EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (10 page)

In parallel with the earlier work on fairness, here too Singer observed greater pain empathy when the favorite team player experienced pain than when the rival experienced pain. She also observed that subjects were more likely to help favorite team players by taking on some of their pain, but more likely to watch rivals receive pain. The higher the activation level in the insula, the more they took on their favorite team player’s pain session — the more they helped. When they watched rivals experience pain, there was significant activation in the nucleus accumbens. They felt an immediate honey hit, joy over the rival’s pain. The higher the activation in this reward area, the more likely they were to choose the option of watching the rival experience pain — like watching a public execution and cheering for just deserts.

Singer’s results suggest that individual differences in our compassion toward others in pain predicts our willingness to help them. It reveals another dimension, like language, that biases our sense of justice, both in our judgments and in our behavior. Conversely, individual differences in our joy over others’ misery predicts our willingness to allow others to suffer, suppress our instincts to help and, I suggest, facilitate our capacity to harm.

Unlike our preferences for sports teams, race is a feature of group membership that is fixed at birth. But like sports teams, our perception of race biases our judgments and actions. As noted earlier, babies stare longer at faces of people from the same race than faces of people from a different race and by the pre-school years, are more likely to show social preferences for peers and adults of the same race. In brain imaging studies, specific areas activate when we process faces as opposed to other objects, and one tenth of a second later, other associated regions activate when we process race. This rapid activation occurs whether we are consciously engaged in classifying faces by race or not; for example, the same areas activate even when we are forced to focus on gender or familiarity. This suggests that from the brain’s perspective, we don’t have an option of processing a person’s race. The brain automatically and unconsciously hands us this information, like it or not. And once we are handed this information, it can influence how we treat others, including our compassion for them. This point is supported by several studies.

In one study, modeled after Singer’s experiment on cooperators and cheaters, Caucasian, Black and Asian subjects sat in a scanner and observed other individuals experience a painful event. Subjects showed stronger activation in the pain-related areas of the brain when viewing individuals from the same race experience pain than when viewing individuals of a different race. In a second study, subjects sitting in a brain scanner played a computerized game involving social ostracism. Black subjects showed stronger activation in areas of the brain involved in social pain when excluded by Caucasian players than when excluded by Black players. Together, these studies suggest that when others suffer and we have the opportunity to help them, we are more likely to help those of the same race, and feel good about it. Conversely, when others are unlike us, we are more than happy to let them suffer or help the cause by causing greater suffering.

Our biases, both unconscious and conscious, influence our compassion toward others and our motivation to help. This statement is true whether we are looking at evidence from young children or adults, and using measures that assess activity patterns in the brain, sensory perception, or behavioral judgment. Beginning with an evolutionarily ancient brain system that was designed to distinguish friendly in-group members and antagonistic out-group members, we populate the inner sanctum with people who we perceive as most like us, using both fixed and variable features. With time, the walls surrounding this sanctum close, attributing the full richness of human nature to those within and bleaching it from those outside.

Bleaching humanity

Draw an imaginary circle around yourself with a diameter of about fifty feet. Now imagine packing this circle with people, forming an expanding set of concentric circles that radiates out from those closest to you to those you know less well. Based on analyses by the sociologists Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, and summarized in their book
Connected
, the majority of people within the inner circles will be like you in a number of ways, including their race, religion, political affiliation, food preferences, and aesthetics. This includes family members and close friends, but also those we work with, vote for, and play with. As you travel out from the inner core, you will find less in common. Some in the outer circles will not only have less in common, but as noted earlier in this chapter, will be perceived as less human, stripped of dimensions of experience and agency that define humanity.

When we strip others of their humanity — a process that can occur both consciously and unconsciously — we may perceive them as either inanimate objects or as animals. Those we perceive as objects lack core aspects of human nature, including emotional sensitivity, warmth, and flexibility. Those we perceive as animals lack uniquely human qualities such as rationality, self-control, moral sensibility, and civility. Of those we see as animals, some will seem like kin to the domesticated form and thus controllable as property; others will seem like wild animals and thus dangerous, dirty and deserving of elimination. However we engage this process, we have bleached individuals of their humanity. This process, one that occurs in both everyday life and in cases of conflict, has allowed us to treat the mentally and physically disabled like animals, to consider women as sexual property, justify slavery, deny certain races the opportunity to vote and receive education, and mandate ethnic cleansing. Dehumanization is a form of denial that, I suggest, enables gratuitous cruelty.

To set the stage for the scientific evidence on dehumanization
³⁴
, there are two important points to keep in mind. The first is that dehumanization is not restricted to a particular period of time in history nor to a particular group of people. As recently reviewed by the philosopher David Livingstone Smith in his book
Less than Human
, in every major recorded instance of inter-group conflict, whether Nazis and Jews, Serbs and Croats, Japanese and Chinese, Hutus and Tutsis, Indians and Pakistanis, Caucasian Americans and North American Indians, Caucasian Australians and Aboriginal Australians, Palestinians and Israelis, or Irish Protestants and Catholics, one group has characterized the other as cargo, parasites, viruses, cockroaches, lice or vermin, or some mixture of these assassinations of humanity. The process is universal. The specific details of how other humans are stripped of their humanity is, however, up to the commanders of dehumanization. The second point is that the process of dehumanization is functional and strategic, certainly not an error of perception. When we dehumanize, whether unconsciously or consciously, it serves the specific function of removing moral constraints. Sometimes these constraints lift for beneficial ends as when a doctor thinks of surgery in cold, mechanical ways in order to push away the emotions of cutting into human flesh. Sometimes they lift for toxic ends as when a power hungry group demonizes a subordinate group to justify cutting off their flesh. With these two points in mind, consider a series of studies focusing on how whites have dehumanized blacks.

The social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt asked whether American citizens unconsciously associate Black people with imagery of apes, using the disturbing history of this association as her jumping off point, as well as the many comments made by people to this day. For example, in December of 2011, Mirlin Toomer, a former black Defense Department worker, sought damages against a supervisor who hung a stuffed ape on her desk. Then there is the case of Chicago bartender Jessica Elizabeth who, on April 3, 2012, wrote several horrific comments about blacks on her Facebook page, including: “They are really apes and must not be fully developed.”
³⁵
Based on these comments, her boss fired her and apologized to the people of Chicago.

Eberhardt was interested in the possibility that if people carry this association around in their head, they may do so unconsciously, despite explicit avowals by some that they are not at all racist. And if they carry this association around unconsciously, how does it impact their judgments and actions?

In one experiment with both Caucasian and non-Caucasian subjects, Eberhardt used a technique called subliminal priming. Subliminal priming involves rapidly presenting pictures or sounds under the radar of a subject’s awareness and then immediately presenting material that they are consciously aware of. If the two experiences are similar, the unconscious version will affect subjects’ perception of the conscious one. For example, if you first prime people by flashing a picture of a woman’s face, subjects will subsequently respond faster to faces of women than to faces of men. Thus, despite the fact that subjects are unaware of the prime, it affects their judgments. Eberhardt first primed subjects with photographed faces of Caucasian or Black people or an unrecognizable non-face. They then watched a short movie that started off with an unrecognizable object that looked like it was covered by dense snow. As the movie progressed, the snow lifted, making it easier to recognize the object as a line drawing of either a duck, dolphin, alligator, squirrel or ape. Subjects stopped the movie as soon as they recognized the animal.

Compared with Caucasian faces and non-faces, priming with Black faces caused subjects to stop the movie much
sooner
for apes, but not for any other animal. Compared with non-faces, priming with Caucasian faces caused subjects to stop the movie much
later
for apes, but not for any other animal. This suggests that seeing Black faces made it easier to identify apes, whereas seeing Caucasian faces made it harder to identify apes. Critically, there was no comparable effects for any other animals. Caucasian and non-Caucasian subjects showed the same pattern of response, and so too did individuals with and without strong, explicit racial attitudes. Although the similarity among Caucasian and non-Caucasian subjects is of interest, and suggests that the association is held even among those who were perhaps less strongly associated with this form of dehumanization, there were relatively few Black subjects in the study.

This first set of experiments suggests that among a racially heterogeneous group of educated Stanford undergraduates, individuals carry an unconscious association between Black people and apes, and thus, an unconsciously dehumanized representation of another human being. Given the animal form of this dehumanization, and Haslam’s analysis of the different dimensions of dehumanization, we can infer that subjects in Eberhardt’s experiments associated Blacks with less rationality, civility, and self-control.

These are remarkably disturbing findings. They can’t be explained by some superficial similarity between human faces and animals because Eberhardt found the same results when she presented either line drawings or words of animals. Had Eberhardt used actual photographs of animals, subjects could have used similarity in skin color or nose shape — for example, seeing a black human face would prime seeing a black ape face because both share the color black in common. Line drawings and written words cut the legs out of this account. Eberhardt’s results suggest that we are biased to associate apes with the socio-cultural, racial category “Black.”

These findings reveal a deep seated, dehumanized representation that is readily triggered even in highly educated people. But perhaps they are less disturbing then we might imagine. Perhaps the take home message is that we are closet racists with antiquated theories of evolution or God’s design. Outside of these artificial studies, we are well educated citizens who keep our isms tucked away, locked up in our unconscious. Unfortunately, the unsettling feelings that many will have to these studies are exacerbated by an additional set of results collected by Eberhardt, linking unconscious impressions to harmful actions. Caucasian male subjects watched a video of a policeman using force to subdue a suspect who was either Black or Caucasian. When primed with an ape drawing, but not that of a tiger, subjects were more likely to say that the policeman was
justified
in subduing the Black suspect than the Caucasian suspect. These results suggest that dehumanization is recruited, often unconsciously, to justify actions that are otherwise morally prohibited. These results suggest that we are more than closet racists. We are out of the closet, armed for prejudice and dehumanization.

To unconsciously think that Blacks are more like apes than other racial groups is to strip them of characteristics that are uniquely human. As Haslam notes, when we dehumanize others in this particular way, we no longer see them as human, but as wild animals, virulent parasites, or immature children, all lacking in intelligence, etiquette, rationality, and moral wherewithal. This mode of dehumanization is ancient, reflected in the writings and paintings of European explorers who encountered indigenous cultures in Asia, Australia, and Africa. Dehumanizing others into objects is equally ancient, cross-cultural, unflattering and dangerous. In studies carried out by Haslam, subjects judged objectified men and women as less capable of suffering and less deserving of moral compassion and protection, reinforcing the age old attitude we once held toward slaves and that many hold today toward prostitutes. When people become property, they fall outside the circle of moral patients. They are moral zeroes. Moral zeroes play no role in our judgments or actions, leaving us guilt-free to do as we please.

What I have explained in this section is that the capacity for dehumanization is part of human nature, an ancient capacity seen across cultures and periods of time. How individuals or societies deploy this capacity is shaped by experience and recruited as both a conscious and unconscious process. Whether we perceive others as animals or objects, we have subtracted important features of humanity from them, often in the service of satisfying a particular desire or in order to justify our own or another’s actions. This process requires a combination of different neural systems, including those specifically involved in categorization, imagery, visual perception, memory, and moral deliberation. Studies of the brain reveal the mechanics of these dehumanizing transformations and highlight, once again, our mind’s seemingly limitless capacity to creatively combine different thoughts and emotions — a central topic of
chapter 3
.