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.