Nobody wished to let the others know he saw nothing, for then he would have been unfit for his office or too stupid. Never emperor’s clothes were more admired.
–Hans Christian Anderson, The Emperor’s New Suit, 1837
I recall rushing to a code one night on call during my residency and upon arrival I saw a swarm of other residents surrounding the patient. There were cries of "he’s herniating" and all turned to me, the neuro resident, to act. What I saw was a grand mal seizure (tonic phase), but my opinion seemed to not please this crowd (even though I was correct) who had worked themselves into a frenzy before I even arrived, and felt strongly we needed to start the mannitol, stat. Fortunately in medicine, the patient’s outcome can sometimes trump opinions, even if the treating physician is outnumbered by onlookers, but in many other situations (such as political elections), the crowd rules. Probably we all have such a story to share.
As neurologists, we share that professional identity, but in many other ways we can differ: men versus women, northerners versus southerners, Democrats versus Republicans, and so on. Us and them, in-groups and out-groups – these are the units of our society. Natural selection operates at the level of individuals, but our ability to survive and reproduce in turn depends on our success within social groupings. Creativity affects not only the individual creator, but the creator’s group, and groups can be as small as families or, as in the case of Facebook users, they can reach global proportions.
According to evolutionary psychology, universal reasoning neural circuits developed during the evolution of Homo sapiens to solve the common adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Hunter-gatherer groups competed against each other so that in reference to any single group there were in-group and out-group members, individuals who either belonged or did not belong to the given group. Membership within the group enhanced the survival of its members, and in-group member cooperation enhanced the fitness of the group. Social cooperation feels rewarding to the individual, as does enacting social justice that enforces the group’s rules of cooperation. Just as the United States has a president, so do all groups develop social hierarchies that in turn are respected by the membership as part of the cooperation dynamics that maintain the stability of the group. It is therefore literally within our behavioral DNA to live, cooperate, and create within a group.
Society is the ultimate judge of creative success, but sometimes society itself, as its own large group, can be murderously wrong. Genocide is not the work of a single individual, but reflects the systematic actions of a country’s government and its people. If there is a disorder of creativity at the level of society, genocide must be the ultimate example. Initial theories of genocide were based on the premise that such extreme behavior must reflect the actions of extraordinary individuals or personality types. None of these theories, however, withstood scientific scrutiny, primarily because of overwhelming evidence that the most evil acts can be and have been committed by the most ordinary among us.
The term genocide conjures images of Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Rwanda, but possibly the most massive genocide of all time was committed by the United States on our own shores. Our great country, which holds the equality of mankind to be so self-evident that we have become the watchdog of human rights across the globe, is also guilty of reducing the size of the North American Indian population from 15 million in 1500 to 250,000 by 1890.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons/Expiring frog/GNU Free Documentation License
Illustration of the setup of a Milgram experiment. The experimenter (E) convinces the subject ("Teacher" T) to give what he believes are painful electric shocks to another subject, who is actually an actor ("Learner" L). Many subjects continued to give shocks despite pleas of mercy from the actors.
Important insight into the potential for ordinary people to inflict cruel punishment came from the remarkable and disturbing experiments of Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s at Yale University (J. Abnorm. Soc. Psychol. 1963;67:371-8). In the study, 40 men were asked to administer electrical shocks of increasing intensity to a "victim" – who was in fact a confederate of the experimenter – each time the shock receiver gave a wrong answer on a paired associative memory task. The shock intensity was said to start at 15 volts and culminate at 450 volts and was labeled from "mild" to "danger: severe shock" and from there to "XXX," which included 435 and 450 volts. At 300 volts, the sham victims pounded the wall to indicate discomfort, and their pleas continued to escalate in parallel with further increases in shock intensity. Despite the explicitly voluntary nature of their cooperation, 26 of the 40 proceeded all the way to 450 volts. Only 5 stopped after the initial protestations at 300 volts, and another 9 stopped at some point before 450. It was clear to those involved that the shocks were effectively torturing the victims, yet 65% of these ordinary men continued beyond the indicated danger point. Prior to the study, Yale psychology seniors predicted that no more than 3% (mean was 1.2%) of the participants would proceed to administer the highest shock levels, and that was a feeling shared by Yale faculty, so Milgram’s results raised some eyebrows, to say the least.