Just Following Orders
Atrocities and the Brain Science of Obedience
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- $41.99
Publisher Description
How can obedience and carrying out orders lead to horrific acts such as the Holocaust or the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, or Bosnia? For the most part, it is a mystery why obeying instructions from an authority can convince people to kill other human beings, sometimes without hesitation and with incredible cruelty. Combining social and cognitive neuroscience with real-life accounts from genocide perpetrators, this book sheds light on the process through which obedience influences cognition and behavior. Emilie Caspar, a leading expert in the field, translates this neuroscientific approach into a clear, uncomplicated explanation, even for those with no background in psychology or neuroscience. By better understanding humanity's propensity for direct orders to short-circuit our own independent decision-making, we can edge closer to effective prevention processes.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Caspar, a professor of neuroscience at Ghent University in Belgium, debuts with a rigorous study of the "process through which obedience influences cognition and behavior." Drawing on robust research—including interviews with perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda and Cambodia—she unravels how "obeying orders impacts our ability to empathize with others" by inhibiting the parts of the brain that process guilt and mirror others' pain. That phenomenon becomes especially deadly in hierarchical environments, like the military, where an implicitly rule-based ethos reduces one's sense of agency. Despite the grim implications for the makings of genocides and other war crimes, some studies suggest that higher-level military personnel exhibited greater degrees of agency when receiving orders, indicating that it might be possible to instill "a greater responsibility over one's own actions" via training. Caspar takes a scrupulous, if occasionally bleak, look at the nexus between agency, morality, and authority, and provides some hope that it's possible "to help people resist blind obedience." This is an eye-opener.
