Neuroscience of inhumanity

By Jason Lim

A Nov. 6 New York Times article stated, "Over 200 mass graves holding as many as 12,000 bodies have been found in areas of Iraq once controlled by the Islamic State," citing United Nations figures. The findings were highlighted in a joint report released by the United Nations mission to Iraq and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, which called the sites a 'legacy of terror.'"

According to the report, no one was spared, not even women and children. The brutality of the killings was extraordinary. Or was it?

The LA Times, in reviewing James M. Scott's book, "Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila" writes, "Like the Rape of Nanking, or the siege of Stalingrad, the tragedy of Manila deserves far greater understanding and reflection today." The atrocities committed by the entrenched Japanese in Manila were horrific. The atrocities committed in the Rape of Nanking were similarly horrific.

But horrific atrocities were not only committed by the Japanese. And not just during WWII. What about Srebrenica? What about Rwanda? What about the Belgian butchering of the people of Congo? What about the Holocaust?

There are endless examples of humans treating each other inhumanely. These examples of inhumanity are not just a few historical outliers. Sadly, they are the norm. It might not always be as severe as massacres and genocide, but sometimes everyday cultural behaviors lead people to regard even their own family members as something less than human.

I recently attended the Parliament of World Religions 2018 in Toronto. There was a social activist from India who recounted how she encountered young girls who were to be sold off as child brides to much older men who could pay the parents with livestock. Therefore, the parents wouldn't bother sending the girls to school. To the parents, it didn't make economic sense to educate them when they were going to be married at such a young age. Even if the girls were allowed to go to school, it was around a 7km journey that wasn't worth the danger of being raped.

In other words, the girls were treated as either an asset to exchange for cows or a liability that the parents would have to write off as quickly as possible. They weren't treated as fully human, with the potential to have different lives from that of their mothers. This is not an uncommon story for young girls in many parts of the world.

Since inhumanity is so prevalent as to be a norm in human societies, I wondered whether there was some neurological basis for such behavior. Fortunately, there was a lecture at the Parliament of World Religions that dealt with the neurological underpinnings of "Us" vs. "Them." The lecturer mentioned a study that intrigued me; it was about how our brain actively dehumanizes people we don't consider as a part of "us."

The article was published in 2007 by Lasana T. Harris and Susan T. Fiske in the Department of Psychology and Center for the Study of Brain, Mind, and Behavior, Princeton University, and is titled, "Social groups that elicit disgust are differentially processed in mPFC."

This is what the executive summary says, in scientific terms: "Social neuroscience suggests medial pre-frontal cortex (mPFC) as necessary for social cognition."

However, the mPFC is activated less to members of extreme outgroups that elicit disgust, an emotion directed toward both people and objects. This study aimed to counteract that effect. Participants made either superficial categorical age estimations or individuating food-preference judgments about people, while fMRI recorded neural activity. Besides replicating the reduced mPFC activity to extreme outgroups that elicit disgust, this study demonstrates that the same type of judgment for these individuals is processed in a region anatomically distinct from social groups that elicit exclusively social emotions (pity, envy, pride). Finally, inferring individuating information (food preferences) increases mPFC activation above superficial categorical judgments. This evidence fits differentiated mPFC processing of extreme outgroups, which activate mPFC less than other groups, but suggests that individuation increases activation."

Put more simply, the article says that as humans divide the world into "us" versus "them," the human brain processes judgment about "them" with the same part of the brain normally used to processes objects. In other words, humans use different parts of the brain to judge "us" and "them." Our own brains objectify and dehumanize other humans when we perceive them to not belong to "us."

Does this mean we are doomed to repeat our inhumanity forever? Of course not. Knowing what horror we are capable of inflicting upon each other is the very beginning of guarding against that same horror. However, we do have to be vigilant against our own nature and be mindful when we find ourselves classifying the people we meet into "us" and "them." Who knew the road to inhumanity was paved with simple taxonomy?

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.