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Luis Dias

As aspecies, why are we willing to kill, exploit, or willfully disregard peopleweve never met? This question leapt out of my laptop screen just as I waswinding down and calling it a night.

It struck a chord. It is a question, perhaps differentlyphrased, that troubles me a lot, and Im sure Im not alone: How and why are wecapable of treating others cruelly, of dehumanising a person or a group ofpeople?

The article, in The Economist, was titled Does yourbrain care about other people? It depends, co-written by David Eagleman,neuroscientist at Stanford University and author of several books on cognitionand society; and Don Vaughn, neuroscientist at the University of California LosAngeles.

It begins with the story of Lord George Gordon(1751-1793), British nobleman and politician, who fought against the injusticemeted out to sailors in the Royal Navy at the time, and against the evils ofslavery on the one hand; but was also responsible for instigating several daysof anti-Catholic riots (known even today infamously as the Gordon riots) in1780. Gordon marched a 50,000-strong mob to the Houses of Parliament that wenton over a whole week to destroy Roman Catholic churches and pillage Catholichomes, killing or wounding hundreds of people in what has gone down as themost destructive domestic upheaval in the history of London.

This, then is the conundrum: how can someone have empathyfor one group or groups of people, but simultaneously harbour antipathy towardsanother?

The writers put it down to a fundamental fact of humannature: our tendency to form ingroups and outgroupsthat is, groups that wefeel attached to and those that we dont. Yes, we have empathy, but it isselective. Eagleman and Vaughn cite examples such as a hometown, a school or areligion bonding people within an ingroup. In India, the big bond would alsohave to be caste.

The Second World War had brought into sharp focus howdangerous such divisions into ingroups and outgroups could be, with thedehumanisation of Jews by the Nazis, and American wartime propaganda portrayingthe Japanese as subhuman, while Japanese propaganda depicted Americans asmonsters.

The authors describe a 1954 psychological study dividinga study sample of pre-teen boys into arbitrary groups, and the antagonism andpartisanship sometimes erupting into violence that resulted from this randomdivision.

This is not an isolated study. It has been replicated atdifferent times in different places in different age-groups. I remember readingabout a similar study from about a decade later. The day after Martin LutherKing Jr was assassinated in April 1968, class-teacher Jane Elliott in a smallall-white town of Riceville Iowa decided to teach her third-graders a lesson inthe meaning of discrimination when she realised that they couldnt understandwhy someone should even want to murder an icon that they had recently madeHero of the Month.

She divided her class by eye colour: those with blue andthose with brown eyes. On the first day, one group was told they were smarter,nicer, neater, and better than the other group. The better group were givenprivileges such a longer recess, and being first in cafeteria lunch line. Theother group had to wear a collar around their neck and their behaviour andperformance were criticised and ridiculed by Elliott.

The next day, the tables were turned, and the other groupbecame the dominant group. In each case, the superior group becamemean-spirit and took pleasure in the discrimination against the other group.

Realising that she had created a microcosm of society ina third-grade classroom, Elliott repeated the exercise for two consecutiveyears after that. Fourteen years later, Frontlines A Class Divideddocumented a reunion of the last, 1970 third-grade class, who still rememberedand cherished the lessons from that experiment.

Eagleman and Vaughn relate the results of a ratherbizarre experiment carried out in 2010. Scientists at the University of Zurichrecruited sports fans for a brain imaging study. The fans were first allowed tomeet and exchange trivia. They then underwent a brain scan during which theywatched other fans receiving painful electric shocks to their hands. Watchingthe pain inflicted on others activated parts of the brain as if they wereexperiencing it themselves. This is the neural basis of empathy, the writersexplain.

But there was a darker side to the interpretation of thedata. Participants experienced higher brain activity when watching the painexperienced by those who liked the same sports team they did, and less activitywhen watching pain inflicted to fans of a rival team!

To remove the bias from the sports fans recognising eachother, Eagleman and Vaughn designed another study: Participants lay in an MRIscanner and looked at six hands on a video screen. The computer selected onehand at random, and then a hypodermic needle entered the picture and stabbedinto the flesh of that hand. In a control condition, a long cotton swab touchedthe persons handvisually similar to the needle, but this time with no pain.By contrasting the brains reaction to the needle and the cotton swab, theresearchers felt they could measure the brain networks that became active whenwitnessing anothers pain.

Then came the twist: Each hand became marked with asimple label: Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Scientologist or atheist. Thequestion they wished to answer was: would a participant experience more pain ifh/she belonged to the label hand being stabbed? Would a Christian feel morepain on watching pain inflicted to a Christian hand?

That was indeed their conclusion. Watching an ingrouphand get stabbed evoked more empathic brain activity; an outgroup handtriggered less, despite all the protestations of neutrality on the part ofsome participants.

The authors ask us to reflect: Take a moment to thinkabout your own level of empathy toward others. Imagine that you see a60-year-old man twist his ankle and fall to the ground. Do you feel an empathicsting? Now imagine hes at a rally for a politician that you loathe. Is yourempathy any different? And if so, does that challenge your view of yourself asan empathic person? If you had unequal responses in the two situations, yourenot alone: people generally assess their own empathy by thinking about those intheir ingroup.

I thought the same thing when pictures of the horrific blazeof the Tezgam passenger train travelling between Karachi and Rawalpindi,killing at least 75, appeared on social media. The ha-ha emoticon reactionfrom tens of thousands of people (while many more reacted with concern, to besure) was mind-numbing. How could anyone trivialise a tragedy like this,wherever it may have occurred, and regardless of who the unfortunate victimswere?

Eagleman and Vaughn suggest that rather than feelingdoomed to succumb to our ingrained biases, we can fight them through severalstrategies such as understanding our own biases; building a better model ofothers; and learning to resist the tactics of dehumanisation.

Excerpt from:
The neuroscience of empathy - The Navhind Times