Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Neuroscientists Detail How Humans Are Able To Hurt Others When Given Orders (universityherald.com)

Posted by yaelk on from the it-wasnt-me dept.

Ever wonder how seemingly normal people were able to become Nazis and commit such atrocities? A team of neuroscientists studied just that, following the Milgram experiment conducted in the 1960s. Published in the journal Current Biology, this new study explains that "some basic feeling of responsibility really is reduced when we are coerced into doing something." The results indicate that humans are able to hurt each other when given orders.

6 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Ever wonder how seemingly normal people... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Ever wonder how seemingly normal people were able to become Nazis and commit such atrocities?

    They were just trying to make Germany great again.

    1. Re:Ever wonder how seemingly normal people... by tnk1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Ever wonder how seemingly normal people were able to become Nazis and commit such atrocities?

      They were just trying to make Germany great again.

      Actually, for many, this sort of hits it right on the head. The "Backstab" legend and the targeting of communists and other groups perceived to be fifth columnists like Jews, was a major popular idea about how Germany lost a war that they seemed to not be losing in 1918. Having gone from the military power that flattened France and Austria-Hungary a few decades past, to a power that somehow lost the war without it reaching German soil was incomprehensible to the German population and the people involved in the German Armed Forces in particular.

      (In defense of the people who didn't like communists, the Communists actually were trying to take over after the war, although it is hard to say who were the bigger assholes: the Communists or the Freikorps.)

      So there is a parallel, although I'd point out that the US may not be perfect right now, but we're still the world's lone superpower, so it's not like we're not currently "great". Embattled, yes, but in the same place as Weimar Germany? Absolutely not.

      Of course, facts don't always matter as much as they should. If you could somehow convince Americans, despite the evidence, that we are not great, and that we should be great again, you could generate a movement like this again.

  2. Nazis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why are the examples always nazis? How about "Ever wonder how seemingly normal people were able to become communists and commit such atrocities?" The communists killed far more than nazis.

    1. Re:Nazis by david_thornley · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Because, after the mid-30s, the National Socialist Party was about as socialist as modern Republicans. The party started with people who were more nationalist and people who were more socialist, and the socialist wing was removed from the Party with extreme prejudice not too long after Hitler took power. Hitler hated to change propaganda principles once used (he mentions it in Mein Kampf), and besides having a pretense of Socialism was useful. It continues to fool ideological idiots to this day.

      The Nazis weren't out after wealth distribution when they megamurdered some classes. The Rom didn't have enough money to be worth killing for, really, as did the Slavs in general. The Nazis primarily wanted to purify the race, although they were not reluctant at all to get what loot they could from the undesirables they killed.

      --
      "When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
  3. Ok, and? by Nidi62 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's the same mechanism that leads to riots and other similar phenomena: people lose their sense of personal responsibility. In riots people who would normally not even think about looting or destroying property will happily participate when in a large crowd because they aren't responsible for it, the crowd is. It's the same in this case: it is the person giving the order that is responsible, not the person actually committing the ordered action.

    Now, granted, in many cases of atrocities (think Holocaust, ISIS, and child soldiers in Africa), those involved have also been affected by some form of conditioning or other coercion. Quite often this begins at an early age because children are impressionable, but it can easily be accomplished on older individuals by tapping into a sense of frustration/disillusionment/anger and exploiting it, often by using the intended targets of the atrocity as the scapegoat for those feelings.

    --
    The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
  4. plenty of data available in the military by Khashishi · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Tell the neuroscientists to go study drone operators ordered to bomb hospitals and schools.