Abstract
Milgram’s classical studies famously suggested a widespread willingness to obey authority, even to the point of inflicting harm. Important situational factors supporting obedience, such as proximity with the victim, have been established. Relatively little work has focused on how coercion affects individual cognition, or on identifying the cognitive factors that underlie inter-individual differences in the tendency to yield to coercion. Here, we used fMRI to investigate the neural systems associated with changes in volitional processes associated with sense of agency and sense of responsibility under coercion. Participants either freely chose, or were instructed by the experimenter, to give mildly painful electric shocks to another participant, or to refrain from doing so. We have previously shown that coercion reduces temporal binding, which has been proposed as an implicit proxy measure of sense of agency. We tested how reduced agency under coercion related to differences in neural activity between free choice and coercion. In contrast to previous studies and to participants performing the task outside the MRI scanner, on average there was no effect of coercion on agency for participants in the scanner. However, greater activity in the medial frontal gyrus was reliably associated with greater agency under coercion. A similar association was found using explicit responsibility ratings. Our findings suggest that medial frontal processes, perhaps related to volition during action planning and execution, may help to preserve a sense of accountability under coercion. Further, participants who administered more shocks under free choice showed reduced activity during free choice trials in brain areas associated with social cognition. Possibly, this might reflect participants cognitively distancing themselves from the recipient of the shocks under free choice, whereas this was not observed under coercion.
Highlights
Experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram [1, 2] showed that obeying orders can lead to extreme antisocial behaviours
Temporal binding has been linked to sense of agency, which is a central aspect of voluntary action, and is tightly linked to responsibility [7]
While the tests for binding-coercion (p = .055) and responsibility ratings–free choice (p = .051) approached significance, the difference scores free choice-coercion used in the following correlation analyses were normally distributed for both measures (p = .2)
Summary
Experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram [1, 2] showed that obeying orders can lead to extreme antisocial behaviours. A majority of individuals could be coerced into inflicting apparent harm to others at levels generally deemed unacceptable (the ‘victim’ in Milgram’s studies was a confederate, who pretended to be harmed). While these studies have described the conditions under which coercion is effective, they have failed to address the central question of how coercion influences moral behaviour. Temporal binding has been linked to sense of agency (see [5, 6] for reviews), which is a central aspect of voluntary action, and is tightly linked to responsibility [7]. Defences based purely on the subjective experience of voluntary control, or lack thereof, remain problematic and controversial [9]
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