In Abu Ghraib, and also more recently in the American prison of Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, military and penal operatives have suppressed their own more humane and empathetic social and emotional responses in committing violent acts. But this is not all about impulses and instincts to obey authority. In the face of potentially violent retribution from their leaders for disobeying or from their peers for rebelling, more deliberative thinking styles associated with self-interest and self-preservation will come into play. The military personnel may judge that they have little choice but to obey given that the consequences for themselves might be so severe. These responses are not irrational. Real-life examples show what the consequences are for those who do not fit willingly into a follower role. In the Abu Ghraib case, some evidence later emerged that authorisation for the abuse came from high up the chain of command and was state-sanctioned. The whistleblower, Joe Darby, was initially reassured that his identity would remain a secret – a promise that was allegedly broken by Donald Rumsfeld, the US secretary of defense at the time. Subsequently, Darby and his family had to be taken into military protection because of threats from others, including from neighbours who castigated him for betraying his fellow soldiers. Going against the actions of the herd, even for the most honourable of reasons, risks ostracism not only by authority figures but also by peers. Like David Kelly, the whistleblower from chapter 5, Joe Darby suffered severe consequences for refusing to comply with the role of obedient follower.
Obedience to authority operates in more benign contexts than prisons and wartime. Hierarchical relationships also characterise academic and scientific research groups, as explored in the previous chapter. Junior researchers are conditioned to follow in the footsteps of their supervisors and mentors, and to respect the authority of these individuals. When times are uncertain, and individuals lack confidence in their own opinions, there is comfort in conforming to the views of an academic ‘tribe’. Something like a safety-in-numbers effect is operating. There may also be an element of fear. Disagreeing with seniors may have negative consequences. As with the Emperor’s New Clothes, naked or not, from the perspective of pure self-interest it would be foolish to argue with the person in authority. So, obeying authority is not purely an unconscious response. Self-interested logic and deliberation come together with impulses and instincts to encourage followers to obey their leaders.
Leader–follower symbiosis
Copycats follow copycats, but who leads the copycat herds? Often, it is contrarians. Imitation, after all, requires at least two players – the imitators and the imitated, the followers and the leader – and they come together in a symbiotic relationship. Copycats need a leader, but a leader is nothing without their followers, which means that they must give those following them something in return for their loyalty – a sense of either belonging, identity or purpose. We have to be selective with our leaders because having too many would create confusion. But why do so few of us decide to lead and most of us prefer to follow? Leaders are characterised by less of a tendency to herd than the rest of us, for a range of reasons – economic, psychological and emotional. The contrarian behaviours associated with leadership are rarer in our world because we have evolved as social animals. So, copycat followers and contrarian leaders each have distinctive personality traits, and each is driven in different ways by the balance of fast System 1 emotion and slow System 2 reason. These interplays of fast and slow thinking also help to define the nature of the symbiosis between leaders and followers. Our leader–follower relationships can occasionally have devastating consequences, as we saw above, but mostly they come in much more benign forms. We can characterise these different relationships and the extent to which our decisions to join in are deliberative or instinctive and emotional by looking at the spectrum of groups we join – from clubs and congregations through to cults, as we shall see below.
Clubs
Clubs are groups of people with a common interest – in sports, books or losing weight, for example. Club members join together to share in an activity or enjoy activities together. From the perspective of mainstream economics, clubs are generally easy to explain as an example of rational self-interest. Each club member is helping themselves by collaborating with others. Clubs are a form of coalition and joining them and following the club’s leader is often a sensible thing to do. The leader helps the club members to achieve their goals together and more easily. Similarly, team leaders play an essential role. What is the incentive for individual members to exert effort if the outputs from joint efforts are to be shared equally? There is a free-rider problem – each self-interested individual will prefer to have an easy life and let the others do the work. Clubs and teams therefore need a leader to take responsibility for coordinating and incentivising the group, and discouraging shirking. Who should lead? One solution is to create the role of what economists call a residual claimant. The residual claimant is penalised (or rewarded) in some monetary or other form if the group output is less (or more) than satisfactory. This residual claimant takes the leadership role because they are offered additional private incentives to motivate other team members. Whether in workplaces or among student groups, successful teams are characterised by good leadership.21
Slimming clubs are one example from our domestic lives. When groups of overweight people gather together for diet tips, motivational talks and weekly weigh-ins, the club leader plays an essential role in coordinating the club’s activities and providing additional inspiration, often very successfully. The effectiveness of having this sort of mutually shared, relatively objective goal means that the relationship between leader and followers can be of the most productive and mutually beneficial type possible. Sports clubs and teams are similarly about the mutual pursuit of a goal that has the capacity to bring satisfaction to the group. Successful slimming clubs also illustrate some of the interactions between System 1 and System 2 thinking. Psychologists and behavioural economists have identified short-termist, impulsive System 1-style decision-making as a culprit in problems associated with overeating. These problems are intensified in obesogenic modern environments. Our metabolisms have evolved to suit a world in which food is scarce, but this is a mismatch with the abundance and easy availability of food stuffs, especially sugary treats, today. By collecting together in slimming clubs, we can overcome our instinctive impulses to overeat, and allow our System 2 thinking to dominate more easily. In ensuring this outcome, clubs work much better when a leader takes responsibility for motivating and coordinating their followers.
Clubs are not all about unadulterated self-interest, however. The Environmental Champions study mentioned above in the context of pro-environmental workplace behaviours also explored methods to improve environmental decision-making at home, using club-like groups as a forum to encourage pro-social behaviours. The researchers brought householders together via an ‘EcoTeams’ programme to look at common household habits and behaviours. At neighbourhood meetings, the Environmental Champion leaders briefed their local communities about better practices for energy use. As for the Environmental Champions scheme, the positive impacts of EcoTeams were significant: 16 per cent of the households involved went on to adopt green energy tariffs, 37 per cent installed energy-efficient light bulbs and 17 per cent reduced their domestic heating consumption. Whilst there was a degree of self-selection involved (people who were already environmentally aware were more likely to join), nonetheless the participants stated that the EcoTeams programme worked for them because it was focused on imparting and communicating practical knowledge via teamwork and collaboration.22
Congregations
Less objective and more subjective influences are crucial when questions of spirituality and identity enter the mix, for example in congregations. The comedian Danny Wallace’s non-religious Join Me movement was a good example. Wallace formed his congregation by putting an advert in Loot magazine inviting people to join his movement. A surprisingly large number of people signed up, even though they did
not really know what Join Me was about.23 Within a congregation, the goals of the group gathered together seem genuinely constructive in terms of building a community, even from the perspective of an outsider. Wallace argued that, in the case of Join Me, the risk-taking inherent in joining a group of strangers was also attractive. The positive outcome was membership of a welcoming community with a common purpose.
In a religious context, the relationship between leader and followers in a congregation represents a mix of the objective rewards from joining a group alongside a sense of belonging and purpose, linking to some of the drivers of collective herding that we first explored in chapter 2. When it comes to religious congregations, at least from the perspective of believers, faith transcends the simple division between calm, deliberative System 2 and instinctive, emotional System 1 thinking. Strongly held beliefs are not obviously objective but nor do they seem to satisfy any basic needs or instinct. Understanding the System 1 dimensions returns us to some of the Freudian insights about our unconscious motivations. We are captured by ineffable and transcendent beliefs, operating beyond either reason or instinct – whether they be about a belief in a God, gods or other spiritual beings, or a belief that there is no God at all. Religious feelings puzzled Freud. He struggled both to find religious sentiment in himself and to categorise religious feelings more generally. He recalls his correspondence with an unnamed friend, who wrote to him about religious sentiment and the way in which religious leaders can take hold of it:
[My friend] was sorry I had not properly appreciated the true source of religious sentiments . . . [It] consists in a peculiar feeling . . . a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, ‘oceanic’. This feeling . . . is a purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of religious energy which is seized upon by various Churches and religious systems, directed by them into particular channels, and doubtless also exhausted by them. One may . . . rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this oceanic feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion.24
We cannot easily understand religious and spiritual congregations as a product of self-interest, or by applying logic and analysis, but neuroscientists are starting to explore what drives different religious beliefs. A team of US neuroscientists used fMRI to scan the brains of fifteen committed Christians and fifteen nonbelievers asked to think about a range of religious propositions (the Virgin Birth, God and so on) and non-religious propositions. They found that emotional and reward-processing areas of the brain, as well as areas associated with cognitive conflict, were engaged more strongly by religious thinking, while thinking about non-religious facts engaged areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with memory retrieval.25 This evidence suggests that religious beliefs are more likely than non-religious beliefs to reflect instincts and emotions, but logic and reason have a role too. Overall, religious congregations are unified by interplays between System 1 and System 2 thinking.
Ultimately, joining congregations and other groups gives many people a sense of an existence that is beyond the individual, and even beyond the groups themselves. By joining a religious congregation believers can feel connected with a faith community stretching across the world, and religious leaders play a key role in promulgating the message. In congregations, the hierarchy separating leader from follower is less clear than in secular contexts because ultimately the congregation is led by a spiritual goal and/or a belief in some higher being. As Gustave Le Bon observed in his description of the psychological crowd,
[such] crowds are about the realm of sentiment . . . in the case of every thing that belongs to the realm of sentiment – religion, politics, morality, the affections and antipathies . . . [in the crowd] the most eminent men seldom surpass the standard of the most ordinary individuals . . .26
Cults
Unlike congregations, which are often driven by benign purposes, cults illustrate some of the most perverse aspects of the symbiosis between copycat followers and contrarian leaders. In everyday language, the word ‘cult’ is often used in a pejorative sense – though whether we believe a religious organisation is a cult or a genuine religion is a matter of subjective opinion. One feature of cults that distinguishes them from conventional religions is that there is often a sinister relationship between the leader and his (rarely her) followers. The leader is perceived to be both mortal and divine, even though to an outsider he is just another human being.
We see this most starkly in the ancient world, when superstitions and beliefs had a powerful pull on ordinary people and there were stronger social hierarchies separating leaders from followers. One example is the ancient Egyptians’ embracement of the ‘cult of the living king’. During coronation rituals, pharaohs were accorded ntr, or godly status, via the union of their human self and the royal ka, or soul. When pharaohs’ ntr and ka were united they became sons of gods. Subsequent rituals reinforced this status, including ones in which the pharaoh would make offerings to his own deified self.27 Illustrating the contrarian, maverick natures of many leaders, the pharaoh Akhenaten developed the cult of king-worship to new levels, with the monotheistic sun-worshipping cult of Aten the sun-disk at the centre.28
Akhenaten believed himself to be the son of Aten and encouraged Egyptians to worship him as the god’s representative on Earth, with statues of Aten replaced by images of Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti, his wife. Akhenaten mandated himself as a god to replace Egyptians’ traditional polytheistic worship of the gods. He closed temples, eradicated priests and removed all references to old gods from places of worship and monuments. Akhenaten was authoritarian, and exerted his leadership role dictatorially. Ordinary Egyptians suffered great hardship and short life expectancies, and many whose names referred to other gods were obliged to change them. Whilst Akhenaten’s reign was relatively short-lived – he probably reigned for just seventeen years or so – the historical significance of his cult continues today: it was the first known monotheistic religion.
Figure 8. Leading the cult of Aten: Akenhaten worshipping the sun-disk.
Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple, introduced in chapter 2, is a modern example of a sinister cult with a charismatic leader. Many would claim that Scientology is another. Its figurehead is a single hypnotic leader, David Miscavige, and it uses the cult of celebrity to build its profile through the prominent endorsements of the likes of Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kirstie Alley. In common with religious cults, it veils itself in secrecy and exclusivity, drawing on an untestable mythology about its origins. While Scientology claims a basis in science and psychological evidence, to outsiders it seems to mostly be a product of an imbalance between emotion and deliberation – with emotion and instinct operating unilaterally, and without the moderating influence of reason.29
Overall, if clubs are about the dominance of System 2 thinking, and congregations are a balance between System 1 and System 2 thinking, cults are much more about a System 1 emotional response. Cult leaders exploit their followers’ insecurities by encouraging them to sever their ties with friends, families and communities.30 Cult followers are seeking comfort and reassurance in the face of fear and uncertainty, a response we have evolved to help us cope with the stresses of life both large and small. For cult leaders, their followers are essential to their power and existence. Without followers, the cult would not exist.
Modern idolatry
The faith placed in a cult leader often leads to terrible outcomes. A more benign version is the hero worship common in our everyday lives, manifested in fans’ adulation of stars of stage and screen. This again is a leader–follower symbiotic relationship. The incentives for the leaders – the pop stars and teen idols – are clear: they accumulate money, fame and glory from their fans’ attention. But many of us cannot fathom the reasons for fans’ adulation. Beatlemania is a classic example of hero worship. It emerged in the UK in 1963 and
reached an apex in 1964 when around 73 million viewers watched The Beatles’ performance on The Ed Sullivan Show. In person, fans exhibited manic, hysterical behaviour – screaming, swooning and throwing their knickers at the group.31 In his book Beatlemania, the journalist Martin Creasy writes that, at one concert, fifty collapsing girls were carried out within five minutes, sobbing hysterically. At another concert in Glasgow, groups of over 3,000 fans got caught in a frenzy, colliding with each other in the melee.32
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