The Science of ‘I Was Just Following Orders’
New research on why seemingly good people do terrible things
by Alison Gopnik
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]here is no more chilling wartime phrase than “I was just following orders.” Surely, most of us think, someone who obeys a command to commit a crime is still acting purposely, and following orders isn’t a sufficient excuse. New studies help to explain how seemingly good people come to do terrible things in these circumstances: When obeying someone else, they do indeed often feel that they aren’t acting intentionally.
Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London, has been engaged for years in studying our feelings of agency and intention. But how can you measure them objectively? Asking people to report such an elusive sensation is problematic. Dr. Haggard found another way. In 2002 he discovered that intentional action has a distinctive but subtle signature: It warps your sense of time.
People can usually perceive the interval between two events quite precisely, down to milliseconds. But when you act intentionally to make something happen—say, you press a button to make a sound play—your sense of time is distorted. You think that the sound follows your action more quickly than it actually does—a phenomenon called “intentional binding.” Your sense of agency somehow pulls the action and the effect together.
This doesn’t happen if someone else presses your finger to the button or if electrical stimulation makes your finger press down involuntarily. And this distinctive time signature comes with a distinctive neural signature too.
More recent studies show that following instructions can at times look more like passive, involuntary movement than like willed intentional action. In the journal Psychological Science last month, Peter Lush of the University of Sussex, together with colleagues including Dr. Haggard, examined hypnosis. Hypnosis is puzzling because people produce complicated and surely intentional actions—for example, imitating a chicken—but insist that they were involuntary.
The researchers hypnotized people and then suggested that they press a button making a sound. The hypnotized people didn’t show the characteristic time-distortion signature of agency. They reported the time interval between the action and the sound accurately, as if someone else had pressed their finger down. Hypnosis really did make the actions look less intentional.
In another study, Dr. Haggard and colleagues took off from the famous Milgram experiments of the 1960s. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram discovered that ordinary people were willing to administer painful shocks to someone else simply because the experimenter told them to. In Dr. Haggard’s version, reported in the journal Current Biology last year, volunteers did the experiment in pairs. If they pressed a button, a sound would play, the other person would get a brief but painful shock and they themselves would get about $20; each “victim” later got a chance to shock the aggressor.
Sometimes the participants were free to choose whether or not to press the button, and they shocked the other person about half the time. At other times the experimenter told the participants what to do.
In the free-choice trials, the participants showed the usual “intentional binding” time distortion: They experienced the task as free agents. Their brain activity, recorded by an electroencephalogram, looked intentional too.
More recent studies show that following instructions can at times look more like passive, involuntary movement than like willed intentional action. In the journal Psychological Science last month, Peter Lush of the University of Sussex, together with colleagues including Dr. Haggard, examined hypnosis. Hypnosis is puzzling because people produce complicated and surely intentional actions—for example, imitating a chicken—but insist that they were involuntary.
The researchers hypnotized people and then suggested that they press a button making a sound. The hypnotized people didn’t show the characteristic time-distortion signature of agency. They reported the time interval between the action and the sound accurately, as if someone else had pressed their finger down. Hypnosis really did make the actions look less intentional.
In another study, Dr. Haggard and colleagues took off from the famous Milgram experiments of the 1960s. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram discovered that ordinary people were willing to administer painful shocks to someone else simply because the experimenter told them to. In Dr. Haggard’s version, reported in the journal Current Biology last year, volunteers did the experiment in pairs. If they pressed a button, a sound would play, the other person would get a brief but painful shock and they themselves would get about $20; each “victim” later got a chance to shock the aggressor.
Sometimes the participants were free to choose whether or not to press the button, and they shocked the other person about half the time. At other times the experimenter told the participants what to do.
In the free-choice trials, the participants showed the usual “intentional binding” time distortion: They experienced the task as free agents. Their brain activity, recorded by an electroencephalogram, looked intentional too.
But when the experimenter told participants to shock the other person, they did not show the signature of intention, either in their time perception or in their brain responses. They looked like people who had been hypnotized or whose finger was moved for them, not like people who had set out to move their finger themselves. Following orders was apparently enough to remove the feeling of free will.
These studies leave some big questions. When people follow orders, do they really lose their agency or does it just feel that way? Is there a difference? Most of all, what can we do to ensure that this very human phenomenon doesn’t lead to more horrific inhumanity in the future?
This article was originally published by The Wall Street Journal. Read the original article.