The Idiot Brain

by Dean Burnett

  Some may think prejudices come from long periods of exposure to the attitudes that shape them; we aren’t born with an inherent dislike of certain types of people, it must need the slow drip-drip of (metaphorical) bile over the years to wear down someone’s principles and make them hate others unreasonably. That is often true. It can also happen very quickly.

  The infamous Stanford Prison experiment, run by a team lead by Philip Zimbardo, looked at the psychological consequences of the prison environment on guards and prisoners.38 A realistic prison set was constructed in the Stanford University basements, and subjects were designated either prisoners or guards.

  The guards became incredibly cruel, being rude, aggressive, abusive and hostile to prisoners. The prisoners ended up thinking of the guards (quite reasonably) as unhinged sadists, so they organised a rebellion, barricading themselves in their rooms, which guards stormed and stripped. Prisoners soon became prone to depression, sobbing fits, even psychosomatic rashes.

  The duration of the experiment? Six days. It was planned for two weeks, but was halted early because things got so bad. It’s important to remember none of them were really prisoners or guards! They were students, from a prestigious university. But they were placed in clearly identified groups, made to coexist with another group with different goals, and group mentality exerted itself very quickly. Our brains are very quick to identify with a group, and in certain contexts this can seriously alter our behaviour.

  Our brain makes us hostile to those who ‘threaten’ our group, even if it’s a trivial matter. Most of us know this from schooldays. Some unfortunate individual inadvertently does something that deviates from the group’s normal standards of behaviour (gets an unusual haircut), which undermines the group uniformity, and is punished (endlessly mocked).

  Humans don’t just want to be part of a group; they want a high-ranking role in it. Social status and hierarchy is very common in nature; even chickens have a hierarchy – hence the term ‘pecking order’ – and humans are just as keen on enhancing their social status as the proudest chicken – hence the term ‘social climber’. They try to outdo each other, make themselves look good/better, be the comparative best at what they do. The brain facilitates this behaviour via regions including the inferior parietal lobe, dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortices, fusiform and lingual gyri. These areas collaborate to provide awareness of social standing, so that we’re not only aware of our membership of a group, but of our position in it.

  As a result, anyone who does something that doesn’t meet the group’s approval is both risking the ‘integrity’ of the group and presenting an opportunity for other members to increase their status at the incompetent individual’s expense. Hence, name calling and mockery.

  However, the human brain is so sophisticated that the ‘group’ we belong to is a very flexible concept. It can be an entire country, as anyone waving their national flag demonstrates. People can even feel like a ‘member’ of a specific race, which is arguably easier as race stems from certain physical characteristics, so members of other races are easily identified and attacked by those who have so little to be proud of that their physical traits (which they had no role in obtaining) are very precious to them.

  Disclaimer: I’m not a fan of racism.

  But there are times when humans, individually, can be alarmingly cruel to those who don’t deserve it. The homeless and poor, victims of assault, the disabled and sick, desperate refugees; rather than getting much needed help, these people are vilified by those better off. This goes against every facet of human decency and basic logic. So why’s it so common?

  The brain has a strong egocentric bias; it makes it and us look good at every opportunity. This can mean that we struggle to empathise with people – because they aren’t us – and the brain mostly has things that have happened to us to go on when making decisions. However, a part of the brain, mainly the right supramarginal gyrus, has been shown to recognise and ‘correct’ this bias, allowing us to empathise properly.

  There’s also data showing it’s much harder to empathise when this area is disrupted, or you aren’t given time to think about it. Another intriguing experiment, lead by Tania Singer from the Max Planck Institute, showed that there are other limits to this compensatory mechanism, by exposing pairs of people to varying tactile surfaces (they had to touch either something nice or something gross).39

  They showed two people experiencing something unpleasant will be very good at empathising correctly, recognising the emotion and intensity of feeling in the other person, but if one is experiencing pleasure while the other is enduring unpleasantness, then the pleasure-experiencing person will seriously underestimate the other’s suffering. So the more privileged and comfortable someone’s life is, the harder it is for them to appreciate the needs and issues of those worse off. But as long as we don’t do something stupid like put the most pampered people in charge of running countries, we should be OK.

  We have seen that the brain has an egocentric bias. Another (related) cognitive bias is called the ‘just world’ hypothesis.40 This argues that the brain inherently assumes the world is fair and just, where good behaviour gets rewarded and bad behaviour is punished. This bias helps people function as a community because it means bad behaviour is deterred before it happens, and people are inclined towards being nice (not that they wouldn’t be anyway, but this helps). It also motivates us; believing the world is random and all actions are ultimately meaningless won’t help you get out of bed at a reasonable hour.

  Unfortunately, this isn’t true. Bad behaviour isn’t always punished; good people often have bad things happen to them. But the bias is so ingrained in our brains that we stick to it anyway. So when we see someone who is an undeserving victim of something awful, this sets up a dissonance: the world is fair, but what happened to this person isn’t fair. The brain doesn’t like dissonance, so has two options: we can conclude the world is cruel and random after all, or decide that the victim did something to deserve it. The latter is crueller, but it lets us keep our nice cosy (incorrect) assumptions about the world, so we blame victims for their misfortune.

  Numerous studies have shown this effect and its many manifestations. For example, people are less critical of victims if they themselves can intervene to alleviate their suffering, or if they were told the victims were compensated later. If people have no means to help victims, they’ll be more disparaging towards them. This, while seeming especially harsh, is consistent with the ‘just world’ hypothesis: the victims have no positive outcome, so they must deserve it, surely?

  People are also far more likely to blame a victim they strongly identify with. If you see someone of a different age/race/gender get hit by a falling tree, it’s much easier to sympathise. But if you see someone of your age, height, build, gender, driving a car just like yours and colliding with a house like the one you live in, you’re far more likely to blame that someone for being incompetent or stupid, despite having no evidence of this.

  In the first instance, none of the factors apply to us, so it’s OK to blame random chance for what happens; it’s something that can’t affect us. The second could easily apply to us, so the brain rationalises it as the fault of the individual involved. It must be their fault, because if it was random chance then it could happen to you. And that’s upsetting thinking.

  It seems that, despite all the inclinations towards being sociable and friendly, our brain is so concerned with preserving a sense of identity and peace of mind that it makes us willing to screw over anyone and anything that could endanger this. Charming.

  Notes

  1 A. Conley, ‘Torture in US jails and prisons: An analysis of solitary confinement under international law’, Vienna Journal on International Constitutional Law, 2013, 7, p. 415

  2 B. N. Pasley et al., ‘Reconstructing speech from human auditory cortex’, PLoS-Biology, 2012, 10(1), p. 175

  3 J. A. Lucy, Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the L
inguistic Relativity Hypothesis, Cambridge University Press, 1992

  4 I. R. Davies, ‘A study of colour grouping in three languages: A test of the linguistic relativity hypothesis’, British Journal of Psychology, 1998, 89(3), pp. 433–52

  5 O. Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, and Other Clinical Tales, Simon and Schuster, 1998

  6 P. J. Whalen et al., ‘Neuroscience and facial expressions of emotion: The role of amygdala–prefrontal interactions’, Emotion Review, 2013, 5(1), pp. 78–83

  7 N. Guéguen, ‘Foot-in-the-door technique and computer-mediated communication’, Computers in Human Behavior, 2002, 18(1), pp. 11–15

  8 A. C.-y. Chan and T. K.-f. Au, ‘Getting children to do more academic work: foot-in-the-door versus door-in-the-face’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 2011, 27(6), pp. 982–5

  9 C. Ebster and B. Neumayr, ‘Applying the door-in-the-face compliance technique to retailing, International Review of Retail, Distribution and Consumer Research, 2008, 18(1), pp. 121–8

  10 J. M. Burger and T. Cornelius, ‘Raising the price of agreement: Public commitment and the lowball compliance procedure’, Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2003, 33(5), pp. 923–34

  11 R. B. Cialdini et al., ‘Low-ball procedure for producing compliance: commitment then cost’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1978, 36(5), p. 463

  12 T. F. Farrow et al., ‘Neural correlates of self-deception and impression-management’, Neuropsychologia, 2015, 67, pp. 159–74

  13 S. Bowles and H. Gintis, A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and Its Evolution, Princeton University Press, 2011

  14 C. J. Charvet and B. L. Finlay, ‘Embracing covariation in brain evolution: large brains, extended development, and flexible primate social systems’, Progress in Brain Research, 2012, 195, p. 71

  15 F. Marlowe, ‘Paternal investment and the human mating system’, Behavioural Processes, 2000, 51(1), pp. 45–61

  16 L. Betzig, ‘Medieval monogamy’, Journal of Family History, 1995, 20(2), pp. 181–216

  17 J. E. Coxworth et al., ‘Grandmothering life histories and human pair bonding’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015. 112(38), pp. 11806–11

  18 D. Lieberman, D. M. Fessler and A. Smith, ‘The relationship between familial resemblance and sexual attraction: An update on Westermarck, Freud, and the incest taboo’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2011, 37(9), pp. 1229–32

  19 A. Aron et al., ‘Reward, motivation, and emotion systems associated with early-stage intense romantic love’, Journal of Neurophysiology, 2005, 94(1), pp. 327–37

  20 A. Campbell, ‘Oxytocin and human social behavior’, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2010

  21 W. S. Hays, ‘Human pheromones: have they been demonstrated?’, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 2003, 54(2), pp. 89–97

  22 L. Campbell et al., ‘Perceptions of conflict and support in romantic relationships: The role of attachment anxiety’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2005, 88(3), p. 510

  23 E. Kross et al., ‘Social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011, 108(15), pp. 6270–75

  24 H. E. Fisher et al., ‘Reward, addiction, and emotion regulation systems associated with rejection in love’, Journal of Neurophysiology, 2010, 104(1), pp. 51–60

  25 J. M. Smyth, ‘Written emotional expression: Effect sizes, outcome types, and moderating variables’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 1998, 66(1), p. 174

  26 H. Thomson, ‘How to fix a broken heart’, New Scientist, 2014, 221(2956), pp. 26–7

  27 R. I. Dunbar, ‘The social brain hypothesis and its implications for social evolution’, Annals of Human Biology, 2009, 36(5), pp. 562–72

  28 T. Dávid-Barrett and R. Dunbar, ‘Processing power limits social group size: computational evidence for the cognitive costs of sociality’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 2013, 280(1765), 10.1098/rspb.2013.1151

  29 S. E. Asch, ‘Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority’, Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 1956, 70(9), pp. 1–70

  30 L. Turella et al., ‘Mirror neurons in humans: consisting or confounding evidence?’, Brain and Language, 2009, 108(1), pp. 10–21

  31 B. Latané and J. M. Darley, ‘Bystander “apathy”’, American Scientist, 1969, pp. 244–68

  32 I. L. Janis, Groupthink: Psychological Studies of Policy Decisions and Fiascoes, Houghton Mifflin, 1982

  33 S. D. Reicher, R. Spears and T. Postmes, ‘A social identity model of deindividuation phenomena’, European Review of Social Psychology, 1995, 6(1), pp. 161–98

  34 S. Milgram, ‘Behavioral study of obedience’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 1963, 67(4), p. 371

  35 S. Morrison, J. Decety and P. Molenberghs, ‘The neuroscience of group membership’, Neuropsychologia, 2012, 50(8), pp. 2114–20

  36 R. B. Mars et al., ‘On the relationship between the “default mode network” and the “social brain”’, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2012, vol. 6, article 189

  37 G. Northoff and F. Bermpohl, ‘Cortical midline structures and the self’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2004, 8(3), pp. 102–7

  38 P. G. Zimbardo and A. B. Cross, Stanford Prison Experiment, Stanford University, 1971

  39 G. Silani et al., ‘Right supramarginal gyrus is crucial to overcome emotional egocentricity bias in social judgments’, Journal of Neuroscience, 2013, 33(39), pp. 15466–76

  40 L. A. Strömwall, H. Alfredsson and S. Landström, ‘Rape victim and perpetrator blame and the just world hypothesis: The influence of victim gender and age’, Journal of Sexual Aggression, 2013, 19(2), pp. 207–17

  * The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is something of an annoyance to linguists, because it is a very misleading label. The supposed originators, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, never actually co-authored anything, and never put forward a specific hypothesis. In essence, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis didn’t exist until the term itself was coined, making it a very good example of itself. Nobody said linguistics had to be easy.

  † There’s much theorising and speculation as to which brain processes and areas of the brain are responsible for these socially relevant tendencies, but it’s difficult to pin these down even now. The more in-depth brain-scanning procedures such as MRI or EEG require the subject to be at least strapped into a large device in a lab, and it’s difficult to get a realistic social interaction going in such contexts. If you were wedged into an MRI scanner and somebody you know wandered in and started asking you for favours, your brain would probably be more confused than anything.

  ‡ One type of chemical often associated with attraction are pheromones, specific substances given off in sweat that other individuals detect and that alter their behaviour, most often linked with increasing arousal and attraction towards the source of the pheromones. While human pheromones are regularly referred to (you can seemingly buy sprays laced with them if you’re looking to increase your sexual appeal), there’s currently no definitive evidence that humans have specific pheromones that influence attraction and arousal.19 The brain may often be an idiot, but it’s not so easily manipulated.

  § Retrospective investigations suggest the original reports of the crime were inaccurate, more urban legend than accurate report, something made up to sell newspapers. Despite this, the bystander effect is a real phenomenon. The murder of Kitty Genovese and supposed unwillingness of witnesses to intervene had other surreal consequences; it’s referenced in Alan Moore’s ground-breaking comic Watchmen, as the event that leads to the character Rorschach taking up vigilantism. Many say they’d love superhero comics to be real. Be careful what you wish for.

  ¶ Fans of Monty Python should be familiar with the ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch. This is (presumably accidentally) an excellent example of group polarisation, if a rather surreal one by normal standards. />
  || There have also been many criticisms of these experiments. Some are to do with methods and interpretations, whereas others are about ethics. What right have scientists to make innocent people think they are torturing others? Such realisations can be very traumatic. Scientists have a reputation for being cold and dispassionate, and it’s sometimes easy to see why.

  ** Not to be confused with the social-brain hypothesis from earlier, because scientists never miss an opportunity to be confusing.

  8

  When the brain breaks down …

  Mental health problems, and how they come about

  What have we learned so far about the human brain? It messes about with memories, it jumps at shadows, it’s terrified of harmless things, it screws with our diet, our sleeping, our movement, it convinces us we’re brilliant when we’re not, it makes up half the stuff we perceive, it gets us to do irrational things when emotional, it causes us to make friends incredibly quickly and turn on them in an instant.

  A worrying list. What’s even more worrying, it does all of this when it’s working properly. So what happens when the brain starts to go, for want of a better word, wrong? That’s when we can end up with a neurological or mental disorder.

  Neurological disorders are due to physical problems or disruption in the central nervous system, like damage to the hippocampus causing amnesia or degradation of the substantia nigra leading to Parkinson’s disease. These things are awful, but usually have identifiable physical causes (although we often can’t do much about them). They mostly manifest as physical issues, like seizures, movement disorders, or pain (migraines, for example).

  Mental disorders are abnormalities of thinking, behaviour or feeling, and they need not have clear ‘physical’ cause. Whatever’s causing them is still based in the physical make-up of the brain, but the brain is physically normal; it’s just doing unhelpful things. To invoke the dubious computer analogy again, a neurological disorder is a hardware problem, whereas a mental disorder is a software problem (although there’s ample overlap between the two, it’s nowhere near as clear cut).