Idiot Brain

by Dean Burnett

  Groupthink is only part of it. Take a controversial subject matter, like the legalization of cannabis (something that’s a “hot button” issue at the time of writing). If you took 30 people off the street (with their permission) and asked them their thoughts about legalizing cannabis, you’d likely get a range of opinions, from, “Cannabis is evil and you should be locked up for even smelling it,” to, “Cannabis is great and should be given away with children’s meals,” with most falling somewhere between these two extremes.

  If you put these people together in one group and ask them to come up with a consensus on cannabis legalization, you’d logically expect something that is the “average” of everyone’s individual opinion, such as: “Cannabis shouldn’t be legalized but possession should only be a minor offence.” But, as ever, logic and brain don’t really see eye to eye. Groups will often adopt a more extreme conclusion than individual members would if alone.

  Groupthink is part of it, but we also want to be liked by the group, and achieve high status in it. So Groupthink produces a consensus that members agree with, but they’ll also agree with it more strongly, to impress the group. But then others do that too, and everyone ends up trying to outdo each other.

  “So we agree cannabis shouldn’t be legalized. Possession of any amount of it should be an arrestable offence.”

  “Arrestable? No, guaranteed jail, ten years for possession!”

  “Ten years? I say life imprisonment!”

  “Life? You hippy! A death sentence, at the very least.”

  This phenomenon is known as group polarization, where people in groups end up expressing views that are more extreme than those they have when alone.¶ It’s very common and warps group decision-making in countless circumstances. It can be limited or prevented by allowing criticism and/or outside opinions to be aired, but the powerful desire for group harmony usually prevents this by excluding detractors and rational analysis from discussions. This is alarming, because countless decisions that affect millions of lives are made by like-minded groups who don’t allow outside input. Governments, the military, corporate boardrooms—what makes these immune to making ridiculous conclusions resulting from group polarization?

  Nothing, nothing at all. A lot of the baffling or worrying policies pursued by governments could be explained by group polarization.

  Bad decisions by the powerful often result in angry mobs, another example of the alarming effects being part of a group can have on the brain. People are very good at perceiving the emotional states of others; if you’ve ever wandered into a room where a couple have just had a fight, you can palpably feel the “tense atmosphere” even though nobody is saying anything. This isn’t telepathy or anything “sci-fi,” just our brains being attuned to picking up this sort of information through various cues. But when surrounded by people in the same intense emotional state, this can heavily influence our own, hence we’re far more likely to laugh when part of an audience. As always, this can go too far.

  Under certain conditions, the highly emotional or aroused state of those around us actually suppresses our individuality. We need a dense or closely unified group that allows us anonymity, that is highly aroused (experiencing strong emotions, not . . . something seedier), and with a focus on external events, so as to avoid thinking about the group’s actions. Angry mobs and riots are perfect for creating these circumstances, and when these conditions are met we undergo a process known as “deindividuation,”33 which is the scientific term for “mob mentality.”

  With deindividuation, we lose our usual ability to suppress impulses and think rationally; we become more prone to detecting and responding to the emotional states of others, but lose our typical concern for being judged by them. These in conjunction make people behave very destructively when part of a mob. Exactly how or why is difficult to say; it’s hard to study this process scientifically. You rarely get an angry mob in a laboratory unless they’ve heard about your grave robbing and are there to put an end to your ungodly efforts to raise the dead.

  I’m not mean, but my brain is

  (The neurological properties that make us treat others badly)

  Thus far, it seems the human brain is geared towards forming relationships and communicating. Our world should be nothing but people holding hands, singing happy songs about rainbows and ice-cream. However, human beings are frequently terrible to each other. Violence, theft, exploitation, sexual assault, imprisonment, torture, murder—these aren’t rare; your typical politician has probably indulged in many. Even genocide, attempting to wipe out an entire population or race, is familiar enough to warrant a dedicated term.

  Edmund Burke famously said, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” But it’s probably even easier for evil if good men are willing to pitch in and help.

  But why would they do it? There are numerous explanations regarding cultural, environmental, political, historical factors, but the workings of the brain also contribute. At the Nuremberg trials, where those responsible for the Holocaust were questioned, the most common defence was they were “only following orders.” A feeble excuse, right? Surely, no normal person would do such awful things, no matter who told them to? But, alarmingly, it seems they just might.

  Stanley Milgram, a Yale professor, studied this “only obeying orders” claim in an infamous experiment. It involved two subjects, in separate rooms, where one had to ask the other questions. If a wrong answer was given, the questioner had to administer an electric shock. For every wrong answer, the voltage was increased.34 Here’s the catch: there were no shocks. The subject answering questions was an actor, deliberately getting things wrong and giving increasingly pained sounds of distress whenever a “shock” was delivered.

  The real subject of the experiment was the questioner. The set-up meant they believed they were essentially torturing a person. Subjects invariably showed discomfort or distress over this, and objected or asked to stop. The experimenter always said the experiment was important so they must continue. Disconcertingly, 65 percent of people did, continuing to inflict intense pain on someone purely because they were told to.

  The researchers didn’t trawl the maximum security cells of prisons for volunteers; everyone who took part was a normal everyday person, who was surprisingly willing to torture another person. They might have objected to it, but they still did it, which is the more relevant point for the recipient.

  This study has had numerous follow-ups that provide more specific information.# People were more obedient if the experimenter was in the room, rather than communicating via telephone. If subjects saw other “subjects” refuse to obey, they were more likely to disobey themselves, suggesting that people are willing to be rebels, just not the first rebel. Experimenters wearing lab coats and conducting the experiments in professional-looking offices also increased obedience.

  The consensus is that we’re willing to obey legitimate authority figures, who are seen as responsible for consequences of actions they demand. A remote person who is visibly disobeyed is harder to consider authoritative. Milgram proposed that, in social situations, our brains adopt one of two states: an autonomous state (where we make our own decisions) and an agentic state, where we allow others to dictate our actions, although this hasn’t yet been reliably identified in any brain-scanning studies.

  One idea is that, in evolutionary terms, a tendency to obey unthinkingly is more efficient; stopping to fight about who’s in charge every time a decision needs to be made is very impractical, so we’re left with a tendency to obey authority despite any reservations. It’s no great stretch to imagine corrupt but charismatic leaders exploiting this.

  However, people are regularly horrible to others without orders from some tyrannical authority. Often it’s one group of people making life miserable for another, for various reasons. The “group” element is important. Our brains compel us to form groups, and turn on those who threaten them.

  Scientists have studied
what it is about the brain that makes us so hostile to anyone who dares disrupt our group. One study by Morrison, Decety and Molenberghs suggested that when subjects contemplate being part of a group, the brain shows activation in a neural network composed of cortical midline structures, temporo-parietal junctions and anterior temporal gyrus.35 These regions have been shown repeatedly to be highly active in contexts where interaction and thinking of others is required, meaning some have dubbed this particular network the “social brain.”**36

  Another particularly intriguing finding was that when subjects had to process stimuli that involved being part of a group, activity was seen in a network including the ventral medial prefrontal and anterior and dorsal cingulate cortex. Other studies have linked these areas to processing of the “personal self,”37 suggesting considerable overlap between self-perception and group membership. This means people derive much of their identity from the groups they belong to.

  One implication of this is that any threat to our group is essentially a threat to “ourselves,” which explains why anything that poses a danger to our group’s way of doing things is met with such hostility. And the main threat to most groups is . . . other groups.

  Fans of rival soccer teams engage in violent clashes so often they’re practically a continuation of the actual game. Warfare between rival criminal gangs is a staple of gritty crime dramas. Any modern political contest quickly becomes a battle between one side and another, where attacking the opposition is more important than explaining why anyone should vote for you. The Internet has just made things worse: post even a slightly critical or controversial opinion online about anything anyone finds important (for example, the Star Wars prequels weren’t that bad, actually) and you’ll have an inbox clogged with hate mail before you can put the kettle on. I write blogs for an international media platform, so trust me on this.

  Some may think prejudices come from long periods of exposure to the attitudes that shape them; we aren’t born with an inherent dislike of certain types of people, it must need the slow drip-drip of (metaphorical) bile over the years to wear down someone’s principles and make them hate others unreasonably. That is often true. It can also happen very quickly.

  The infamous Stanford Prison experiment, run by a team led by Philip Zimbardo, looked at the psychological consequences of the prison environment on guards and prisoners.38 A realistic prison set was constructed in the Stanford University basements, and subjects were designated either prisoners or guards.

  The guards became incredibly cruel, being rude, aggressive, abusive and hostile to prisoners. The prisoners ended up thinking of the guards (quite reasonably) as unhinged sadists, so they organized a rebellion, barricading themselves in their rooms, which guards stormed and stripped. Prisoners soon became prone to depression, sobbing fits, even psychosomatic rashes.

  The duration of the experiment? Six days. It was planned for two weeks, but was halted early because things got so bad. It’s important to remember none of them were really prisoners or guards! They were students, from a prestigious university. But they were placed in clearly identified groups, made to coexist with another group with different goals, and group mentality exerted itself very quickly. Our brains are very quick to identify with a group, and in certain contexts this can seriously alter our behavior.

  Our brain makes us hostile to those who “threaten” our group, even if it’s a trivial matter. Most of us know this from schooldays. Some unfortunate individual inadvertently does something that deviates from the group’s normal standards of behavior (gets an unusual haircut), which undermines the group uniformity, and is punished (endlessly mocked).

  Humans don’t just want to be part of a group; they want a high-ranking role in it. Social status and hierarchy is very common in nature; even chickens have a hierarchy—hence the term “pecking order”—and humans are just as keen on enhancing their social status as the proudest chicken—hence the term “social climber.” They try to outdo each other, make themselves look good/better, be the comparative best at what they do. The brain facilitates this behavior via regions including the inferior parietal lobe, dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortices, fusiform and lingual gyri. These areas collaborate to provide awareness of social standing, so that we’re not only aware of our membership of a group, but of our position in it.

  As a result, anyone who does something that doesn’t meet the group’s approval is both risking the “integrity” of the group and presenting an opportunity for other members to increase their status at the incompetent individual’s expense. Hence, name calling and mockery.

  However, the human brain is so sophisticated that the “group” we belong to is a very flexible concept. It can be an entire country, as anyone waving their national flag demonstrates. People can even feel like a “member” of a specific race, which is arguably easier as race stems from certain physical characteristics, so members of other races are easily identified and attacked by those who have so little to be proud of that their physical traits (which they had no role in obtaining) are very precious to them.

  Disclaimer: I’m not a fan of racism.

  But there are times when humans, individually, can be alarmingly cruel to those who don’t deserve it. The homeless and poor, victims of assault, the disabled and sick, desperate refugees; rather than getting much needed help, these people are vilified by those better off. This goes against every facet of human decency and basic logic. So why’s it so common?

  The brain has a strong egocentric bias; it makes it and us look good at every opportunity. This can mean that we struggle to empathize with people—because they aren’t us—and the brain mostly has things that have happened to us to go on when making decisions. However, a part of the brain, mainly the right supramarginal gyrus, has been shown to recognize and “correct” this bias, allowing us to empathize properly.

  There’s also data showing it’s much harder to empathize when this area is disrupted, or you aren’t given time to think about it. Another intriguing experiment, led by Tania Singer from the Max Planck Institute, showed that there are other limits to this compensatory mechanism, by exposing pairs of people to varying tactile surfaces (they had to touch either something nice or something gross).39

  They showed two people experiencing something unpleasant will be very good at empathizing correctly, recognizing the emotion and intensity of feeling in the other person, but if one is experiencing pleasure while the other is enduring unpleasantness, then the pleasure-experiencing person will seriously underestimate the other’s suffering. So the more privileged and comfortable someone’s life is, the harder it is for them to appreciate the needs and issues of those worse off. But as long as we don’t do something stupid like put the most pampered people in charge of running countries, we should be OK.

  We have seen that the brain has an egocentric bias. Another (related) cognitive bias is called the “just world” hypothesis.40 This argues that the brain inherently assumes the world is fair and just, where good behavior gets rewarded and bad behavior is punished. This bias helps people function as a community because it means bad behavior is deterred before it happens, and people are inclined towards being nice (not that they wouldn’t be anyway, but this helps). It also motivates us; believing the world is random and all actions are ultimately meaningless won’t help you get out of bed at a reasonable hour.

  Unfortunately, this isn’t true. Bad behavior isn’t always punished; good people often have bad things happen to them. But the bias is so ingrained in our brains that we stick to it anyway. So when we see someone who is an undeserving victim of something awful, this sets up a dissonance: the world is fair, but what happened to this person isn’t fair. The brain doesn’t like dissonance, so has two options: we can conclude the world is cruel and random after all, or decide that the victim did something to deserve it. The latter is crueler, but it lets us keep our nice cozy (incorrect) assumptions about the world, so we blame victims for their misfortune.

&n
bsp; Numerous studies have shown this effect and its many manifestations. For example, people are less critical of victims if they themselves can intervene to alleviate their suffering, or if they were told the victims were compensated later. If people have no means to help victims, they’ll be more disparaging towards them. This, while seeming especially harsh, is consistent with the “just world” hypothesis: the victims have no positive outcome, so they must deserve it, surely?

  People are also far more likely to blame a victim they strongly identify with. If you see someone of a different age/race/gender get hit by a falling tree, it’s much easier to sympathise. But if you see someone of your age, height, build, gender, driving a car just like yours and colliding with a house like the one you live in, you’re far more likely to blame that someone for being incompetent or stupid, despite having no evidence of this.

  In the first instance, none of the factors apply to us, so it’s OK to blame random chance for what happens; it’s something that can’t affect us. The second could easily apply to us, so the brain rationalizes it as the fault of the individual involved. It must be their fault, because if it was random chance then it could happen to you. And that’s upsetting thinking.

  It seems that, despite all the inclinations towards being sociable and friendly, our brain is so concerned with preserving a sense of identity and peace of mind that it makes us willing to screw over anyone and anything that could endanger this. Charming.

  _____________

  * The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is something of an annoyance to linguists, because it is a very misleading label. The supposed originators, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, never actually co-authored anything, and never put forward a specific hypothesis. In essence, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis didn’t exist until the term itself was coined, making it a very good example of itself. Nobody said linguistics had to be easy.