That Neuroscience Guy - Evilness

Episode Date: June 20, 2021

It's a simple question: why do people do bad things? In today's episode, I discuss the neuroscience behind evilness. 

Hi, my name is Olof Krogolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. Have you ever thought about why people do bad things? You know, why does someone steal something? Or in a worse situation, why does someone commit murder? On today's podcast, we're going to talk about the neuroscience of being evil. To start this discussion, we're just going to revisit a few things

that we've talked about on previous episodes. First of all, the amygdala. The amygdala is a bilateral brain structure that plays a crucial role in emotion. Early research examining what the amygdala does used functional magnetic resonance imaging, a way to measure the activity of various regions within the brain. And if you put people in an fMRI scanner and you show them faces, faces that have no emotional content or emotional content, you find that you get an enhanced emotional response to faces that have emotional content. For instance, they're happy or fearful as opposed to not having an emotional valence. An interesting offshoot of this line of research is that when people are sleep-deprived,

you get a larger emotional response in the amygdala. So to be clear, when you're tired, you're going to be more emotional. At a higher level, the amygdala and other brain regions represent our emotional response to things. Some really interesting research by Andreas Bartels and Samir Zeki looked at the neural correlates of maternal and romantic love. And what they found was that when people were engaged in or thinking about romantic love, different brain regions were activated than when they were thinking about maternal love. The key point is

that your emotional system isn't just capturing a simple thing like responding to a face, but it also plays a role in these complex constructs. Now, if you want to start talking about why people do things that are evil, we also have to quickly revisit decision making and the role that emotion plays in it. Now at its simplest level decision making comes into a choice between values. A value for choice A and a value for choice B. And again those values don't have to have anything to do with money and typically they don't. So for instance if someone someone was going to steal something, there's a value for stealing that item, and there's a value for not stealing that item. The value assessment for stealing it might be the thrill of doing it, or the fact that you gained that item that you didn't have.

And the value for not doing it would be associated with what might happen if you get caught, or an assessment of your own morality. Now, where the emotional system comes in is it biases these values. So the emotional system might bias the value for stealing the item or, in an even worse case, committing murder. And this emotional response can be biased. For instance, one of the things that alcohol does is suppress the logical systems in the brain and let the emotional system bias choices. This is why a lot of crimes are committed spontaneously or while you're under the influence, because the emotional system gets in the way and you end up doing something evil that you might not normally do.

We can look at this in a different form of decision-making, and I'll give you another example to get us on the road to truly being evil. A famous dilemma that's being posed is the trolley dilemma. I've talked about it before. If you don't remember, a trolley or train is coming down some tracks and it's out of control, and you're there standing beside the tracks and there's a switch. Now, the train, if you don't do anything, is going to run over and kill five people. However, if you pull the switch, the train will be diverted and just kill this one person. So do you do this? Do you murder one person to save five? Well, as it turns out, this also involves your emotional system, but it also involves the prefrontal cortex. So the prefrontal

cortex is doing the math and saying, well, logically, it's better to kill one person and save five. And your emotional system might be responding in a way that either biases you to save five people or is biasing you to not play the part of God and make this decision. These decisions come from your emotional system and your logical decision system, sort of hashing it out and trying to figure out what you should be doing. Now, we can go a little bit further and look at the idea of punishment. As it turns out, parts of the brain light up when you punish someone, especially if it's justified, showing that the brain is playing a role in this decision to punish someone. In the case of one study by De Quervain and colleagues, they were looking at altruistic punishment. That's when you punish

someone because they deserve to be punished. And they found that there was a part of the brain that was sensitive and controlled that desire. In other research, people have found that there's a pattern of activity between honest and dishonest moral decisions. When people decide to be dishonest, there's more activity in certain brain regions than others. Typically, this line of research shows that there's more activity in the prefrontal cortex when people are being honest. But again, this is your brain just doing something that is evil, if you call dishonesty evil, and it's just a pattern of neural activity. But we can take it a step further. What about when people start doing things that are truly considered evil? I'll frame this by using

the example of the Second World War and the crimes perpetrated by the Nazi regime. For the most part, the people that perpetrated the crimes weren't psychopaths or sadists. They were just normal people that did horrible things. Now, why is this and what's happening in the brain? Typically, these sort of evil decisions are associated with situational contexts where, because of the situation, people make a choice that is evil, or they've been systematically manipulated. They've come to believe that the choice that they're making is not evil, but accepted and correct. This was demonstrated really well by Dr. Milgram in the 60s. A lot of you might have already heard of the Milgram studies,

but I'm going to walk you through them and really talk about what they truly mean. In the Milgram experiments, essentially what happened is a participant was brought in and they were told that they were going to teach something to a student. Now, this was rigged. The student was actually a confederate of the experimenter, and the teacher was the only person that wasn't in on what was happening. And the way it worked is the teacher would get the student to try to learn something, and watching over this was Milgram, making sure the study took place. Now, where this got interesting was that when the student made a mistake, the teacher, and remember, this is the person that's not in the know, had a panel in front of them, and it had a number of switches,

which when triggered, provided larger and larger electric shocks. Now, the experiment, as I said, was rigged. So what the participant or teacher didn't know was that the student made mistakes on purpose, and that prompted the experimenter to get the teacher to give them a shock. Now, these shock levels kept going up and up, and the question was, how far would people go? Now, the original Milgram hypothesis was that people wouldn't do this. They thought that there was a small subset of the population that had sadistic or psychopathic tendencies, and those people would be the ones that would use the large voltages,

and most people would stop. But that's not quite what Milgram found. Now, if you want to try to live the Milgram experiment a little bit, essentially the way it worked is as the voltages increased, the participant's response changed. So at 75 volts the participant would grunt. Now the teacher, and remember this is the person not in the know, might look at the experimenter and sort of say, should I keep doing this? And the response on the first objection was, the student is fine. Go on. Now, remember, the student keeps making mistakes.

So at 120 volts, there were shouts of pain. At 150 volts, the student is saying that they're refusing to go on with the experiment. And if the teacher objected, the response from the experimenter was, the experiment requires you to go on. It is absolutely essential to go on. You have no choice. You must go on. And if the teacher kept shocking them at 200 volts they heard a blood curdling scream and at 300 volts they heard some mumbling and a refusal to answer and at 330 volts plus it was just silence so you might ask yourself would you keep shocking the person would you keep doing this and what Milgram found is that quite a few people were able to go up to the extreme voltages that basically sounded like the person was dying.

Now, Milgram didn't just run one study. It turned out that Milgram ran a whole bunch of studies. And the results were interesting. And the results were interesting. In the base experiment, Milgram found that about 65% of people would shock people up to 450 volts. Remember, this is far past the point when the so-called student is responding. But there were some subtleties to this. That was what's called the standard effect in the base experiment.

If you put the student in the same room as the teacher, Milgram found that only 40% of people would go all the way. If the teacher had to put the student's hand on the shock plate each time, only 30% would go all the way. If the experimenter wasn't in the room and it was just the teacher and the student, only 19% would go all the way. And if the teacher said you can select the level of shock, only 3% would go all the way. And if the teacher said you can select the level of shock, only 3% went up to the top end, which is kind of in line with the percentage of people they thought might have a sadistic or psychopathic response. Interestingly, if the teacher doesn't deliver the shock but just helps out, 93% of people shocked up to the maximum voltage. Now, you might say to yourself, that was the 60s.

Could this still happen? Interestingly, Dr. Berger at Santa Clara University replicated this recently and found basically the same result. In one of the cases, 82.5% of the people continued after 150 volts. Now, what is the neuroscience of this? The neuroscience of this actually isn't that complicated. The person is making a choice. And in this case, they're weighing their options. Should I do it or I shouldn't?

And those values, they're just being biased. In the case of Milgram's comments, you must go on. You have to continue. This is biasing people to keep going. And they do. For the people that stop, it's because their emotional system is presumably kicking in and responding to the cries of agony or just their own morality system. And it's telling them to stop. The key point is it is just decision-making and no one's evil here. They're just people that are making decisions based on the context or environment. Now, there is another case. So we've talked about the fact that people can make some called evil decisions because of decision-making and that perhaps contexts like the Milgram study might bias them. But there,

of course, is also the case when people are evil for different reasons. For instance, damage to the brain or an area of the brain not functioning correctly might result in someone being evil. Kluver-Boussy syndrome is interesting. Pre-operation, typically animals in these studies are found to be aggressive and raging when they have this particular syndrome. So they actually have something wrong with the temporal cortex where they're overtly aggressive.

And interestingly, if you operate and you remove the temporal lobe, these animals change behavior. I'm not saying we need to go around cutting parts of the brain out of people, but it's clear that in this instance, there's actually something wrong with the brain and the animals are behaving in a way that might parallel evil. Other studies by Dr. Kent Keel and colleagues have shown that people that have psychopathic tendencies typically exhibit less activation in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, the lateral orbital frontal cortex, and the periactrial gray areas relative to controls. So the people in these psychopathy

studies actually have different brain activation, and that is why they might do something that is evil. And there's other research that supports this. For instance, other work by Dr. Rain and colleagues has shown that people with antisocial personality disorder typically have reduced prefrontal gray matter and reduced autonomic activity within their nervous system, and that contributes to their antisocial behavior. their nervous system, and that contributes to their antisocial behavior. In another study, people have found differences in brain activity in people that have borderline personality disorder. And so, for a small subset of people, they're evil because their brain is behaving differently. I'll finish by talking about one other study, a study that looked at violent video game players versus non-violent video game players. And they showed these people neutral images or violent images. And what they found is that people that were violent video game players had a reduced

brain response to the violent images than as opposed to people that play video games that weren't violent. So what I'm saying is if you played a people that play video games that weren't violent. So what I'm saying is if you played a lot of violent video games, your brain response was attenuated. It was almost like you were used to seeing those violent images. Now, does that mean that these people were born that way? Possibly. It's more likely that this is a learned response,

but does this contribute them to being evil? It's hard to say, but it would bias their decision-making values. I hope you've learned something about why people might do things that are considered to be evil. My name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm That Neuroscience Guy. You can follow me on Twitter, at That Neuroscience Guy, or on YouTube, I have a channel, That Neuroscience Guy. Additionally, you can check out my website at www.olivkregolson.com. And finally, if you want to ask a question or suggest a topic for an episode, please email me,

thatneuroscienceguy at gmail.com. Thank you for listening, and I hope you've enjoyed this podcast.