Bruce Hood - The Domesticated Brain - A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)

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. 32We 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, 33conducted 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, 34conducted 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. 35Even 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. 36

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.