That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Genocide

Episode Date: November 9, 2024

What drives people to commit the ultimate atrocity? In today's epsiode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss the neuroscience behind genocide. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kurt Olsson, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. So this topic came as a request from actually a couple of listeners, and I've kind of sort of pushed it away because it's going to be a tough one, and there's going to be some stuff that might make you a bit uncomfortable. But it's been asked multiple times, and I think it's important to address specifically. We have sort of hinted at it in some of the previous episodes and some of the examples I've used before. But the reason I'm finally doing it is my son is doing a unit on what happened in Rwanda a while ago.

And I had to explain to him, you know, how do these sort of things happen? What I'm talking about is genocide. him, you know, how do these sort of things happen? What I'm talking about is genocide. So how do people, you know, kill people, not on a one-off sort of emotional thing like a murder, but where a society takes on a mindset where they basically deliberately try to wipe out another group. So on today's podcast, the neuroscience of genocide. So after the Second World War, when researchers began investigating the Holocaust and what happened, there was an initial assumption by the general public that the perpetrators of the Holocaust were basically sociopaths or sadists or mentally off somehow.

These were people that were different than the rest of us. And there were a few of those people. There's no doubt there was a small subset of the perpetrators of the Holocaust that were not normal, just to keep it simple and use that kind of language. They had mental issues. And as as a result they did some of the things they did. But the reality is the vast majority of the people that were involved in the actual killing process were normal. When a lot of these Nazis were interviewed after the war by psychologists and assessed, the vast majority of them were found to be normal. Prior to the Second World War, most of them had normal jobs. They were bakers, there were lawyers, there were

teachers. They came from all walks of life. Yet somehow they were turned into a group of people that killed over 6 million people. And how can this be done? Like how does genocide occur? Like I said, one-off murders are most of the time they're crimes of passion. The emotional system in the brain overrides the logical system and someone is killed as a result. and someone is killed as a result. A very poor choice is made and it results in the death of someone. But in the terms of genocide, it's not an emotional thing. This is not your brain's emotional system running out of control. These are decisions that are made day to day and hour to hour and minute to minute.

And in the moment, they are rational decisions made by the people that are doing the killing. So how does it happen? What is the neuroscience of genocide? Well, there's three key steps that I've identified with my research on this. And for this episode, I've done more research than usual because I wanted to speak accurately from both a historical perspective and from a neuroscience perspective. Now, obviously, I always strive to do that. But in this case, given the subject matter, I put in a lot of extra homework, shall we say. a lot of extra homework, shall we say. So I believe the neuroscience of genocide boils down to three key components. Number one is the establishment of authority. And what I mean by that is that the people that are going to end up perpetrating the genocide need to be in a structured authoritarian organization now in terms of the holocaust this was definitely the case the nazis that ended up

perpetrating these crimes they were definitely you know an, they were in the SS, all right, the Schutzstaffel, and they, you know, which was a very strict military organization. There was people in charge at various ranks, and it's not unlike the army. The Schutzstaffel or the SS had ranks, just like you would in a regular army. They were colonels and captains and corporals and privates. Of course, the actual ranks were different in German and they were also different and specific to the SS themselves. But there was very strict discipline and a very strict command structure. In fact, when a lot or the vast majority of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were, you know, accused of their crimes and they

were on trial, they basically said, you know, it was an order. I was just following orders. And this is true, especially with some of the very famous Nazis, Adolf Eichmann, who was captured in South America long after the war was over and brought to trial in Israel. And he was the one that was, they call him the architect of the Holocaust because he was responsible for the organization and transport of the people that were killed. for the organization and transport of the people that were killed. That was his primary defense as he was following orders. He was told to do it and he did it without questioning the authority. So for the neuroscience of genocide to occur, you need this strict authority-like organization. this strict authority-like organization. Now, it's important to point out that in cases like Rwanda,

that authority-like atmosphere might have been a little bit different, but it was still there in some sense. And we'll talk a bit more about that specifically. But in the case of the Holocaust, where something was organized, and what was interesting about the Holocaust, if you can use that word, was just the fact that it was organized mass murder. It wasn't a mob, right? It was organized and implemented in a very specific and deliberate manner. So number one, from a neuroscience perspective, is for you to carry out these actions is your brain needs to believe or understand that it's just doing what's right. So if you think about our worldview models with the left prefrontal cortex maintaining our worldview, the left prefrontal cortex has to believe in a world model where following orders is the right thing to do. And those orders aren't to be questioned,

they're to be acted on instantly. The second piece of the neuroscience of genocide is dehumanization. And the Nazi regime did this extensively. So if you take the Jews, who are by far the most targeted of all the peoples, but not the only people targeted, they were dehumanized through a propaganda campaign. The Jews were seen as subhuman or not even human at all. They were portrayed as being a disease that needed to be exterminated. They were likened to rats and bugs, things that you wanted to get rid of. And this message was carried out by the state. It was on the radio. It was in what you read in the newspapers. It was what you

were told by speeches by politicians and rallies. They even taught this in schools. So this became a part of the school curriculum, that the Jewish race was not human. And the Nazis went to a lot of trouble to try to prove this with some very bad pseudoscience. They were measuring skulls and other characteristics, trying to establish their superior race, the Aryan race, but at the same time trying to point out that the Jewish race was different. So the people

perpetrating the crimes were acting from a position of authority, but what it made it easier for them was this dehumanization. So again, their worldview was such, their left prefrontal cortex was such that they believed that they were exterminating something that wasn't human and they were doing it legally. It was through an authoritative structure. The final piece of the neuroscience of genocide, which is a critical piece, is distance. Now, I'm going to explain distance through an example. When the Holocaust first began, the Nazis used basically groups of men called Einsatzgruppen. And these were men who went out with rifles. And you've probably heard, if you've studied history or been exposed to history or watched

any number of movies, they basically took people out into the woods and shot them and buried them. Sometimes they didn't even bother to take them to the woods. But when it came to the mass killings, came to the mass killings, that's what they did. And the men that did this, you know, these were not psychopaths, all right? They weren't sadists. Some of them would have been. There would have been a subset that were, but these were men that were conscripted to do this and told to do this. There were some volunteer groups, but there were groups that weren't. One of the groups was actually a group of policemen that were basically moved to the eastern front of the war, and they went around and rounded up Jewish people and other people that were deemed not to live, and they were shooting them. Now, where distance comes in is this didn't work very well.

From a technical perspective, yes, you could do this. You could shoot large amounts of people, but the people that did this suffered from it for the most part. Among the groups of men that were perpetrating these horrible crimes, there was rampant alcoholism. There was theft. happened alcoholism. There was theft. They basically didn't handle it that well because it's very hard to shoot someone at close range. At least we hope it's very hard to do this. So this is what I mean by distance. And what's interesting is if you actually look at other aspects of the Second World War, research showed that among the Allied forces, so the Canadians, the Americans, and the British, and the French, and the other nations that fought on the side of the Allies, the vast majority of infantry soldiers didn't fire their rifles at the enemy in a battle. And that's because to shoot someone with a gun generally means that you're at a pretty short distance, you can see them,

and pulling a trigger and killing another human being for most of us is hard to do. So what happened with the Holocaust is they invented the death camps. They basically changed the way that the Jewish people were killed and they were put into a room that was supposed to resemble a shower. There are other instances where it was a bit different, but that's the most common way. And then they were gassed. So the person that put the gas in

had distance from what they were doing. Yes, they could hear some noise, and I can't imagine the other atmosphere here, but they weren't seeing them, all right? They were basically putting a cylinder of gas down a tube. And what the Germans did is they helped select the people that were going to go to this outfait. And they definitely were guarding the process. But once they got into the actual shower chambers of the death chambers, there was a lot of help from other prisoners, typically other Jewish people,

who were basically forced to do this on pain of death. So that most of the people, the vast majority of people that interacted with the dead bodies, weren't the Germans themselves. They were forcing someone else to do it because this created distance. Now, as I said, there were definitely some sadists and psychopaths among the Germans. and I'm not going to go through all of that because we can do another episode on psychopathy in general. But the vast majority of these were soldiers who were acting under authority, who were acting against a race of people who were dehumanized, and they created this distance such that the killing wasn't direct. and they created this distance such that the killing wasn't direct. And that is how you set up the neuroscience of a genocide. Now, in terms of going back to that idea of distance,

another key interesting report from World War II, as I told you just a couple of minutes ago, that a lot of infantry soldiers didn't fire their weapons at the enemy. But what they did do if they were pilots was they dropped their bombs. Now, what's the difference between a pilot and an infantry soldier? Well, a pilot in a plane up high in the sky can't see the death and destruction that's caused by their bombs. So they're just pushing a button and bombs are falling. Now, cognitively, they're aware of what they're doing, but by dropping bombs, they created that distance. And that's how they were able to do that.

And that's what the Nazis did in terms of the Holocaust. They created distance as well. Now, I'll end this by saying this concept of authority and dehumanization and distance doesn't apply to all situations. There have definitely been examples of holocausts or slaughters or genocides where some of these components are missing. In Rwanda, for instance, it was mostly dehumanization. It was this idea that the people they were killing didn't deserve to be alive or weren't a part of their race. And the distance wasn't really there. The authority was sort of

there. So I'm applying this to the most famous and largest example, which is the Holocaust, because all three of these things were present. But the neuroscience of genocide comes down to some, if not all of these elements being present. The authority relationship, the dehumanization of the people that are going to be killed, and creating distance, which allows the killers to actually implement the genocide more easily. Anyway, that's a pretty dark one, but it did come from requests by multiple people and it's been over a couple of years, so I thought I'd tackle it. I promise something lighter on the next episode of the podcast. Just remember the website, thatneuroscienceguy.com, links to Etsy and Patreon.

If you have ideas for episodes, we want to know what you want to know about the neuroscience of daily life. So on threads or X, it's at that neuroscience guy. And of course, the podcast itself. Thank you so much for listening and please subscribe if you haven't already. My name is Olof Kerkhalsen and I'm that neuroscience guy.