The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

by Will Storr

  This was not an isolated incident. Similar incidents had been occurring for years. Ultimately, the scam was pulled in more than seventy restaurants across the United States.

  ‘The point is that this did not happen occasionally,’ Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University, tells me. ‘If it happened just once or twice, you’d say, “Gee, how dumb are these people? How gullible?” But it worked most of the time. The scenario that was created was so compelling that people got trapped in it.’

  Zimbardo served as an expert witness in one of the trials that related to the so-called ‘strip-search scams’. He was called because, back in the 1970s, he had become an authority on the invisible processes which compel good people to do bad things when he carried out a study that remains darkly notorious among students of the psychology of evil. In an attempt to examine the effects of prison life on ordinary individuals, Zimbardo created a mock gaol on the grounds of his university and recruited the twelve most ‘normal and healthy’ young men from a cohort of seventy-five applicants. ‘We randomly assigned half to be guards and half to be prisoners,’ he recalls. ‘I had to end it in six days because it was out of control. Normal healthy college students were having emotional breakdowns. Five of them had to be released early because of the cruelty and sadism of the guards towards them. It demonstrated in a powerful way how situations can overwhelm the best and the brightest.’

  The Stanford Prison Experiment is a legendary study in the realm of what became known as ‘situational psychology’. It helped to reveal a terrible flaw in the way humans typically view themselves. We tend to assume that we are in control of ourselves; that inner forces such as character and conscience captain our actions and define our behaviour. But the work of Zimbardo revealed the hitherto unimaginable power of outside forces to affect us. ‘My research and the research of many social psychologists has demonstrated very powerfully that people can be corrupted into behaving in evil ways, often without the awareness of the power of the situation that they find themselves in.’

  According to Zimbardo, there is a kind of recipe for creating evil. ‘How did evil come about during the prison experiment?’ he asks. ‘It was people playing a role. You’re assigned a role as a guard, a prisoner, a teacher or a military trainer – any of the roles we play in life. Although you start off thinking those roles are arbitrary and not the real you, as you live them, they become you. The second thing is the power of the group. You’re a guard but you’re in a cadre of other guards, so you put pressure on each other to be tough. Groups can have powerful influences on individual behaviour. Our guards were in uniform and they wore sunglasses to conceal their eyes. We call that de-individuation. You take away somebody’s individuality. You make them anonymous. The next process is called dehumanisation, where you begin to think of other people as different from you and then as different from your kind and kin, and then as less than human. You take away their humanity. Once you do that, you can do anything to them – harm, hurt, torture, rape, kill. These were the basic processes operating in the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which I studied at length because I was an expert witness for one of the guards.’

  Of course, generating evil was not the intent of the Buddhists at the Vipassana centre in Blackheath. All the people who attend their courses do so voluntarily and a number of those present were returnees who evidently received huge benefit from their practice. When I look back upon my days there, I realise now that, psychologically speaking, I was unprepared, under-researched and weak. Really, I should never have gone. But listening to Zimbardo, I cannot help but wonder if situational forces had an accidental impact on my inability, despite myself, to stand up and attend to the screaming woman. Perhaps it was the role I had taken on, as serious, studious Buddhist; the pressure of the group to conform; the anonymity of the darkness and the prohibition against communicating with anyone. If so, I believe that there was also another powerful engine in play. When Louise Ogborn was asked in court why she did not simply leave the room in which she was being abused, she replied, ‘I was scared, because they were a higher authority to me.’ It was the same reason why her assistant manager and her fiancé behaved as they did. They believed that they were being instructed by someone senior to them.

  ‘Excessive obedience’ to authority is a flaw in humans that has been known to social psychologists for a long time. This is, in part, due to a set of extremely famous experiments carried out by Professor Stanley Milgram at Yale University in 1961, during which it was discovered that two-thirds of participants were prepared to deliver potentially fatal electric shocks to strangers, simply because they had been told to do so by a man in a white coat.

  We are invisibly influenced not only by those in authority, but by those who populate our work and social lives. In a 2012 paper, neuroscientist Professor Chris Frith reviews a trove of well-replicated studies that demonstrate how, when we are in the company of others, we can automatically switch from ‘I mode’ to ‘we mode’. ‘We can’t help taking into account the views of others,’ he writes. ‘The brain creates the illusion that we are all independent entities who make our own decisions. In reality there are powerful unconscious processes that embed us in the social world. We tend to imitate others and share their goals, knowledge and beliefs, but we are hardly aware of this. This is why strange narratives work best when they are shared by a group.’

  In 1951, Professor Stanley Milgram’s boss, Dr Solomon Asch, conducted a simple but devastating test that explored the ease by which we can let the opinions of others affect our own. He showed a hundred and twenty-three participants a series of two simple straight lines and asked them to say whether the first was longer, shorter or the same length as the second. Each person was in a group of eight and, initially, everything was easy. As you would expect, most of the time everyone gave the same answer: the same, longer, shorter, shorter, longer, the same, and so on. But gradually, for one person in the group, everything turned weird. Because all the others began to give answers that were wrong. What Asch wanted to know was this: when it came to their turn, what would that one person do? Go their own way and give the right answer? Or copy all the others?

  This was a test to see if pressure from the group (who were actually actors) could compel individuals to defy the evidence of their own eyes. Asch found that around 70 per cent of people did just that. But as amazing and troubling as that finding was, it failed to answer a critical question: did the opinions of others simply intimidate the participant into calling it wrong? Or was his finding evidence of another, infinitely stranger hypothesis? That the group changed how the person actually perceived the line? It is a radical idea. Can it really be true? Can the view of the many actually change the world of the one?

  It took the development of some advanced technologies before the tantalising beginnings of an answer could be sensed. In 2005, Dr Gregory Berns, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Emory University in Atlanta, conducted a test based on Asch’s lines, which involved judging the ‘sameness’ of various objects while under social pressure to give the wrong answer. This time, however, the participants were in an fMRI scanner, having their brain activity recorded.

  In Berns’s study, people bowed to peer pressure 41 per cent of the time. But did they make a conscious decision to lie? Or were they somehow pressured into actually seeing the wrong answer? Were the situational forces so great that they altered their perception of reality? Checking the fMRI data, Berns’s team found that in the moments prior to a participant giving their answer, there was no corresponding activity in areas of the brain that are associated with conscious decision- making. And yet there was corresponding activity in the area which is involved in the judging of spatial awareness. To put it simply, when these people were considering their response, it seemed as if they were not analysing their opinion, but seeing it.

  Before we leap too high for our conclusion, it must be pointed out that there has recently been a significant backlash in scientif
ic circles against inappropriate levels of confidence in the kinds of things that fMRI scans can tell us. But if further research reinforces these findings, the implications will be weird and dazzling. In an interview with the New York Times after his paper was published, Berns said, ‘We like to think that seeing is believing, but the study’s findings show that seeing is believing what the group tells you to believe.’ In his book The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo writes that this test ‘calls into question the nature of truth itself.’

  *

  They are everywhere, these invisible forces. In the effects of placebo, in the power of authority figures, in the awful physics of the situations that can push us silently into evil. What connects them seems to be some species of illusion. It tells us that these forces do not exist, that we are in control of who we are, what we do and how we think. Having spent ten days being menaced by proximity to my unconscious, it is clear where I now have to lead my search – to the place where all these forces work their magic, and where so many discomforting illusions are summoned. The brain.

  6

  ‘The invisible actor at the centre of the world’

  The first surprise is how new brains are. The earth has existed for a full four and a half billion years, and yet it was just six hundred million years ago that the earliest of them began to form. It has taken almost all of that time for nature to work out the stunning mechanics of the human iteration. The first neurologically recognisable Homo sapiens, known as ‘Mitochondrial Eve’ (to whom, incredibly, genetic studies have shown that everyone on earth is related), lived only two hundred thousand years ago. Nobody knows what caused the human brain to accelerate its form and function until it was so dramatically in advance of our fellow creatures, but for some reason we gained an oversized prefrontal cortex, which enabled us to strategise, socialise and make lateral associations.

  We left our sunny Eden in East Africa sixty thousand years ago and began colonising the world. Then, around forty thousand years ago, the next evolutionary mystery took place. For reasons that remain unclear, there was a sudden explosion in creativity that saw paintings springing up on cave walls from Australia to Europe and the crafting of intricate articles such as rope, oil lamps, drills and sewing needles as far away as Siberia. We began painting our bodies, wearing jewellery and burying our dead.

  It is for behaviours such as these that we humans like to flatter ourselves that we are made of a different metaphysical stuff than the animals. But our DNA does not lie. Even today, we remain a specific variety of African ape that evolved in the Great Rift Valley. The last survivors of the hominins, we once lived alongside at least four other varieties of nearly-humans. In terms of time alone, though, we are nowhere near the most successful hominin to have inhabited the planet. We might have been here for two hundred thousand years, but some of our cousins lived for more than two million.

  From the confidence that is exuded by some neuroscientists, it might be easy to assume that the riddles of the brain have mostly been solved. But that is not so. How does it generate thoughts? How, exactly, does it store memories? How does it create that sensation of oneness, of coalescence, of having an identity, a narrative purpose, a soul? Although there are plenty of theories, the answers to all of these questions remain far from clear. In truth, this most magical of organs remains deeply mysterious.

  It begins its formation in the embryo as a tiny fluid-filled tube. Pinched off in the centre as the foetus develops, one end of the sac becomes the spinal cord, while on the other grows – at the rate of two hundred and fifty thousand cells a minute – a piece of organic technology that is so advanced, and yet so wondrously strange, that nothing in the known universe is comparable. Built from what has been described by neuroscientist Professor David Eagleman as ‘an alien kind of computational material,’ it is pink, has the texture of almost-set jelly, consumes 20 per cent of our bodily energy and is said to be capable of receiving millions of pieces of information at any given moment.

  It might weigh little over a kilogram but, taken on its own scale, the brain is unimaginably vast. One cubic millimetre contains between twenty and twenty-five thousand neurons. It has eighty-six billion of these cells, and each one is as complex as a city and is in contact with ten thousand other neurons just like it. Within just one cubic centimetre of brain tissue, there is the same number of connections as there are stars in the Milky Way. Your brain contains a hundred trillion of them. Information in the form of electricity and chemicals flows around these paths in great forking trails and in circuits and feedback loops and fantastical storms of activity that bloom to life at speeds of up to a hundred and twenty metres per second. According to the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, ‘The number of permutations and combinations of activity that are theoretically possible exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.’ And yet, he continues, ‘We know so little about it that even a child’s questions should be seriously entertained.’

  Those still desperate for evidence that we are of a special category of being should start their hunt for clues in early childhood. Other mammals give birth to their young when their brains have developed enough that they can control their own body. But not us. We arrive into life, in the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, as an ‘unfinished animal.’ Our brains are so monstrously oversized that we are born about two years prematurely, at the point at which our skulls can still be squeezed agonisingly, bloodily and dangerously through a birth canal. We are then effectively useless for years, relying entirely upon a parent for survival until the gigantic computational device that sits on our neck is finally capable of running the body it is attached to.

  Between the ages of zero and two, babies create around 1.8 million synapses per second. Throughout childhood, the brain is extraordinarily alive with the activity of warring neurons, fighting for connection space across its epic territories. Although it never stops changing, it remains in this heightened learning phase until late adolescence. In his book Brain and Culture Professor Bruce E. Wexler writes that ‘During the first part of life, the brain and mind are highly plastic, require sensory input to grow and develop, and shape themselves to the major recurring features of their environment. By early adulthood, the mind and brain have a diminished ability to change those structures … much of the [brain] activity is devoted to making the environment conform to the established structures.’

  It may have passed you by as you read it, just now, but what that rather formal, rather dry sentence is saying is amazing. It is the keyhole through which the first, fuzzy outlines of my answer can be spied. Although the context is neurological rather than psychological, it actually speaks to the whole picture: to the brain’s form and the mind’s function. To me, Wexler’s words are an ancient spell, a revelation of long-hidden magic. They contain the essence of the brain’s sly modus operandi – the organising principle behind the worrying fact that a central function of this wondrous machine is to deceive you. By the time you have reached adulthood, your brain has decided how the world works – how a table looks and feels, how liquids and authority figures behave, how scary rats are. It has made countless billions of little insights and decisions. It has made its mind up. From then on, its treatment of any new information that runs counter to those views can sometimes be brutal. Your brain is surprisingly reluctant to change its mind. Rather than going through the difficulties involved in rearranging itself to reflect the truth, it often prefers to fool you. So it distorts. It forgets. It projects. It lies.

  These untrustworthy processes run far deeper than the realms of opinion and belief. Your mind contains internal models of everything, from the physical geography of the room you are sitting in to the rights and wrongs of the conflict in the Middle East. The brain loves its models. It guards them like a bitter curmudgeon, making adjustments only when it has to. It uses these models as a shortcut, in order to more easily conjure an illusion of a sane, whole and coherent reality. This illusion is so complete that we don’t believe it is one.
It is hard to underplay the brilliance of this lie: up to 90 per cent of what you are seeing right now is constructed from your memories.

  Practitioners of lucid dreaming know how convincing these mental models of reality are. When writer Jeff Warren was trained to ‘wake up’ during a dream by expert Dr Stephen LaBerge of Stanford University, his mind’s projection of the room that he had gone to bed in was so accurate he didn’t realise that he was still asleep. ‘It was my room, seamlessly modelled by my brain,’ he writes in Head Trip. ‘I could see the outlines of furniture from under the bottom edge of the mask, feel my bed underneath me, hear Kelly’s breathing – everything was perfect. It even smelled like my room. At that moment there was no recognisable difference between my waking and my dreaming perception.’ This experience is so common in students of lucid dreaming that Dr LaBerge teaches a variety of ‘reality tricks’ – such as looking at a clock’s second hand to see if it is behaving predictably – to enable them to check if their eyes are open or closed. We all have these models. When we dream, and it feels real, it is because our models of reality are so detailed and textured and perfect it might as well be. It is all there: the sights, the noises, the textures and touches and scents. Our brains contain worlds. And it is mostly those worlds that we are seeing when we are awake.

  If you are thinking that you must be misunderstanding all this, because it is just too spooky, too grotesque, too much like a disturbing science fiction film, then I am sorry to tell you that you are not. The truth really is this weird. We think of our eyes as open windows and our ears as empty tubes. We experience the out-there as if we are a tiny homunculus gazing from holes in our heads at a world that is flooded with light, music and colour. But this is not true. The things that you are seeing right now are not out there in front of you, but inside your head, being reconstructed in more than thirty sites across your brain. The light is not out there. The objects are not out there. The music is not out there. A violin has no sound without a brain to process it; a rose petal has no colour. It is all a re-creation. A vision. A useful guess about what the world might look like, that is built well enough that we are able to negotiate it successfully.