Why Being In a Group Causes Some to Forget Their

Morals
When people are in a group they are more disconnected from their moral beliefs,
according to new neuroscientific research.
The results come from a study which compared how peoples brains work when
they are alone compared with when they are in a group (Cikara et al., 2014).
The study was inspired by a trip to Yankee Stadium in New York made by Dr
Mina Cikara, now an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
On the trip her husband was wearing a Red Sox cap (for non-US readers: the
Red Sox are a rival team from Boston).
He was continuously heckled by Yankee fans, so Mina took the cap from her
husband and wore it herself:
What I decided to do was take the hat from him, thinking I would be a lesser
target by virtue of the fact that I was a woman.
I was so wrong. I have never been called names like that in my entire life.
It was a really amazing experience because what I realized was I had gone from
being an individual to being seen as a member of Red Sox Nation.
And the way that people responded to me, and the way I felt myself responding
back, had changed, by virtue of this visual cue the baseball hat.
Once you start feeling attacked on behalf of your group, however arbitrary, it
changes your psychology.
When me versus you becomes us versus them
Two reasons why people behave differently in groups are that:
1. they feel more anonymous,
2. and that they feel less likely to be caught behaving badly.
But Cikara and colleagues wanted to examine a further factor: whether peoples
moral compass also goes awry when they are in a group.
They did this by asking a group of participants to answer question which gave an
insight into their personal morality.
This enabled the researchers to create personalised statements for each of them,
such as:
I have stolen food from shared refrigerators.
I always apologize after bumping into someone.
Participants then played a game while inside a brain scanner: once as part of a
team and once on their own.
When people played on their own, and saw moral statements related to
themselves, their brains showed more activity in a part of the medial prefrontal
cortex an area associated with thinking about the self.
This is normal, suggesting a strong identification with their own morals.
But, when some people playing in group saw moral statement about themselves,
they reacted much less intensely, suggesting weaker identification with their own
beliefs and moral ideals.
Forgotten morals
In a follow-up test, these people were also much more likely to try and harm
members of the other group.
Not only that, but they even seemed to conveniently forget the moral statements
theyd heard beforehand.
One of the studys authors, Rebecca Saxe, an associate professor of cognitive
neuroscience at MIT, said:
Although humans exhibit strong preferences for equity and moral prohibitions
against harm in many contexts, peoples priorities change when there is an us
and a them.
A group of people will often engage in actions that are contrary to the private
moral standards of each individual in that group, sweeping otherwise decent
individuals into mobs that commit looting, vandalism, even physical brutality.