EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (11 page)

Brains without borders

As I discussed earlier, dehumanization enables doctors to treat their patients — human or nonhuman animal — as mechanical devices that require repair. This allows for cool-headed, rational, and skillful surgeries, while fending off the humanizing emotions of compassion and empathy. This is beneficial. This is a transformation that enables doctors working in war-torn areas or regions afflicted with a disease outbreak to treat hundreds of suffering patients as if they were treating cars on an assembly line. Good doctors allow their compassion and empathy to return as their patients regain awareness. Bad doctors maintain their cool, detached manner, insensitive to the physical and psychological pain of their waking patients. Bad doctors continue to perceive their patients like cars on the assembly line. Really bad doctors see their patients like cars that were created for personal R&D.

The cognitive neuroscientist Jean Decety showed that when physicians look at video clips of people experiencing pain from a needle prick, regions of the brain involved in pain empathy are quiet relative to non-physicians
³⁶
. For physicians, it’s as if they were watching a needle prick a pillow, or any inanimate object without feelings. These doctors have dehumanized their patients. Though we don’t know how much experience was necessary or sufficient to cause the physician’s lack of pain empathy, or the extent to which physicians are physicians because they were born with less empathy, Decety’s findings point to individual differences in our capacity to feel what others feel and the potential modulating role of experience. Similar modulating effects arise in the context of our perception of racial differences.

Recall from earlier sections that the circuitry for pain empathy is less active when we see someone from a different racial group experience pain. Two other, similarly designed experiments, not only support this finding but extend it to another area of the brain — the motor cortex, involved in the production and perception of actions — and to the importance of unconscious racial prejudice. Caucasian and Black subjects watched a video of a needle penetrating a human hand while sitting in the scanner. Consistently, subjects showed weaker activation in the pain and motor areas when watching the needle penetrate the hand from another race. This lowering of pain empathy and motor response for the out-group was greatest for subjects who, based on a survey, had the highest unconscious racial biases. Reinforcing a point I made earlier, we unconsciously and automatically make racial discriminations that guide our compassion for other humans. When we perceive someone from another race, regardless of our specific experience with them, they command less of our compassion. They are as deserving of our empathy as a surgeon perceiving a patient, or as a cooperator perceiving a cheater. Individuals outside of our racial group are dehumanized, often outside of our conscious awareness.

There is one potential snag in my explanation of the studies of racial biases and pain perception. By definition, we look more like those from within our racial group than those outside it. Perhaps the bias is less about race and more about those that don’t look like us. To explore this possibility, a follow up study placed Black and Caucasian subjects in a scanner and presented them with a video of a needle penetrating a
violet
-colored hand. Violet hands are not only different, but far more different than either black or white hands in terms of our experience of skin coloration. Nonetheless, the activation pattern in the brain matched the subject’s own race. When we feel less compassion for someone of another race, it is because of racial biases, not because of superficial differences in appearance. Color is simply a cue that reminds us of our prejudice.

The fact that we feel less empathy for people in pain if they fall outside our inner sanctum suggests that we have dehumanized them, stripping away dimensions of experience that humanize those within the sanctum. These are the dimensions associated with emotion, and when taken away, cause us to perceive the other as an object. Since objects can’t feel pain or joy, we can’t share in their experience because they lack experience altogether. If that is the case, then when we perceive any human group that has been dehumanized in this particular way, there should be little to no activity in those areas of the brain associated with thinking, feeling, wanting, and believing. To explore this possibility, the social psychologist Susan Fiske placed subjects in a brain scanner and presented photographs of either extreme out-group members, such as the homeless and drug addicts, or photographs of other groups such as the elderly, middle-class Americans, and the rich. When viewing the extreme out-group, there was little activity in an area critically related to self-awareness and the process of thinking about others thoughts and emotions — the
medial prefrontal cortex
. There was, however, intense activity in the
insula
, a brain area that is recruited when we experience disgust. As Fiske concludes, when we dehumanize the other to an object, we have effectively switched off the caring and compassionate areas of the brain. We no longer see humanity. We no longer have to uphold our moral standards because objects don’t deserve such respect.

Fiske’s results highlight both the variety of ways in which we dehumanize other human beings and the toxicity of this process. Built out of our biology, modified by our culture, and triggered by environmental events, the process of dehumanization causes us to see others as having less feelings, which causes us to feel less bad when they suffer. In fact, we don’t perceive them as suffering at all because they are not the kind of thing that can suffer. Recalling the work of Gray, Wegner and Haslam, these are things without the dimension of experience, much more like God, robots, and dead people than they are like living men, women, children, dogs, and even people in a vegetative state. This process sets up another that takes us back to Corporal Graner and the atrocities at Abu Ghraib: moral disengagement.

The moral checkout counter

In
Moral Minds
, an earlier book of mine, I synthesized a large body of research showing that our moral response to events in the world often occurs automatically, driven by unconscious processes. These unconscious processes consist of emotions and a grammar of principles. When these processes operate, they generate moral intuitions about forbidden and permissible actions. The combination of these unconscious moral intuitions and our conscious recognition of moral norms and laws generates a rich system of constraints on our behavior. These constraints comprise our moral standards. Sometimes, however, our standards disintegrate as we pursue, consciously or unconsciously, a process of moral disengagement. Freed from the guiding power of our moral compass, we engage in behaviors that carry no moral valence at all or carry moral benefits of heroism and protection. Killing human beings who have been dehumanized to objects or virulent parasites leaves us cold. Killing thousands of individuals who have been painted as the enemy leaves us proud, perceived by those on our side as heroes. The scientific evidence on moral disengagement
³⁷
, which I discuss next, helps us further understand why desire recruits denial in the service of decimating innocent victims.

The psychologist Albert Bandura has demonstrated over decades of research that moral disengagement can arise in a variety of ways, including morally justifying our actions, denying personal responsibility, conceiving of our actions as less egregious than other possible actions, and by dehumanizing others. Though there are different pathways, all humans have the capacity to morally disengage, all of us do it to some extent, do it more often when we are young than when we are old, and engage in it often if our biology predisposes us and our culture encourages it. But why do we check out from our moral responsibilities?

We are morally engaged when we perceive that we may help or harm a moral patient, or that we want to help and avoid harming others. Moral patients deserve our care and concern, and in many situations we have a desire to deliver these moral goods. When we deliver them, we feel good. When we don’t, believe that we might not want to, or consider options that may harm others, we feel bad, guilty, and remorseful; or at least we should if our moral compass is properly working. The tension between our beliefs and desires on the one hand, and the possibility that we may violate our own moral standards on the other, causes a ringing feeling of discomfort, what psychologists call
cognitive dissonance
. In such situations, moral disengagement can rescue us from our conflict. Moral disengagement liberates us from the anticipated feelings of guilt and remorse, enabling us to do bad things. Moral disengagement also liberates us from feelings of guilt and remorse that typically follow when we do bad things. Moral disengagement thus facilitates immoral behavior and allows us to feel okay when we act immorally. Moral disengagement allows people to rationalize harm by transforming lethal motives into morally justified and even benevolent ones. Moral disengagement allows us to excuse ourselves from moral responsibility, either disregarding the harm imposed or convincing ourselves that it was justified, even obligatory. Corporal Graner wanted to humiliate the Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib, to destroy their spirit so that they wouldn’t fight back. Satisfying this desire is non-trivial as it stands in direct opposition to typical moral standards. Graner did what he believed was necessary to do his job: by stripping the detainees of their clothes and hiding their faces with underwear, he removed their identity and humanity, and lifted the problem outside of the moral sphere. As the pictures of a smiling Graner revealed, he felt neither guilt nor remorse, but pride. By morally disengaging, Graner felt justified. Moral disengagement provides a visa for causing harm. These claims are supported by considerable scientific evidence.

In several cross-cultural studies of school-aged children, results consistently show that those who are most morally disengaged are most likely to engage in various forms of aggression, including bullying and repeated criminal offenses. These same children are also least likely to engage in helpful behavior, revealing that moral disengagement dispenses with the typical process of self-censure and sanctioning that we carry around when we are morally engaged. In a study of American prison personnel involved in death penalty sentences, executioners were more morally disengaged than support staff or prison guards. Executioners were more likely to dehumanize the convicted prisoner and provide moral and economic justifications. Executioners also felt less guilt because they had developed a narrative to justify their actions, one that ascribed complete fault and responsibility to the victim. Support staff flipped in the opposite direction, fully involved with the weighty moral issues associated with ending someone’s life. Overall, then, these studies show that those closer to actively harming others are more likely to fully checkout from the moral arena.

Moral disengagement
enables
behaviors that are either immoral, illegal, or counter to deeply rooted prohibitions against harming others. But moral disengagement can also arise as a
consequence
of immoral behavior. When consumers want to purchase products produced by unethical means, such as those created by abusive child labor, they morally disengaged after the purchase, finding ways to justify their decision by thinking that the abuse was either not so bad or exaggerated by the press. In a series of experiments by the psychologist Lisa Shu and her colleagues, subjects either read about scenarios where they had the opportunity to cheat and then decided whether or not to do so, or played a word game where they could earn extra money by cheating. Consistently, those who cheated were more morally disengaged than those who did not, often considering their actions as reasonable and justified given the circumstances. Those who cheated and morally disengaged also selectively forgot the rules of the game, mental gymnastics that help alleviate the dissonance we normally feel when breaking rules. Equally interesting, when subjects read about or signed an honor code, they were far less likely to cheat, morally disengage, or selectively forget the rules of the game.

These studies reveal the plasticity of our moral behavior, especially its vulnerability to being pushed toward highly unethical acts. They reveal how exchanging our present moral standards for a new set enables us to justify our actions, including acts of extreme violence that would have been unimaginable under the old regime.

Moral disengagement facilitates behavior that runs counter to our moral standards and eases the emotional pangs we feel when we violate such standards. Sometimes, this process has beneficial consequences as when it empowers otherwise fearful soldiers to go to war for just causes. More often, moral disengagement enables toxic actions by empowering rogue leaders to carry out genocide under unjust causes. Moral disengagement is a process that allows us to hibernate from our moral responsibilities. It is a form of self-deception, a partner to dehumanization in the denial of reality. But self-deception, like deception of others, is not always harmful. In fact, it is often highly beneficial.

Angelic denial

In a nationally televised address in 2005, the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pronounced that the Jews had “created a myth in the name of the Holocaust and consider it above God, religion and the prophets.”
³⁸
Judge Daniel Schreber believed that his brain was softening and that he was turning into a woman in order to form a sexual union with God. During a doctor’s visit, a man reported that his pet poodle had been replaced by an impostor, masquerading
as if
he was the real deal. Judge Patrick Couwenberg stated under oath that he received the Purple Heart for military operations in Vietnam, and soon thereafter carried out covert missions in Southeast Asia and Africa as a CIA agent. The pilots of Air Florida flight 90 ignored signs from their dashboard indicating engine trouble and then proceeded to crash into a bridge, killing 74 of the 79 people on board. In 2008, while Hilary Clinton was running for President of the United States, she regaled admiring supporters with stories of her international experience, including her visit to Bosnia in 1996 where her plane was forced to land under sniper fire, followed by a rapid evacuation for cover. When I was a teenager, I often walked onto the tennis court thinking that I was John McEnroe, serving and volleying like the world’s number one player.