Speaker 1: Would you electrocute someone if you were told to by
Speaker 1: an authority figure? Would you torture a prisoner just because
Speaker 1: you were put in the uniform of a prison guard?
Speaker 1: How much of your behavior is a function of your situation?
Speaker 1: And what does any of this have to do with
Speaker 1: matching the length of a line, or soldiers posing with
Speaker 1: dead bodies of their enemies, or propaganda or dehumanization or
Speaker 1: how we should educate our children. Welcome to Inner Cosmos
Speaker 1: with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author
Speaker 1: at Stanford and in these episodes, I examine the intersection
Speaker 1: between our brains and our lives, and we sail deeply
Speaker 1: into our three pound universe to understand why and how
Speaker 1: our lives look the way they do. In last week's episode,
Speaker 1: we talked about dehumanization and how your brain can dial
Speaker 1: up and down the degree to which you view another
Speaker 1: person as human. And I gave you a particular example
Speaker 1: of empathy, which is where you're simulating what it is
Speaker 1: like to be someone else, and we saw how empathy
Speaker 1: can be modulated based on whether those people are in
Speaker 1: your in group or your outgroup. For today, I want
Speaker 1: to drill down a little bit deeper into the heart
Speaker 1: of a related issue, which is that when you look
Speaker 1: at people who are behaving in these very violent acts
Speaker 1: throughout history, the assumption has been for a long time
Speaker 1: that it's something about the disposition of those people. In
Speaker 1: other words, there's something really wrong with those people. But
Speaker 1: this started coming into questions some years ago because there
Speaker 1: were so many hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of people
Speaker 1: participating in these violent acts, and it's a strange theory
Speaker 1: to say that all of them had something wrong with
Speaker 1: their brains. Instead, what researchers started thinking about is maybe
Speaker 1: there are situational forces that make people behave in these
Speaker 1: incredibly awful ways. So there's something to be understood here
Speaker 1: about the social context that people find themselves in that
Speaker 1: cause them to behave a certain way. And of course
Speaker 1: this leads to the question of could you behave this
Speaker 1: way if you found yourself in that situation? And this
Speaker 1: makes us all very uncomfortable to even think about it,
Speaker 1: because we know we're good people and we're not going
Speaker 1: to behave in these terrible ways. But the reason it's
Speaker 1: important to ask these questions is because social psychologists got
Speaker 1: really interested in what was happening with what came to
Speaker 1: be known as the finality of evil. So after World
Speaker 1: War two, for example, Adolf Eikman was on trial. He
Speaker 1: was one of the main coordinators of the final solution
Speaker 1: for the Jewish population. He personally had the blood of
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands, or maybe millions of people on his hands.
Speaker 1: And the thing is, as the journalist Hannah Errand put
Speaker 1: it as she covered his trial, she called this the
Speaker 1: banality of evil, because there was nothing particularly special about
Speaker 1: Adolf Eikman. He was on the stand and he said,
Speaker 1: I was just doing my job. He was part of
Speaker 1: this machinery. He had this opportunity to impress his wife
Speaker 1: and the people around him. There were all kinds of
Speaker 1: situational forces at play here. Now this is no defense
Speaker 1: of his behavior, but what it does encourage us to
Speaker 1: do is try to understand what are these situational forces
Speaker 1: that steer whole populations of people to do incredibly off
Speaker 1: then in other situations you wouldn't even consider. And this
Speaker 1: is why the whole research question about situational forces came
Speaker 1: to the forefront. So right after World War two there
Speaker 1: was a research psychologist named Solomon ash and he decided
Speaker 1: I want to understand how it is that social forces
Speaker 1: can change people's decision making. So he did a very
Speaker 1: simple experiment. You come in to participate in the lab,
Speaker 1: and you see there are seven other people that are
Speaker 1: there to participate as well, just like you, And you're
Speaker 1: all shown a line on the screen of a certain length,
Speaker 1: and then you're shown three more lines marked AB and C,
Speaker 1: and you're asked which one matches the original line in
Speaker 1: terms of length. But it just so happens that you're
Speaker 1: sitting in the eighth chair, and so the first person
Speaker 1: registers his answer, and the next person calls out her answer,
Speaker 1: and so go on, and it goes down the line,
Speaker 1: and it turns out that all these people are shills.
Speaker 1: That means there are plants from the experimenter. They're not
Speaker 1: just like you, even though they appear to be just
Speaker 1: like you. And sometimes what they'll do is they'll all
Speaker 1: say the wrong answer, but they'll say it confidently. They'll
Speaker 1: maybe pick the shortest line over there, and they'll say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's definitely line C, and you stare at it and
Speaker 1: you think it's line B. But person number one, person
Speaker 1: number two, number three, they all are picking line C
Speaker 1: and so what do you do when it comes time
Speaker 1: for your turn? Are you going to say, you know what,
Speaker 1: you guys are all wrong, it's line B. Or do
Speaker 1: you think, gosh, maybe there's something wrong with me in
Speaker 1: the way that I'm seeing this Now. Solomon Ash didn't
Speaker 1: think this would work. He figured people would go ahead
Speaker 1: and stick with what they thought was the right answer.
Speaker 1: But the results were really surprising because what happened is
Speaker 1: that almost almost everybody conformed to the group whatever the
Speaker 1: group was saying. The experimental subject was reluctant to say otherwise,
Speaker 1: even though this was a clear, easy perceptual task with
Speaker 1: a right and wrong answer. So this was a surprising result. Now,
Speaker 1: as it turns out, Ash had a student in his lab,
Speaker 1: a young man named Stanley Milgram, who watched this, and Milgram,
Speaker 1: being Jewish just like Ash, and having just seen what
Speaker 1: happened in World War two, was very interested in these issues.
Speaker 1: And Milgram noticed something, which is there was no social
Speaker 1: consequence to this line experiment. It wasn't a moral decision
Speaker 1: of any sort. It was just a very simple perceptual decision.
Speaker 1: So Milgram decided to launch an experiment that drilled a
Speaker 1: lot deeper and it's one of the most famous experiments
Speaker 1: in psychology, but not everyone knows the details. So let's
Speaker 1: just walk through this. First, you see an ad that's
Speaker 1: advertising for pe people to participate in a study about memory.
Speaker 1: It says, we will pay five hundred men to help
Speaker 1: us complete a scientific study of memory and learning. The
Speaker 1: flyer says that you will get paid for one hour
Speaker 1: of your time and there's no further obligation. So you
Speaker 1: show up. It's this laboratory at Yale University, and you're
Speaker 1: told that in this experiment you're going to play the
Speaker 1: role of the teacher. And there's another volunteer over on
Speaker 1: the other side of the wall, and you're told this
Speaker 1: is a study on the effect of punishment on how
Speaker 1: well people can learn. And so it's explained to you
Speaker 1: that the learner will be asked to memorize arbitrary pairs
Speaker 1: of words, and he's going to be continuously quizzed on it,
Speaker 1: and he's just been strapped to a chair that can
Speaker 1: give him a small electrical shock. So if he gets
Speaker 1: an answer right, the experimenter moves on to the next problem.
Speaker 1: But if the guy gets the answer wrong, your job
Speaker 1: is to deliver a small electrical shock. Now you're sitting
Speaker 1: in front of this device which he has thirty switches
Speaker 1: in a row on it, and these switches are marked
Speaker 1: at the left side as slight shock, all the way
Speaker 1: up to the right side where it says danger extreme shock.
Speaker 1: And so you hear the experiment begin. The job of
Speaker 1: the learner is to learn these associations between the words,
Speaker 1: and he gets the first answer right, and then he
Speaker 1: gets the second answer right and so on. But finally
Speaker 1: he can't remember some pairing and he gets the answer wrong.
Speaker 1: So now the experimenter and the white coat says to you,
Speaker 1: I want you to press the button for the lowest
Speaker 1: level of shock, level one. So that's all you need
Speaker 1: to do. You press the button that reads slight shock.
Speaker 1: And even though it seems like the kind of thing
Speaker 1: you might not normally do, you're being instructed by a
Speaker 1: professional researcher, and so you hit the button. You can't
Speaker 1: see the learner and you don't hear anything, so the
Speaker 1: whole thing is pretty straightforward. Okay, So he's going along
Speaker 1: and he gets another wrong answer, and you're told to
Speaker 1: give him a tiny shock again, and this goes on,
Speaker 1: but the guy isn't performing that well at memorizing the
Speaker 1: pairs of words, and so the experimenter tells you at
Speaker 1: some point, okay, each time he gets another wrong answer,
Speaker 1: I want you to increase the level of the shock.
Speaker 1: So the learner gets it wrong and you're told to
Speaker 1: hit the second button, and this goes on, and every
Speaker 1: time he gets the wrong answer, you have to move
Speaker 1: up in the level of shock. So you work your
Speaker 1: way up along the buttons, and it changes from mild
Speaker 1: shock up to extreme intensity shock and over on the
Speaker 1: right side the buttons read danger severe shock, and in
Speaker 1: fact the last few buttons are past that danger sign
Speaker 1: and they're unlabeled. So you're getting a little worried about this,
Speaker 1: And as the learner is going along, you're hoping that
Speaker 1: he'll get the right answers so you won't have to
Speaker 1: keep going up very high. But the guy gets a
Speaker 1: wrong answer, and then another, and eventually another, and the
Speaker 1: experimenter very calmly tells you to give him these higher
Speaker 1: and higher shocks. And what's happening by midway up this
Speaker 1: scale is that when you give a shock, you hear
Speaker 1: the learner in the other room say ow. And as
Speaker 1: you're going up higher than that, he says, ow, that
Speaker 1: really hurt. And as you go up higher, he says,
Speaker 1: let me out of here. I don't want to be
Speaker 1: part of this experiment. So you look pleadingly to the experimenter,
Speaker 1: and the experimenter in his white coat, says, keep going.
Speaker 1: So maybe you keep going and the guy says, OW,
Speaker 1: I want out of here, let me out, And the
Speaker 1: experimenter says to you, keep going, and you say I
Speaker 1: don't want to keep going. He's obviously in pain, and
Speaker 1: the experimenter says, don't worry. I take full responsibility. You
Speaker 1: are not responsible for any of this. You are just
Speaker 1: participating in an experiment. So the question is how high
Speaker 1: do you keep going? Because at some point, when you
Speaker 1: reach a pretty high level, the learner stops responding. You
Speaker 1: press the shock button, but you don't hear any cries anymore.
Speaker 1: Is he unconscious? Is he dead? There's nothing but silence now,
Speaker 1: And the question is will you keep going even beyond
Speaker 1: that level? Will anybody go all the way to the top? Now,
Speaker 1: As it turns out, the learner was a shill. He
Speaker 1: is not a real volunteer. He was working with the experimenter.
Speaker 1: You were the experimental subject. So Stanley Milgram talked to
Speaker 1: a group of psychiatrists, and he said, what's your prediction.
Speaker 1: How high will people go? How many people do you
Speaker 1: think will go all the way to the top and
Speaker 1: will give somebody the strongest electrical shock, even though the
Speaker 1: learner seems to be unconscious at this point or maybe dead.
Speaker 1: So the psychiatrists concluded that their prediction was one percent
Speaker 1: of people will do this because psychiatrists are experts in
Speaker 1: human nature, and they're thinking about this in a dispositional way,
Speaker 1: in other words, who has that disposition? Who's the kind
Speaker 1: of person that would allow them to do that? And
Speaker 1: they figured, well, the only person who would do that
Speaker 1: is somebody who is psychopathic, and psychopaths make up about
Speaker 1: one percent of the population. But as it turned out,
Speaker 1: sixty five percent of Milgrim's volunteers went all the way
Speaker 1: to the top. They delivered four hundred and fifty volt
Speaker 1: shocks to the learner. Why It's simply because they were
Speaker 1: asked to. So Milgram wrote a famous book after this,
Speaker 1: called Obedient to Authority, because he couldn't believe what he
Speaker 1: had just found. He couldn't believe that people would listen
Speaker 1: to him all the way up to the very top
Speaker 1: where they were perhaps killing somebody, and somebody who was
Speaker 1: a total stranger to them, who had done nothing to them.
Speaker 1: And in his book he describes nineteen different versions of
Speaker 1: the experiment that he did. He tweaked every possible parameter.
Speaker 1: He figured out the details of our behavior, like if you,
Speaker 1: the teacher, actually have to be close to the learner
Speaker 1: where you can see him, then compliance goes down. Or similarly,
Speaker 1: if the experimenter, the guy in the white coat, is
Speaker 1: farther away from you, then compliance also goes down. And
Speaker 1: in the extreme case, when the experimenter is just talking
Speaker 1: to you on a telephone, compliance only drops to twenty percent. Now,
Speaker 1: twenty percent is still really awfully high for delivering these
Speaker 1: strong electrical shocks. And by the way, he ran the
Speaker 1: experiment also with female participants instead of male and even
Speaker 1: though the women expressed more stress about it, they still
Speaker 1: did exactly as much. Shocking sixty five percent of them
Speaker 1: went up to the top most switch. Now, I want
Speaker 1: to make a quick note here about the thirty five
Speaker 1: percent those people who did not go all the way
Speaker 1: up to four hundred and fifty volts. Thank goodness, there's
Speaker 1: that thirty five percent those are the people that we
Speaker 1: need a socially model. Those are the people who were
Speaker 1: perhaps raised in households where they were always asked to
Speaker 1: question why they were doing something. And even though we
Speaker 1: talked in the last episode about all these bloody events
Speaker 1: in the past century, there were always people who hid
Speaker 1: Jewish families in the Holocaust, or protected Chinese women during
Speaker 1: the invasion of Nan King, or people who sheltered Tutsi
Speaker 1: in Rwanda. So thank goodness those people exist. And our
Speaker 1: job really is to take that thin radio signal to
Speaker 1: the world and amplify it, to work every day to
Speaker 1: cultivate that kind of bravery in ourselves and our children.
Speaker 1: And I'm not talking about acting like we know what's
Speaker 1: right and wrong and going and hurting people. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about being the kind of people who don't allow that
Speaker 1: to happen, no matter who is doing the hurting. Okay,
Speaker 1: So back to Milgram's experiments. He wanted to make sure
Speaker 1: that this had nothing to do, in particular with the
Speaker 1: academic prestige of Ale University, where he was from, So
Speaker 1: he rented some random office space in downtown New Haven,
Speaker 1: Connecticut and just said he was a random researcher and
Speaker 1: people still comply just as much. So. Milgram's experiments were
Speaker 1: a shocking illustration of how easy it is to get
Speaker 1: people to listen to authority. Now, it turns out there
Speaker 1: is another kind of social influence also besides authority, and
Speaker 1: that is the influence of your peers. Happens that Milgram
Speaker 1: had a high school friend named Philip Zimbardo. Milgrim ended
Speaker 1: up at Yale and Zimbardo ended up working at Stanford.
Speaker 1: Zimbardo was interested in how prison systems run and why
Speaker 1: people behave the way they do in prisons, so he
Speaker 1: recruited people for a two week study, and he made
Speaker 1: sure to do full psychological tests on them to ensure
Speaker 1: they were all in a normal range essentially random normal
Speaker 1: research participants. Then he assigned them to the role of
Speaker 1: a prisoner or the role of a guard. For the guards,
Speaker 1: he gave them things like sunglasses to cover their eyes
Speaker 1: and billy clubs to carry, and for the prisoners, he
Speaker 1: stripped them of all their clothing except for a simple gown,
Speaker 1: and he made things as realistic as possible, so he
Speaker 1: actually picked up the prisoners in police cars and brought
Speaker 1: them in and had them handcuffed and checked in and
Speaker 1: he had three different shifts of guards who would switch
Speaker 1: off every eight hours, whereas the prisoners actually lived there
Speaker 1: in this basement, which was set up to be just
Speaker 1: like a jail cell. And you may have heard about
Speaker 1: the outcome of this experiment. The guards started acting like
Speaker 1: bullies to the prisoners, making them do arbitrary things just
Speaker 1: for the sake of punishment. So, for example, they had
Speaker 1: to lineup to count off in the morning, and that
Speaker 1: was a perfect time for the guards to make up
Speaker 1: arbitrary rules like okay, now you have to do it backwards.
Speaker 1: Now you have to sing. Now you're not singing sweetly enough,
Speaker 1: you have to do it again. And they would do
Speaker 1: this kind of thing for hours just to persecute these guys.
Speaker 1: But it just kept magnifying. The guards started becoming so
Speaker 1: creatively evil in coming up with punishments and rules, and
Speaker 1: this all happened quite quickly. The guards started taking away
Speaker 1: food from them, taking their beds away, locking them in
Speaker 1: solitary confinement, and everybody involved became psychologically a bit traumatized,
Speaker 1: and the experiment had to shut down early because essentially,
Speaker 1: right away the prisoners and guards fell into these roles
Speaker 1: and what happened was the community was shocked by what
Speaker 1: had just transpired in this experiment, because these were just
Speaker 1: normal young men who just by dint of being put
Speaker 1: in these roles, ended up behaving so differently. And Zimbardo
Speaker 1: wrote a great book on this called The Lucifer Effect,
Speaker 1: about how people can turn into such bad actors depending
Speaker 1: on the situation in which they find themselves. And what
Speaker 1: Zimbardo emphasized is the situational nature of our behavior. In
Speaker 1: other words, it matters what role you're playing, and beyond
Speaker 1: a particular situation, he said, you have to understand whole
Speaker 1: systems to understand how humans behave you have to understand
Speaker 1: more than their disposition, in other words, the kind of
Speaker 1: person that individual is, and you have to understand more
Speaker 1: than the situation they're in right now. You have to
Speaker 1: understand the whole system they're in. Because what happens in prisons,
Speaker 1: for example, is not unique to the Stanford prison experiment.
Speaker 1: It's typical of what happens in prisons where the system
Speaker 1: is set up with guards and prisoners and they've each
Speaker 1: got their roles, and the guards want total compliance and
Speaker 1: the prisoners want to resist that, so the guards will
Speaker 1: keep upping the arms race until they're certain that they
Speaker 1: can get compliance from the prisoners. And in this light,
Speaker 1: it's no real surprise what happened, for example, in Abu
Speaker 1: grab where photographs emerged of torture and humiliation of the
Speaker 1: insurgents that were being held there by the US forces.
Speaker 1: It's exactly the character of interaction that happened in the
Speaker 1: Stanford prison experiment. So you may have seen some years
Speaker 1: ago where photos surfaced of prisoners being stripped, naked and humiliated,
Speaker 1: or another was of a man being terrorized by the
Speaker 1: US guard dogs, or there's a photo of a man
Speaker 1: standing on a small box and he's draped in a
Speaker 1: sheet with his head covered, and he has two electrode
Speaker 1: wires attached to his fingers, and he was told that
Speaker 1: as soon as he loses his strength and falls off
Speaker 1: the box, he's going to be electrocuted. Zimbardo's point is
Speaker 1: it's not as easy as thinking about this as a
Speaker 1: few bad apples in the system, which is how the
Speaker 1: Army worked to portray this. The army said, we are
Speaker 1: shocked at what happened in Abu Ghrab. There were obviously
Speaker 1: some bad apples who behaved badly, Zimbardo's point is that
Speaker 1: it's not really a few bad apples that's a systemic problem.
Speaker 1: It's a system that sets up particular situations like the
Speaker 1: Stanford prison experiment. He wasn't making a defense of the
Speaker 1: soldiers who behaved badly like this, torturing their prisoners, but
Speaker 1: it's important to try to figure out how to build
Speaker 1: or repair these systems so that it does happen. And
Speaker 1: shortly after that, eighteen pictures emerged of American soldiers who
Speaker 1: are posing with dead members of the Taliban and making
Speaker 1: it look like the bodies were doing things like having
Speaker 1: their hand on their shoulder. And so what I thought
Speaker 1: was interesting is the headlines the La Times said photo
Speaker 1: of US soldiers posing with Afghan corpses prompts condemnation, and
Speaker 1: in the subtitle, American officials denounce the actions of troops
Speaker 1: photographed with dead insurgents. But this condemnation is a little
Speaker 1: hard to understand because the army tells you, look, we
Speaker 1: want you to go over there, we want you to
Speaker 1: kill these guys, to wreck their roads and burn their bridges,
Speaker 1: but don't take any pictures with them, because that's disrespectful.
Speaker 1: This condemnation is complicated because the soldier's behavior was part
Speaker 1: of the system, part of the situational variables that were
Speaker 1: set up. You get these young men and women to
Speaker 1: have vim and vigor and go out to kill the enemy,
Speaker 1: give them propaganda, you dehumanize the enemy, and then you say, hey,
Speaker 1: we're outraged that you didn't treat this corpse respectfully. And
Speaker 1: by the way, just as a side note, it turns
Speaker 1: out that with modern communication channels, these photographs surfaced quickly
Speaker 1: and everyone thought this was some awful new sign of
Speaker 1: the times. But this is as old as war itself.
Speaker 1: People have always posed with the dead bodies of their
Speaker 1: enemies for as long as there have been cameras, and
Speaker 1: before photography, they would do things like cut off people's
Speaker 1: ears or take out teeth or stuff like that, and
Speaker 1: make belts and necklaces out of them. So there's nothing
Speaker 1: new going on here. Again, this is not a defense
Speaker 1: of that behavior, but it is to say there's something
Speaker 1: about the systemic variables in wartime that change the way
Speaker 1: people make decisions in these situations. And I want to
Speaker 1: be clear about one point, which is that when I'm
Speaker 1: talking about with these situational variables, this doesn't get rid
Speaker 1: of individual respons responsibility, but it gives us the tools
Speaker 1: to understand the variables that chronically cause situations like this.
Speaker 1: People who behave badly in Abu grad, prison or any
Speaker 1: place else, they still have to face punishment for many reasons,
Speaker 1: because justice, it turns out, tries to accomplish many things
Speaker 1: at the same time, such as slaking public bloodlust and
Speaker 1: setting up examples for the next people. So the people
Speaker 1: who commit bad acts still have to get punished. The
Speaker 1: importance of studying all the variables that steer human behavior
Speaker 1: is not to let people off the hook. It's to
Speaker 1: prevent the next generation from ending up in the same
Speaker 1: situation and performing as badly. Now. In this episode and
Speaker 1: the last one, we talked about dehumanization and its neural underpinnings,
Speaker 1: and in this episode we talked about the situational variables
Speaker 1: which play a role in it. So the question is
Speaker 1: what can we do about dehumanization As we come to
Speaker 1: understand the neural basis and the psychological basis and the
Speaker 1: contextual basis, how does that steer us? So I'm need
Speaker 1: to propose three lessons that emerge for us. The first
Speaker 1: is the unspeakably important role of education education, specifically about
Speaker 1: propaganda and dehumanization and the social context that influences us.
Speaker 1: It's critical for us to teach the Milgrim experiments and
Speaker 1: the Zimbardo experiments to our children and to ourselves, such
Speaker 1: as this becomes part of our background knowledge. Everyone knows
Speaker 1: and talks about these sorts of experiments, and they know
Speaker 1: what to do about it, because, after all, in his
Speaker 1: book Obedience to Authority, Milgrim said, look, I'm going to
Speaker 1: take what we've learned here and distill it down to
Speaker 1: all the rules that people use when they want other
Speaker 1: people to do their bidding. So he said, first of all,
Speaker 1: if a person wants you to be obedient to them,
Speaker 1: first they're going to pre arrange some form of contractual obligation.
Speaker 1: In this case, it was we're going to pay you
Speaker 1: four bucks, and then you're going to participate in this experiment. Next,
Speaker 1: they'll give you a meaningful role, like you're a teacher
Speaker 1: or your a guard, and those activate particular response scripts.
Speaker 1: People feel like, oh, I know exactly what to do
Speaker 1: with that. Then the person will present basic rules to
Speaker 1: be followed, like when the student gets the wrong answer,
Speaker 1: you move up to the next level of shock. And
Speaker 1: these rules can be arbitrarily changed. Later, the person will
Speaker 1: change the semantics of the act. Instead of calling it
Speaker 1: hurting the victim, they'll call it helping the experimenter. The
Speaker 1: person will allow for a diffusion of responsibility. So remember
Speaker 1: in Milgram's setup, the experimenter said, don't worry all be
Speaker 1: responsible for anything that happens to him. Just keep going
Speaker 1: this way. When you're doing the act, you don't have
Speaker 1: to take everything onto your own shoulders. The person will
Speaker 1: start the path with small steps, like just give him
Speaker 1: a little electrical shock. He'll barely feel it, and then
Speaker 1: as things go on, they'll say just a little more,
Speaker 1: just a little higher, until before you know it, you
Speaker 1: are at the top of the scale, delivering dangerously high
Speaker 1: levels to a person who might already be unconscious. It's
Speaker 1: like the frog and the frying pan method. If the
Speaker 1: heat gets turned up slowly, the frog doesn't jump out,
Speaker 1: and humans are no different in this way. Finally, the
Speaker 1: person will make exit costs high, but they'll allow verbal descent.
Speaker 1: In other words, they won't let you leave the experiment,
Speaker 1: but they will allow you to express distress. They'll allow
Speaker 1: you to complain because that'll make you feel better. A
Speaker 1: complaining person will still go up to four hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty volts, but they'll feel better about themselves if they say, oh,
Speaker 1: I feel really uncomfortable, I don't want to do this,
Speaker 1: but they still do it. And finally, the person will
Speaker 1: offer larger goals, some ideology that your small contribution helps with.
Speaker 1: In the case of the Milgrim experiment, it was as
Speaker 1: simple as we're trying to study the science of memory.
Speaker 1: In the case of genocide, it's usually about pride or purity,
Speaker 1: or economics or restoring dignity and opportunity or whatever story.
Speaker 1: But the idea is that as you shock somebody or
Speaker 1: perhaps shoot somebody, you are working in service of a
Speaker 1: larger goal. So Milgrim was able to distill all these
Speaker 1: rules that we find whenever people blindly follow authority, and
Speaker 1: you see these rules played out the same way across
Speaker 1: place and time. And this is what we need to
Speaker 1: teach our children, so they know the signs to look for,
Speaker 1: so they know how not to get used into the trap.
Speaker 1: I mean, for God's sake, we teach all children how
Speaker 1: to do long division by hand, and we teach them
Speaker 1: how to play soccer and how to watercolor. But why
Speaker 1: isn't it mandatory that we teach them lessons like this,
Speaker 1: like how to know when they are getting manipulated, how
Speaker 1: easy it is to get manipulated, how to develop immunity
Speaker 1: against manipulation by simply knowing the signs to look for.
Speaker 1: That would be an education worth having. Okay, So the
Speaker 1: first thing we need is meaningful, universal education about these issues.
Speaker 1: The second thing we need is social modeling. So in
Speaker 1: the last episode, I talked about syndrome E, which is
Speaker 1: where your neural circuitry for caring about other people gets
Speaker 1: turned down or turn off, and people act like psychopaths,
Speaker 1: performing actions like murdering mothers and their babies on camera,
Speaker 1: things that would normally not even be thinkable or conscionable.
Speaker 1: And I spoke about it as though everyone in wartime
Speaker 1: can catch syndrome E, or that everyone in Milgrim's experiments
Speaker 1: showed inappropriate obedience to authority, But in fact there are
Speaker 1: always heroes who stand up against authority. In Nazi Germany,
Speaker 1: for example, there was a group of students known as
Speaker 1: the White Rose. They put all their efforts into making
Speaker 1: and disseminating flyers and pamphlets against the actions of the
Speaker 1: Third Rite. Now tragically, they were eventually captured and rounded up,
Speaker 1: and they were all executed by the Nazis. But this
Speaker 1: is the kind of thing for us to teach our
Speaker 1: children about and keep their names alive, celebrating heroes who
Speaker 1: stand against authority when they see something going horribly wrong.
Speaker 1: And I'm not talking about just being a pain in
Speaker 1: the neck to authority, because that's trivial and not always useful.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about seeing something that's actually really wrong. And
Speaker 1: even though it appears that all the adults know what
Speaker 1: they're doing and have good reasons and they're only asking
Speaker 1: you to do something small and they'll take the responsibility
Speaker 1: and so on, think about whether it's the kind of
Speaker 1: action you would want to take if you thought about
Speaker 1: it from your own first principles, would you feel that
Speaker 1: it's conscionable to murder your neighbors and take their stuff.
Speaker 1: If the answer is no, then it should remain no,
Speaker 1: even if the world gets a little nutty. And this
Speaker 1: is where social modeling helps. We learn about heroes who
Speaker 1: stuck with their conscience. So if you know these stories,
Speaker 1: then the next time you find yourself in some situation,
Speaker 1: at least got a template that you can think about following.
Speaker 1: So number two is about teaching our children and ourselves
Speaker 1: about those who stand strongly against things that are asked
Speaker 1: of them in a time of war and madness. The
Speaker 1: third defense against dehumanization is clever social structuring. And I
Speaker 1: talked about this a few episodes ago about the Iroquis
Speaker 1: Native Americans who lived up around what's now upstate New York.
Speaker 1: And they're known as the League of Peace and Power.
Speaker 1: But they weren't always known as that, and certainly not
Speaker 1: four hundred years ago. There used to be six tribes
Speaker 1: who were always fighting with one another, real bloody battles.
Speaker 1: But in the sixteen hundreds they were brought together by
Speaker 1: a man who came to be known as the Great Peacemaker.
Speaker 1: He combined them into one nation. By the way, combining
Speaker 1: people is not enough. It turns out that if you
Speaker 1: simply push people together, that can fall back apart easily.
Speaker 1: He did something more clever. He structured clans such that
Speaker 1: each tribe member ended up belonging to one of nine clans.
Speaker 1: So I might be a member of the Seneca tribe,
Speaker 1: but I'm a member of the Wolf clan, and you're
Speaker 1: a member of the Mohawk tribe, but you're also a
Speaker 1: member of the Wolf clan. And the key is that
Speaker 1: the membership to tribes and clans these cross cut. And
Speaker 1: so how is the Seneca tribe going to fight against
Speaker 1: the Mohawk tribe when I'm a wolf and you're a wolf.
Speaker 1: And by the way, my Seneca friend is in the
Speaker 1: Hawk clan and your Mohawk friend is in the Hawk
Speaker 1: clan too, So when we all consider waging war, we think,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I got friends over there, I've got
Speaker 1: fellow clansmen in that tribe. So by cleverly structuring things
Speaker 1: in a society, by cultivating cross cutting ties, you can
Speaker 1: tamp down people's natural vigor to make easy outgroups. You
Speaker 1: can complexify their allegiances. I think it's likely naive for
Speaker 1: us to think about obtaining world peace by just getting
Speaker 1: everyone to get along, because we're very hardwired for in
Speaker 1: groups and outgroups. But we can structure things carefully like
Speaker 1: the Iroquois chief did, so that things have counter balance,
Speaker 1: so that it's not so easy for people to raise
Speaker 1: arms against one another. So that's our third tool, is
Speaker 1: social structuring to create or enhance cross cutting allegiances. So
Speaker 1: let's wrap up in this episode and the last one,
Speaker 1: I've told you about the way that the human brain
Speaker 1: is so social and comes to understand other people as people,
Speaker 1: but it's also really easy for brains to form in
Speaker 1: groups and outgroups, and how the circus in your brain
Speaker 1: that understand other people can come to see them more
Speaker 1: like objects. They're no longer human, they are dehumanized. And
Speaker 1: once someone has become an object, it becomes much easier,
Speaker 1: sometimes trivial, to do what you need to make them
Speaker 1: not be a problem to you anymore, and pushing people
Speaker 1: into the outgroup is not hard to do. We saw
Speaker 1: last week the tools of the trade, of propaganda and
Speaker 1: other techniques of dehumanization, and in this week's episode we
Speaker 1: saw how the situation you're in can influence decision making
Speaker 1: as well. All it takes sometimes is an authority figure
Speaker 1: telling you there's a contract and you have to do this,
Speaker 1: and this is for a greater purpose, and don't worry,
Speaker 1: the responsibility will be diffused off of you. Just press
Speaker 1: the button, or in the case of Zimbardo's experiment, systems
Speaker 1: have an inherent structure such that guards and prisoners have
Speaker 1: their own implicit scripts, and it's very easy to find
Speaker 1: that you know those scripts, and in that situation you
Speaker 1: play out those scripts. All of these situations make it
Speaker 1: much easier to take dehumanization on board, to treat another
Speaker 1: person not like someone just like you, but instead like
Speaker 1: an object. And although we're a massively social species capable
Speaker 1: of such empathy, it's just not difficult to set up
Speaker 1: situations where we're capable of such violence. And I suggested
Speaker 1: three ways that we might take our knowledge of this
Speaker 1: and reorganize ourselves. The first is education of our community
Speaker 1: about the tricks of the trade, of propaganda and obedience
Speaker 1: to authority, because the truth is, once you know this stuff,
Speaker 1: it becomes so obvious what people are trying to accomplish,
Speaker 1: and you have a meaningful immunity to it. But without
Speaker 1: education on it, the youth of each new gen generation
Speaker 1: is at risk. So let's get this information into schools
Speaker 1: and communities. The second way is social modeling, that is,
Speaker 1: looking at people who stood up before us, like the
Speaker 1: people in Milgrim's experiments who said, sorry, I'm not going
Speaker 1: to deliver that next shock, and the guy says, but
Speaker 1: you have to. That's the experiment. I will take responsibility
Speaker 1: and you say, no, I'm not going to do it.
Speaker 1: It takes courage to be that kind of person, and
Speaker 1: we'd all be better off if we saw lots of
Speaker 1: examples of that kind of behavior. Then it wouldn't seem
Speaker 1: so foreign to us, and we would find it easier
Speaker 1: to discover that courage when we need it. And the
Speaker 1: third thing is figuring out ways to surface the ties
Speaker 1: between people that perhaps they weren't aware of before, to
Speaker 1: establish ties that bind across all the typical boundaries. And
Speaker 1: I'll talk in a different episode about how we might
Speaker 1: do this by leveraging the power of social media. Social
Speaker 1: media is not going away, so let's see if we
Speaker 1: can leverage it for unity instead of division. So those
Speaker 1: are three strategies we can take. And the reason this
Speaker 1: matters is because we have evolved for use sociality. We're
Speaker 1: not independent contributors. We have succeeded as a species because
Speaker 1: we behave as a super organism as a group. And
Speaker 1: the reason I think it's so absolutely critical to study
Speaker 1: all this is because this is what is going to
Speaker 1: define our future. I mean, we pour billions of dollars
Speaker 1: into working to understand the science of Alzheimer's and cancer
Speaker 1: and diabetes, as we should, but these issues of dehumanization
Speaker 1: affect our species in an even deeper way, and there's
Speaker 1: comparatively little research about this. The important thing for our
Speaker 1: future is understanding why and how people can behave so
Speaker 1: badly towards one another. This may be the single most
Speaker 1: important question in terms of our legislation, the education of
Speaker 1: our children, and the future of our species. Go to
Speaker 1: Eagleman dot com slash podcast for more information and to
Speaker 1: find further reading. Send me an email at podcasts at
Speaker 1: eagleman dot com with questions or discussion, and I'll be
Speaker 1: making an episode soon in which I address those. Until
Speaker 1: next time, I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner Cosmos.