In experiments by social neuroscientist Emilie Caspar at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, volunteers gave each other electric shocks. The research follows in the footsteps of the notorious experiments of Stanley Milgram in the s, but in a more ethically and scientifically rigorous way.
First, participants were asked to administer shocks for a small sum of money about 5p each time. When a participant was given 60 chances to shock their partner, about half of the time they chose not to. Then Caspar stood over the participants and ordered the person giving the shocks to do it. For the vast majority of volunteers, their sense of agency and responsibility started to melt away. Why are some of us able to resist authority — while the vast majority usually are not?
Credit: Getty Images. Studies on patients with localised brain damage are helping to answer part of this question. When people have lesions in the prefrontal cortex — the outermost layer of the front part the brain — they appear to be much more prone to following orders than the general population. The question gets into philosophical topics like the nature — and neurological basis — of belief. While there is no clear scientific consensus, the Spinozan model is a strong contender.
It suggests that in order to understand a new idea or fact, our brain must, for a split-second, believe it completely. After a split second, you then can doubt or reject this new piece of information. So instead of quite literally thinking twice about what an authority figure says, prefrontal cortex patients are more likely to take what they hear as given. If the prefrontal cortex is the seat of our ability to doubt and question authority, there may be a way in healthy people to strengthen our ability to do this.
The prefrontal cortex has some plasticity. Education is one of the best ways to improve your ability to doubt, says Asp, and therefore your ability to think critically about things you might be told to do. In order to obey authority, the obeying person has to accept that it is legitimate i. Adolf Eichmann was executed in for his part in organizing the Holocaust, in which six million Jewish people, as well as gypsies, communists and trade unionists were transported to death camps and murdered in Nazi Germany and surrounding countries under Nazi control.
Eichmann was a logistical genius whose part in the Holocaust was the planning of the efficient collection, transportation and extermination of those to be killed. At his trial in , Eichmann expressed surprise at being hated by Jewish people, saying that he had merely obeyed orders, and surely obeying orders could only be a good thing.
In his jail diary Eichmann wrote 'The orders were, for me, the highest thing in my life and I had to obey them without question' extract quoted in The Guardian, 12 August, , p. Eichmann was declared sane by six psychiatrists, he had a normal family life and observers at his trial described him as very average. Given that there appears to be nothing particularly unusual about Eichmann, we must face the uncomfortable possibility that his behavior was the product of the social situation in which he found himself, and that under the right circumstances we may all be capable of monstrous acts.
Following the Second World War - and in particular the Holocaust - psychologists set out to investigate the phenomenon of human obedience. Early attempts to explain the Holocaust had focused on the idea that there was something distinctive about German culture that had allowed the Holocaust to take place. Other factors were trust and understanding, which were measured by items including, "When Player A requests a minimum of generosity, he distrusts me and I dislike that," and, "I understand when Player A requests a minimum of generosity.
But if their peers requested a minimum, all but 10 participants tended to give less than they normally did, though to varying degrees. Responses to questionnaires revealed that in the controlled conditions, the more someone perceived distrust or the less understanding they had, the more they reduced the money they gave away. These factors seemed to influence participants' decisions more than how angry they felt or how badly they wanted to restore their freedom. A third finding from the brain scans complemented this picture further.
The participants who were more control-averse showed higher simultaneous activity in the brain areas called the inferior parietal lobule and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In that sense, our study revealed a missing piece of the puzzle," the researchers said.
The puzzle, however, is still incomplete. The two brain regions have both been implicated in diverse functions. For the inferior parietal lobule, that ranges from mathematical operations to reorienting attention and processing distances to self.
And the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is involved with cognitive control, moral decision-making and resolving conflicts in decisions. So it is unclear exactly why activity in these two brain regions shows up during control-averse behavior.
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