Incremental justifications can have an influence on the degree of our conformity and obedience
Conformity and obedience is influenced the persuasive power of the incremental. “You were okay shocking the guy with 225 volts, but not with 226? That’s illogical.” “Come on, we’re all boycotting their businesses. Let’s shut them down; it’s not like anyone patronizes them. Come on, we’ve shut down their businesses, let’s loot them; it’s not like the stores are doing them any good.” We rarely have a rational explanation for an intuitive sense that a line has been crossed on a continuum. What incrementalism does is put the potential resister on the defensive, making the savagery seem like an issue of rationality rather than of morality.
This represents an ironic inversion of our left hemisphere tendency to think in categories (The right hemisphere recognizes and groups things by comparing them with an exemplar whereas the left recognizes things by categories), and to irrationally inflate the importance of an arbitrary boundary. The descent into savagery can be so incremental as to come with nothing but arbitrary boundaries, and our descent becomes like the proverbial frog cooked alive without noticing. When your conscience finally rebels and draws a line in the sand, we know that it is likely to be an arbitrary one, fueled by implicit subterranean forces—despite your best attempts at pseudospeciation, this victim’s face reminds you of a loved one’s; a smell just wafted by that took you back to childhood and reminds you of how life once felt innocent; your anterior cingulate neurons just had breakfast. At such times, a line having finally been drawn must be more important than its arbitrariness.
References
- Sapolsky, Robert. (2017). Behave Chapter 12. Hierarchy, Obedience, and Resistance (p. 536). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Psychology / Social Psychology Status:☀️