WEBVTT - Ep20 "Why does your brain care more about some people than others?" 0:00:04.920 --> 0:00:08.560 Why does your brain care more about some groups of 0:00:08.600 --> 0:00:12.559 people than others? Why do we so naturally form in 0:00:12.600 --> 0:00:14.920 groups and out groups? And what does any of that 0:00:15.080 --> 0:00:18.880 have to do with George W. Bush's political commercials, or 0:00:18.960 --> 0:00:24.960 the Greeks or psychopaths or syndrome E or propaganda posters 0:00:25.079 --> 0:00:32.080 and how to develop immunity against them. Welcome to Inner 0:00:32.159 --> 0:00:36.440 Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an 0:00:36.479 --> 0:00:40.640 author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail into 0:00:40.720 --> 0:00:44.440 our three pound universe to understand why and how our 0:00:44.520 --> 0:00:46.320 lives look the way they do. 0:00:55.680 --> 0:00:56.080 Today. 0:00:56.440 --> 0:00:59.680 We're going to talk about why we're so wired to 0:00:59.760 --> 0:01:04.200 have in groups and out groups, and what the consequences are, 0:01:04.600 --> 0:01:07.840 and how some knowledge on this goes a long way 0:01:08.240 --> 0:01:11.880 to making us a little smarter in the face of propaganda. 0:01:12.560 --> 0:01:16.600 This is a topic of enormous importance, in no small 0:01:16.640 --> 0:01:22.760 part because repeatedly throughout history, groups of people have inflicted 0:01:22.959 --> 0:01:27.280 violence on other members of their population. Think of the 0:01:27.400 --> 0:01:31.280 Nazis and they're killing of millions of people Jewish communities 0:01:31.319 --> 0:01:34.640 and Gypsies and others based on religious and ethnic and 0:01:34.680 --> 0:01:38.480 political affiliations. Or look at the Nanking massacre, in nineteen 0:01:38.520 --> 0:01:43.280 thirty seven when the Japanese invaded China and killed hundreds 0:01:43.280 --> 0:01:48.560 of thousands of unarmed civilians and systematically raped between eighty 0:01:48.600 --> 0:01:51.800 and one hundred thousand people. And in nineteen fifteen there 0:01:51.880 --> 0:01:55.680 was a systematic killing of the Armenian population by the 0:01:55.680 --> 0:02:00.280 Ottoman Empire. It's estimated that about one million Armenians were 0:02:00.360 --> 0:02:04.320 killed during this. And then in nineteen ninety four, in 0:02:04.360 --> 0:02:08.120 a period of one hundred days, the Hutu in Rwanda 0:02:08.240 --> 0:02:12.600 killed eight hundred thousand Tutsi and this was accomplished mostly 0:02:12.639 --> 0:02:15.520 with machetes, and at the peak of this they were 0:02:15.560 --> 0:02:20.240 actually achieving a higher killing rate with machetes than the 0:02:20.360 --> 0:02:24.359 Nazis had accomplished with gas chambers. And so the question 0:02:24.520 --> 0:02:27.240 is what is going on here? We see this kind 0:02:27.280 --> 0:02:30.520 of thing over and over in history, and often people 0:02:30.560 --> 0:02:33.920 will inflict this kind of violence in coordination with the 0:02:33.960 --> 0:02:38.360 authorities and against groups of people in their society that 0:02:38.440 --> 0:02:42.639 were no direct threat to them and were defenseless. So 0:02:42.720 --> 0:02:47.960 how can we understand this characteristic of human behavior, Because 0:02:48.040 --> 0:02:51.400 it's of deep importance for us to understand this if 0:02:51.400 --> 0:02:54.200 we want to have any hope of preventing this in 0:02:54.240 --> 0:02:58.760 the future. Now, historians look for explanations by digging into 0:02:58.800 --> 0:03:03.600 issues of political and civil strife and economic troubles. But 0:03:03.639 --> 0:03:06.240 the real issue is that the only way these events 0:03:06.280 --> 0:03:10.080 can happen is when there's a distinct change in the 0:03:10.120 --> 0:03:15.040 behavior of individuals, and how can we understand that change 0:03:15.120 --> 0:03:17.800 in behavior. What I want to talk about today is 0:03:17.880 --> 0:03:22.079 the science of what we understand about that about genocide. 0:03:22.120 --> 0:03:25.120 I want to put together a new framework to see 0:03:25.480 --> 0:03:28.440 how we can come to understand events like this, and 0:03:28.480 --> 0:03:31.000 I'm going to end by saying what we can do 0:03:31.160 --> 0:03:35.160 about it. So let's start in the distant past. When 0:03:35.160 --> 0:03:39.000 we think about human evolution. The story we all know 0:03:39.200 --> 0:03:43.720 about Darwinian evolution is that it's survival of the fittest. Right, 0:03:43.800 --> 0:03:47.720 you have to be a strong competitor to survive and thrive, 0:03:48.360 --> 0:03:51.880 and that's a pretty good framework. But people started realizing 0:03:51.960 --> 0:03:54.840 there was a little bit of a problem because the 0:03:54.920 --> 0:03:59.000 issue is altruism. That is, when you give your own 0:03:59.040 --> 0:04:03.160 resources to help other people. How does the basic Darwinian 0:04:03.240 --> 0:04:07.040 story of survival of the fittest explain why people help 0:04:07.080 --> 0:04:10.280 each other out. You can't understand that just by thinking 0:04:10.280 --> 0:04:15.920 about individual selection. And that got people thinking about kin selection, 0:04:16.680 --> 0:04:18.680 So you may have heard of this notion of the 0:04:19.080 --> 0:04:22.440 selfish gene. The idea is that if I share some 0:04:22.600 --> 0:04:26.320 genetic material with my brother, then maybe that explains why 0:04:26.360 --> 0:04:30.120 I want to help him out. The genes want to survive, 0:04:30.839 --> 0:04:33.599 and I share a little bit less genetic material with 0:04:33.720 --> 0:04:37.200 my cousins, and so all sacrifice for them, but maybe 0:04:37.240 --> 0:04:39.440 a little bit less so and so on through my 0:04:39.880 --> 0:04:45.080 family tree. The evolutionary biologist J. S. Haldane famously said 0:04:45.480 --> 0:04:48.080 I would gladly jump in a river to save two 0:04:48.080 --> 0:04:51.600 of my brothers or eight of my cousins. So this 0:04:51.680 --> 0:04:56.320 is known as kin selection rather than individual selection. But 0:04:56.400 --> 0:04:59.720 it turns out even that's not enough to explain the 0:04:59.760 --> 0:05:04.440 world of humans, because in fact, what distinguishes our species 0:05:04.560 --> 0:05:10.400 is that humans get together and cooperate irrespective of kinship. 0:05:11.040 --> 0:05:15.040 So that led people to think about group selection, which 0:05:15.080 --> 0:05:18.440 is to say, if you and your fellow tribe members 0:05:18.520 --> 0:05:22.640 are the type who cooperate, then as a group you 0:05:22.920 --> 0:05:26.880 all increase your chances of survival. Your tribe has a 0:05:26.880 --> 0:05:30.279 better chance of surviving than the other tribe on the 0:05:30.320 --> 0:05:32.880 other side of the mountain, who are not very cooperative 0:05:32.880 --> 0:05:35.760 with each other, no matter how strong they may be 0:05:35.880 --> 0:05:40.880 as individuals. So the term for this is you sociality 0:05:41.520 --> 0:05:46.720 You you meaning good or positive. So if a species 0:05:46.960 --> 0:05:50.520 is you social, then there's this glue that allows them 0:05:50.520 --> 0:05:55.479 to build tribes and groups and nations irrespective of kinship. 0:05:55.880 --> 0:05:58.919 My colleague Jonathan Hate gave a nice analogy for this. 0:05:59.080 --> 0:06:03.160 He said, as a result of the evolutionary history of humans, 0:06:03.520 --> 0:06:07.840 we're sort of ninety percent primate and ten percent honeybee. 0:06:08.240 --> 0:06:12.039 By primates, he means we're mostly about individual competition, but 0:06:12.200 --> 0:06:16.240 by honeybee he means sometimes we work together for the 0:06:16.279 --> 0:06:19.840 good of the hive. So our strong youth social nature 0:06:20.000 --> 0:06:24.159 can't be explained just by individual selection, but instead it 0:06:24.200 --> 0:06:28.480 seems to require this selection for groups who want to work. 0:06:28.240 --> 0:06:28.920 With one another. 0:06:29.279 --> 0:06:33.880 Now, this massively social nature is what underlies our ability 0:06:33.960 --> 0:06:38.400 to build and operate cities and industry and do science 0:06:38.480 --> 0:06:41.920 and so on. Humans say, hey, let's link arms and 0:06:42.000 --> 0:06:45.680 cooperate with one another and drive things forward together and 0:06:46.000 --> 0:06:49.360 enjoy all the benefits of that. This kind of thinking 0:06:49.560 --> 0:06:55.000 allows organisms to operate as superorganisms. And by the way, 0:06:55.000 --> 0:06:58.800 I should just note something about religion here. Some scholars 0:06:58.880 --> 0:07:04.159 compare religion to a pathological virus that spreads across minds. 0:07:04.520 --> 0:07:07.080 But that's probably not the optimal way to think about it. 0:07:07.400 --> 0:07:11.360 From an evolutionary point of view, things are judged by 0:07:11.400 --> 0:07:15.160 what they cause people to do, and what religions cause 0:07:15.440 --> 0:07:19.520 is for people to group together, to be usocial. So 0:07:19.640 --> 0:07:22.840 what happens with religions is you define a group, you 0:07:22.920 --> 0:07:26.280 coordinate the behavior of the group, and you incentivize the 0:07:26.280 --> 0:07:31.000 group to cooperate and work together. So, as one evolutionary 0:07:31.000 --> 0:07:35.040 biologist in the late eighteen hundred said, religion is just 0:07:35.200 --> 0:07:40.040 another weapon in the Darwinian struggle for survival. In other words, 0:07:40.080 --> 0:07:43.520 if religion were maladaptive, it would have gone away. But 0:07:43.760 --> 0:07:47.800 it usually is adaptive in the sense that it causes 0:07:47.880 --> 0:07:53.080 groups to come together and work cooperatively. But one of 0:07:53.120 --> 0:07:57.800 the costs of our usociality is that we get in 0:07:57.880 --> 0:08:01.960 groups and outgroups. And today we're going to see what 0:08:02.000 --> 0:08:06.640 all of this has to do with the brain. Historically, traditionally, 0:08:06.720 --> 0:08:10.160 we've always studied the brain by looking at individual parts 0:08:10.160 --> 0:08:12.440 and regions of it. So you say, okay, well, this 0:08:12.520 --> 0:08:14.920 is how vision works, and this is how hearing works, 0:08:14.920 --> 0:08:16.840 and this is how decision making works and so on, 0:08:17.480 --> 0:08:20.320 and it's only in recent years that people began to 0:08:20.400 --> 0:08:23.640 appreciate that a lot of the circuitry of the brain 0:08:23.840 --> 0:08:27.000 has to do with this youth sociality. A lot of 0:08:27.040 --> 0:08:29.440 it has to do with how you interact with other 0:08:29.560 --> 0:08:33.920 brains in terms of trust and reputation and allegiances. And 0:08:33.960 --> 0:08:36.560 I talked a little bit about this in a previous episode. 0:08:36.720 --> 0:08:40.640 And this has led to a new field called social neuroscience, 0:08:40.920 --> 0:08:42.800 which studies this sort of thing. And that's what I'm 0:08:42.800 --> 0:08:46.080 going to tell you about today, and how social neuroscience 0:08:46.440 --> 0:08:48.720 can shed light on group behavior. 0:08:49.679 --> 0:08:50.600 So I mentioned in. 0:08:50.559 --> 0:08:55.480 This previous episode about this philosophical problem called the trolley dilemma, 0:08:55.800 --> 0:08:58.680 And just as a reminder, there is a trolley barreling 0:08:58.720 --> 0:08:59.120 down the. 0:08:59.120 --> 0:09:00.840 Tracks full speed. 0:09:01.120 --> 0:09:03.800 Its brakes are broken, and you see there are five 0:09:04.000 --> 0:09:07.600 workmen farther down the track and they're going to get killed. 0:09:07.760 --> 0:09:09.760 The trolley is going to run over them. But it 0:09:09.920 --> 0:09:12.320 just so happens that you notice you're standing next to 0:09:12.440 --> 0:09:15.880 a lever that can switch the track for the trolley, 0:09:16.080 --> 0:09:17.680 and on this other track, you see. 0:09:17.559 --> 0:09:19.040 There's only one workman there. 0:09:19.320 --> 0:09:22.280 So the question is will you switch the track over 0:09:22.400 --> 0:09:26.120 so it kills only one person instead of five? So 0:09:26.160 --> 0:09:28.920 think about what you would do here. Now, here's scenario 0:09:29.040 --> 0:09:31.760 number two. It's the same thing. The trolley is barreling 0:09:31.800 --> 0:09:34.080 down the track. You see the five workmen. They're going 0:09:34.120 --> 0:09:37.360 to get killed. But this time you're standing on a 0:09:37.360 --> 0:09:41.760 little footbridge over the tracks, and you realize that there 0:09:41.880 --> 0:09:44.880 is a man standing in front of you, and if 0:09:44.920 --> 0:09:47.400 you push him over the edge of the tracks, his 0:09:47.520 --> 0:09:51.240 weight will be sufficient to stop the trolley and save 0:09:51.320 --> 0:09:56.080 the five men. So the question is do you push 0:09:56.160 --> 0:10:00.120 the man or not? Now, in most cases people will 0:10:00.000 --> 0:10:02.760 do it. But the thing to notice is that it's 0:10:02.840 --> 0:10:06.640 exactly the same question. In both cases, will you trade 0:10:07.360 --> 0:10:10.959 one life for five lives or won't you Most people 0:10:10.960 --> 0:10:13.000 will do that in the first case, but they won't 0:10:13.000 --> 0:10:15.320 in the second case, which is interesting, right, it's the 0:10:15.400 --> 0:10:20.040 same math. So my colleagues Joshua Green and Jonathan Cohen 0:10:20.080 --> 0:10:22.880 got interested in this question some years ago and they 0:10:22.880 --> 0:10:25.160 did neuro imaging on people. They put them in the 0:10:25.240 --> 0:10:28.840 brain scanner while they had the people walking through the 0:10:28.960 --> 0:10:31.760 trolley dilemma problem, and essentially what they found is there 0:10:31.760 --> 0:10:33.920 are areas of your brain that are involved in math 0:10:34.040 --> 0:10:37.080 problems that are saying, okay, well, one versus five and 0:10:37.120 --> 0:10:39.960 so on. They make a calculation, and you have other 0:10:40.040 --> 0:10:43.640 areas of your brain that care about emotional issues. They're 0:10:44.080 --> 0:10:48.480 simulating situations and assessing how those make you feel. Those 0:10:48.520 --> 0:10:51.240 areas are generally along the midline of the brain if 0:10:51.280 --> 0:10:53.640 you drew a line from your nose to the back 0:10:53.640 --> 0:10:55.640 of your head. And it turns out that in this 0:10:55.960 --> 0:10:58.520 second scenario where you're asking if you're going to push 0:10:58.559 --> 0:11:03.240 the guy, these emotional areas come online, and that changes 0:11:03.360 --> 0:11:07.679 your decision making. In other words, emotions, how you feel 0:11:07.720 --> 0:11:12.360 about something is a very important part in navigating the decision. 0:11:12.800 --> 0:11:15.439 The first scenario is just an easy math problem. The 0:11:15.480 --> 0:11:19.080 second one is an emotional problem, and it changes what 0:11:19.240 --> 0:11:22.800 you decide. And in fact, the idea that reason and 0:11:22.880 --> 0:11:26.280 emotion are fighting with each other. That's a very old idea. 0:11:26.480 --> 0:11:29.960 The Greeks had this metaphor that life is as though 0:11:30.000 --> 0:11:33.839 you are a charioteer and you're being pulled along by 0:11:34.200 --> 0:11:37.360 the white horse of reason and the black horse of passion, 0:11:37.760 --> 0:11:40.800 and they're always trying to pull you off in opposite directions, 0:11:41.160 --> 0:11:44.160 and your job as the charioteer is to. 0:11:44.160 --> 0:11:45.640 Stay down the middle of the road. 0:11:46.040 --> 0:11:48.200 And it's not easy, right because you've got these two 0:11:48.200 --> 0:11:53.040 different polls going on all the time. So emotions are 0:11:53.120 --> 0:11:57.120 tightly involved in decision making. They serve an important role 0:11:57.559 --> 0:12:00.000 in how we navigate our life. 0:12:00.559 --> 0:12:02.720 And you wouldn't want to live in a world. 0:12:02.520 --> 0:12:05.720 Where everybody is like mister Spock and Star Trek and 0:12:05.760 --> 0:12:09.400 doesn't have emotions, right, because everybody would just push the 0:12:09.440 --> 0:12:10.760 man off the bridge and that would be. 0:12:10.760 --> 0:12:11.240 The end of it. 0:12:11.600 --> 0:12:16.240 But instead, we use emotions to steer the decisions we make, 0:12:16.360 --> 0:12:19.280 and if something feels wrong, we try not to do it. 0:12:35.440 --> 0:12:39.240 So the question is how do we understand or interpret 0:12:39.920 --> 0:12:44.960 the things that we see during wartime. There's a horrifying 0:12:45.040 --> 0:12:48.400 photograph from World War Two where there's a crying mother 0:12:48.480 --> 0:12:51.720 who's clutching her small child to her chest, and there's 0:12:51.760 --> 0:12:55.240 a German soldier about six feet behind her with his 0:12:55.520 --> 0:12:59.440 rifle poised aimed at her head, ready to execute her 0:12:59.720 --> 0:13:02.760 while she's holding her baby in her arms. Now, there 0:13:02.760 --> 0:13:05.160 are several things to note about this photograph. First, the 0:13:05.240 --> 0:13:07.920 fact that he's doing this in front of someone in 0:13:07.960 --> 0:13:11.679 front of the cameraman suggests that he has a diminished 0:13:12.160 --> 0:13:16.559 emotional reactivity to this situation. He's not distressed by the situation. 0:13:17.040 --> 0:13:20.079 He's not feeling like you felt when you thought about 0:13:20.120 --> 0:13:22.920 pushing the man off the bridge. Now, if this were 0:13:23.320 --> 0:13:26.480 the one guy committing atrocities during wartime, we might just 0:13:26.520 --> 0:13:28.400 write him off as a psychopath. 0:13:28.800 --> 0:13:30.120 But there were hundreds of. 0:13:30.160 --> 0:13:34.120 Thousands of young men doing awful stuff everywhere you looked, 0:13:34.120 --> 0:13:38.480 including running the concentration camps, or raping women in the towns, 0:13:38.600 --> 0:13:42.560 or lining up dozens of people along ditches and machine 0:13:42.559 --> 0:13:47.200 gunning them. So it wasn't just one psychopath. What was 0:13:47.240 --> 0:13:50.800 going on here? The neurosurgeon you talk Freed in the 0:13:50.880 --> 0:13:54.320 late nineties started thinking about this question a lot, and 0:13:54.360 --> 0:13:57.160 he said, you know, when you look across all these 0:13:57.160 --> 0:13:59.400 different events in the world, you find this kind of 0:13:59.480 --> 0:14:03.920 behavior everywhere. People seem to lose their normal way that 0:14:03.960 --> 0:14:07.160 their brain functions, and they become different in how they 0:14:07.160 --> 0:14:11.840 make decisions, they act differently than they would under normal circumstances. 0:14:12.520 --> 0:14:15.000 And he said, when you look at the signs and 0:14:15.040 --> 0:14:18.640 the symptoms of their behavior, it's like there's a medical 0:14:18.679 --> 0:14:22.680 condition going on here. So he named this syndrome E, 0:14:23.560 --> 0:14:27.080 and he said there are very particular signs and symptoms 0:14:27.640 --> 0:14:29.400 that you look for here, just like you would look 0:14:29.440 --> 0:14:32.960 for coughing or fever with pneumonia. You look for particular 0:14:33.120 --> 0:14:39.920 things that characterize people's behavior during wartime. First, there's diminished 0:14:40.000 --> 0:14:45.720 emotional reactivity that gives people this ability to do repetitive 0:14:46.000 --> 0:14:49.480 acts of violence. Maybe people start off having a little 0:14:49.480 --> 0:14:51.920 bit of a hard time with it, but they rapidly 0:14:52.480 --> 0:14:57.160 desensitize it doesn't bother them anymore. Second, he noticed there's 0:14:57.200 --> 0:15:01.080 a hyper arousal or as the Germans called it, raush, 0:15:01.440 --> 0:15:06.400 which is this feeling of elation when committing these horrific acts. 0:15:06.840 --> 0:15:11.080 Another sign is group contagion, which is an important one 0:15:11.080 --> 0:15:14.520 that I'll come back to. The issue is everybody's doing 0:15:14.560 --> 0:15:18.000 something and it catches on and it spreads. He also 0:15:18.160 --> 0:15:22.960 pointed to compartmentalization. Someone can care about their own family 0:15:23.360 --> 0:15:25.040 and yet at the same time do this sort of 0:15:25.040 --> 0:15:28.640 thing to another family. So these are the signs of 0:15:28.680 --> 0:15:34.840 syndrome E. Diminished emotional reactivity, repetitive acts of violence, hyper arousal, 0:15:35.360 --> 0:15:40.520 group contagion, compartmentalization. And the interesting thing from a neuroscience 0:15:40.520 --> 0:15:43.560 point of view is that the other functions of the 0:15:43.560 --> 0:15:46.880 brain are working just fine. Things like language and memory 0:15:46.920 --> 0:15:50.720 and problem solving, those are completely intact so that gives 0:15:50.800 --> 0:15:53.920 us a clue into what's happening under the hood. And 0:15:54.000 --> 0:15:57.280 what's happening in the case of syndrome E is something 0:15:57.400 --> 0:16:03.280 like this. The emotional networks of the brain are short circuited. 0:16:04.120 --> 0:16:07.800 They are not participating in the decision making anymore. They 0:16:07.840 --> 0:16:11.960 are now sidelined. They're out of the equation. So that 0:16:12.160 --> 0:16:16.200 allows a soldier to execute a woman clutching her baby, 0:16:16.520 --> 0:16:18.760 just like it would allow you to push the man 0:16:18.800 --> 0:16:21.520 off the bridge without really thinking twice about it. In 0:16:21.560 --> 0:16:24.840 other words, their decision making is being steered by parts 0:16:24.840 --> 0:16:27.400 of the brain that can do logic and reasoning and 0:16:27.480 --> 0:16:29.920 memory and so on, but not the parts of the 0:16:29.960 --> 0:16:33.760 brain that normally navigate things with emotion. And what this 0:16:33.920 --> 0:16:38.480 leads to is a moral disengagement. A person becomes like 0:16:38.600 --> 0:16:41.400 a car that's in neutral going down the hill. He 0:16:41.440 --> 0:16:44.560 doesn't have all these systems anymore that tell him the 0:16:44.640 --> 0:16:47.560 right way to steer his actions. Now, can this sort 0:16:47.600 --> 0:16:51.200 of thing be studied in the laboratory, Yes it can. 0:16:51.840 --> 0:16:57.280 So consider this study. People are shown photographs of other 0:16:57.320 --> 0:16:59.960 people and you measure what's going on in their brain. 0:17:00.520 --> 0:17:02.680 And what the researchers found is that if you show 0:17:02.760 --> 0:17:08.240 participants pictures of people they admire, Olympic athletes and hard workers, 0:17:08.240 --> 0:17:10.800 and so on. Various parts of the brain light up, 0:17:11.560 --> 0:17:14.040 and the area I want to draw attention to is 0:17:14.200 --> 0:17:18.199 a part along the brain's midline called the medial prefrontal cortex. 0:17:18.560 --> 0:17:23.040 The medial prefrontal cortex is involved in these emotional systems, 0:17:23.040 --> 0:17:26.680 and it's also involved in social cognition. In other words, 0:17:26.760 --> 0:17:31.120 this area is active whenever you're dealing with another person 0:17:31.280 --> 0:17:33.639 as opposed to an object like a coffee cup or 0:17:33.640 --> 0:17:37.399 a laptop. Even if you show participants photographs of people 0:17:37.440 --> 0:17:40.439 they don't like very much, like people they envy or 0:17:40.440 --> 0:17:44.280 people they pity, you still get medial prefrontal cortex activation. 0:17:44.400 --> 0:17:47.760 In other words, people still see them as humans even 0:17:47.800 --> 0:17:50.639 though they're maybe not in their in group. But if 0:17:50.680 --> 0:17:54.159 you go even further along the spectrum of outgroups and 0:17:54.200 --> 0:17:58.520 show pictures of people that they feel very separated from, 0:17:58.600 --> 0:18:02.280 like homeless people are drug addicts, the medial prefrontal cortex 0:18:02.560 --> 0:18:06.399 turns off. It just doesn't come online in the same way. 0:18:06.560 --> 0:18:10.000 And what that means is that they're viewing these people 0:18:10.480 --> 0:18:14.080 the same way that they do objects. So again, when 0:18:14.119 --> 0:18:17.520 you view objects, this area doesn't come online, and it 0:18:17.600 --> 0:18:21.639 comes online when you're looking at humans, except for really 0:18:21.800 --> 0:18:25.840 outgroup humans, when it simply doesn't activate anymore. So when 0:18:25.880 --> 0:18:30.640 we talk about dehumanization, what we're really talking about are 0:18:30.760 --> 0:18:34.800 regions of the brain that think about other humans that 0:18:35.000 --> 0:18:38.280 don't come online anymore. These regions are now out of 0:18:38.320 --> 0:18:42.200 the equation, and in this scenario, when you are making 0:18:42.320 --> 0:18:46.520 moral decisions about people who are in your outgroup, you 0:18:46.560 --> 0:18:52.760 don't have these use social mechanisms steering your behavior. With psychopaths, 0:18:52.760 --> 0:18:55.680 by the way, there are many subtle differences in their brains, 0:18:55.680 --> 0:18:57.800 but one of the issues you see is this, they 0:18:57.880 --> 0:19:00.439 just don't have these areas like the medial pre frontal 0:19:00.440 --> 0:19:04.760 cortex emotionally steering their behavior, and so they're capable of 0:19:04.840 --> 0:19:08.080 doing things like violence and murder because they don't care 0:19:08.119 --> 0:19:11.159 about you. They're not simulating what it is like to 0:19:11.280 --> 0:19:15.919 be you. They don't have the emotional feeling that's steering 0:19:16.000 --> 0:19:20.400 around their decisions. And this is what happens when groups 0:19:20.880 --> 0:19:25.359 dehumanize their neighbors. I have a photograph of a group 0:19:25.400 --> 0:19:28.320 of German citizens and soldiers at the beginning of World 0:19:28.359 --> 0:19:33.480 War Two making their Jewish neighbors scrub the pavement with toothbrushes, 0:19:33.880 --> 0:19:36.880 and the Germans watching are having a great time posing 0:19:36.920 --> 0:19:39.679 and laughing. And what's happening is that, because of the 0:19:39.760 --> 0:19:45.160 social context that allows syndrome E, these emotional regions are 0:19:45.200 --> 0:19:49.480 no longer online, and so their neighbors are not like 0:19:49.560 --> 0:19:55.400 humans to them anymore. And this situation typifies genocides. Here's 0:19:55.440 --> 0:19:59.520 a quotation from a Japanese general talking about his behavior 0:20:00.160 --> 0:20:03.880 during the invasion of China. He explained his soldier's behavior 0:20:03.920 --> 0:20:07.160 by saying, it was quote because we thought of them 0:20:07.280 --> 0:20:10.240 as things, not as people like us. 0:20:10.440 --> 0:20:10.879 End quote. 0:20:11.200 --> 0:20:14.440 Here's a statement from a woman in Rwanda who orchestrated 0:20:14.480 --> 0:20:17.800 the killing of thousands of Tutsi. She said, quote, we 0:20:18.000 --> 0:20:21.840 thought of them as nothing more than insects or cockroaches. 0:20:22.359 --> 0:20:26.240 Here's a quotation from an American sergeant stationed in Iraq. 0:20:26.359 --> 0:20:29.359 He says, quote, you just sort of tried to block 0:20:29.400 --> 0:20:32.200 out the fact that they're human beings and you see 0:20:32.200 --> 0:20:35.919 them as enemies. So what we're talking about here is 0:20:35.960 --> 0:20:41.439 the same neural issue across place and time. Dehumanization is 0:20:41.480 --> 0:20:44.600 about turning off the parts of your brain that allow 0:20:44.680 --> 0:20:48.680 you to understand what it is like to be someone else. 0:20:49.119 --> 0:20:53.880 You may remember Anders Bravik, the Norwegian who murdered seventy 0:20:54.000 --> 0:20:57.520 seven young people in twenty eleven. So back in twenty twelve, 0:20:57.560 --> 0:21:01.600 I was following his trial closely, and here's what he said. 0:21:01.920 --> 0:21:04.159 One might say I was quite normal in two thousand 0:21:04.160 --> 0:21:09.920 and six when I started training, when I commenced de emotionalizing. 0:21:10.160 --> 0:21:15.240 He said, I've had a dehumanization strategy towards those I 0:21:15.320 --> 0:21:19.240 considered valid targets so I could come to the point 0:21:19.520 --> 0:21:23.240 of killing them. He nailed it here. He knew that 0:21:23.359 --> 0:21:28.200 his own training regime was about de emotionalizing. I mean, 0:21:28.200 --> 0:21:30.960 he phrased exactly what we've been talking about here so far. 0:21:31.359 --> 0:21:36.000 He worked, for example, with meditation, to hammer away any 0:21:36.119 --> 0:21:40.400 emotional response he had to the idea of killing someone. 0:21:41.040 --> 0:21:43.480 That's the way he trained. He worked to diminish the 0:21:43.520 --> 0:21:47.320 response of his medial prefrontal cortex in other areas and 0:21:47.359 --> 0:21:50.960 the networks involved in emotion. Now, we might lament the 0:21:51.040 --> 0:21:54.040 fact that these programs are able to be overridden, but 0:21:54.119 --> 0:21:57.200 we should be thankful for the fact that they're so 0:21:57.200 --> 0:22:03.000 so difficult to override. Act like bravics is extremely rare. 0:22:03.240 --> 0:22:06.440 Despite the logical ease of anyone pulling it off. Now, 0:22:06.440 --> 0:22:08.560 if you're not that good at turning off your own 0:22:08.640 --> 0:22:11.840 medial prefrontal cortex, you should know that there are always 0:22:11.960 --> 0:22:14.920 groups that are willing to do this for you, and 0:22:15.000 --> 0:22:19.920 that is the art and science of propaganda. So something 0:22:19.960 --> 0:22:23.280 that I have always found amazing is looking at war posters. 0:22:23.720 --> 0:22:26.680 For example, I have an American poster from World War One. 0:22:26.800 --> 0:22:31.600 It shows a giant, crazy looking ape wearing a German helmet, 0:22:31.680 --> 0:22:34.760 and on the helmet it reads militarism. And in one 0:22:34.800 --> 0:22:37.720 hand the ape is carrying a huge club, and in 0:22:37.760 --> 0:22:41.920 the other arm he's holding a beautiful woman whose arms 0:22:41.960 --> 0:22:45.959 are flung over her head, and the poster reads, destroy 0:22:46.200 --> 0:22:50.199 this mad brute enlist US Army. Now, I want to 0:22:50.240 --> 0:22:52.800 point out that if you look at any propaganda poster 0:22:52.960 --> 0:22:56.480 from any war at any time, on any side, you'll 0:22:56.480 --> 0:23:01.199 see a common theme. You make your enemy less than human, 0:23:01.520 --> 0:23:04.639 and making them explicitly an animal. 0:23:04.320 --> 0:23:05.919 Is a very popular choice. 0:23:06.040 --> 0:23:08.600 So in this case, the Germans are portrayed as a 0:23:09.040 --> 0:23:12.600 bellicose ape coming onto American shores, and the fact that 0:23:12.640 --> 0:23:17.080 he's stealing away a half naked, beautiful American woman makes 0:23:17.080 --> 0:23:19.520 you even more mad about the whole thing. And this 0:23:19.680 --> 0:23:23.800 is typical of propaganda posters. You always give the enemy 0:23:24.320 --> 0:23:28.240 fangs and feral features. And the idea is you want 0:23:28.280 --> 0:23:32.200 to shut off the networks that are involved in humanization. 0:23:32.880 --> 0:23:35.600 You want your population to feel like we can do this, 0:23:35.720 --> 0:23:38.119 We can go to war with these guys because they're 0:23:38.119 --> 0:23:42.560 not like us, they're animals. Or consider this other propaganda 0:23:42.600 --> 0:23:46.040 poster I have from Germany during World War Two, which 0:23:46.160 --> 0:23:52.400 represents America as a giant mechanical robot monster toting guns 0:23:52.440 --> 0:23:56.119 and bombs and destroying Europe. So it doesn't have to 0:23:56.119 --> 0:23:59.680 be animals, just anything that's not human. And in fact, 0:23:59.720 --> 0:24:02.720 when our Winian thinking got introduced in the eighteen hundreds, 0:24:02.760 --> 0:24:07.800 lots of people took the opportunity to generate pseudoscience, suggesting 0:24:07.800 --> 0:24:11.480 that whoever their enemy was, they were less than human. 0:24:12.160 --> 0:24:15.959 This is a typical strategy to implement, and it can 0:24:16.000 --> 0:24:18.840 even be done subtly. Some of you may remember that 0:24:18.960 --> 0:24:22.480 when George W. Bush was running for president against Al Gore, 0:24:22.840 --> 0:24:26.160 he did the same thing. His commercial ran and said 0:24:26.720 --> 0:24:30.000 the Gore prescription plan, and then you see this big 0:24:30.000 --> 0:24:33.920 word rats on the screen, and then after about half 0:24:33.960 --> 0:24:36.280 a second is the word zooms out. You see it 0:24:36.359 --> 0:24:41.040 actually says bureaucrats, and eventually, when it's all zoomed out, 0:24:41.080 --> 0:24:44.520 it says bureaucrats decide. But what it starts with is 0:24:44.560 --> 0:24:49.680 this giant word rats. The strategy of dehumanization is one 0:24:49.680 --> 0:24:52.720 that people use to make your brain feel like it 0:24:52.760 --> 0:24:55.959 doesn't have to think about the other person as a 0:24:56.000 --> 0:24:58.119 fellow human. And I have a lot of goals with 0:24:58.160 --> 0:25:00.919 this podcast, but one of them is to expose this 0:25:01.160 --> 0:25:05.080 simple neural tricks that have been employed forever so that 0:25:05.160 --> 0:25:07.880 you can know what to watch for. We'll come back 0:25:07.920 --> 0:25:09.600 to this at the end. But the thing I want 0:25:09.640 --> 0:25:11.400 you to keep an eye out for as you move 0:25:11.520 --> 0:25:15.280