Obeying orders reduces vicarious brain activation towards victims’ pain

Emilie A Caspar,Kalliopi Ioumpa,Christian Keysers,Valeria Gazzola

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117251

Emilie A Caspar, Kalliopi Ioumpa + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.117251

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Abstract

Past historical events and experimental research have shown complying with the orders from an authority has a strong impact on people's behaviour. However, the mechanisms underlying how obeying orders influences moral behaviours remain largely unknown. Here, we test the hypothesis that when male and female humans inflict a painful stimulation to another individual, their empathic response is reduced when this action complied with the order of an experimenter (coerced condition) in comparison with being free to decide to inflict that pain (free condition). We observed that even if participants knew that the shock intensity delivered to the ‘victim’ was exactly the same during coerced and free conditions, they rated the shocks as less painful in the coerced condition. MRI results further indicated that obeying orders reduced activity associated with witnessing the shocks to the victim in the ACC, insula/IFG, TPJ, MTG and dorsal striatum (including the caudate and the putamen) as well as neural signatures of vicarious pain in comparison with being free to decide. We also observed that participants felt less responsible and showed reduced activity in a multivariate neural guilt signature in the coerced than in the free condition, suggesting that this reduction of neural response associated with empathy could be linked to a reduction of felt responsibility and guilt. These results highlight that obeying orders has a measurable influence on how people perceive and process others’ pain. This may help explain how people's willingness to perform moral transgressions is altered in coerced situations.

Highlights

Many examples in the history of Mankind show that when people obey the orders from an authority, they are able to perform highly immoral acts towards others (e.g. Arendt, 1951, 1963, Herman & Chomsky, 1988)
We hypothesize that if „‟ obeying the orders of an authority allows humans to perform atrocities towards other humans, it could do so by reducing the inner empathic response towards the inflicted pain, which should lead to a measurable reduction of brain response in the abovementioned regions associated with empathy and pain ratings when witnessing pain delivered under coerced compared to free condition
We tested the hypothesis that obeying the orders received from an authority would reduce the vicarious brain activation when witnessing the pain that one had delivered to a „victim‟ compared to a free condition

Summary

Introduction

Many examples in the history of Mankind show that when people obey the orders from an authority, they are able to perform highly immoral acts towards others (e.g. Arendt, 1951, 1963, Herman & Chomsky, 1988). The seminal study of Singer et al (2004) shows that experiencing painful stimulations and empathizing with the same pain delivered to others triggers an overlapping brain activity in the anterior insula (AI) and in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). These results, largely replicated (Fan et al, 2011; Lamm et al, 2011 for an overview), suggest that we share what others feel, at least in part, because we map their pain onto our own pain system (see Lamm & Majdandzic, 2015 for a critical review). We hypothesize that if „‟ obeying the orders of an authority allows humans to perform atrocities towards other humans, it could do so by reducing the inner empathic response towards the inflicted pain, which should lead to a measurable reduction of brain response in the abovementioned regions associated with empathy and pain ratings when witnessing pain delivered under coerced compared to free condition

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