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  3. War atrocities are sometimes committed by " normal" people because they obeyed orders. Researchers from the Netherlands Institut

War atrocities are sometimes committed by " normal" people because they obeyed orders. Researchers from the Netherlands Institut

admin2021-09-25  2
问题     War atrocities are sometimes committed by " normal" people because they obeyed orders. Researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience in Amsterdam measured brain activity while participants inflict pain, and found that obeying orders reduced empathy- and guilt-related brain activity for the inflicted pain. This may explain why people more readily commit immoral acts under coercion.
    The Nuremberg trials are full of cases in which humans commit atrocious crimes but show disturbingly little guilt—because they just "follow orders". Are they fundamentally different from us, or do we all have it in us to dull our conscience when we follow orders?
    Most people are averse to harming others. In a study published in PNAS in 2014, Molly Crockett gave people a chance to pay money to reduce shocks to themselves or to an anonymous other. Most actually paid more to reduce the pain of others than they paid to reduce their own pain. One of the reasons why the pain of others is so aversive to us is that our brain is empathic. If you measure brain activity while people observe the pain of someone else, you consistently find that the observer activates their insula and anterior cingulate cortex-regions normally activated when they feel pain on their own body—as if the observer were in pain themselves. The brain transforms the witnessed pain of someone else into the witness’ own pain. Together with moral ideals, this empathic brain activity is thought to be part of what keeps us from harming our fellow humans.
    So what happens when any of us follow orders? In an experiment we just published in the journal Neurolmage, we had people participate in pairs. Participant A went into the fMRI scanner to measure brain activity, while participant B went in front of a camera, with electrodes connected to their hand. Participant A could now decide whether to give, or not to give, little shocks to participant B, knowing that for each shock to B, A would get 5 cents. The shocks were unpleasant, but tolerable, and A could see B’s hand twitch each time they gave B a shock. The key manipulation was that in 60 trials, A was free to choose whether to give shocks or not, while in the other 60 trials, A heard the experimenter order them to give a shock on half the trials and not to give a shock on the other half.
    The results were quite striking. The vast majority of participants never disobeyed an order to deliver a shock, and gave the full 30 shocks they were ordered to give. In contrast, on trials in which they were free to choose, they only delivered 23 shocks on average, deciding not to give shocks on more trials than they decided to give shocks. When asked how guilty they felt about delivering shocks, they reported feeling less guilty when following orders than when freely deciding to deliver a shock. So orders increase the willingness to inflict pain, and reduce the feeling of guilt. Using fMRI, we looked specifically at how strongly A would activate their own pain system (including the insula and anterior cingulate cortex) while witnessing the shocks they inflict on B. This activity was clearly reduced when following orders.
    These results help us understand the terrifying mystery of war atrocities. We are all empathic beings who normally suffer when we harm other people. But if we obey the orders of others, this empathy is reduced. Our conscience is dulled, and the brakes on our violence are weakened.
According to the author’s experiment published in the journal Neuroimage, ________.
选项 A、participant A can decide on the duration of the pain felt by participant B
B、the control group and intervention group are set up in trials
C、participant A tend to give as many shocks as possible to participant B
D、participant do not feel guilty when they deliver shocks to others
答案B
解析 推断题。根据题干关键词Neurolmage定位到第四段。第四段提到了作者自己做的电击实验，考生阅读时需要注意与上文2014年莫利.克罗基特所做的实验做好区分。在作者的实验中，参与者们被分成两人一组，并且关键的操作步骤是在60次试验中，A可以自由选择是否电击，而在另外60次试验中，A根据命令行事，在一半试验中电击，在另一半试验中不电击。由此可推测得知，该实验设置了对照组和干预组，因此答案选[B]。参与者A可以决定是否给参与者B电击，而非能决定电击持续时间，排除[A]；[C]与文章意思不符合，在参与者A自由决定的实验中，A不愿意给B电击；[D]与文意不符，文中对比的是自由决定实施电击和执行命令实施电击的内疚程度。
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