sciencedaily | When people get
together in groups, unusual things can happen -- both good and bad.
Groups create important social institutions that an individual could not
achieve alone, but there can be a darker side to such alliances:
Belonging to a group makes people more likely to harm others outside the
group.
"Although
humans exhibit strong preferences for equity and moral prohibitions
against harm in many contexts, people's priorities change when there is
an 'us' and a 'them,'" says Rebecca Saxe, an associate professor of
cognitive neuroscience at MIT. "A group of people will often engage in
actions that are contrary to the private moral standards of each
individual in that group, sweeping otherwise decent individuals into
'mobs' that commit looting, vandalism, even physical brutality."
Several
factors play into this transformation. When people are in a group, they
feel more anonymous, and less likely to be caught doing something
wrong. They may also feel a diminished sense of personal responsibility
for collective actions.
Saxe and colleagues recently studied a
third factor that cognitive scientists believe may be involved in this
group dynamic: the hypothesis that when people are in groups, they "lose
touch" with their own morals and beliefs, and become more likely to do
things that they would normally believe are wrong.
In a study that recently went online in the journal NeuroImage,
the researchers measured brain activity in a part of the brain involved
in thinking about oneself. They found that in some people, this
activity was reduced when the subjects participated in a competition as
part of a group, compared with when they competed as individuals. Those
people were more likely to harm their competitors than people who did
not exhibit this decreased brain activity.
"This
process alone does not account for intergroup conflict: Groups also
promote anonymity, diminish personal responsibility, and encourage
reframing harmful actions as 'necessary for the greater good.' Still,
these results suggest that at least in some cases, explicitly reflecting
on one's own personal moral standards may help to attenuate the
influence of 'mob mentality,'" says Mina Cikara, a former MIT postdoc
and lead author of the NeuroImage paper.
