The Idiot Brain

by Dean Burnett

  It’s lucky we have powerful brains, capable of handling all these different relationships. Actually, according to some scientists, this isn’t just a convenient coincidence; we may have big powerful brains because we formed complicated social relationships.

  This is the social brain hypothesis, which argues that complex human brains are a result of human friendliness.27 Many species form large groups, but this doesn’t equal intelligence. Sheep form flocks, but their existence seems is largely dedicated to eating grass and general fleeing. You don’t need smarts for that.

  Hunting in packs requires more intelligence as it involves coordinated behaviours, so pack hunters such as wolves tend to be smarter than docile-but-numerous prey. Early human communities were substantially more complex again. Some humans hunt, while others stay and look after the young and sick, protect the homestead, forage for food, make tools and so on. This cooperation and division of labour provides a safer environment all round, so the species survives and thrives.

  This arrangement requires humans to care about others who are not biologically linked to them. It goes beyond simple ‘protect our genes’ instincts. Thus, we form friendships, meaning we care about the well-being of others even though our only biological connection is that we’re the same species (and ‘man’s best friend’ shows even this isn’t essential).

  Coordinating all the social relationships required for community life demands a great deal of information processing. If pack hunters are playing noughts and crosses, human communities are engaged in ongoing chess tournaments. Consequently, powerful brains are needed.

  Human evolution is difficult to study directly, unless you have several hundred thousand years to spare and lots of patience, so it’s hard to determine the accuracy of the social-brain hypothesis. A 2013 Oxford University study claimed to have demonstrated it via sophisticated computer models that showed social relationships do in fact require more processing (and therefore brain) power.28 Interesting, but not conclusive; how do you model friendship on a computer? Humans have a strong tendency to form groups and relationships, and concern for others. Even now, a complete lack of concern or compassion is considered abnormal (psychopathy).

  An inherent tendency to want to belong to a group can be useful for survival, but it also throws up some surreal and bizarre results. For example, being part of a group can override our judgement, even our senses.

  Everyone knows about peer pressure, where you do or say things not because you agree but because the group you belong to wants you to, like claiming to like a band you detest because the ‘cool’ kids like them, or spending hours discussing the merits of a film your friends loved but that you found agonisingly dull. This is a scientifically recognised occurrence, known as normative social influence, which is what happens when your brain goes to the effort of forming a conclusion or opinion about something, only to abandon it if the group you identify with disagrees. Worryingly often, our brains prioritise ‘being liked’ over ‘being right’.

  This has been demonstrated in scientific settings. A 1951 study by Solomon Asch put subjects in small groups and asked them very basic questions; for instance, showing them three different lines and asking, ‘Which is longest?’29 It might surprise you to hear that most participants gave completely the wrong answer. It didn’t surprise the researchers though, because only one person in each group was a ‘real’ subject; the rest were stooges instructed to give the wrong answer. The genuine subjects had to give their answers last, when everyone given theirs aloud. And 75 per cent of the time, the subjects gave the wrong answer too.

  When asked why they gave a clearly wrong answer, most said they didn’t want to ‘rock the boat’ or similar sentiments. They didn’t ‘know’ the other group members at all outside the experiment, and yet they wanted the approval of their new peers, enough to deny their own senses. Being part of a group is apparently something our brains prioritise.

  It’s not absolute. Although 75 per cent of subjects agreed with the group’s wrong answer, 25 per cent didn’t. We may be heavily influenced by our group but our own backgrounds and personalities are often equally potent, and groups are composed of different types of individuals, not submissive drones. You do get people who are happy to say things almost everyone around them will object to. You can make millions doing this on televised talent shows.

  Normative social influence can be described as behavioural in nature; we act as if we agree with the group, even if we don’t. The people around us can’t dictate how we think though, surely?

  Often, this is true. If all your friends and family suddenly insisted 2 + 2 = 7, or that gravity pushes you up, you still wouldn’t agree. You might worry that everyone you care about has completely lost it, but you wouldn’t agree, because your own senses and understanding show that they’re wrong. But here the truth is blatant. In more ambiguous situations, other people can indeed impact on our thought processes.

  This is informational social influence, where other people are used by our brains as a reliable source of information (however wrongly) when figuring out uncertain scenarios. This may explain why anecdotal evidence can be so persuasive. Finding accurate data about a complex subject is hard work, but if you heard it from a bloke down the pub, or from your friend’s mother’s cousin who knows about it, then this is often sufficient evidence. Alternative medicine and conspiracy theories persist thanks to this.

  It’s perhaps predictable. For a developing brain, the main source of information is other people. Mimicry and imitation are fundamental processes whereby children learn, and for many years now neuroscientists have been excited about ‘mirror neurons’, neurons that activate both when we perform a specific action and when we observe that action from someone else, suggesting the brain recognises and processes the behaviour of others at a fundamental level. (Mirror neurons and their properties are something of a controversial issue in neuroscience, so don’t take any of this for granted.30)

  Our brains prefer to use other people as a go-to reference for information in uncertain scenarios. The human brain evolved over millions of years, and our fellow humans have been around a lot longer than Google. You can see how this would be useful; you hear a loud noise and think it might be an enraged mammoth, but everyone else in your tribe is running away screaming, so they probably know it is an enraged mammoth, and you’d best follow suit. But there are times when basing your decisions and actions on other people’s can have dark and unpleasant consequences.

  In 1964, New York resident Kitty Genovese was brutally murdered. While tragic in itself, this particular crime became infamous because reports revealed that 38 people witnessed the attack but did nothing to help or intervene. This shocking behaviour prompted social psychologists Darley and Latané to investigate it, leading to the discovery of the phenomenon known as the ‘bystander effect’,§ which is where people are unlikely to intervene or offer assistance if there are others around.31 This isn’t (always) due to selfishness or cowardice but because we refer to other people to determine our actions when we aren’t certain what to do. There are plenty of people who get stuck in where needed, but if others are around the bystander effect presents a psychological obstacle that must be overcome.

  The bystander effect acts to suppress our actions and decisions; it stops us doing something because we’re in a group. Being part of a group can also cause us to think and do things we’d never do when alone.

  Being in a group invariably makes people desire group harmony. A fractious or argumentative group isn’t useful and is unpleasant to be part of, so overall agreement and accord is usually something everyone wants to achieve. If conditions are right, this desire for harmony can be so compelling that people will end up thinking or agreeing with things that they’d usually consider irrational or unwise just to achieve it. When the good of the group takes precedence over logical or reasonable decisions, this is known as groupthink.32

  Groupthink is only part of it. Take a controversial subject matter, like th
e legalisation of cannabis (something that’s a ‘hot button’ issue at the time of writing). If you took 30 people off the street (with their permission) and asked them their thoughts about legalising cannabis, you’d likely get a range of opinions, from, ‘Cannabis is evil and you should be locked up for even smelling it’, to, ‘Cannabis is great and should be given away with children’s meals’, with most falling somewhere between these two extremes.

  If you put these people together in one group and ask them to come up with a consensus on cannabis legalisation, you’d logically expect something that is the ‘average’ of everyone’s individual opinion, such as: ‘Cannabis shouldn’t be legalised but possession should only be a minor offence.’ But, as ever, logic and brain don’t really see eye to eye. Groups will often adopt a more extreme conclusion than individual members would if alone.

  Groupthink is part of it, but we also want to be liked by the group, and achieve high status in it. So Groupthink produces a consensus that members agree with, but they’ll also agree with it more strongly, to impress the group. But then others do that too, and everyone ends up trying to outdo each other.

  ‘So we agree cannabis shouldn’t be legalised. Possession of any amount of it should be an arrestable offence.’

  ‘Arrestable? No, guaranteed jail, ten years for possession!’

  ‘Ten years? I say life imprisonment!’

  ‘Life? You hippy! A death sentence, at the very least.’

  This phenomenon is known as group polarisation, where people in groups end up expressing views that are more extreme than those they have when alone.¶ It’s very common and warps group decision-making in countless circumstances. It can be limited or prevented by allowing criticism and/or outside opinions to be aired, but the powerful desire for group harmony usually prevents this by excluding detractors and rational analysis from discussions. This is alarming, because countless decisions that affect millions of lives are made by like-minded groups who don’t allow outside input. Governments, the military, corporate boardrooms – what makes these immune to making ridiculous conclusions resulting from group polarisation?

  Nothing, nothing at all. A lot of the baffling or worrying policies pursued by governments could be explained by group polarisation.

  Bad decisions by the powerful often result in angry mobs, another example of the alarming effects being part of a group can have on the brain. People are very good at perceiving the emotional states of others; if you’ve ever wandered into a room where a couple have just had a row, you can palpably feel the ‘tense atmosphere’ even though nobody is saying anything. This isn’t telepathy or anything ‘sci-fi’, just our brains being attuned to picking up this sort of information through various cues. But when surrounded by people in the same intense emotional state, this can heavily influence our own, hence we’re far more likely to laugh when part of an audience. As always, this can go too far.

  Under certain conditions, the highly emotional or aroused state of those around us actually suppresses our individuality. We need a dense or closely unified group that allows us anonymity, that is highly aroused (experiencing strong emotions, not … something seedier), and with a focus on external events, so as to avoid thinking about the group’s actions. Angry mobs and riots are perfect for creating these circumstances, and when these conditions are met we undergo a process known as ‘deindividuation’,33 which is the scientific term for ‘mob mentality’.

  With deindividuation, we lose our usual ability to suppress impulses and think rationally; we become more prone to detecting and responding to the emotional states of others, but lose our typical concern for being judged by them. These in conjunction make people behave very destructively when part of a mob. Exactly how or why is difficult to say; it’s hard to study this process scientifically. You rarely get an angry mob in a laboratory unless they’ve heard about your grave robbing and are there to put an end to your ungodly efforts to raise the dead.

  I’m not mean, but my brain is

  (The neurological properties that make us treat others badly)

  Thus far, it seems the human brain is geared towards forming relationships and communicating. Our world should be nothing but people holding hands, singing happy songs about rainbows and ice-cream. However, human beings are frequently terrible to each other. Violence, theft, exploitation, sexual assault, imprisonment, torture, murder – these aren’t rare; your typical politician has probably indulged in many. Even genocide, attempting to wipe out an entire population or race, is familiar enough to warrant a dedicated term.

  Edmund Burke famously said, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’ But it’s probably even easier for evil if good men are willing to pitch in and help.

  But why would they do it? There are numerous explanations regarding cultural, environmental, political, historical factors, but the workings of the brain also contribute. At the Nuremberg trials, where those responsible for the Holocaust were questioned, the most common defence was they were ‘only following orders’. A feeble excuse, right? Surely, no normal person would do such awful things, no matter who told them to? But, alarmingly, it seems they just might.

  Stanley Milgarm, a Yale professor, studied this ‘only obeying orders’ claim in an infamous experiment. It involved two subjects, in separate rooms, where one had to ask the other questions. If a wrong answer was given, the questioner had to administer an electric shock. For every wrong answer, the voltage was increased.34 Here’s the catch: there were no shocks. The subject answering questions was an actor, deliberately getting things wrong and giving increasingly pained sounds of distress whenever a ‘shock’ was delivered.

  The real subject of the experiment was the questioner. The set-up meant they believed they were essentially torturing a person. Subjects invariably showed discomfort or distress over this, and objected or asked to stop. The experimenter always said the experiment was important so they must continue. Disconcertingly, 65 per cent of people did, continuing to inflict intense pain on someone purely because they were told to.

  The researchers didn’t trawl the maximum security cells of prisons for volunteers; everyone who took part was a normal everyday person, who was surprisingly willing to torture another person. They might have objected to it, but they still did it, which is the more relevant point for the recipient.

  This study has had numerous follow-ups that provide more specific information.|| People were more obedient if the experimenter was in the room, rather than communicating via telephone. If subjects saw other ‘subjects’ refuse to obey, they were more likely to disobey themselves, suggesting that people are willing to be rebels, just not the first rebel. Experimenters wearing lab coats and conducting the experiments in professional-looking offices also increased obedience.

  The consensus is that we’re willing to obey legitimate authority figures, who are seen as responsible for consequences of actions they demand. A remote person who is visibly disobeyed is harder to consider authoritative. Milgram proposed that, in social situations, our brains adopt one of two states: an autonomous state (where we make our own decisions) and an agentic state, where we allow others to dictate our actions, although this hasn’t yet been reliably identified in any brain-scanning studies.

  One idea is that, in evolutionary terms, a tendency to obey unthinkingly is more efficient; stopping to fight about who’s in charge every time a decision needs to be made is very impractical, so we’re left with a tendency to obey authority despite any reservations. It’s no great stretch to imagine corrupt but charismatic leaders exploiting this.

  However, people are regularly horrible to others without orders from some tyrannical authority. Often it’s one group of people making life miserable for another, for various reasons. The ‘group’ element is important. Our brains compel us to form groups, and turn on those who threaten them.

  Scientists have studied what it is about the brain that makes us so hostile to anyone who dares disrupt our group. O
ne study by Morrison, Decety and Molenberghs suggested that when subjects contemplate being part of a group, the brain shows activation in a neural network composed of cortical midline structures, tempo-parietal junctions and anterior temporal gyrus.35 These regions have been shown repeatedly to be highly active in contexts where interaction and thinking of others is required, meaning some have dubbed this particular network the ‘social brain’.**36

  Another particularly intriguing finding was that when subjects had to process stimuli that involved being part of a group, activity was seen in a network including the ventral medial prefrontal and anterior and dorsal cingulate cortex. Other studies have linked these areas to processing of the ‘personal self’,37 suggesting considerable overlap between self-perception and group membership. This means people derive much of their identity from the groups they belong to.

  One implication of this is that any threat to our group is essentially a threat to ‘ourselves’, which explains why anything that poses a danger to our group’s way of doing things is met with such hostility. And the main threat to most groups are … other groups.

  Fans of rival football teams engage in violent clashes so often they’re practically a continuation of the actual game. Warfare between rival criminal gangs is a staple of gritty crime dramas. Any modern political contest quickly becomes a battle between one side and another, where attacking the opposition is more important than explaining why anyone should vote for you. The Internet has just made things worse: post even a slightly critical or controversial opinion online about anything anyone finds important (for example, the Star Wars prequels weren’t that bad, actually) and you’ll have an inbox clogged with hate mail before you’ve can put the kettle on. I write blogs for an international media platform, so trust me on this.