Would you electrocute someone if you were told to by an authority figure?

Would you torture a prisoner just because you were put in the uniform of a prison guard?

How much of your behavior is a function of your situation? And what does any of this

have to do with matching the length of a line or soldiers posing with dead bodies of their enemies,

or propaganda or dehumanization, or how we should educate our children?

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman.

I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford.

And in these episodes, I examine the intersection

between our brains and our lives.

And we sail deeply into our three-pound universe

to understand why and how our lives look

the way they do.

In the last week's episode, we talked about dehumanization and how your brain can dial up and down the degree to which you view another person as human.

And I gave you a particular example of empathy, which is where you're simulating what it is like to be someone else.

And we saw how empathy can be modulated based on whether those people are in

your in-group or your out-group. For today, I want to drill down a little bit deeper into the heart

of a related issue, which is that when you look at people who are behaving in these very violent

acts throughout history, the assumption has been for a long time

that it's something about the disposition of those people. In other words, there's something

really wrong with those people. But this started coming into questions some years ago because

there were so many hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of people

participating in these violent acts.

...