The Self Illusion

6

How the Tribe Made Me

Did you know that one of the most terrifying experiences people can imagine is speaking in front of other people? When this fear becomes so extreme that it begins to affect how people live their lives, it is known as social anxiety disorder. According to the American Psychiatric Association, it is the number one most common anxiety problem and the third most common mental disorder in the United States. More than one in ten of us have social anxiety disorder, which is surprisingly high given that we are such a sociable species.¹ Why is this?

The mind that generates our sense of self is a product of a brain that has evolved to become social. But in being social, the self is radically altered by the presence of others and our need to fit in with them. This is such an imperative, that being in a group can be one of the most life-affirming experiences but also one of the greatest anxiety-inducing challenges.

One theory is that other people trigger our emotions reflexively.² As soon as we are in a crowd we become aroused. The limbic system that controls our behaviour responds automatically to the presence of others. Arguably, this is the basic function of emotions – to motivate social behaviour to either join or avoid others. When people simply look at us we become aroused by the focus of their attention. In one of our studies³ we showed that direct attention from staring eyes triggered increased pupil dilation, which is controlled by the limbic system. This system controls how we interact with others – whether we fight them, flee from them or fornicate with them.

Sometimes, arousal can improve performance. We run faster, cycle faster and basically up our game when others are about. However, this energy can also impair performance when we are not that skilled in the first place. When others look at us, our mouths dry up, our voices tremble and our hands shake – all signs of limbic arousal. These are the butterflies that we get in our stomach, which explains why opening-night nerves are a common experience for actors who are not yet comfortable in their roles. It’s only when we become expert that we can rise to the occasion.⁴

However, not all group behaviour leads to increased performance. In a tug of war, teammates expend about half as much energy as when they pull as individuals in a phenomenon known as ‘social loafing’.⁵ As soon as we blend into the crowd we no longer feel the need to put in as much effort if it is not recognized. It is only if the group appreciates our efforts that we try harder. This need for recognition also explains why groups can become more polarized on issues that would normally generate only moderate views.⁶ In an effort to gain group approval, individuals adopt increasingly extreme positions that they feel represent the group, which in turn drags the group further towards that position. If you couple that dynamic force with ‘groupthink’,⁷ the tendency to suspend critical thinking when we are one of many decision-makers so as to try and galvanize the gathering, then it is easy to see how we behave so differently in groups than we would as individuals. It explains why the rise of political extremism requires not only the determination of the few but also the complacency of the many. When we are in large groups, whatever self we believe we have is swamped by others. The illusion is to assume you are more autonomous than you really are.

Suicide Baiting

In January 2010, a distressed woman on a bridge over the M60 motorway in the UK brought the traffic to a four-hour standstill while the police attempted to talk her down. A radio DJ, Steve Penk, thought it would be a funny prank to play Van Halen’s hit track, ‘Jump’, for the frustrated drivers caught up in the drama.⁸ Moments later, the woman jumped allegedly after hearing the song on a radio turned up by one of the waiting motorists. Luckily, the woman survived her suicide attempt but Penk was unrepentant.

Left to his own devices, the DJ would not have taunted the potential suicide victim unless he thought his clowning would please the listeners. The drivers trapped on the motorway would probably not have normally wished this woman harm either. They were sufficiently removed from the incident that they did not feel any consequences of their actions. This kind of crowd behaviour is known as suicide baiting. Fortunately, it is very rare, probably because most suicides are not public spectacles. However, there are well-documented cases where crowds have urged individuals to kill themselves. How can we understand such behaviour? Conceivably this is not the sort of thing that individual members of a crowd would normally encourage on their own.

One explanation is that groups create deindividuation, a loss of the individual self. An analysis of 166 failed and successful suicide attempts across the US between 1966 and 1979 found that crowds were present in about twenty of them and, of those, half were found to bait or jeer the victim.⁹ The factors that seemed to link to baiting were larger crowds, the distance between the crowd and the victim, and the cover of night – arguably all factors that lead to greater anonymity.

Anonymity to outsiders appears to be the crucial factor when individuals feel that they are not accountable, which leads to greater antisocial behaviour. Riots, lynching and hooliganism are all believed to be examples of mob mentality that are thought to thrive through the process of deindividuation.¹⁰ In contrast, the more that we lose anonymity, the more we conform and behave. In one simple study, researchers placed a picture of a pair of eyes on the wall above a collection tin in the coffee room where members of staff paid for their beverages.¹¹ For the next ten weeks they alternated posting pictures of flowers or watchful eyes above the coffee pot. People were more honest paying for their beverages when the eyes were posted. Just like the self-conscious Halloween children, we are more honest when a mirror is present to reflect our behaviour. When we are made self-conscious we become more accountable. For example, students consider working on an exam paper after time is up as cheating, and yet 71 per cent of them continue to do so if left alone. However, only 7 per cent do so if they are made self-aware by a mirror hanging in the exam room.¹² Anything that exposes the self to the scrutiny of others makes us more prosocial. Groups can bring out both the good and bad sides of our self.

Does one really lose one’s individual identity in a crowd as deindividuation suggests? As the psychologist Vaughan Bell¹³ points out, anyone who has ever found themselves in a situation where they are suddenly under threat as a group does not necessarily lose identity – they just see themselves as part of a different, larger collective. For example, imagine you get on a crowded late-night bus home where there is a group of drunken students, an elderly couple and maybe a teenager playing his music too loudly through his personal stereo. You do not feel anything in common with them and might even resent your fellow travellers. However, if looters, aliens or zombies suddenly attack the bus, you spontaneously feel like a group and formulate plans to fend off the threat. You do not lose your identity but form a new one to address the group concern of which you are now a member. It’s the storyline of many film scripts where individuals discover themselves in threatening situations and, of course, this is where the heroes and villains emerge. So groups do not cause deindividuation but rather trump individualism depending on the context.¹⁴

Piggy in the Middle

Do you remember the childhood game, ‘piggy in the middle’? It’s a wicked teasing game. Usually, two players are supposed to pass a ball backwards and forwards to each other and the ‘piggy’ is the person in the middle who has to intercept it. Sounds harmless, doesn’t it. Except that whenever I was the piggy, I used to get very upset because it seemed as if I was being excluded.

Caring about what others think may be one of the strongest preoccupations we have as an animal. Indeed, as Philippe Rochat¹⁵ has pointed out, ‘To be human is indeed to care about reputation.’ To be ostracized from the group is the worst fate, which he calls ‘psychological death’. Being ignored and rejected by our peers is painful. Most of us can remember being very upset when we were teased as children or not picked to play on teams. At the time, these events seemed like personal tragedies.

This is why bullying is not simply physically abusive but psychologically traumatizing. According to a 2001 survey by the US National Institute of Child Health, one in three teenage children was involved in bullying.¹⁶ It is more prevalent in boys than girls and the patterns of abuse are different.¹⁷ For males, both physical and verbal bullying is common, whereas for females verbal bullying through taunting and rumour-mongering is typically more common. However, even though girls use less physical violence, neuroscience indicates they might as well punch their victims, as the pain of social rejection is just as real.

This is something that psychologist Kip Williams from Purdue University knows from experience. He was out in the park walking his dog one day when he was hit in the back with a Frisbee. He threw it back to one of the two guys who were playing with it who then began tossing it back to Kip. This was fun but, after about a minute, they stopped throwing the Frisbee to Kip and returned their attention to each other. At first Kip thought it was amusing but then it became clear that they were not going to include Kip in their game again. The psychology professor was surprised at how upset he was by this exclusion given that he had only been included in their game for a minute and that these were complete strangers. He realized how sensitive we are to ostracism.

Kip took his experiences from the park and developed a computer simulation known as ‘Cyberball’ where adult participants had their brains scanned as they played a game where they had to toss a ball back and forth between two other playmates.¹⁸ Just like the frisbee event, Cyberball was going along fine, until the two others started to only pass the ball back between themselves and ignore the adult in the brain scanner. When this exclusion became obvious, the ACC regions of the brain, which are activated by social cognition, started to light up with activity. This is because the pain of rejection also triggers the ACC – a result of its importance as a mechanism for conflict resolution. The social exclusion of the game had initially caused consternation and then distress, as it activated areas associated with emotional pain. Just like ego-depletion, those who were rejected by colleagues were more likely to eat fattening cookies, which is probably where comfort food gets its potency.¹⁹ When we say that our feelings are hurt, it may not simply be a metaphor we are using. We really feel as much pain as a punch in the stomach.

What is remarkable is how sensitive we are to being rejected. Even when participants played Cyberball for only a couple of minutes and were told that it was only a computer simulation, they still felt the pain of rejection.²⁰ And this pain had nothing to do with the personality of the players either. They were not overly sensitive. Rather, there is something very fundamental and automatic about ostracism.²¹ Williams argues that this reaction must be hard-wired and points out that, in many other social species, ostracism often leads to death. That’s why humans are so sensitive. As soon as it looks as though we are in danger of being ostracized, we become hyper-vigilant to those around us, looking for clues in the way people are interacting and opportunities to re-engage with the group.²² Excluded individuals engage in behaviours that increase their likelihood of being reconciled back into the group. We are more likely to mimic, comply with requests, obey orders and cooperate with others who don’t deserve it. We become obsequious to the extent that we will agree with others who are clearly in the wrong.

If these ingratiating strategies fail, then ostracized individuals switch tack and turn from being likeable to being angry and aggressive: ‘Look at me, I’m worthy of attention. I am not invisible, damn you.’ Individuals no longer care about being liked but rather want to exert their influence on others to take notice. People who have been ostracized are less helpful and more aggressive to others, whether or not the others are the perpetrators of the ostracism. For example, in one study ostracized individuals sought revenge by giving an innocent bystander five times the amount of hot chilli sauce as a punishment even when they knew the victim hated the sauce.²³ Many of the tragic cases of school shootings and murderous rampages involve individuals who feel they have been socially rejected. An analysis of the diaries of school-shooters found that in thirteen of the fifteen cases examined, the perpetrators had been targets of ostracism.²⁴ Clearly not everyone who has been ostracized goes on a shooting rampage, but if the ostracism persists, then excluded individuals eventually experience alienation and worthlessness. They often withdraw from society and become profoundly depressed and contemplate suicide. As humans, we all need to belong.

Do You Want to Be in My Gang?

In his resignation telegram to an elite Beverly Hills social club, Groucho Marx wrote, ‘Please accept my resignation, I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept people like me as a member.’²⁵

Whether we like it or not, we are all members of clubs. As a social animal, we cannot help but hang out with others. Even those of us not in a family can identify significant others in our lives – friends, Romans and even countrymen. Ultimately we are all members of one very big club: the human species. No man or woman is an island. Of course, there are some among us who reject being with others and seek out the isolated life of a hermit, but that is not the norm. They are the weirdoes amongst us. Most of us just want to belong. There is a drive, deep inside us, that compels us to be accepted by others.

Some group membership is relatively fixed and independent of what we want – age, sex, race, height and nationality, for example – though sometimes we try to change even these: lie about our age, cross-dress, have surgery, wear elevator shoes and become a nationalized citizen. Other groups we aspire to join throughout our lifetime – the in-crowd, the jet-set, the highfliers, the intelligentsia or the seriously wealthy. Some of us are assigned to groups we would rather not join – the poor, the uneducated, the criminal classes or the drug addicts. People do not normally choose to be any of these but we are all members of groups whether we like it or not. Furthermore, it is in our human nature to categorize each other into groups. Even those who don’t want to be characterized are a group unto themselves – they are the dropouts and the outsiders.

We categorize others because it makes it much easier to deal with strangers when we know where they are coming from. We do not have to do as much mental work trying to figure out how to respond and can react much quicker when we categorize. This is a general principle of our brains – we tend to summarize previous experiences to be prepared for future encounters. It’s likely to be an evolutionary adaptation to optimize processing loads and streamline responses. When we identify someone as belonging to a group, this triggers all the stereotypes we possess for that group, which, in turn, influences how we behave towards the person. The problem is, of course, that stereotypes can be very wide of the mark when it comes down to the characteristics of the individual.

Those stereotypes can also be manipulated by others as well as by prejudice, which means we can all be biased to be biased. In one study, participants had to inflict painful punishment on fellow students in a learning experiment, and they were allowed to choose the level of pain to administer.²⁶ If they ‘accidentally’ overheard an experimenter describe the students as ‘animals’ before the start of the experiment, the participants chose more severe punishments. They were influenced by others’ opinions. Most of us say we hate to be pigeonholed but the truth is that it is in our nature to label others and be labelled our selves, and that process is highly dependent on what other people think. We are less self-assured than we believe in making our minds up. It is the group consensus, not the individual opinion, that determines how most of us evaluate others.

The groups we belong to define us, but we are constantly entering, leaving, expanding and swapping our groups. People obviously benefit from the collective power of groups as well as the resources and companionship that can be shared, but membership is also necessary for generating a sense of self-identity. Just belonging to a group shapes our self because we automatically identify with other members. We know this from the work of social psychologists like Henri Tajfel who used to be the head of my department. Before he came to Bristol in the 1960s, Tajfel witnessed the power of groups when he was a French prisoner-of-war, having been captured by the Germans during the Second World War. In fact, he was a Polish Jew but he kept this aspect of his identity secret from his German prison guards. After the war, Tajfel dedicated his life to understanding group psychology. In what is now regarded as a classic study, he showed that arbitrarily assigning Bristol schoolboys into two groups by the toss of a coin produced changes in the way that they treated each other.²⁷ Those members in the same group or ‘in group’ were more positive to each other, and shared resources, but hostile to ‘out group’ members, even though they were all from the same class.

What’s In Your Eye, Brother?

In fact, Tajfel’s study had been pre-empted a couple of years earlier in the United States by Jane Elliot, an Iowa third-grade teacher from Middle America.²⁸ The class had just been studying Dr Martin Luther King Jr as American of the Month, when news came over that the civil rights leader had been assassinated on 4 April 1968. The children had little experience of discrimination and could not understand why anyone would want to kill their man of the month. The following day, Elliot planned an audacious class project to teach them about discrimination. She told her class that there was very good evidence that children with blue eyes were superior to students with brown eyes.

Following this revelation, Elliot afforded the blue-eyed students privileges such as extra long breaks and being first in the lunch queue. However, the next day she said that she had been wrong, and that in fact the evidence proved that it was the brown-eyed children who were superior. This role-reversal produced the same pattern. On both days, children who were designated as inferior took on the look and behaviour of genuinely inferior students, performing poorly on tests, whereas the superior group became more hostile to the inferior group, thinking them less worthy. Simply by belonging to a group influences how you feel about your self and how you feel about others not in your group. In fact, it is the favourable comparisons that we draw against others not in our group that help to define who we are. This is how we formulate our identity – by focusing on what we are not. The trouble is that by focusing on others, we miss our own imperfections. As Matthew (7:3) in the Bible reminds us when talking about small grains (motes) of imperfection, ‘And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?’

Social identity theory has been refined and elaborated over the decades with research demonstrating that people see themselves within a hierarchy of different groups that can shift periodically over the lifespan. Clearly some changes in circumstances change our group affiliation. If we marry, have children or become crippled, the groups to which we belong change by default. Because we occupy so many different positions throughout our lifetime – child, adolescent, worker, parent, etc. – most of us see our selves occupying multiple groups. In most instances we perceive group membership as bolstering self-esteem; by being part of a larger affiliation, we gain a sense of who we think we are as individuals. This is a delicate balance we strive to achieve between our desire to be an individual and the need to belong alongside others,²⁹ though not every culture sees the need to strike this balance. Most of us believe that we know our own minds and whether we decide to identify with a group, or not, is really up to us to decide. However, if anything has emerged in the field of social psychology, it is the revelation that such a belief is naive as we are all susceptible to the power of the group – whether we like it or not.

Conformity

How good is your vision? Take a good look at the lines in Figure 7 and decide which one matches the line on the left – A, B or C? This is pretty much a no-brainer and unless someone has serious visual problems, you would predict that everyone would answer B. However, it depends what others around you say.

In what is considered one of the most important studies of the power of groups,³⁰ Solomon Asch had eight participants take the line test. He held up cards with the lines on them and went round the room asking the participants which line matched the test line. In fact, there was only one real subject as the other seven participants were actually confederates of the experiment. At first, everything seemed above board. Everyone agreed on the length of the test line on the first two trials. However, on the third trial, the confederates gave the wrong answer saying that it was line C that matched. The real participant stared in disbelief at his fellow students. Were they blind? What would the participant say when it came to his turn? On average, three out of every four participants went along with his fellow participants and also gave the wrong answer. Each did not suddenly become blind, but rather conformed in accordance with the group so as not to be the outsider. Each participant was fully aware of the correct answer, but each did not want to appear different. They did not want to be ostracized so they conformed to the group consensus.

What about situations that are not so clear-cut, as in the case of a jury evaluating evidence? In Sidney Lumet’s classic portrayal of the power of group psychology, Twelve Angry Men (1957), Henry Fonda stands alone as the one dissenting member of a jury. In the film, a Spanish–American youth is accused of murdering his father, but Fonda gradually convinces the other jury members that the eyewitness testimony is not only unreliable, but false. This film was made long before the experiments on false memories were conducted. As the film unfolds, we see the dynamics of allegiances shift as Fonda tries to win the jury over man by man. It is a dramatic portrayal of the power of compliance and group consensus.

When we conform, it is not so much the power of the group or peer pressure that shapes our behaviour, but rather our desire to be accepted. Our need to conform is a powerful force that shapes us and literally changes the way we think. In other words, it is not just public compliance when we conform to the group but true private acceptance of group norms. For example, when asked to rate the attractiveness of music or faces,³¹ if there is a discrepancy between an individual’s liking and the group consensus, this triggers activation in brain regions associated with social cognition and reward evaluation. However, as soon as we have an ally, we become more self-opinionated. In Asch’s line test, it only required the presence of one other dissenter to give the right answer for the effect to reduce significantly. When we are accompanied by another dissenter, we are no longer an individual but part of a new group. The same thing unfolded in Twelve Angry Men. That’s why we seek out others who share our opinion, because there is strength in numbers. It’s also one of the reasons that oppressive regimes quash any resistance as soon as it starts to appear. If we feel isolated and powerless, then we submit more readily to authority and are less likely to resist. History teaches that authoritarian regimes have managed to control the people by terrorizing them into submission with acts of human cruelty and atrocity, but to suppress dissent you need others to do your bidding unquestioningly. This is where the power of the group can be manipulated to change the nature of the individual. This is where normal, good-natured people become monsters.

Figure 7: Asch test of compliance. Which line (A, B or C) matches the test line?

The Lucifer Effect

Do you consider your self evil? Could you inflict pain and suffering on another human being or a defenceless animal for that matter? Consider how likely it is that you would do any of the following:

• Electrocute a fellow human until they were dead

• Torture a puppy

• Administer a lethal dose

• Strip-search a co-worker and make them perform a sex act on another worker

Most readers are appalled by such suggestions. However, the Stanford psychologist Phil Zimbardo forces us to think again in his recent book, The Lucifer Effect,³² about how to make good people become evil by putting them in toxic situations that generate a downward spiral into degradation. Zimbardo convincingly argues that all of us are capable of doing the despicable deeds in this list, even though none of us thinks we ever would. This is because we believe that we are essentially good and that only bad people do bad things. Our whole legal system is based on this assumption that individuals are responsible for their own moral choices. But Zimbardo argues that the situations we can find our selves in and the influence of those around us determine how we behave and treat others. If we believe our self illusion has a core morality then it is one that is at the mercy of those around us.

Zimbardo, who rather resembles a popular portrayal of Lucifer with his goatee, is known for his infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where he investigated the consequences of simulating an incarceration scenario using ordinary students playing cops and robbers. It was to be a two-week study of the effects of role-playing in the basement of the Stanford psychology department, which had been turned into a makeshift prison. Like Tajfels’s Bristol schoolboy study, on the flip of a coin, the volunteers were divided. Half of the student volunteers were to be the guards and the other half were to be their prisoners, each earning $15 a day for fourteen days. Most thought it would be easy money to loaf around for a couple of weeks. However, what happened next shocked everyone involved and has left a legacy in the literature on the psychology of evil that now explains many unbelievable examples of human cruelty.

To simulate authenticity, the prisoners were arrested on a Sunday by real policemen, handcuffed, blindfolded and taken to the prison where they were stripped and put in smocks without underwear. This was only the beginning of the humiliation. Then the ‘guards’ – uniformed fellow students wearing mirror shades – met them. When they wanted to go to the toilet down the hall, the inmates were led out with bags on their heads. Their guards gave them a long list of rules that they had to memorize and failure to do so led to punishment. Within a very short time, things began to deteriorate. Even though they had never been instructed to harm the inmates, the guards began to spontaneously torment and torture the inmates. In this authoritarian atmosphere, the inmates became psychologically distressed while their guards were getting increasingly out of control.

From a scientific perspective, this was exhilarating. Even though everyone involved knew the set-up was not real, the situation was creating real cruelty and suffering. Thrilled by the speed and ease at which morality seemed to be deteriorating, Zimbardo pushed on, largely as the scientist overseeing the project but also as his role as the Superintendent in charge of the prison. He was becoming a player immersed in his own fantasy story.

His girlfriend at the time, another psychology professor, Christina Maslach, visited to see how the experiment was progressing and was shocked by what she observed. She told Zimbardo, ‘What you’re doing to those boys is a terrible thing!’ A heated row between the lovers ensued and she would later recall, ‘Phil seemed so different from the man I thought I knew. He was not the same man that I had come to love.’ Zimbardo had lost the plot. He seemed unable to see what cruelty he had created. After six days, largely at the bequest of Christina, he terminated the experiment. He married her the following year.

For the next forty years, the Stanford Prison Experiment has remained a controversial study both in terms of the ethics of putting people in this situation as well as the interpretation.³³ Zimbardo thinks that the devil is in the deindividuation whereas others claim that all that was demonstrated was over-enthusiastic role-playing. That may be true to some extent. Maybe some of the students had watched too many prison movies like Cool Hand Luke where the guards also wore the same mirrored sunglasses and behaved sadistically.³⁴ One of the student guards even adopted a Southern American accent indicating a well-formulated stereotype of the typical correctional officer. They behaved as they thought the officers and prisoners should. But even if it was all acting, one is still left wondering what is the difference between role-playing and reality. What does it mean to say: that I may act in a terrible way but that’s not the way I really am? Who is the real me, or self?

The Man in the White Coat

Some questioned the authenticity of the Stanford Prison Experiment. What would happen in a real situation of authority? This is where the work of Stanley Milgram is so relevant. Milgram was one of Solomon Asch’s research assistants, and in the early 1960s he wanted to take his mentor’s work further. In what has become one of the most notorious psychology studies, Milgram demonstrated the power of authority when compliance becomes blind obedience.³⁵

It began with a simple advertisement in which participants were asked to volunteer and would be paid $4 an hour to take part in an experiment on learning and punishment to be conducted at prestigious Yale University. When each of the volunteers arrived at the laboratory, they met with the experimenter, wearing a white lab coat, and another middle-aged man, who was introduced as another participant but who was actually a trained actor. After a supposedly random decision, the experimenter explained that the volunteer would play the role of teacher and the actor would play the role of learner. The learner was led off to another room and it was explained that the teacher would read words to the learner over an intercom. The learner would then repeat the words back to the teacher. If the learner made a mistake, the teacher would press a button that delivered an electric shock to the learner in the other room. There were thirty levels of shock rising in 15-volt increments from an initial 15 volts to 450 volts. Each switch had the level and a description of the shock, ranging from ‘mild’ at the start, through the tenth level (150 volts), ‘strong’; thirteenth level (195 volts), ‘very strong’; seventeenth level (255 volts), ‘intense’; twenty-first level (315 volts), ‘extremely intense’; twenty-fifth level (375 volts), ‘danger, severe shock’. The final two levels of 435 and 450 volts had no label other than an ominous ‘XXX’. To give them an idea of what it felt like, the participant teacher was given a taste of the third level (45 volts), which induced a very real, tingly pain.

Initially the experiment began fairly well as the learner repeated back the correct answers. However, when the learner began to make errors, the teacher was instructed by the man in the white coat to administer punishment shocks. Of course, the actor in the next room was not really receiving any shocks but duly gave a more and more distressing performance as the intensity of the punishment shocks increased. At first, he started to complain that the shocks hurt. Then they were painful. As the punishment voltages increased, so did the intensity of the screams. Soon the learner was pleading with the teacher and telling him that he had a heart condition. Many of the participants protested that they could not go on but the man in the white coat replied impassively, ‘Please continue.’ At this point the teachers were clearly stressed, shaking and sweating, and yet they went on. Even after the intercom went silent and they reached the twentieth level of 300 volts, they were told that the learner’s failure to answer the question was an error and that the teacher must proceed with the punishment.

What do you think you would do in such a situation? Before Milgram had started his study, he consulted a panel of forty psychiatrists and asked what they predicted that members of the public would do. As experts on human psychology, they agreed that fewer than one in 100 participants would go all the way to the end. How wrong could they be? It turned out that two out of every three of the participants in Milgram’s shocking study went all the way to the end at 450 volts. They were prepared to kill another human being at the request of the man in the white coat.

Maybe the participants knew that this was all a trick and that no one was being hurt. I doubt it. I have watched the early recordings of this study and it is fairly disturbing viewing as the teachers are clearly distressed as they become resigned to administering the lethal shocks. In a later study that would never get ethical approval today, researchers conducted the almost identical experiment using puppies punished with real electric shocks.³⁶ This time there was no charade. The animals were clearly suffering (although they were not receiving lethal shocks and the voltages were way below the descriptions the teachers thought they were administering). Half of the male teachers went all the way to the maximum punishment and, surprisingly, all of the female teacher participants obeyed the order to give the maximum shocks.

The authority figure does not even have to be in the room. In another study with real nurses in a hospital,³⁷ the participants received a telephone call from an unknown doctor who asked them to administer a 20-millilitre dose of a drug, ‘Astrogen’, to a patient that he was on his way to visit. The label on the drug indicated that 5 millilitres was a normal dose and it should not exceed 10 millilitres. All but one of twenty-two nurses knowingly gave the dose that was double the safety limit. This is a very old study and guidelines have changed over the years to prevent exactly this sort of blind obedience operating, but Zimbardo documents more recent examples where people working in hierarchical organizations succumb to the pressure of their superiors even when they know that what is requested is wrong.

Outside of the workplace, the power of authority is most evident in law enforcement. Whenever we have been pulled over by men in uniforms, most of us become obedient. I know I do. In an incredible account of blind obedience, Zimbardo describes how he served as an expert witness in one case of a spate of sixty sexual assaults that had taken place in fast-food chains across the United States during the late 1990s and early 2000s. In a typical scam, the caller asked to speak to the assistant manager and then informed him that he was a police officer and that one of the recent employees had been stealing money and concealing drugs. The assistant manager was asked to cooperate by restraining the suspect employee and performing a strip search while the police made their way to the restaurant. Of course, this was not a real police request but a pervert who wanted the manager to describe the intimate search in detail into the phone. In the case with which Zimbardo was involved, a terrified eighteen-year-old female employee was stripped naked and then commanded to perform oral sex with another male co-worker, simply because they were told to so by an anonymous phone caller who they believed was ‘the law’.³⁸

The Banality of Evil

Much of the research on compliance and obedience was conducted in a period of history still recovering from the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps. Asch, Milgram and Zimbardo were Americans of Jewish descent who wanted to know how the Holocaust could ever have taken place. It was a question to which the world wanted the answer as well. Even today, we still ask the same questions. How can ordinary people perform such extraordinarily cruel acts on other people?

Perhaps the Milgram experiments were products of the era – when authoritarianism ruled the day. We are much more liberated today and wary of the corrupting power of authority in the post-Watergate years. However, in 2007, the ABC News Primetime TV show in the US decided to recreate the Milgram study to see whether a sample of forty men and women would go as far as to administer the highest level of shock.³⁹ Again two-thirds of them obeyed a man in the white coat and went all the way to the end of the dial. We are fooling our selves if we believe we can resist the influence of others. We can all become the instruments of torture.

We still question how people can be so evil whenever we hear of another example of human atrocity inflicted on fellow human beings around the globe. One example that was so surprising was the treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib by US professional soldiers. In 2004, images of naked male Iraqi detainees piled high on top of each other in a human pyramid were circulated around the world’s press. Alongside their victims, grinning American guards posed, with smiling faces and thumbs up gestures, for trophy photographs. The images also showed the psychological torture of hooded detainees balanced on boxes with outstretched arms, who were told that, if they fell, they would be electrocuted with the dummy wires attached to their fingers. The pictures bore a shocking resemblance to those of hooded prisoners in Zimbardo’s prison experiment. Others detainees were forced to wear women’s clothing or simulate fellatio with other male prisoners. All of these images showed that Abu Ghraib prison, originally used by Saddam Hussein to torture his opponents, continued with the tradition of sadistic human behaviour under the occupation of the coalition’s liberating Army.

At first, US Army generals dismissed the scandal as the work of a few ‘bad apples’ – disturbed sadists who had managed to infiltrate the honourable corp. In particular, the most upsetting images were of a young female guard, Private Lynndie England, who was photographed grinning as she led a naked male prisoner around in a dog-collar. There was nothing out of the ordinary about Lynndie England’s upbringing to suggest that she was a sadist. One of her ex-teachers described her as ‘invisible’. If anything, it appears that Lynndie England was just a simple woman who followed others and was under the influence of her lover, Charles Garner, who instigated the abuse and took many of the photographs. But it is the cherub-like smiling face of twenty-one-year-old England, and not Garner’s, that will forever be associated with the atrocities.⁴⁰

This is probably the most disturbing thing about evil. When the philosopher Hannah Arendt was commissioned by the New Yorker to cover the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s, she reported that the trouble with Eichmann and his ilk was that they were neither perverted nor sadistic, but simply ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’. Seemingly ordinary people had committed extraordinary crimes. It was as if, as she called it, the ‘banality of evil’ was proof that the self had capitulated to the cruelty that war and conflicts engender and that people were generally incapable of resisting the will of others.⁴¹

The Human Chameleon

When you consider the power of groups in these studies, it seems unlikely that anyone was totally unaware of their behaviour in the conformity and obedience experiments of the 1960s and 1970s. People were also probably aware of their actions in the real-life examples of blind obedience described by Zimbardo. They simply don’t feel responsible for their actions. They may still believe in their self illusion, that they could do otherwise should they wish, but rather they prefer to suspend their decision-making in order to fit in with others or obey authority figures. It’s not a pleasant realization, but then we can always justify it later by weighing up what is in our best interests in the long term. It is our old friend cognitive dissonance, again.

Sometimes our behaviour can also be hijacked unknowingly by the influence of those around us. This is when the self is covertly manipulated. In these situations we are not even aware that we are being shaped by social influences. For example, Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis recalls the time when he and a few members of the Nijmegen Psychology Department went to watch a soccer match.⁴² On their walk to the stadium, the academics behaving calmly and orderly were soon surrounded by hundreds of yelling and shouting soccer fans and hooligans. At that point something odd happened. One of academics saw an empty beer can and, in what seemed to be an impulsive act, he kicked it violently as far away as possible. For a moment, he stood there, transfixed and aghast at what he had just done. He was no longer an individual – he had become like the crowd around him.

This change in behaviour to match others around us is known as the ‘chameleon effect’⁴³ after the exotic lizard that can change its skin colour to blend in with its surroundings. It is not a deliberate effort to change but rather reflects the automatic way that we mimic others around us. This can be anything from simple postures, expressions and gestures to more complicated patterns of behaviour such as speech or moods. Simply the way we move about can be influenced by others without us even being really aware. The brain’s mirroring system that is activated during our own movements that can also be triggered by the goal-directed actions of another when we observe them performing the same goal. These mirror neurons provide a convenient way of mapping the behaviour of others directly into our own brains through a process much like resonance. It’s like when you are in a guitar salesroom and strike the ‘G’ string loudly enough on one guitar, all the other ‘G’ strings on all the other guitars will eventually vibrate in synchrony.

Human mirroring works the same way. Most of us have a repertoire of behaviours that can be triggered by others without us being aware that we are mirroring someone else’s movements. We may cross our legs, yawn, stroke our nose, play with our hair and change the way we speak or sit simply because we are unwittingly copying another person.⁴⁴ This unconscious imitation, known as mimicry, is a powerful mechanism for binding the self to others.⁴⁵ It is not entirely automatic as we only mimic those we like in a virtuous self-fulfilling circle – we copy others who we like, who in turn like us more, thereby increasing the likelihood that they will copy us in a synchronized sycophantic symphony of mutual appreciation.⁴⁶

Not only do we like people who mimic us more but we are willing to help them out if they request favours from us.⁴⁷ We even feel like a better human being after we have been copied and it can last long after the encounter. In one study, after being mimicked, participants donated twice as much money to a charity box as they left the experiment compared to those who had not been copied even though the donations were anonymous.⁴⁸ We even tip waitresses more when they mimic us.⁴⁹

However, we are not simply puppets at the mercy of others tugging on our strings to control how we feel about them. Even though we may not be consciously aware of the mimicry, riding on top of this mirroring system of social interaction is an appraisal veto that seems to be double-checking for interlopers. We tend to mimic only those people from our own social circles and those with whom we want to be affiliated. We don’t mimic those outside our social groups. In fact, we dislike individuals from outside of our social group more if they mimic us. In one study, white Dutch adults who scored highly on tests that measure prejudice disliked a computer-generated avatar that mimicked them if it appeared to have a Moroccan face rather than a white European one.⁵⁰

The Rhythm of Life

This process of liking others who copy us appears early in development. The young infant’s facial imitation could be an early example of mimicry where the motor system of the brain is automatically triggered by watching the movements of others. This might explain why the repertoire of behaviours is very limited at first – this is not too surprising given what movements newborns can actually make by themselves. Over the next twelve months the opportunity to copy others increases and the Machiavellian babies look out for those who copy them. Five-month-old babies placed in a baby walker that enables them to scoot about the floor prefer to approach a stranger who has mimicked them and acted in a synchronized manner than one who did not respond to the babies’ behaviour in a contingent way.⁵¹ Sometimes it is not only the lack of mimicking that puts babies off, but the timing and amount of effort. Mothers with post-natal depression can have either a very flat emotionless interaction with their babies or go over the top with an exuberant flurry of attempted interaction. Either way, two-month-old babies prefer the more measured and synchronized interactions.⁵²

Synchrony seems to be an important characteristic of social interaction. Turn-taking is essential during conversations as anyone listening to a radio interview knows that not everyone can be heard at once. We have to take turns during communication. Again these patterns are established early in development. As mothers breastfeed their infants, they instinctively know how to synchronize their movements and baby talk to fit with their child’s sucking patterns which come in bursts and pauses.⁵³

Synchrony of movements and timing continue to influence the nature of social interactions throughout our lives. Children must learn to take turns and control their impulses and urges. Routines are learned that emphasize the importance of coordination with others. Those who fail to develop control of their selves in the presence of others are said to be out of control. All the institutions that make up our societies – schools, churches and armies – thrive on synchrony to solidify ties between their members. Dancing and singing are synchronized activities that depend on timing to be pleasurable. In today’s modern army where the combat troop member is more of a technician than a field grunt, soldiers are still taught to march in unison as a means of establishing group harmony. This is why we say that individuals failing to conform to the group are ‘getting out of step’ or ‘falling out of line’.

Regimentation is not just a way of gaining control over large numbers of individuals. Rather it actually promotes prosocial behaviour. In one study, participants were walked around a college campus either in step or out of step with their colleagues.⁵⁴ Both groups then played a trade-off game where the goal was to optimize winnings by members choosing the same but riskier option than a safer option that paid out less. In short, if members thought there was less group cohesion they tended to go for the safer bet. What researchers found was that those who walked in unison before the test did much better by selecting the responses that indicated a sense of group cohesion even though they were completely unaware of the purpose of going for a walk. Even Americans who sang along with the Canadian national anthem ‘O Canada’, rather than simply listening to it or reading the lyrics, were more likely to succeed in trade-off games that tested how much we trust others.

Walk This Way

Yale psychologist John Bargh has shown that these chameleon effects can operate simply by reading about the attributes of others. This is priming, which reflects the way that the circuits of the brain that store related information can be influenced by external events. For example, when students were asked to unscramble sentences that contained words related to being elderly such as, ‘forgetful, retired, wrinkle, rigid, traditional, bitter, obedient, conservative, knits, dependent, ancient, helpless, gullible’, they left the experimental room walking like an old person. They were slower and frailer. If they read sentences that contained words related to being rude such, ‘bold, bother, disturb, intrude, annoyingly, audaciously, brazen, impolitely, infringe, obnoxious’, they were more likely to interrupt a conversation than students who had read polite words.⁵⁵

These influences of external events work because the mere exposure to words triggers thoughts that for a moment can influence our behaviours. It is not only actions – even our general knowledge can be primed to be better or worse. If you are asked to imagine what it must be like to be a professor for five minutes, then you will perform better on Trivial Pursuit questions than if you imagine being a soccer hooligan.⁵⁶ Claude Steele, one of the most prominent African American psychologists, has been looking at how stereotypes distort behaviours.⁵⁷ White students primed to think about being black African Americans responded with hostility when asked to repeat a task they had just completed, indicating that negative stereotypes can be triggered in the same manner. Just listing your race can influence the way you perform on a task. When asked to list their race before sitting an IQ test, African Americans did significantly worse than if they had not been asked.

These priming effects can even be triggered unconsciously through mimicry by others. For example, in mathematics tests there is a racial stereotype that Asian Americans do better than Caucasian Americans who do better than African Americans.⁵⁸ To see if this stereotype could be triggered by mimicry, Asian American, African American and white Caucasian students were asked to take a mathematics test.⁵⁹ Before they took the test, each one sat in a waiting room where there was another student of the same ethnic background who was also taking the test. The other student was, in fact, a confederate of the experimenters who had been instructed to either mimic or not mimic the real subject. When there was no mimicking, all three groups performed equally well, showing that the stereotype was not activated. However, if they had been mimicked by the confederate, Asian Americans performed significantly better than the white Caucasians, whereas the African Americans tended to show poorer performance. The same mimicry effect was found with the sex stereotype that women are not as good at mathematics as men.

Despite it being in our best interests to perform as well as we can, we are nevertheless at the mercy of stereotypes and those around us who can trigger them unconsciously.

When East and West Collide

Perhaps one of the most surprising lines of research in recent years has shown that cultural stereotypes operate at a much more basic level in the brain than has previously ever been considered. This is true even in the way we perceive the world around us. For example, it is often assumed that while people around the world may have different preferences and tastes, when it comes to music and art we all have essentially the same brain. When someone in Beijing hears Mozart, they hear the same music as someone from Boston. When someone from Tokyo looks at a painting by Magritte, they see the same image as someone from Tennessee. They may not agree about whether they like the work, but they have the same perceptual experience. But is that really true? Richard Nisbitt thinks not. He has accumulated a vast body of evidence to show that cultures can shape the way we literally perceive the world and, ultimately, the way we think about our self.

In his book, The Geography of Thought ⁶⁰ Nisbitt argues that cultures influence not only the way we process the world, but also the way we interpret it. He draws a sweeping dividing line between Eastern and Western cultures and argues that peoples from the East tend to see and interpret the world in a holistic or collectivist manner, noticing connections and patterns between everything. Peoples from the West, on the other hand, tend to be more focused on the individual objects in the world. Admittedly, we must bear in mind that here, West usually means US students whereas East typically means Japanese and Chinese students.

In spite of these caveats, according to Nisbitt, the collectivist/individualistic divide can explain a multitude of complex behaviours and traditions that vary from one culture to the next. For example, one characteristic of Eastern holism accounts for a philosophical leaning towards notions of order, resonance and harmony. Such leanings are exemplified in the Eastern notion of ‘feng shui’, a need to achieve balance for happier home and work environments. In contrast, studies of Westerners reveal a comparatively more individualistic attitude of an independent self.⁶¹

Nisbitt thinks that the origin of this cultural divide can be traced back thousands of years to the times of ancient Greece and China. However, the recent modern history of the United States is sufficient to explain why, as a whole, this nation is individualistic. In a comparatively short space of time, the United States was rapidly forged out of the struggle of groups who had immigrated in order to establish a better life. Other nations tend to evolve over much longer periods as one invading army conquered another, but the United States experienced sudden rapid growth primarily from immigration. Initially, some of these early immigrants sought religious freedom, which again, strengthened their sense of independence. The early settlers formed self-sufficient communities, struggling to adapt to their new environment and compete against the indigenous peoples. There was little room for social loafing or slackers in these early communities and so to survive you had to rely on your own efforts.

In many ways, the notions of individualism and independence have been branded into the American psyche. For example, when asked to come up with twenty statements that we think define our self, Westerners typically respond with traits centred from their own perspective (e.g. ‘I am tall’), whereas those from collectivist cultures typically provide relational statements, such as ‘I am taller than my sister’. Maybe this focus on our relationship to others explains why social loafing is not as strong in these societies, where one is inclined to consider one’s self in social contexts.⁶²

What is most remarkable about the work coming out of this field of cultural psychology is that individuals from the East and West not only describe themselves differently but may in fact see the world differently. For example, study Figure 8 opposite and concentrate on the square frame and line on the far left. You have one of two tasks: either draw an identical line of the same length independently of the frame (absolute), or draw a line of the same relative length to the frame dimension (relative). The correct solutions are on the right.

The absolute task requires focusing on the line and ignoring the frame, whereas the relative task requires estimating the relationship of the line to the frame. Remarkably Japanese students are significantly better at the relative task than the absolute task while US students show the opposite profile by being significantly better at the absolute task compared to the relative task.⁶³ This finding is interpreted to mean that the Easterners focus more on the relative rather than the absolute. But this difference does not exist in the youngest children who have been tested. Below six years of age, both Eastern and Western children show the same pattern of finding the relative task much easier than the absolute task. It’s only after schooling begins that the typical switch in thinking styles between East and West starts to appear.⁶⁴

Our cultural upbringing can even influence how we watch a film. In one study Japanese and US students watched an underwater scene with various fish and plants.⁶⁵ US students could recall information about the large fish, whereas Japanese students recalled more detail about the background and the relationship between objects. When presented with a recognition task in which individual fish were presented alone, against the original background or different background, US students recognized the fish irrespective of the background, while the Japanese students were thrown by the absence of background or a different background. In another study using a different Eastern population, US and Chinese participants watched movies of a shoal of fish with one fish swimming out front that could be interpreted as either leading the shoal or ostracized by the other fish.⁶⁶ US students thought the lone fish was more likely to be leading the shoal, whereas Chinese students interpreted the movie as the lone fish being rejected by the group.

Figure 8: The Frame Test: The task is to draw the length of the vertical line either exactly (absolute) or proportionately (relative)

It’s not only what you see that is influenced by culture, but also what you don’t see. We may think that we have a good grasp of events that take place around us, but unless we pay special attention, we often miss conspicuous events. This happens in ‘spot-the-difference’ puzzles. Take a good look at the two pictures in Figure 9. Something is different between them (answer at the end of the chapter).

Our inability to notice changes between the images is called change blindness and we vary in the extent to which we can spot the difference. If you are someone who can rapidly process the whole picture, then you are more likely to notice differences. Those who focus on individual elements are going to take longer because they cover less territory during inspection. They can’t see the wood for the trees. It turns out that Westerners are much slower on measures of change blindness than Easterners who are quicker to spot the difference. The Easterners are considering more of the picture rather than focusing on individual elements. In fact, measurements of eye movements indicate that Easterners make more eye movements and spend less time dwelling on individual targets when inspecting scenes compared to Western participants.⁶⁷ That’s pretty low-level stuff. We are generally not even aware of how we control our eye movements so how could culture shape these?

Figure 9: Change blindness: Individuals from Eastern cultures tend to notice changes faster

How Does Development Shape the Way We See the World?

How could people from the East and West see the world so differently? One possibility is that brain plasticity enables the developing brain to encode relevant experiences to shape the way we see faces and hear languages. Nisbett believes that the same developmental process shapes the way we pay attention to things in the world. The world is full of complexity, ambiguity and missing information, ‘a blooming, buzzing confusion,’ as William James once wrote.⁶⁸ We make sense of it by organizing the information into meaningful patterns. Much of this happens automatically as part of the package we inherit through our genes as the organizing brain processes that generate our perceptions. Sitting atop these built-in perceptual processes, is cognition – the higher order operations that guide perception.

Cognition organizes our thinking and gets better at this as we become more expert at noticing the regularities of the world and remembering them. This leads us to form expectations so that we can predict events. For example, if we know what to expect next from previous encounters, we can look out for familiar patterns. That’s why foreign games of sport can seem so disorganized to those unfamiliar with the rules.

In addition to our built-in rules for learning about the world, the most important source of expertise is other people. We have previously described how babies are tuned in to other people from the very beginning. Nisbitt believes that our early interactions with adults also shape the way we view the world. For example, Western and Eastern mothers interact and talk to their infants in different ways. US mothers are much more likely to engage in play that involves naming individual toys. Japanese mothers are more likely to engage their children in social games. In one study US and Japanese mothers were observed interacting with their children with the same toys.⁶⁹ US mothers were twice as likely to label toys and focus the child’s attention on the attributes of each item. In contrast, Japanese mothers did label the object but they were much more likely to then engage the child with exchange games such as ‘I give it to you, now you give it to me’. Even the languages in these different cultures emphasize differently the individual- from the relational properties of items.⁷⁰ This may explain why Eastern children are delayed in learning to sort objects into different categories compared to Western children who are comparatively more skilled at considering the properties of individual objects as opposed to grouping them together.

These differing ways of categorizing the world reflect the way that children can learn to adopt the prevalent social norms. But this learning is not set for life as are other critical-period phenomena. These ways of processing the world do not satisfy the biological imperatives that require hard-wiring. It seems unlikely that there are going to be significant permanent differences between individuals who view the world from collectivist or individualistic perspectives. More importantly these differing perspectives are easily reversible, suggesting that they are not cast in stone. For example, European/American students were asked to circle either independent pronouns (‘I’ or ‘mine’) or interdependent pronouns (‘we’ or ‘ours’). Those primed with independent pronouns gave higher endorsements to individualistic statements, whereas those primed with interdependence gave higher endorsement to collectivistic values.⁷¹ Clearly, such manipulations reveal that we are much more malleable to conforming to group norms rather than holding deep-seated notions about group and self-identity.

Also, if you prime Hong Kong residents who have grown up under the influence of both Western and Eastern cultural perspectives, you can shift their attitudes toward a collectivist perspective if you show them an image of the Chinese dragon, or shift them toward individualism with a picture of the US flag. In one study, groups of bicultural Hong Kong Chinese were primed with either Eastern or Western attitudes and then told about an overweight boy who cannot resist the temptation to gorge on food.⁷² They were then asked to rate how much of his weight problem was due to his own disposition and also how much was due to his social circumstances. Both groups were equal on rating the boy’s obesity as due to his own problems of self control, but those primed with the Chinese icons rated his situational circumstances significantly higher than those primed with the US flag.

Who Am I?

These studies reveal that the vast body of evidence undermines the notion of a core self, but rather supports the self illusion. If we are so susceptible to group pressure, subtle priming cues, stereotyping and culturally cuing, then the notion of a true, unyielding ego self cannot be sustained. If it is a self that flinches and bends with tiny changes in circumstances, then it might as well be non-existent. Most humans entertain some form of a self illusion, but it is one that is shaped by context. For many in the West, their self illusion is characterized by the individual fighting against the odds, whereas in the East, the most common form of the self illusion will be the team player. If these different types of selves were intrinsic, then they should not be so easily modified by context. Note that both ways of seeing the world, and more importantly one’s self illusion, require some form of public validation. Both require the presence of others.

It is worth pointing out a lesson to be learned. In this day and age where we increasingly need to share our limited living space on the planet, most people entertain a belief that they are considerate, reasonable and fair. Not many would readily accept that they are prejudiced, unreasonable and racist. However, we can easily harbour many stereotypes and distortions that shape the way that we behave and think. We are certainly more pliable through the influence of others than we ever thought. If we wish to be fair and just individuals, I think a good starting alternative is to accept that prejudice may be the norm, and not the exception, and is inherent in group psychology as Tajfel and others claimed. The first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging that you have one to begin with and so long as we entertain a self illusion, we are not going to accept just how much external circumstances have shaped us in the past and continue to exert an influence throughout our lives. We don’t see this because our cognitive dissonance is constantly shielding us from our failings by trying to maintain an integrated self belief – an idealized story of who we think we are.

Answer to Figure 9: There is a gorilla next to the pencils.