The Domesticated Brain (27 page)

Our empathy is also two-faced. When we watch someone from our ethnic group receive an injection in the cheekbone, we wince and register more mirrored pain in our brains compared to watching the same pain inflicted on someone from another race.
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We can more easily watch others suffer if we do not identify with them. Taken to its logical conclusion, we can witness and inflict suffering upon others without feeling any remorse by dehumanizing them. This is one of the reasons why we refer to those we persecute as insects, parasites, animals, plagues, or any other term that demeans our enemy or victim as not being a member of the human race.

When the division between groups escalates into conflict, humans treat each other in the most terrible ways
imaginable. Whether it is political, economic or religious justification, there seem to be no boundaries when it comes to the suffering and cruelty we can inflict upon other humans when we regard them as the enemy. This has been borne out in countless conflicts in the modern era, where neighbours have turned on each other and committed atrocities that seem inconceivable. Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Syria are just a few examples where communities that had known decades of peaceful coexistence suddenly erupted into genocide as one group tried to obliterate another.

That ordinary people can readily commit extraordinary atrocities against their neighbours is puzzling. What can make people behave in such a way that one would never dream possible? One explanation is that our own moral code is not as robust as we would wish. We are not as independently minded as we think we are. Rather, we are easily manipulated by the influence of the groups to which we belong and conform to the will and consensus of the majority rather than stand up against persecution and prejudice. We readily submit to the commands of individuals we perceive to have authority in the group. Whether it is our compliance to fit with what others do and say, or our obedience to follow orders, we are remarkably malleable to the pressure of the group. Our desire to be good group members seems to trump our desire to be group members who do good.

This idea is supported by two classic studies that dominate the field of compliance. The first was Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies,
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conducted at Yale in the 1960s. Here, ordinary members of the public were recruited to take part in what they thought was a study of the effects of punishment
on memory. The were asked to ‘teach’ a student in another room to learn lists of words by punishing mistakes with increasing levels of electric shock, rising in thirty increments from an initial 15 volts to the final 450 volts. The first level was labelled ‘mild’ whereas the 25th level (375 volts) was labelled ‘danger, severe shock’. The final two levels of 435 and 450 volts had no label other than an ominous ‘XXX’. In reality, the student in the other room was a confederate of the experimenter and there were no electric shocks. The real purpose of the study was to determine how far someone would go in inflicting pain on another innocent individual when instructed to do so by an authority figure. Contrary to what the psychiatrists had predicted – they thought only about one in a hundred members of the public would obey such lethal orders – two out of three participants administered the maximum level of electric shock even though the student had been screaming and pleading to be let go. They were prepared to torture the other person to death. This is not to say most were sadists at heart; many became very distressed at the pain they were causing and yet continued to obey the orders.

The second classic study that contributed to our understanding of the way that individuals conform to group pressure is Stanford psychologist Phil Zimbardo’s prison study,
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conducted in 1971. In this mock scenario, students were recruited to take part in a two-week study of the effects of assigning the roles of prison guards and inmates in a makeshift prison built in the basement of the Stanford psychology department. The guards were told that they could not physically abuse the prisoners but they could create boredom,
frustration and a sense of fear. After six days, and on the insistence of a fellow psychologist, Zimbardo abandoned the study after the guards were abusing the prisoners to such an extent that it went beyond the realms of ethical procedure. Even though they had not been given instructions to directly harm the inmates, some of the guards began to torment and torture the ‘prisoners’ over and beyond the original instructions. In the same way that three-year-olds were prejudiced against classmates who wore a differently coloured T-shirt, adult students took their prejudices and acted them out in violence. For Zimbardo, who interprets his study as a demonstration of the lack of personal responsibility, it was not the individuals but rather the toxic nature of the ‘us’-and-‘them’ mentality of the situation that had created the right conditions for cruelty.

First they came …

When we become members of a group, we activate biases and prejudices. Even groups formed on the basis of the flip of a coin exhibit these attitudes and behaviours. We know this from the seminal work of Henri Tajfel, the former head of my department at Bristol, and subsequent studies that found the same basic automatic effects of prejudice. Before he became a psychologist, Tajfel had been a prisoner held by the Nazis during the Second World War. After the war, this experience of seeing how humans can treat and degrade their fellow man in the most appalling ways led him to spend the rest of his professional life studying the psychology of groups and how prejudice operates. Tajfel discovered that prejudice
does not have to be a deep-seated, historical hatred based on politics, economics or religion. These axes to grind can aggravate any bias, but they are not an essential factor in forming prejudice. Nor does it require authority figures dictating how group members should behave. You simply have to belong to a group. Tajfel showed that simply arbitrarily assigning Bristol schoolboys into two groups by the toss of a coin produced changes in the way members of each group treated each other.
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Even though the boys were all from the same class, those within the same group were more positive to each other but hostile to those in the other group. They went out of their way to help members of their own group, but not others.

After the war, those quick to criticize German citizens accused them of apathy because they did nothing to stop the Nazis’ persecution. However, another viewpoint is one that comes from the out-group perspective. The individuals targeted were from the minorities in society so the majority did not feel threatened – it was not their problem. Initially the process was slow, during the pre-war years, so there did not appear to be a major cause for concern. Then, once the final solution was under way, people ignored what was going on.

This group mentality echoes the famous statement made after the war by the German pastor Martin Niemöller, who had spoken out about the reluctance of citizens to prevent the atrocities when he said:

First they came for the communists,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the socialists,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists,

and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for me,

and there was no one left to speak for me.
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Other variations of this famous statement include the Catholics and of course the Jews, who became the focus of the ‘final solution’. In addition, gypsies, homosexuals and the mentally retarded were all considered substandard humans and outcasts by the majority of German society, so it was easier to ignore their plight.

Of course, the circumstances that led up to the Holocaust are extremely complicated and there were many contributing factors. It is easy with hindsight to pass judgement on others, but the ease with which people seemed to descend into moral depravity or at least an unwillingness to help the persecuted is a testament to the power of groups. Rather than dismissing a whole nation as apathetic, anti-Semitic or even evil, it is more sensible to look for explanations that address the way people behave once they identify with a group and consider themselves to be different.

Nothing has really changed, because history repeats itself with every ethnic conflict that arises around the world. If you take our built-in tendency to be members of a tribe and the prejudices that entails, and combine it with charismatic leaders who have an agenda to coerce the group to believe that they have a legitimate grievance against an out-group, then it is easier to understand how ordinary people with no political agenda and history of racism could turn on their
neighbours. Automaticity of prejudice explains how groups of otherwise peaceful citizens become violent mobs seeking out enemies of the state in hate-fuelled witch-hunts for those who have been identified as out-group members. The ease with which we take sides also explains why other countries are reluctant to get involved in these non-domestic disputes unless their interests are directly threatened. One of the most disturbing aspects of mankind is that ordinary people will turn on others who they regard as different. This is especially true when they are perceived to be in competition for resources – a bias that is exploited by political groups to stir up hatred.

These examples seem to suggest that we are all sheep, prepared to go with the crowd even when that means behaving in an immoral way. Another more plausible interpretation is that we can reinterpret our behaviour as not being bad at all, but rather for the good of the group. Even in Milgram’s shocking studies, participants were more likely to comply with the instructions if they were told that it was necessary for the success of the study rather than simply told that they had no choice. Zimbardo had instructed how the guards should behave in his scientific study. It may be that these examples of extreme obedience and compliance are less about people blindly following orders but rather persuading others to believe in the importance of what they are doing. This creates a diffusion of accountability, where the individual no longer feels responsible for their actions. As British social psychologists Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam, who repeated Zimbardo’s prison study in 2002, point out, ‘People do great wrong, not because they are unaware of
what they are doing but because they consider it to be right. This is possible because they actively identify with groups whose ideology justifies and condones the oppression and destruction of others.’
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Primate prejudice

It is often assumed that the prejudices that fuel group conflicts are attitudes that we have to learn. When you consider that for much of our civilization there has been constant conflict between groups of different economic, political and religious identities, then it is tempting to think that the prejudice that accompanies such conflicts must come from indoctrination. After all, national identity, political perspectives or religious beliefs are cultural inventions that we pass on to our children. And as we noted in the last chapter, we are inclined to believe what we are told. Surely we must learn to hate from others around us. However, when you look at other social animals you find evidence that prejudice is not uniquely human.

My colleague Laurie Santos at Yale wanted to know whether rhesus macaque monkeys were prejudiced.
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Like nearly all primates, macaques live in social groups with hierarchies that are relatively stable, with dominant individuals and familial ties. The macaques Santos studies live on the beautiful Caribbean island of Cayo Santiago, a sanctuary for animals that had previously been used in US laboratories. The island is now home to around 1,000 free-ranging macaques who have formed into six distinct groups. Their social order has been well-documented, but Santos and her
colleagues wanted to know if in-group members displayed evidence of prejudice against out-group members.

First they tested how individual macaques responded to static photographs of in-group and out-group members. When given a choice, macaques looked longer at the out-group individual in comparison to the in-group member. This was not because this out-group monkey was unfamiliar, because they also looked longer at a monkey who had previously spent much of its time as a member of the group before it switched allegiance to join another group. The most likely reason why they were paying extra attention to the out-group monkey was that they were being vigilant for a potential threat.

Not only do they look longer at out-group monkeys, they also associate them with unpleasant experiences. Using an ingenious technique to measure each monkey’s emotional response to pictures of in-and out-group members, they found that monkeys were quicker to associate positive images of delicious fruit to pictures of in-group members and negative images of spiders with out-group members. (Like humans, monkeys hate spiders.) Not only do they aggress against out-group members, they do not like them either.

Recognizing your own group is important, but why does it feel good to belong? Humans have evolved rationality and logic to calculate the benefits of living in groups as opposed to being alone. Why do we need to feel emotions towards others as well? Feelings and emotions are two sides of the same coin. Emotions are short-lived, outward responses to an event that everyone around can read, like a sudden burst of anger or fit of laughing, but feelings are the internal
lingering experiences that are not always for public consumption. We can have feelings without expressing them as emotions. They are part of our internal mental life. Without feelings, we would not be motivated to do the things we do. Feelings we get from others are some of the strongest motivations that we can have. Without feelings, there would be no point getting out of bed in the morning. Even pure logic needs feelings. When we solve a puzzle, it is not enough to know the answer – you have to feel good about it too. Why else would we bother?