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

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