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?