This is a horrifying clip, a seventy-five second proof that Hobbes was a little bit right about human nature:
I didn't embed that video to depress you, because lord knows the world is sad enough. Instead, I think it's a powerful reminder of how much we don't know about human nature. One of the limitations of current neuroscience research is that we're forced to study ourselves one at a time in a brain scanner. (They are a few exceptions to this rule.) We've learned a tremendous amount from this research program. In fact, we've learned so much that it's easy to ignore the inherent constraints of studying isolated individuals in a claustrophobic tube.
To understand these limitations, consider an extremely interesting experiment conducted a few years ago by Joshua Greene, a neuroscientist at Harvard. The experiment itself is simple: Greene asked his subjects a series of questions involving a runaway trolley, an oversized man and five maintenance workers. (It might sound like a strange setup, but it’s actually based on a well-known philosophical thought puzzle.) The first scenario goes like this:
In this hypothetical case, about ninety percent of people agree that it is morally permissible to turn the trolley. The decision is just simple arithmetic: it’s better to kill fewer people. Some moral philosophers even argue that it is immoral to not turn the trolley, since such passivity leads to the death of four extra people. But what about this scenario:
The brute facts, of course, remain the same: one man must die in order for five men to live. If our ethical decisions were perfectly rational, then we would act identically in both situations, and we’d be as willing to push the man as we are to turn the trolley. And yet, almost nobody is willing to actively throw another person onto the train tracks. The decisions lead to the same basic outcome, yet one is moral and one is murder.
What makes this thought experiment so interesting is that the fuzzy moral distinction is built into our brain, as the two different trolley scenarios trigger distinct patterns of activation. When the subjects were asked whether or not they should turn the trolley, the scanner detected increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain area associated with rational, deliberate thought. However, when people were asked whether they would be willing to push a man onto the tracks, a separate network of brain areas was activated. These bits of cortex - the superior temporal sulcus, posterior cingulate and medial frontal gyrus - help us interpret the thoughts and feelings of other people. As a result, the subjects automatically imagined how the poor man would feel as he plunged to his death. This burst of empathy led them to conclude that pushing him was a capital crime, even if it saved the lives of five other men.
Greene's work, along with the research of psychologists like Jonathan Haidt and primatologists like Frans de Waal, has led to a reconsideration of primate morality. While stories of Darwinian evolution often stress the amorality of natural selection - we are all nasty brutes, driven to survive by selfish genes - our psychological reality is much less bleak. We aren’t fallen angels, but we also aren’t depraved hominids.
This is good news, right? We automatically take the feelings of others into account (unless, of course, we suffer from psychopathy.) And yet, the mad violence of mobs is a depressing reminder that our innate goodness is a fragile thing. Once we are dissolved in a group (or absolved by authority), we find ourselves capable of the cruelest acts, such as mugging a boy bleeding from the mouth. It is thoughts of others that keep us moral, and yet the mere presence of others can lead to rampant immorality.
So we know mobs matter. We just don't know how they matter, or why a group of hooded young men is capable of such awful deeds. (There's some interesting evidence that the amygdala plays an important role in modulating the social regulation of transgressive behavior. But that only begs the question: why do certain crowds silence the amygdala? Is it the size of the crowd? The density? The costumes? The initial mood? How does the behavior of cops influence the violence of the crowd? Economic analyses point to some relevant variables.) My banal point is that such crucial questions can't be answered given the limitations of current neuroscience research. They won't be solved by studying solitary undergraduates in a fancy scanner. In real life, no man exists alone.
PS. And the impact of others isn't just relevant for questions of morality. Look at the recent gyrations of the stock market for yet more evidence that human behavior is deeply influenced by herds.
PPS. Vaughan Bell, as usual, writes a brilliant summary of what we know about mob psychology.
