
What it takes to stand up to authority - robinoh
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180709-our-ability-to-stand-up-to-authority-comes-down-to-the-brain
======
jpfed
>Studies on patients with localised brain damage are helping to answer part of
this question. When people have lesions in the prefrontal cortex – the
outermost layer of the front part the brain – they appear to be much more
prone to following orders than the general population.

WOW, that's going to come in handy when some government decides to weaponize
it.

~~~
chrisco255
How would a government weaponize this? By going around damaging people's
brains with brute force?

~~~
albutr
By promoting hard-hitting contact sports to youth, and issuing equipment that
doesn't do a good job at protecting the head?

Even considering the underreporting with young, high school athletes, a large
number of young football players in the US have suffered concussions[1] at a
very young age when their brains are developing, and that's with equipment
that we can reasonably assume is designed with safety in mind. If a nefarious
government were to try to promote a sport, which had rules and equipment that
lead to a higher risk of brain injury, and cultivated an image/environment
that elevates "toughness"(not complaining when you feel you've been injured; a
significant fraction (~16%) of high school football players continue to play
even after being hit hard enough to lose consciousness, so that attitude is
there, just need to bump the number up), that might get you close.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concussions_in_American_footba...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concussions_in_American_football)

~~~
yontherubicon
TBH, we're far better at reducing executive function and impulse control
simply by widespread drug usage, pornography usage and (IMHO) highly
rewarding, low-attention media, esp social meda, youtube, and video games. All
of those are FAR more widespread than playing football, and in aggregate, are
far more likely to render one subservient.

~~~
maxerickson
Wake up sheeple!

~~~
dang
Not here please.

~~~
maxerickson
Okay, but I think it probably isn't a good outcome where a serious comment
saying the same thing is more welcome than the ironic one.

~~~
dang
I don't see that it said the same thing. This is an opportunity to practice
the site guideline that asks you to respond to the strongest plausible
interpretation of what someone says, instead of a weaker one that's more
easily dismissed.

------
kstenerud
> Assigning negative term after term to harmless groups of people was intended
> to be emotionally wearing and to make most participants feel uncomfortable.
> Plenty dropped out as it got more intense. For those who carried on, it was
> a belief that they were contributing to something important – a rigorous
> scientific study – that drove them to push through.

It's a pretty sloppy to assume that they believed this because of an authority
figure.

~~~
otakucode
I found that study a really strange one as well. They seem to be operating on
the tacit assumption that all of the participants are mush-minded simpletons
who think "assigning negative terms" in some study somehow had some relevance
to anything anywhere in the world. That's absurd. I invite you to find
yourself a quiet room and dedicate yourself to writing the most insidious,
invective, negative diatribes aimed at me personally that you are capable of
manufacturing. You could do it for decades, and absolutely nothing would come
of it. Anyone who believes differently is both wrong and probably has some
mild form of mental illness which causes them to conflate their own thought
processes and imagination with reality.

Asking a person to assign negative terms to photos is as consequential as
asking them to whistle or drum their fingers on a desk. It is meaningless and
utterly amoral in content. We're not talking about even applying the terms to
actual people, but to images. And they're not being monitored or published.
There are a million guarantees that what is being done is thoroughly and
totally meaningless.

~~~
watwut
It is not about to what it does with person on picture, it is about what it
does with person that is writing them. The way it affects their thinking and
feelings toward target, how much they are aware it is affecting them, the way
it makes them more and more comfortable with insulting person on pic and what
they think or feel about that.

The discomfort is partly because you can make yourself like or hate people you
don't know personally and trying to come up with bad/good things to say about
them is one approach how to do it. You start process insulting them and you
can see yourself starting to feel differently and some might feel good about
the process and where it leads.

You know how people close themselves into bubbles that says only bad things
about some outside group and then become to genuinely hate that outside group?
It is the same, but is small scale, temporary limited and easier to detect.

~~~
otakucode
I can see that, but I don't understand how simply 'attaching a label' could
lead to any real earnest sentiment. If I train myself, day in and day out, to
tag a photo of children 'racist', is the presumption that I will start to
actually think that children generally believe in fundamental qualitative
differences between people that break along racial lines? That isn't how my
brain works. If someone asks me 'hey, are kids racists?' I don't think
'hmmm... do I FEEL LIKE kids are racists?'... I think 'Hmmm... do I have any
evidence or have I come across any resources that suggest children might
harbor racist tendencies?' And 'well I attached all those labels' doesn't
qualify as evidence of anything except me wasting my time. Words have power,
but they're not magical.

It certainly can be frightfully easy to lead people down a path into forming
tons of negative associations about some group or topic, and that will result
in a trained emotional response pretty reliably..... but it's just an
emotional response. It doesn't mean anything, and can't be used to support or
detract from anything in terms of what is true.

~~~
mockingbirdy
> it's just an emotional response. It doesn't mean anything, and can't be used
> to support or detract from anything in terms of what is true.

Emotional responses are more important for your belief system and vice versa
than you seem to realize. "what is true" is based on your belief system. It
may not seem visible, but all those small interactions shape our emotions and
belief system.

It's like training data for a neural network which has functional components
and meta-learning capabilities (this is essentially what a brain is). Saying
"this training data doesn't affect my neural network" or "this part (emotions)
of my neural network doesn't affect another part (reasoning)" is not correct
when training neural networks. Why would you assume that this is any different
for your biological neural network? Every interaction shapes your brain,
however small it seems.

------
squozzer
I'm not sure we can do much to understand the role of authority without
understanding the role of conditioning in what makes people act.

For instance, why are most schools so regimented and rule-rich? For
efficiency, certainly, but not all school rules increased efficiency. I would
guess some of the rules exist to reinforce obedience to the other rules.

~~~
forapurpose
> I would guess some of the rules exist to reinforce obedience to the other
> rules.

If it existed, it seems like there would be evidence of this, in the
literatures of educational research, training, and school management. I doubt
there is conspiracy of school principals.

Schools are bureaucracies, and like every bureaucracy they have rules, often
rules that seem nonsensical to people who haven't had to manage one. People
feel like companies and other organizations are overly regimented too.

~~~
barry-cotter
Every single government primary and secondary education system on Earth is a
direct descendant of the Prussian one. Non-existent to very limited choice of
how one spends ones time, constant ranking and grading to inure people to
dominance behaviours that do not come naturally, and all in groups that are
age normed rather than competence or ability normed.

School doesn’t have a singular purpose because there’s no one out there who
designed it but learning definitely isn’t in the top five things it does. The
people who did design the progenitor of modern school systems designed it to
get people to sit down, shut up and do as they were told, and to love the
government.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system)

[http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-
submit.ht...](http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/04/school-is-to-submit.html)

------
pdimitar
> _Being able to stand up to authority doesn’t hinge on bravery or courage,
> confidence or stubbornness. The brain processes and regions essential for
> rejecting ideas from authority figures are starting to be revealed._

Nonsense. Sure everything stems from chemical processes in our bodies,
including the brain -- of course. But they _breed_ the bravery, courage,
confidence and stubbornness. I don't see why we must contrast these two
things. They have a one-directional causation link between them.

------
yontherubicon
Hmmm, I wonder if there might be some evolutionary reason why we _shouldn 't_
do this?

I mean it's not like a deferrence to authority allows human beings to
coordinate and work together efficiently. Hierarchies are totally inefficient
ways to work together and get things done.

/s

EDIT: A paper that is __very __much worth reading:[https://hbr.org/1990/01/in-
praise-of-hierarchy](https://hbr.org/1990/01/in-praise-of-hierarchy)

------
lucideer
I'm not sure I understand the grammar of the HN title. What does "goes in
length" mean?

~~~
osrec
I think they mean 'in detail'

~~~
jackstraw14
Could also be 'at length'

------
grzm
Actual article title: "What it takes to stand up to authority"

------
tajen
Isn’t that a reproduction of the (well-criticized) Stanford experiment, which
already didn’t need to be demonstrated because we already demonstrated it with
the Nazi horror?

~~~
otakucode
The distinction here is some further evidence of the actual mechanism through
which this operates, and, critically, evidence that we can actively work to
improve our ability to challenge immoral authority.

The $64 billion dollar question, though, is whether anyone in society will see
it as reasonable to expect themselves or anyone else to abandon their
intuition which tells them to follow without question, the 'natural' and
'automatic' response that they identify most strongly with their 'self', and
train themselves to contradict and contravene that part of themselves. As is
so often the case, you can't fix the flaws that your emotional and intuitive
processing of the world brings about if you venerate intuition and emotion and
denigrate any attempts to change it.

~~~
mockingbirdy
Then we would need to train everyone to be essentially an ubermensch - they
need to be able to operate on meta-levels and use metacognition all the time.

This is a hard task, you need cognitive resources (which means you have enough
sleep, food, resilience, mental energy and a stress-free environment) and a
lot of time and it's also very demanding to doubt essential beliefs about
oneself and ones' own values.

So I don't really think that most people will do it. It's just too cumbersome
and frankly, they have other things to do and the current mode works for them
most of the time. When it fails, something like the Nazi regime happens (for
various reasons, not only due to lack of advanced metacognition), but high
expectations won't help us, anyway.

\- - -

I think a good solution is to build a system which generally uses balance
mechanisms to keep power divided - we can't expect all people to be highly
self-aware and self-critical. Unsurprisingly, that's exactly why we use
democracies. Unfortunately, those systems stop to work when the majority of
people lack advanced metacognition or don't have the required cognitive
resources or lack information and understanding. Unfortunately, this can
happen pretty fast.

~~~
otakucode
I'm not sure exactly what 'ubermensch' implies, but I think I understand the
point of what you are saying. And I agree, it is unreasonable, even
biologically, to expect human beings to effectively perform at their mental
peak continuously. Brains don't work that way. But, that's also not necessary.
The vast majority of situations we face in day to day life don't really call
on us to be able to muster complex well-reasoned arguments with nuance. When
deciding whether to buy a gift for a partner, you're fine to go with whether
that feels like the right thing to do.

The problem comes in when people take a positive stance against ever trusting
the use of reason. Where they see someone stepping back, and dealing with a
topic dispassionately, and alarm bells start going off. They immediately
distrust the person, and if their conclusions contradict the gut intuitive
reaction they have to a topic, they will side with the intuitive reaction. The
'intuitive reaction' of human brains is essentially documented in any
comprehensive list of common logical fallacies. They were things we feel ought
to be true, but we know are not. Things like a terrible person can't make good
points, if a person is wrong about one thing they must be wrong about others,
if things happened close together spatially or temporally they must be
causally connected, if something is natural it must be better than artificial,
etc. At that point, it doesn't matter if anyone in the group is practicing
metacognition and solid reasoning, because they will be actively resisted for
precisely that.

Societies view of intellectualism changes on the scale of centuries. It was at
a height before World War I, almost to the point of fanaticism. It made people
willing to believe that science and reason would usher in a utopia by default,
because it was not capable of doing otherwise. Then, mustard gas rolled down
hillsides into trenches. Mechanized tanks crawled battlefields. The creations
of science were used to wreak the most horrible suffering, and society paused
at that. By the time the concentration camps were unveiled after the end of
the eugenics (all widely accepted as true and reasonable by the scientific
community of the time), the horror wasn't new. And the 20th century kept the
hits on coming, with tragedy after tragedy laid at the feet of science and
reason. We may know now that all of those people made critical errors and
overreached with hubris or were outright corrupt, but that doesn't matter
terribly much to the person who never understood it well to begin with. All
they know is that it's not a sure thing, and it can lead to stupendous
tragedy. The tragedies born by anti-intellectualism, such as Pol Pots purging
of intellectuals, Maos similar practices that resulted in profound starvation
and the deaths of millions, couldn't get much airtime in the face of society
shrinking away from reason.

I don't think this is a simple problem. In fact, I have often referred to it
as the single biggest problem facing the human species. Civilization includes
its own undoing. At the beginning, lethal danger, famine, disease, and other
terrors of the past make people willing to try anything - even dispassionate
reason. And then they build a civilization. Whose primary, if not sole, goal
is to remove danger from the lives of as many as possible. This must,
absolutely must, include removing the dangers which motivated the willingness
to reason and ignore intuition. Given enough time, arguing for expansion of
the infrastructure of civilization becomes harder. Given more time, arguing
for maintenance of the existing infrastructure becomes harder. People revert
to relying on intuition if for no other reason than it is easier and no longer
bears many negative consequences. And when the infrastructure begins to fail,
and danger re-asserts itself, it is naive to think people would see the error
of their ways and return to reason. There is no historical basis for such a
hope. The mother whose unvaccinated child dies of measles does not blame
herself. No, they will blame not having gone far enough. They will blame what
remains of the infrastructure, and call for it to be dismantled. And they will
continue until humanity returns to its 'default state' of slogging through the
mud, racked with disease, starving, killing each other over whose god is
stronger.

~~~
mockingbirdy
> because they will be actively resisted for precisely that.

Then your response has to be to adapt. Wrap some emotional frame around your
reasoning and people will listen to your position because you speak their
language. This doesn't help in the greater picture, but can help in individual
interactions with anti-intellectual people.

\- - -

> People revert to relying on intuition if for no other reason than it is
> easier and no longer bears many negative consequences.

I like the analysis. Pretty dark, but I agree with it. The fragility of
civilization is often attributed to the interconnectedness and
interdependencies, but the psychological implications are often overlooked.

Although I have to disagree with some parts: I don't think it's just a battle
between intuition and reasoning that is the root cause for annihilation of
social progress. Intellectualism and anti-intellectualism both produced
horrible and positive things in the past. I don't think that both approaches
are entirely right and that every generation has to find a dualistic point of
view which combines intuition and reasoning into a framework that deals with
emotions but also solves problems rationally. I've got the feeling that you
see intuition and emotional aspects as entirely negative (Mao, unvaccinated
children, killing each other over whose god is stronger, ...).

~~~
otakucode
>Then your response has to be to adapt. Wrap some emotional frame around your
reasoning and people will listen to your position because you speak their
language.

This is the problem... a person who values reason would see that 'emotional
frame' as the most disgusting, base, unethical kind of manipulation. Sure, you
could violate everything you believe and coerce people by manipulating them
emotionally... but if others figure out what you are doing, they will realize
you as a hypocrite and be even less likely to consider your viewpoint.

>Pretty dark, but I agree with it.

Oh, I left out the dark parts. The dark parts come when you start asking
yourself 'how can we fix or avoid this problem?' I've been considering the
problem for many years, and the only ideas I have ever been able to think of
are stupendously unethical and would debase whatever society used them.

>I've got the feeling that you see intuition and emotional aspects as entirely
negative (Mao, unvaccinated children, killing each other over whose god is
stronger, ...).

I do not, actually. Emotion and intuition are important parts of human life,
and an integrated view is key. We even have support for this in biology. There
are people (maybe just one person, I can only recall reading about one case)
who have a lesion in a very specific part of the brain which essentially
destroys their ability to experience emotion. One of the surprising things
found was that this also affected their ability to reason. Specifically, they
could consider an argument and produce a list of 'pros' and 'cons' for
choices, but no matter how lopsided the lists are, they're incapable of
deciding upon a course of action. Utterly and completely incapable of making
the leap from argument to decision. So you simply can't function without
emotion coming in to play.

The reason intellectualism is the right path (and by that I mean relying on
reason and science in situations where the matters are important) is that it
can integrate all of this, it can recognize its own shortcomings, and it can
formulate ways of dealing with them. All of the tragedies of the past can
usually be traced back to someone (or groups) who had all of the tools
available to them which could have said "you do not have the evidence to
support your conclusion", but they let other motivations sway them from rigor.
Total rigor is impossible, of course. We will always have limited information.
Acknowledging this, and being circumspect and conservative in our actions,
building in the ability to turn back, is something only intellectualism can
do.

I do not and would not advocate a 'Vulcan' emotionless outlook. We are human,
and we have emotion. It's not inherently destructive. However, our emotional
capacity is an outgrowth of the functioning of our brain which evolved to keep
us alive (just) while living in small tightknit tribes on the African
savannah. It did not adapt to function in anything like the environments in
which we find ourselves today. As such, it is often misleading. The silver
lining is that whether it is or is not misleading is something that reason can
determine. If our emotional responses are consistent with reality, great,
reason will verify that and give us confidence. If not, reason can enable us
to correct ourselves. As emotion is a trained response, enough repeated
correction results in this not always being a 'battle'.

~~~
mockingbirdy
> but no matter how lopsided the lists are, they're incapable of deciding upon
> a course of action.

Reminds me of [1] from Futurama. Here [2] is an article about that man.

> As emotion is a trained response, enough repeated correction results in this
> not always being a 'battle'.

I agree to a certain extend. I think you have a very differentiated and
reflected view.

> the only ideas I have ever been able to think of are stupendously unethical
> and would debase whatever society used them.

I would like to hear your solutions. Analyzing is one thing, but constructive
ideas to solve these problems is another big feat.

[1]: [https://youtu.be/1-bCIA_vyVc](https://youtu.be/1-bCIA_vyVc)

[2]: [https://www.thecut.com/2016/06/how-only-using-logic-
destroye...](https://www.thecut.com/2016/06/how-only-using-logic-destroyed-a-
man.html)

------
malmsteen
I've never understood how the classic interpretation of milgram that "people
can become monster under authority" were remotely relevant.

"hurting other people" is just a natural tendency inside at least a large
proportion if not all humans. That's why we've had so many wars in the
history, bullys at school and abuse in generally ANY UNREGULATED ENVIRONEMENT
(chrisitan schools in the 50s in france for example, prisons and in some way
even the weinstein compagny). That's also why a lot of us love watching MMA,
boxing, and why many people love, even secretly because society doesn't
acknowledge this feeling, going at war [1].

We can argue all day whether it stems from a domination instinct, a fear of
our own weakness or how this instincs have to be channeled into a more
constructive force / healthy contribution for society but the point is that
this instinct exists... probably in most persons.

At some point i suspect most participants in milgram experiment switched from
the "this is horrible" voice in their head to the "my feelings tells me it's
not horrible I feel in power it's cool I almost like it plus there's authority
so i wont get punished so it's fine". It's not so much of a big deal.

[1] [https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a28718/why-men-
lo...](https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a28718/why-men-love-war/)

~~~
projektir
Claiming that people love war seems like a pretty dangerous statement to me
without some very solid study. There's a lot going on there, most notably,
trauma. People who went to war are not necessarily the people who come back.

~~~
dsego
Why is it dangerous? You explain nothing.

~~~
projektir
Wait, I really have to explain why an incorrect gender-based generalization
could be dangerous? How about the conclusions the person I'm responding to
arrived at.

It's one thing to describe the experiences of soldiers returning from Vietnam,
because that is valuable information. It's another to interpret it and make
conclusions when there are 50 other valid explanations.

"People/men like war/aggression/risk" is honestly not a new concept, and it's
seems pretty correct on the surface, especially when you cut out the whole
part of your comrade slowly dying due to a stray shell. This is the
glorification of war that books like Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five were
written against.

Most incorrect claims are dangerous, and the reasons are not always all
enumerable since you often can't see the problem when you think a false thing
is true. I.e., if you already think women are hysterical, treating them as
hysterical doesn't seem like an issue because, well, they're hysterical.

~~~
malmsteen
Late answer: your answer is quite level-headed I think.

I would say that first that I never said anything about gender-specific, or if
i did it was a mistake.. My point is that every human (men or women) has a
potential of violence that can be unleashed in many situations. This potential
is the kind of thing that look "unnatural" "scary" or "bad" when you see it
and don't feel it but feel naturalyou experience it.

Granted there's not many data / source in my answer. My point is just that I
feel a bit weird when I see a lot of articles like this who talk about
violence being an "unnatural" tendency of the humans when I think it is a very
natural tendency (which we constantly try to make disappear in our peaceful
societies, which is why it might look unnatural nowadays.).

