Speaker 1: Why does your brain care more about some groups of
Speaker 1: people than others? Why do we so naturally form in
Speaker 1: groups and out groups? And what does any of that
Speaker 1: have to do with George W. Bush's political commercials, or
Speaker 1: the Greeks or psychopaths or syndrome E or propaganda posters
Speaker 1: and how to develop immunity against them. Welcome to Inner
Speaker 1: Cosmos with me David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an
Speaker 1: author at Stanford and in these episodes we sail into
Speaker 1: our three pound universe to understand why and how our
Speaker 1: lives look the way they do.
Speaker 2: Today.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about why we're so wired to
Speaker 1: have in groups and out groups, and what the consequences are,
Speaker 1: and how some knowledge on this goes a long way
Speaker 1: to making us a little smarter in the face of propaganda.
Speaker 1: This is a topic of enormous importance, in no small
Speaker 1: part because repeatedly throughout history, groups of people have inflicted
Speaker 1: violence on other members of their population. Think of the
Speaker 1: Nazis and they're killing of millions of people Jewish communities
Speaker 1: and Gypsies and others based on religious and ethnic and
Speaker 1: political affiliations. Or look at the Nanking massacre, in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty seven when the Japanese invaded China and killed hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of unarmed civilians and systematically raped between eighty
Speaker 1: and one hundred thousand people. And in nineteen fifteen there
Speaker 1: was a systematic killing of the Armenian population by the
Speaker 1: Ottoman Empire. It's estimated that about one million Armenians were
Speaker 1: killed during this. And then in nineteen ninety four, in
Speaker 1: a period of one hundred days, the Hutu in Rwanda
Speaker 1: killed eight hundred thousand Tutsi and this was accomplished mostly
Speaker 1: with machetes, and at the peak of this they were
Speaker 1: actually achieving a higher killing rate with machetes than the
Speaker 1: Nazis had accomplished with gas chambers. And so the question
Speaker 1: is what is going on here? We see this kind
Speaker 1: of thing over and over in history, and often people
Speaker 1: will inflict this kind of violence in coordination with the
Speaker 1: authorities and against groups of people in their society that
Speaker 1: were no direct threat to them and were defenseless. So
Speaker 1: how can we understand this characteristic of human behavior, Because
Speaker 1: it's of deep importance for us to understand this if
Speaker 1: we want to have any hope of preventing this in
Speaker 1: the future. Now, historians look for explanations by digging into
Speaker 1: issues of political and civil strife and economic troubles. But
Speaker 1: the real issue is that the only way these events
Speaker 1: can happen is when there's a distinct change in the
Speaker 1: behavior of individuals, and how can we understand that change
Speaker 1: in behavior. What I want to talk about today is
Speaker 1: the science of what we understand about that about genocide.
Speaker 1: I want to put together a new framework to see
Speaker 1: how we can come to understand events like this, and
Speaker 1: I'm going to end by saying what we can do
Speaker 1: about it. So let's start in the distant past. When
Speaker 1: we think about human evolution. The story we all know
Speaker 1: about Darwinian evolution is that it's survival of the fittest. Right,
Speaker 1: you have to be a strong competitor to survive and thrive,
Speaker 1: and that's a pretty good framework. But people started realizing
Speaker 1: there was a little bit of a problem because the
Speaker 1: issue is altruism. That is, when you give your own
Speaker 1: resources to help other people. How does the basic Darwinian
Speaker 1: story of survival of the fittest explain why people help
Speaker 1: each other out. You can't understand that just by thinking
Speaker 1: about individual selection. And that got people thinking about kin selection,
Speaker 1: So you may have heard of this notion of the
Speaker 1: selfish gene. The idea is that if I share some
Speaker 1: genetic material with my brother, then maybe that explains why
Speaker 1: I want to help him out. The genes want to survive,
Speaker 1: and I share a little bit less genetic material with
Speaker 1: my cousins, and so all sacrifice for them, but maybe
Speaker 1: a little bit less so and so on through my
Speaker 1: family tree. The evolutionary biologist J. S. Haldane famously said
Speaker 1: I would gladly jump in a river to save two
Speaker 1: of my brothers or eight of my cousins. So this
Speaker 1: is known as kin selection rather than individual selection. But
Speaker 1: it turns out even that's not enough to explain the
Speaker 1: world of humans, because in fact, what distinguishes our species
Speaker 1: is that humans get together and cooperate irrespective of kinship.
Speaker 1: So that led people to think about group selection, which
Speaker 1: is to say, if you and your fellow tribe members
Speaker 1: are the type who cooperate, then as a group you
Speaker 1: all increase your chances of survival. Your tribe has a
Speaker 1: better chance of surviving than the other tribe on the
Speaker 1: other side of the mountain, who are not very cooperative
Speaker 1: with each other, no matter how strong they may be
Speaker 1: as individuals. So the term for this is you sociality
Speaker 1: You you meaning good or positive. So if a species
Speaker 1: is you social, then there's this glue that allows them
Speaker 1: to build tribes and groups and nations irrespective of kinship.
Speaker 1: My colleague Jonathan Hate gave a nice analogy for this.
Speaker 1: He said, as a result of the evolutionary history of humans,
Speaker 1: we're sort of ninety percent primate and ten percent honeybee.
Speaker 1: By primates, he means we're mostly about individual competition, but
Speaker 1: by honeybee he means sometimes we work together for the
Speaker 1: good of the hive. So our strong youth social nature
Speaker 1: can't be explained just by individual selection, but instead it
Speaker 1: seems to require this selection for groups who want to work.
Speaker 2: With one another.
Speaker 1: Now, this massively social nature is what underlies our ability
Speaker 1: to build and operate cities and industry and do science
Speaker 1: and so on. Humans say, hey, let's link arms and
Speaker 1: cooperate with one another and drive things forward together and
Speaker 1: enjoy all the benefits of that. This kind of thinking
Speaker 1: allows organisms to operate as superorganisms. And by the way,
Speaker 1: I should just note something about religion here. Some scholars
Speaker 1: compare religion to a pathological virus that spreads across minds.
Speaker 1: But that's probably not the optimal way to think about it.
Speaker 1: From an evolutionary point of view, things are judged by
Speaker 1: what they cause people to do, and what religions cause
Speaker 1: is for people to group together, to be usocial. So
Speaker 1: what happens with religions is you define a group, you
Speaker 1: coordinate the behavior of the group, and you incentivize the
Speaker 1: group to cooperate and work together. So, as one evolutionary
Speaker 1: biologist in the late eighteen hundred said, religion is just
Speaker 1: another weapon in the Darwinian struggle for survival. In other words,
Speaker 1: if religion were maladaptive, it would have gone away. But
Speaker 1: it usually is adaptive in the sense that it causes
Speaker 1: groups to come together and work cooperatively. But one of
Speaker 1: the costs of our usociality is that we get in
Speaker 1: groups and outgroups. And today we're going to see what
Speaker 1: all of this has to do with the brain. Historically, traditionally,
Speaker 1: we've always studied the brain by looking at individual parts
Speaker 1: and regions of it. So you say, okay, well, this
Speaker 1: is how vision works, and this is how hearing works,
Speaker 1: and this is how decision making works and so on,
Speaker 1: and it's only in recent years that people began to
Speaker 1: appreciate that a lot of the circuitry of the brain
Speaker 1: has to do with this youth sociality. A lot of
Speaker 1: it has to do with how you interact with other
Speaker 1: brains in terms of trust and reputation and allegiances. And
Speaker 1: I talked a little bit about this in a previous episode.
Speaker 1: And this has led to a new field called social neuroscience,
Speaker 1: which studies this sort of thing. And that's what I'm
Speaker 1: going to tell you about today, and how social neuroscience
Speaker 1: can shed light on group behavior.
Speaker 2: So I mentioned in.
Speaker 1: This previous episode about this philosophical problem called the trolley dilemma,
Speaker 1: And just as a reminder, there is a trolley barreling
Speaker 1: down the.
Speaker 2: Tracks full speed.
Speaker 1: Its brakes are broken, and you see there are five
Speaker 1: workmen farther down the track and they're going to get killed.
Speaker 1: The trolley is going to run over them. But it
Speaker 1: just so happens that you notice you're standing next to
Speaker 1: a lever that can switch the track for the trolley,
Speaker 1: and on this other track, you see.
Speaker 2: There's only one workman there.
Speaker 1: So the question is will you switch the track over
Speaker 1: so it kills only one person instead of five? So
Speaker 1: think about what you would do here. Now, here's scenario
Speaker 1: number two. It's the same thing. The trolley is barreling
Speaker 1: down the track. You see the five workmen. They're going
Speaker 1: to get killed. But this time you're standing on a
Speaker 1: little footbridge over the tracks, and you realize that there
Speaker 1: is a man standing in front of you, and if
Speaker 1: you push him over the edge of the tracks, his
Speaker 1: weight will be sufficient to stop the trolley and save
Speaker 1: the five men. So the question is do you push
Speaker 1: the man or not? Now, in most cases people will
Speaker 1: do it. But the thing to notice is that it's
Speaker 1: exactly the same question. In both cases, will you trade
Speaker 1: one life for five lives or won't you Most people
Speaker 1: will do that in the first case, but they won't
Speaker 1: in the second case, which is interesting, right, it's the
Speaker 1: same math. So my colleagues Joshua Green and Jonathan Cohen
Speaker 1: got interested in this question some years ago and they
Speaker 1: did neuro imaging on people. They put them in the
Speaker 1: brain scanner while they had the people walking through the
Speaker 1: trolley dilemma problem, and essentially what they found is there
Speaker 1: are areas of your brain that are involved in math
Speaker 1: problems that are saying, okay, well, one versus five and
Speaker 1: so on. They make a calculation, and you have other
Speaker 1: areas of your brain that care about emotional issues. They're
Speaker 1: simulating situations and assessing how those make you feel. Those
Speaker 1: areas are generally along the midline of the brain if
Speaker 1: you drew a line from your nose to the back
Speaker 1: of your head. And it turns out that in this
Speaker 1: second scenario where you're asking if you're going to push
Speaker 1: the guy, these emotional areas come online, and that changes
Speaker 1: your decision making. In other words, emotions, how you feel
Speaker 1: about something is a very important part in navigating the decision.
Speaker 1: The first scenario is just an easy math problem. The
Speaker 1: second one is an emotional problem, and it changes what
Speaker 1: you decide. And in fact, the idea that reason and
Speaker 1: emotion are fighting with each other. That's a very old idea.
Speaker 1: The Greeks had this metaphor that life is as though
Speaker 1: you are a charioteer and you're being pulled along by
Speaker 1: the white horse of reason and the black horse of passion,
Speaker 1: and they're always trying to pull you off in opposite directions,
Speaker 1: and your job as the charioteer is to.
Speaker 2: Stay down the middle of the road.
Speaker 1: And it's not easy, right because you've got these two
Speaker 1: different polls going on all the time. So emotions are
Speaker 1: tightly involved in decision making. They serve an important role
Speaker 1: in how we navigate our life.
Speaker 2: And you wouldn't want to live in a world.
Speaker 1: Where everybody is like mister Spock and Star Trek and
Speaker 1: doesn't have emotions, right, because everybody would just push the
Speaker 1: man off the bridge and that would be.
Speaker 2: The end of it.
Speaker 1: But instead, we use emotions to steer the decisions we make,
Speaker 1: and if something feels wrong, we try not to do it.
Speaker 1: So the question is how do we understand or interpret
Speaker 1: the things that we see during wartime. There's a horrifying
Speaker 1: photograph from World War Two where there's a crying mother
Speaker 1: who's clutching her small child to her chest, and there's
Speaker 1: a German soldier about six feet behind her with his
Speaker 1: rifle poised aimed at her head, ready to execute her
Speaker 1: while she's holding her baby in her arms. Now, there
Speaker 1: are several things to note about this photograph. First, the
Speaker 1: fact that he's doing this in front of someone in
Speaker 1: front of the cameraman suggests that he has a diminished
Speaker 1: emotional reactivity to this situation. He's not distressed by the situation.
Speaker 1: He's not feeling like you felt when you thought about
Speaker 1: pushing the man off the bridge. Now, if this were
Speaker 1: the one guy committing atrocities during wartime, we might just
Speaker 1: write him off as a psychopath.
Speaker 2: But there were hundreds of.
Speaker 1: Thousands of young men doing awful stuff everywhere you looked,
Speaker 1: including running the concentration camps, or raping women in the towns,
Speaker 1: or lining up dozens of people along ditches and machine
Speaker 1: gunning them. So it wasn't just one psychopath. What was
Speaker 1: going on here? The neurosurgeon you talk Freed in the
Speaker 1: late nineties started thinking about this question a lot, and
Speaker 1: he said, you know, when you look across all these
Speaker 1: different events in the world, you find this kind of
Speaker 1: behavior everywhere. People seem to lose their normal way that
Speaker 1: their brain functions, and they become different in how they
Speaker 1: make decisions, they act differently than they would under normal circumstances.
Speaker 1: And he said, when you look at the signs and
Speaker 1: the symptoms of their behavior, it's like there's a medical
Speaker 1: condition going on here. So he named this syndrome E,
Speaker 1: and he said there are very particular signs and symptoms
Speaker 1: that you look for here, just like you would look
Speaker 1: for coughing or fever with pneumonia. You look for particular
Speaker 1: things that characterize people's behavior during wartime. First, there's diminished
Speaker 1: emotional reactivity that gives people this ability to do repetitive
Speaker 1: acts of violence. Maybe people start off having a little
Speaker 1: bit of a hard time with it, but they rapidly
Speaker 1: desensitize it doesn't bother them anymore. Second, he noticed there's
Speaker 1: a hyper arousal or as the Germans called it, raush,
Speaker 1: which is this feeling of elation when committing these horrific acts.
Speaker 1: Another sign is group contagion, which is an important one
Speaker 1: that I'll come back to. The issue is everybody's doing
Speaker 1: something and it catches on and it spreads. He also
Speaker 1: pointed to compartmentalization. Someone can care about their own family
Speaker 1: and yet at the same time do this sort of
Speaker 1: thing to another family. So these are the signs of
Speaker 1: syndrome E. Diminished emotional reactivity, repetitive acts of violence, hyper arousal,
Speaker 1: group contagion, compartmentalization. And the interesting thing from a neuroscience
Speaker 1: point of view is that the other functions of the
Speaker 1: brain are working just fine. Things like language and memory
Speaker 1: and problem solving, those are completely intact so that gives
Speaker 1: us a clue into what's happening under the hood. And
Speaker 1: what's happening in the case of syndrome E is something
Speaker 1: like this. The emotional networks of the brain are short circuited.
Speaker 1: They are not participating in the decision making anymore. They
Speaker 1: are now sidelined. They're out of the equation. So that
Speaker 1: allows a soldier to execute a woman clutching her baby,
Speaker 1: just like it would allow you to push the man
Speaker 1: off the bridge without really thinking twice about it. In
Speaker 1: other words, their decision making is being steered by parts
Speaker 1: of the brain that can do logic and reasoning and
Speaker 1: memory and so on, but not the parts of the
Speaker 1: brain that normally navigate things with emotion. And what this
Speaker 1: leads to is a moral disengagement. A person becomes like
Speaker 1: a car that's in neutral going down the hill. He
Speaker 1: doesn't have all these systems anymore that tell him the
Speaker 1: right way to steer his actions. Now, can this sort
Speaker 1: of thing be studied in the laboratory, Yes it can.
Speaker 1: So consider this study. People are shown photographs of other
Speaker 1: people and you measure what's going on in their brain.
Speaker 1: And what the researchers found is that if you show
Speaker 1: participants pictures of people they admire, Olympic athletes and hard workers,
Speaker 1: and so on. Various parts of the brain light up,
Speaker 1: and the area I want to draw attention to is
Speaker 1: a part along the brain's midline called the medial prefrontal cortex.
Speaker 1: The medial prefrontal cortex is involved in these emotional systems,
Speaker 1: and it's also involved in social cognition. In other words,
Speaker 1: this area is active whenever you're dealing with another person
Speaker 1: as opposed to an object like a coffee cup or
Speaker 1: a laptop. Even if you show participants photographs of people
Speaker 1: they don't like very much, like people they envy or
Speaker 1: people they pity, you still get medial prefrontal cortex activation.
Speaker 1: In other words, people still see them as humans even
Speaker 1: though they're maybe not in their in group. But if
Speaker 1: you go even further along the spectrum of outgroups and
Speaker 1: show pictures of people that they feel very separated from,
Speaker 1: like homeless people are drug addicts, the medial prefrontal cortex
Speaker 1: turns off. It just doesn't come online in the same way.
Speaker 1: And what that means is that they're viewing these people
Speaker 1: the same way that they do objects. So again, when
Speaker 1: you view objects, this area doesn't come online, and it
Speaker 1: comes online when you're looking at humans, except for really
Speaker 1: outgroup humans, when it simply doesn't activate anymore. So when
Speaker 1: we talk about dehumanization, what we're really talking about are
Speaker 1: regions of the brain that think about other humans that
Speaker 1: don't come online anymore. These regions are now out of
Speaker 1: the equation, and in this scenario, when you are making
Speaker 1: moral decisions about people who are in your outgroup, you
Speaker 1: don't have these use social mechanisms steering your behavior. With psychopaths,
Speaker 1: by the way, there are many subtle differences in their brains,
Speaker 1: but one of the issues you see is this, they
Speaker 1: just don't have these areas like the medial pre frontal
Speaker 1: cortex emotionally steering their behavior, and so they're capable of
Speaker 1: doing things like violence and murder because they don't care
Speaker 1: about you. They're not simulating what it is like to
Speaker 1: be you. They don't have the emotional feeling that's steering
Speaker 1: around their decisions. And this is what happens when groups
Speaker 1: dehumanize their neighbors. I have a photograph of a group
Speaker 1: of German citizens and soldiers at the beginning of World
Speaker 1: War Two making their Jewish neighbors scrub the pavement with toothbrushes,
Speaker 1: and the Germans watching are having a great time posing
Speaker 1: and laughing. And what's happening is that, because of the
Speaker 1: social context that allows syndrome E, these emotional regions are
Speaker 1: no longer online, and so their neighbors are not like
Speaker 1: humans to them anymore. And this situation typifies genocides. Here's
Speaker 1: a quotation from a Japanese general talking about his behavior
Speaker 1: during the invasion of China. He explained his soldier's behavior
Speaker 1: by saying, it was quote because we thought of them
Speaker 1: as things, not as people like us.
Speaker 2: End quote.
Speaker 1: Here's a statement from a woman in Rwanda who orchestrated
Speaker 1: the killing of thousands of Tutsi. She said, quote, we
Speaker 1: thought of them as nothing more than insects or cockroaches.
Speaker 1: Here's a quotation from an American sergeant stationed in Iraq.
Speaker 1: He says, quote, you just sort of tried to block
Speaker 1: out the fact that they're human beings and you see
Speaker 1: them as enemies. So what we're talking about here is
Speaker 1: the same neural issue across place and time. Dehumanization is
Speaker 1: about turning off the parts of your brain that allow
Speaker 1: you to understand what it is like to be someone else.
Speaker 1: You may remember Anders Bravik, the Norwegian who murdered seventy
Speaker 1: seven young people in twenty eleven. So back in twenty twelve,
Speaker 1: I was following his trial closely, and here's what he said.
Speaker 1: One might say I was quite normal in two thousand
Speaker 1: and six when I started training, when I commenced de emotionalizing.
Speaker 1: He said, I've had a dehumanization strategy towards those I
Speaker 1: considered valid targets so I could come to the point
Speaker 1: of killing them. He nailed it here. He knew that
Speaker 1: his own training regime was about de emotionalizing. I mean,
Speaker 1: he phrased exactly what we've been talking about here so far.
Speaker 1: He worked, for example, with meditation, to hammer away any
Speaker 1: emotional response he had to the idea of killing someone.
Speaker 1: That's the way he trained. He worked to diminish the
Speaker 1: response of his medial prefrontal cortex in other areas and
Speaker 1: the networks involved in emotion. Now, we might lament the
Speaker 1: fact that these programs are able to be overridden, but
Speaker 1: we should be thankful for the fact that they're so
Speaker 1: so difficult to override. Act like bravics is extremely rare.
Speaker 1: Despite the logical ease of anyone pulling it off. Now,
Speaker 1: if you're not that good at turning off your own
Speaker 1: medial prefrontal cortex, you should know that there are always
Speaker 1: groups that are willing to do this for you, and
Speaker 1: that is the art and science of propaganda. So something
Speaker 1: that I have always found amazing is looking at war posters.
Speaker 1: For example, I have an American poster from World War One.
Speaker 1: It shows a giant, crazy looking ape wearing a German helmet,
Speaker 1: and on the helmet it reads militarism. And in one
Speaker 1: hand the ape is carrying a huge club, and in
Speaker 1: the other arm he's holding a beautiful woman whose arms
Speaker 1: are flung over her head, and the poster reads, destroy
Speaker 1: this mad brute enlist US Army. Now, I want to
Speaker 1: point out that if you look at any propaganda poster
Speaker 1: from any war at any time, on any side, you'll
Speaker 1: see a common theme. You make your enemy less than human,
Speaker 1: and making them explicitly an animal.
Speaker 2: Is a very popular choice.
Speaker 1: So in this case, the Germans are portrayed as a
Speaker 1: bellicose ape coming onto American shores, and the fact that
Speaker 1: he's stealing away a half naked, beautiful American woman makes
Speaker 1: you even more mad about the whole thing. And this
Speaker 1: is typical of propaganda posters. You always give the enemy
Speaker 1: fangs and feral features. And the idea is you want
Speaker 1: to shut off the networks that are involved in humanization.
Speaker 1: You want your population to feel like we can do this,
Speaker 1: We can go to war with these guys because they're
Speaker 1: not like us, they're animals. Or consider this other propaganda
Speaker 1: poster I have from Germany during World War Two, which
Speaker 1: represents America as a giant mechanical robot monster toting guns
Speaker 1: and bombs and destroying Europe. So it doesn't have to
Speaker 1: be animals, just anything that's not human. And in fact,
Speaker 1: when our Winian thinking got introduced in the eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: lots of people took the opportunity to generate pseudoscience, suggesting
Speaker 1: that whoever their enemy was, they were less than human.
Speaker 1: This is a typical strategy to implement, and it can
Speaker 1: even be done subtly. Some of you may remember that
Speaker 1: when George W. Bush was running for president against Al Gore,
Speaker 1: he did the same thing. His commercial ran and said
Speaker 1: the Gore prescription plan, and then you see this big
Speaker 1: word rats on the screen, and then after about half
Speaker 1: a second is the word zooms out. You see it
Speaker 1: actually says bureaucrats, and eventually, when it's all zoomed out,
Speaker 1: it says bureaucrats decide. But what it starts with is
Speaker 1: this giant word rats. The strategy of dehumanization is one
Speaker 1: that people use to make your brain feel like it
Speaker 1: doesn't have to think about the other person as a
Speaker 1: fellow human. And I have a lot of goals with
Speaker 1: this podcast, but one of them is to expose this
Speaker 1: simple neural tricks that have been employed forever so that
Speaker 1: you can know what to watch for. We'll come back
Speaker 1: to this at the end. But the thing I want
Speaker 1: you to keep an eye out for as you move
Speaker 1: forward is when is someone using the technique of trying
Speaker 1: to manipulate your assessment about some other group by making
Speaker 1: them less than human, like animals or machines, or viruses
Speaker 1: or insects. Once you start seeing the tricks of propaganda,
Speaker 1: you'll find yourself more immune to them. So how does
Speaker 1: the issue of dehumanization get studied in the laboratory? While
Speaker 1: in nineteen seventy five, a researcher named Albert Bandura set
Speaker 1: up a simple study. He had college students come in
Speaker 1: to do an experiment. So you come into a room
Speaker 1: and you're told that in this other room are three
Speaker 1: college students and they're trying to learn some associations with words,
Speaker 1: and you're there to help teach them. Whenever they get
Speaker 1: a wrong answer, you you are to send an electrical
Speaker 1: shock to them in the other room, but you get
Speaker 1: to choose how high the level of that shock is
Speaker 1: from one to ten, and you get to choose each
Speaker 1: time they make a mistake.
Speaker 2: So those are the rules of the game.
Speaker 1: And what happens is just before the experiment starts, the
Speaker 1: experiment to running, it accidentally leaves the intercom on and
Speaker 1: you overhear him say these guys meaning the students that
Speaker 1: you don't see, these guys are a bunch of animals,
Speaker 1: or in a different condition he says, oh, those guys
Speaker 1: are really nice, or in a third condition, he doesn't
Speaker 1: say anything at all.
Speaker 2: So that's it.
Speaker 1: The only experimental variable is what you overhear him say.
Speaker 2: So the experiment begins, and every time they get.
Speaker 1: A wrong answer, you get to decide between one and
Speaker 1: ten what level of electrical shock you're going to send.
Speaker 1: And what Bandura found was striking in the dehumanized condition
Speaker 1: where they're called animals, people send stronger sho the only
Speaker 1: difference being that they heard them described as animals at
Speaker 1: the beginning. In the neutral condition, where nothing is overheard,
Speaker 1: they send milder shocks, And in the humanized condition, where
Speaker 1: they overheard the compliment that they were nice, they sent
Speaker 1: even smaller shocks on average, just by dint of having
Speaker 1: heard a simple sentence that humanized them. So I want
Speaker 1: to be clear that the issue of humanization is not
Speaker 1: something that's just turned on or off. It's more subtle.
Speaker 1: It's not just human or nonhuman. Your notion of what
Speaker 1: you think about someone can be modulated quite subtly, and
Speaker 1: this is one of the things we've studied in my laboratory.
Speaker 1: So for me to explain this, let's talk for a
Speaker 1: second about pain. Let's say you put your hand on
Speaker 1: the table and I stab your hand with a syringe
Speaker 1: needle that activates a particular series of areas in your brain,
Speaker 1: a network that we summarize as the pain matrix, and
Speaker 1: that network says out, I'm feeling pain.
Speaker 2: Now. If you watch somebody else's hand get stabbed, it's
Speaker 2: not your hand.
Speaker 1: You're watching a video of someone else's hand get stabbed
Speaker 1: with a syringe.
Speaker 2: Needle.
Speaker 1: What happens in the brain, most of this same network
Speaker 1: becomes active. So these areas respond when you're in pain
Speaker 1: or when you're watching somebody else in pain, and this
Speaker 1: is the neural basis of empathy. Watching someone else in
Speaker 1: pain and simulating what it is like for them. You're
Speaker 1: running a simulation as if it were your hand. That's
Speaker 1: what empathy is. You're literally simulating what it is like
Speaker 1: to be the other person. Now, the surprise is, even
Speaker 1: though this is a very low level neural response, it
Speaker 1: can be modulated by what you think about the other person.
Speaker 1: So there was an experiment done by my colleague Tania
Speaker 1: Singer in which she had people play a little game
Speaker 1: with other people where they're making decisions about exchanging money.
Speaker 2: With each other.
Speaker 1: What's called an economic decision game. I'll skip to details.
Speaker 1: The important part is that the other person that you're
Speaker 1: playing with is a shill, someone who's secretly working with
Speaker 1: the experimenter, and they can either play fairly or unfairly.
Speaker 1: So you're either playing with someone who you feel does
Speaker 1: the right thing or against the person that you conclude
Speaker 1: is a bit of a cheat. And then you get
Speaker 1: to see the person get an electrical shock. Now the
Speaker 1: question is how much does your brain care? Just based
Speaker 1: on their behavior, whether they're fair or a cheater, your
Speaker 1: empathy can be modulated you care more or less about
Speaker 1: their pain. Now, I'll link to all these papers on
Speaker 1: Eagleman dot com slash podcast, but I'll just mention there
Speaker 1: are a lot of individual differences between the participants, and
Speaker 1: on average, men showed this effect of losing their empathy
Speaker 1: more than women did. But once again, the point is
Speaker 1: that this very basic neural response about seeing someone else
Speaker 1: in pain can get modulated. Now, this is based on
Speaker 1: their behavior. And one of the things that I started
Speaker 1: wondering about in my work was could this be based
Speaker 1: on something that's not even behavior. You never even meet
Speaker 1: the person, You never see the person, but it's just
Speaker 1: based on the in group or outgroup that they're in.
Speaker 1: Could that modulate empathy? So my student Don Vaughan and
Speaker 1: I put people into the brain scanner and we show
Speaker 1: you six hands on the screen. Then on each round,
Speaker 1: the computer goes around and randomly picks one of those hands,
Speaker 1: and that hand expands to the middle of the screen,
Speaker 1: and then you see that hand get touched with a
Speaker 1: Q tip or stabbed with a syringe needle. We can
Speaker 1: trast those two conditions to find those areas of the
Speaker 1: brain that are just involved in that difference. And as
Speaker 1: I mentioned before, this is where we find a network
Speaker 1: that we summarize as the pain matrix. Now that we've
Speaker 1: established this baseline condition, we just make one very simple change,
Speaker 1: which is now we label the six hands on the
Speaker 1: screen with a one word label Christian, Jewish, Atheist, Muslim, Hindu, scientologist.
Speaker 1: A hand gets selected, comes to the middle of the screen,
Speaker 1: and then you either see if get touched with a
Speaker 1: Q tip or stabbed. And the question is what's your
Speaker 1: in group and how does your brain respond to seeing
Speaker 1: that hand get hurt as opposed to one of the
Speaker 1: other hands get hurt. So in the baseline case, where
Speaker 1: there's no label, your brain shows a lot of activity
Speaker 1: in this network. This is the empathic response. When you
Speaker 1: watch your in group gets stabbed, you see this response
Speaker 1: but larger. Your brain really really cares about your in
Speaker 1: group in pain. And when you watch a hand labeled
Speaker 1: as one of your out groups get stabbed, the response
Speaker 1: is diminished, so you care a lot about your in
Speaker 1: group and less about your out groups. And by the way,
Speaker 1: we recruited participants of all different religions, and we see
Speaker 1: this same in group out group effects for everyone. And
Speaker 1: by the way of interest, is that we see the
Speaker 1: same effect even.
Speaker 2: For that atheists.
Speaker 1: Atheists care when they see an atheist hand get stabbed,
Speaker 1: and they don't care as much when they see someone
Speaker 1: else's hand get stabbed. So this is a very basic
Speaker 1: issue about labels. It's about who's team you're on. Now,
Speaker 1: something that got me interested is understanding how flexible these
Speaker 1: sorts of designations are. So if you look, for example,
Speaker 1: before World War Two, the Americans and the Soviets hated
Speaker 1: each other, and then during World War two they were
Speaker 1: both allied against the Axis powers. So now they were
Speaker 1: buddies and fighting side by side, and when the war ended,
Speaker 1: they went back to a position of enmity. And I thought,
Speaker 1: it's interesting how flexible labels are. So we did the
Speaker 1: same experiment. We put you in the scanner, and now
Speaker 1: it says the year is twenty thirty two, and three
Speaker 1: of these religions have teamed up against the other three religions,
Speaker 1: and it's randomly selected every time. Okay, so now you're
Speaker 1: in the scanner and you see the six hands on
Speaker 1: the screen. But now you have teammates, allies, these other
Speaker 1: religions that you didn't care about a minute ago, Now
Speaker 1: they're on your team. And the question is what happens
Speaker 1: when you see someone else's hand get stabbed if they're
Speaker 1: an in group but happen to be an ally And
Speaker 1: the answer is we find particular regions in the brain
Speaker 1: that are sensitive to these alliances, which is to say,
Speaker 1: you know, five minutes ago, you didn't care at all
Speaker 1: about this outgroup, and now just because we've told you
Speaker 1: in a single sentenced narrative that this outgroup is on
Speaker 1: your team, now you care a little more about them
Speaker 1: when you see them get stabbed. So, even though labels,
Speaker 1: like religious labels, run so deep, things are flexible, and
Speaker 1: that got me interested in a third phase of the
Speaker 1: experiment to really understand about the arbitrariness of labels. So
Speaker 1: what we do is we have you come into the
Speaker 1: lab and I hand you a coin, and I say
Speaker 1: you're going to toss this coin. And if it's heads,
Speaker 1: you're an Augustinian, if it's tails, you're a Justinian. That's
Speaker 1: all I tell you. I don't tell you anything else.
Speaker 1: So you toss the coin, let's say you're a Justinian.
Speaker 1: So I now hand you a bracelet according to which
Speaker 1: team you're on, and you put it on, and you
Speaker 1: go into the scanner, and we give you a one
Speaker 1: sentence narrative that the Justinians and Augustinians are two warring tribes,
Speaker 1: and it's the same thing. And the computer chooses a
Speaker 1: hand and you either see the Justinian hand get stabbed
Speaker 1: or the Augustinian hand get stabbed. And the question is
Speaker 1: does your brain care more about a team that you
Speaker 1: were arbitrarily assigned to and you know it was arbitrary
Speaker 1: because you're the one who flipped the coin. And the
Speaker 1: answer is yes, it's a smaller effect, but a totally
Speaker 1: arbitrary team label is sufficient to make you care more
Speaker 1: for your in group. And this is at a very
Speaker 1: low level. This is a very basic neural response. So
Speaker 1: this is the kind of thing we've been studying, and
Speaker 1: it's important not only for what it reveals about human nature,
Speaker 1: but also because it gives us a diagnostic tool for
Speaker 1: measuring the degree of in group outgroup. In other words,
Speaker 1: how much do you care about your in group and
Speaker 1: how much do you not care about your outgroup? We
Speaker 1: can quantify that difference, and that gives us a tool
Speaker 1: into the future to measure the effect of rehumanizing narratives.
Speaker 1: In other words, what are the different interventional strategy that
Speaker 1: we can use to actually make groups reconverge. So we'll
Speaker 1: come back to that in next week's episode. What I've
Speaker 1: told you about today is the issue of dehumanization and
Speaker 1: how your brain dials up and down the degree to
Speaker 1: which you view another person as human. And in next
Speaker 1: week's episode, part two, I'm going to expand these points
Speaker 1: to dive deeper into our brains to understand what we
Speaker 1: can do about it. I've said this before, but I
Speaker 1: want to be really clear about this point. The reason
Speaker 1: we work to understand the science of human behavior is
Speaker 1: because our psychology has been carved by millions of years
Speaker 1: of evolutionary pressures, and what we see in history is
Speaker 1: the same events playing out over and over again, wherein
Speaker 1: groups of individuals turn on their neighbors and devour them.
Speaker 1: And this is not academic stuff that makes no difference.
Speaker 1: This is the most important work that we can devote
Speaker 1: ourselves to understanding because as we come to understand the
Speaker 1: detail of our psychology and the tools of propaganda. We
Speaker 1: develop our capacity to at least recognize when we are
Speaker 1: getting manipulated. So when a government or rebel group, or
Speaker 1: your neighbor tells you something about the members of some
Speaker 1: other country, or some other religion or some other group,
Speaker 1: we can at least be a step ahead of our
Speaker 1: predecessors in previous generations, who fell for the most basic
Speaker 1: tricks over and over.
Speaker 2: We can work to strengthen our.
Speaker 1: Societies and improve our world by better understanding the fabric
Speaker 1: of our own psyches. Go to Eagleman dot com slash
Speaker 1: podcast for more information and further readings. Send me an
Speaker 1: email at podcasts at eagleman dot com with questions or
Speaker 1: any discussions, and I'll be making an episode soon in
Speaker 1: which I address those. And check out and subscribe to
Speaker 1: Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each episode, and
Speaker 1: you can leave comments there.
Speaker 2: Until next time. I'm David Eagleman, and this is Inner
Speaker 2: Cosmos