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According to the new work by researchers at University College London and Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, when someone gives us an order, we actually feel less responsible for our actions and their painful consequences.
"Maybe some basic feeling of responsibility really is reduced when we are coerced into doing something," says Patrick Haggard of University College London. "People often claim reduced responsibility because they were 'only obeying orders.' But are they just saying that to avoid punishment, or do orders really change the basic experience of responsibility?"Haggard and his colleagues sought to answer this question by measuring a phenomenon called sense of agency.
This is the feeling that one's actions have caused some external event. For instance, Haggard has explained, if you flip a light switch and a light comes on, you often experience those events as being nearly simultaneous, even if there's a lag.
Negative Versus Positive Outcomes
Haggard's team has already shown that people feel reduced sense of agency when their actions produce a negative versus a positive outcome. In other words, people literally perceive a longer lapse in time between an action (in this case, presses of a computer key) and its outcome when the end result is negative compared to when it is positive.
In the new study, the researchers measured sense of agency in the same way to explore changes in perception when someone delivered a mild electric shock to another person, either on orders or by their own choice. In other experiments, the harm inflicted on the other person was a financial penalty instead of a minor pain.
When the participants chose freely, they were encouraged along with the promise of a small financial gain.
They also knew exactly what kind of harm they were inflicting because pairs of participants traded places with each other. Those who delivered shocks or suffered financial losses in some trial sessions received the same treatment in others.
Cause and Effect
The researchers report that coercion led to a small but significant increase in the perceived time interval between action and outcome in comparison to situations in which participants freely chose to inflict the same harms. Interestingly, coercion also reduced the neural processing of the outcomes of one's own action.
The researchers concluded that claims of reduced responsibility under coercion could indeed correspond to a change in basic feelings of responsibility, not just attempts to avoid social punishment.
"When you feel a sense of agency— you feel responsible for an outcome— you get changes in experience of time where what you do and the outcome you produce seem closer together," Haggard says.Haggard says it would now be interesting to find out whether some people more readily experience a reduced sense of agency under coercion than others.
Comment: These easily coerced individuals fits Bob Altemeyer's definition of right wing authoritarian followers.
High-RWAs tend to value lawfulness above human life, except when the law-breaker is one of their treasured authority figures. Altemeyer writes, "If you give them moral dilemmas (e.g. should one steal an absurdly expensive drug to save a life?) they're more likely to say, 'The law is the law and must be obeyed' than most people are." However, "they do not see laws as social standards that apply to all. Instead, they appear to think that authorities are above the law, and can decide which laws apply to them and which do not - just as parents can when one is young." They insist on showing more respect for "their fathers, the president of companies where they worked, and so on," than most people. When Altemeyer replicated the Milgram study, they were less likely to blame the person who actually ordered the shocks, rather "they blamed the poor devil who was ordered to deliver the shocks, and the victim, more than most others did."
"Fortunately for society, there have always been some people who stand up to coercion," he says.Source:
Emilie A. Caspar , Julia F. Christensen , Axel Cleeremans , Patrick Haggard
Coercion Changes the Sense of Agency in the Human Brain
Current Biology, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.12.067
