their position, whether they are themselves oppressed, or whether they have meaningful power within the system becomes secondary to the fact that they are standing on the other side.

Katniss repeatedly complicates that category in ways Gale does not. She has known Cinna. She has been cared for by people whose accents, clothes and lives are unmistakably Capitol. She has witnessed avoxes — people punished, enslaved and rendered powerless by the same government supposedly represented by everyone who lives there. She gradually gains evidence that living inside an oppressive system is not the same thing as choosing to uphold it and that is not only the people living outside of the Capitol that are victim to the oppression within it. 

Gale has less access to those contradictions. That does not make his conclusions inevitable. Nor does it absolve him of them. It does, however, help explain how a boy whose earliest motivation is keeping vulnerable people alive can later become increasingly comfortable with a worldview in which the identity of the person harmed matters less than whether their death might help defeat the enemy.

The danger of constructing an enemy category is not simply that we come to hate the people inside it. It is that eventually we may stop asking who, exactly, we have put inside it.

When the individual becomes the soldier

District 13 does not look like the Capitol. There are no extravagant costumes, elaborate parties or cultivated displays of individuality. People wear the same grey clothes. Their days are organised around schedules, work assignments, meals and military purpose. Food is rationed. Individual preference is repeatedly subordinated to what the community requires.

At first glance, this appears to be the opposite of the Capitol’s excess.

Psychologically, however, District 13 raises a different question about identity: what happens when the individual becomes increasingly understood through the group?

Traditional theories of deindividuation suggested that immersion in a group, anonymity and reduced self-awareness could weaken a person’s individual identity and restraints. Later research complicated that account considerably. Postmes and Spears (1998), reviewing 60 independent studies, found little evidence for a general deindividuated state in which people simply become less controlled or more antisocial. Instead, behaviour was better explained by increased conformity to the particular norms of the group.

The Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects developed by Reicher, Spears and Postmes makes that distinction especially useful. When personal identity becomes less salient, people do not necessarily lose a sense of who they are. A social identity can become more important instead. The question shifts from What do I believe? towards Who are we, and what do people like us do?

District 13 is almost built to make that collective identity visible. The clothes are interchangeable. The schedules are assigned. People are given functions. The rebellion provides a clear in-group — us — and an equally clear enemy — the Capitol. And Gale enters that environment with qualities District 13 can use.

This is not a weak or passive young man waiting for somebody else to tell him what to think. Gale has already demonstrated extraordinary courage, initiative and leadership. When District 12 is destroyed, he is capable of getting hundreds of people away from an active attack. He knows how to survive, how to organise and how to act under pressure.

District 13 does not need to manufacture those qualities. It needs to give them a new purpose.

The boy who once used his strength primarily to feed and protect the people immediately around him is increasingly given opportunities to use that same strength as part of a military collective. His anger becomes useful. His tactical thinking becomes useful. His willingness to make difficult decisions becomes useful and usefulness brings something District 12 could rarely offer him: status, recognition and power.

That makes Gale’s relationship with District 13 more complicated than straightforward indoctrination. He is not simply stripped of his beliefs and handed new ones. The institution takes characteristics that already exist — his anger at the Capitol, protectiveness towards his own people, capacity for violence when necessary and belief that survival sometimes requires brutal choices — and places them inside an environment where those characteristics are not merely understandable; they are rewarded. This may be one of the more dangerous forms of group influence because it does not necessarily feel like somebody is changing you. It can feel like somebody has finally recognised what you are good at.

Gale does not have to stop being Gale Hawthorne when he enters District 13. He only has to become increasingly convinced that being a soldier of the rebellion is the most important part of Gale Hawthorne to be. 

When the enemy becomes a person

One of the clearest differences between Gale and Katniss is not that one has suffered and the other has not. It is who their suffering has forced them to meet.

Katniss enters the Games already hating the Capitol as a system. But the closer she gets to that system, the harder it becomes to imagine everybody inside it as interchangeable. Cinna is Capitol. Her prep team are Capitol. Avoxes live within the Capitol while being brutally punished and denied basic freedom by it, and she recognises one of them. Later, Plutarch gives her reason to believe he is not what he seems, then members of the propo team leave the Capitol and join the rebellion despite the risk involved. Again and again, Katniss is confronted with people who complicate the category she has been given. That matters psychologically.

Gordon Allport’s work on the contact hypothesis proposed that meaningful contact between members of different groups can reduce prejudice under particular conditions. Decades later, Pettigrew and Tropp’s (2006) meta-analysis of more than 500 studies found that intergroup contact was generally associated with lower prejudice, including in situations that did not perfectly meet Allport’s original conditions. Contact does not automatically remove hostility. Nor is Katniss participating in some neat psychological intervention. Her relationships with Capitol citizens are shaped by power, exploitation, fear and war.

But those relationships give her something Gale has much less access to:counterexamples.  It becomes harder to say Capitol people are the enemy when you have loved somebody from the Capitol. Harder to believe everyone inside the system freely supports it when you have met people who were mutilated by that same system. Harder to reduce a population to a political category when individual faces keep returning to mind.

Gale’s experience develops differently. He knows the Capitol primarily through what it has done to him and to the people he loves. Hunger. The Games. The mines. The destruction of District 12. By the time he reaches District 13, the Capitol is already associated with almost every major source of threat in his life, and then he enters an environment where that broad category is reinforced rather than complicated.

This becomes particularly visible when Gale treats even low-status Capitol workers as part of the enemy simply because their labour contributes to the Capitol system. But proximity to power is not the same thing as possessing power. The person cleaning a floor in an authoritarian state may be supporting the functioning of that state in the most literal sense, while simultaneously having almost no meaningful ability to challenge it. They may themselves be coerced, impoverished, punished or excluded.

Katniss has encountered enough people inside the Capitol to understand that distinction instinctively. Gale increasingly does not appear interested in making it. This is where the difference between their experiences becomes more important than simply asking who suffered more.

Trauma does not produce one predictable worldview. Oppression does not reliably make people either compassionate or cruel. Experiences interact with relationships, information, opportunities, group belonging and the meanings people construct around what happened to them. Two people can survive the same oppressive state and learn different lessons from it.

Katniss increasingly learns: The system is the enemy, but not everybody trapped inside it is the system.

Gale increasingly moves towards something more dangerous: If the system must be destroyed, the people inside it may become acceptable collateral.

Neither position emerges from nowhere, but only one requires the individual person to disappear behind the category they have been placed in.

When moral disengagement becomes strategy

By the time Gale begins contributing to military strategy in District 13, his thinking has moved beyond anger. It has become operational. The most disturbing example is the two-stage bomb design developed with Beetee: an initial explosion creates casualties, then a second blast targets the people who move in to help the wounded. The logic is brutally efficient. It is also psychologically revealing.

Bandura’s theory of moral disengagement helps explain how people can participate in harmful behaviour without necessarily abandoning the belief that they are moral people. One mechanism is moral justification: harmful actions are reframed as necessary in the service of a larger, worthy goal. Another is the minimisation or displacement of responsibility, where attention shifts away from the person harmed and towards the system, order or objective that supposedly required the action.

Gale does not need to enjoy the suffering caused by the weapon for this process to matter. He only needs to decide that the suffering is acceptable because the outcome matters more. 

The problem with the bomb is not simply that it can kill “the enemy.” It is designed around a predictable human response to suffering: people move towards the injured. Medics move towards them. Friends move towards them. Family members move towards them. People whose only involvement in the first attack may be that they tried to help. The strategy therefore turns compassion itself into a vulnerability.

And that is where Gale’s earlier narrowing of the category of innocence becomes especially consequential. Once the people on the other side are understood primarily as part of the Capitol, the individual identities of those approaching the wounded become less relevant than the tactical advantage their presence creates.

Who are they?

Did they choose to be there?

Are they soldiers, medical workers, coerced civilians or children?

The weapon does not ask. Neither does the logic that makes it acceptable. This is why Prim’s death matters so profoundly to Gale’s character even if he never intended it. Coin chooses to use the weapon in that context. Gale does not knowingly target Prim. The responsibility for that decision is not identical. But Prim’s death reveals the moral danger already built into the strategy: once a tactic is designed to disregard the distinction between combatant and rescuer, the identity of the person caught in the second blast can become almost irrelevant to the mechanism itself.

Gale wanted Prim protected. He had promised Katniss that he would help protect her family. And yet he helped create a weapon whose effectiveness depended on not stopping to ask whether the person running towards the injured might be somebody like Prim. Gale was not aiming for Prim, the problem was he didn’t care who he was aiming for as long as it served the needs of the rebellion and Katniss knows all too well how an attitude that the ends justify the means can kill many Prim’s, whether you want it to or not. Gale needed only to become sufficiently comfortable with a way of thinking in which someone else’s Prim could be an acceptable price. That is the danger of moral disengagement. It does not always make people cruel. Sometimes it makes cruelty feel necessary and within that necessity, one could find themselves okay with killing the exact type of person in the supposed enemy territory that they swore to protect within their own circle. 

When liberation starts to resemble domination

Gale wants the Capitol defeated. There is little reason to doubt that. His anger is rooted in genuine oppression, and the future he initially appears to want is one in which the districts are no longer starved, exploited or forced to surrender their children for entertainment.

The more difficult question is what he becomes willing to reproduce in order to get there. This is where The Hunger Games begins to resemble the political warning at the centre of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Revolution does not automatically produce liberation simply because the people taking power once suffered under the previous regime. A movement can begin by opposing oppression and gradually adopt the same underlying logic: some lives matter more than others, violence becomes justified by political necessity, and power becomes acceptable when it belongs to the “right” people.

District 13 is not the Capitol in different clothes. There are important differences between them, and reducing the two systems to equivalents would flatten the politics of the story. But Collins repeatedly gives us reasons to notice similarities.

District 13 regulates appearance, schedules, food, work and information. Individual preference is routinely subordinated to collective necessity. Coin increasingly concentrates political authority while presenting that authority as temporary and necessary for the revolution. And eventually she proposes repeating the Capitol’s most defining atrocity — a Hunger Games involving Capitol children — only now reframed as justice rather than oppression. The victims have changed. The reasoning has not changed enough. Gale’s development sits uncomfortably inside that transition.

He does not appear to want children placed in arenas, nor does the trilogy give him a vote on Coin’s proposal. But by this stage his own moral reasoning has increasingly accepted a principle on which such a proposal depends: innocence can become negotiable when somebody belongs to the group held responsible for oppression. That is what makes the trajectory frightening.

The revolutionary does not need to wake up one morning and decide to become the tyrant. They only need to make a series of exceptions. This action is necessary. These casualties are unavoidable. Those people benefit from the system. They would do the same to us. We cannot afford compassion until we have won.

Each individual decision can be defended as temporary. Taken together, however, they can begin constructing the moral architecture of the very system the revolution promised to replace. And Gale is particularly vulnerable to that logic because District 13 does not ask him to abandon the qualities that once made him heroic. It redirects them. His willingness to act becomes military decisiveness. His protectiveness becomes fierce in-group loyalty. His anger becomes ideological certainty. His ability to make difficult choices becomes a willingness to accept increasingly devastating consequences.

The same young man who leads people away from a burning District 12 can therefore also contribute to strategies that make other civilians expendable. Those versions of Gale do not contradict one another. They demonstrate how much the boundaries around our compassion matter. Perhaps that is one of the bleakest lessons shared by Animal Farm and The Hunger Games: overthrowing an oppressor does not guarantee that we have rejected oppression itself.

Sometimes the hardest part of revolution is not defeating the people who held power. It is refusing to inherit their logic once the power becomes ours.

The person is not the worst thing they have done

One of the easiest ways to read Gale is retrospectively. Once we know where his story leads, earlier moments can begin to look like warning signs. His anger becomes evidence that he was always dangerous. His harshness becomes proof that cruelty was inevitable. The weapon becomes the only lens through which everything before it is interpreted. But that is too simple.

Gale is also brave. He is deeply loyal to his family. He takes on adult responsibilities young. He hunts, provides, protects, organises and, when District 12 is destroyed, helps hundreds of people escape an active attack. Those actions matter too.

Psychologically, this is where a broader understanding of personhood becomes important. Human beings are capable of holding contradictory traits, values and behaviours at the same time. Someone can be compassionate in one context and ruthless in another. Protective towards one group and indifferent towards another. Capable of courage and capable of causing harm. Recognising that complexity is not the same thing as refusing judgement. Gale’s later choices still matter. His willingness to accept civilian casualties still matters. The moral logic behind the bomb still matters. But if we reduce him entirely to those acts, we reproduce the same kind of simplification that runs throughout his own thinking: one category becomes enough to explain the whole person.

He does this to the Capitol. The reader can easily do it to him. And both are mistakes.

Perhaps the more difficult task is to hold several truths at once. Gale is a victim of oppression. Gale is shaped by war. Gale is capable of extraordinary courage. Gale is capable of moral disengagement. Gale loves people deeply. Gale becomes willing to treat other people as expendable. None of those statements cancels the others. That is what makes his character so uncomfortable.

He is not a warning about what happens when a bad person gets angry. He is a warning about what can happen when a person with understandable anger, genuine strengths and real reasons for grievance begins narrowing the boundaries of who deserves their compassion and that is much harder to dismiss, because it asks the reader to consider not only what Gale becomes, but how easily moral certainty can make complexity disappear.

Understanding is not absolution

Gale’s story is compelling because there is no single moment in which he becomes somebody else. There is no clean dividing line between the boy hunting outside District 12 and the young man helping to design weapons for a revolution. The same strengths remain visible throughout: courage, loyalty, intelligence, endurance, willingness to act. What changes is the moral framework around them.

Trauma, oppression and war help explain that shift. They shape what Gale fears, what he values, who he trusts and how he comes to understand violence. District 13 then gives those experiences a collective language and a military purpose. But explanation is not absolution.

To say that Gale is shaped by his environment is not to say that his choices are inevitable. Katniss, Peeta and Haymitch are all shaped by the same oppressive world in different ways, and none of them emerge from it unchanged. Their differences remind us that suffering does not dictate one moral outcome. Gale’s tragedy may be that his desire to protect people never entirely disappears. His definition of which people deserve protection becomes narrower.

That is why his character is more interesting than either “hero” or “villain” allows. He saves lives. He contributes to strategies that destroy them. He can love Prim and still help create a weapon whose logic makes somebody else’s Prim expendable. Those contradictions do not need to be resolved before we can judge his actions. They need to be held together. Because perhaps the most unsettling thing Gale Hawthorne tells us about oppression is not simply that victims can become perpetrators. It is that people can remain recognisably themselves — loving, courageous, wounded, loyal — while gradually becoming capable of things an earlier version of themselves might once have found unthinkable. That is precisely why looking beneath behaviour matters; so that we understand how somebody arrived there well enough to recognise the road before someone else follows it.

Panem Under Pressure

Panem Under Pressure is an ongoing series exploring trauma, power, identity and moral choice across The Hunger Games. Rather than diagnosing fictional characters, it uses psychological and sociological research as a lens through which to examine the choices they make, the systems surrounding them, and the different people they become under pressure.

Next in Panem Under Pressure:

Katniss Everdeen: What Surviving Does to the Survivor

References & Further Reading

Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209.

Haslam, N. (2006). Dehumanization: An integrative review. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(3), 252–264.

McCauley, C., & Moskalenko, S. (2008). Mechanisms of political radicalization: Pathways toward terrorism. Terrorism and Political Violence, 20(3), 415–433.

Pettigrew, T. F., & Tropp, L. R. (2006). A meta-analytic test of intergroup contact theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), 751–783.

Postmes, T., & Spears, R. (1998). Deindividuation and antinormative behavior: A meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 123(3), 238–259.

Reicher, S. D., Spears, R., & Postmes, T. (1995). A social identity model of deindividuation phenomena. European Review of Social Psychology, 6(1), 161–198.

Orwell, G. (1945). Animal Farm. Secker & Warburg.

Collins, S. (2008). The Hunger Games. Scholastic Press.

Collins, S. (2009). Catching Fire. Scholastic Press.

Collins, S. (2010). Mockingjay. Scholastic Press.