Video: Neurosciences de la violence et des valeurs (DocDrop)

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so welcome to the violence values and the brain which has been organized by professor gretie mirdal who is the director of the brain culture

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and society program of the institute of advanced studies in paris whose president is sadie lalu and scientific director simone luke

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this project started by some years ago four years ago was started by professor izak fried when he was a fellow in the institute

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and he brought a challenge con concerning what he called syndrome e that he is going to present to you in a minute during three years of work and

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discussions three international interdisciplinary symposia were held in the institute following this incredible work

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gathering specialties from so many disciplines a book was published by odile jacob new york and we want to thank odile jacob and

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bernard gottlieb from the edition that gave us this opportunity and this book was launched only a few days ago and will be also presented to

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you i will basically share this webinar meaning that i will have as a main job to tell the speakers

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that they cannot go over 15 minutes and i will ring after 12 minutes a little song but i have a co-chairman who is professor denis paschansky

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denis is a historian and he's a great specialist and i just want to mention that he published recently a very interesting book concerning

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the terrorist attack and the victims of this attack on 13th of november 2015 and the knee will have some minutes after all the

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speakers have given their talks to give us his appreciation or ideas of what he heard this afternoon we will have

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three speaks three speakers first issac fried susan fisker bernard gertillo then we will have a 15-minute discussion time where we will give

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the discussion time to all the not the speakers but the audience and that will be gathered by the chat system so please send your messages which will be

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gathered by simon luke and then we will have patrick hargard leos migrad greti mirdal and then the little commentary by

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denis paschansky i'd like to introduce immediately process is sacred from ucla and tel aviv university who was the

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initiator of this program and i i want to say how fantastic it has been not only for the institute community but all the participants to have his ability

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to come and go from uh across the planet to follow this program for these three years thank you itzhak you have the floor i want to really uh thank you for for

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this invitation i must say the only disappointment is really not being able to to actually be in paris here at this time

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i think this is a big loss especially at the wonderful place which is the the institute itself and so our topic

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today uh my my topic really concentrate on the brains that pull the the triggers really syndrome e i labeled it then and now but let me just go back to

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to the origin of this work and this concept essentially um [Music] we have seen over and over again this

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same uh phenomena over the years you know in armenia in 1915 in poland in 1941

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in cambodia in 1975 in serb nika in 1995

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and in rwanda in 1994 and of course in syria in 2014 and and even now so this repeating uh images of

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people at trenches or interventions being shot by by individuals who are aiming at them from above in many forms are

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a repeating phenomena essentially in in history and indeed this phenomena and the emphasis on the perpetrators really as a

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as a topic of study it was already pointed out by a soul free freedom there in 1989 he says most interpreters try to avoid the

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problem posed by the psychology of total extermination concentrating exclusively on specific ideological motives on institutional dynamics but an

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independent psychological residue seem to defy the historian and there's sort of an unease of interpretation that we cannot but stem from the non-congruence between

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intellectual probing and the blocking of intuitive comprehension i mean we see something and yet we say is really does it really exist or does it not so

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there is really an uncanny uh sensation when we are actually facing with these problems of the perpetrators you know there's a recent book which

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which really goes back to this very issue the ravine by wendy lower which was just a published a couple of months ago and really the author here concentrated

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on this single image which i think portrays this very minute that we are all you know extremely agitated by and yet we cannot really comprehend and

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understand what is going on here this is a moment you know of four individuals essentially shooting at a woman you know who is holding her

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child and in a moment she will be dead in the pit you can see the smoke coming out which is actually the previous shooting this was obviously a sight of of massive shooting

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and what wendy laura did she really went and tried to to investigate this very minute to identify both victim and each of the perpetrators

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which was actually present at this minute and this was in a place in the uk ukraine and neuropol and in fact you can see other you know

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horrible sights you know from that in this very moment of what is happening here really um left me with with a feeling of uh of really trying to

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understand and that's really what precipitated you know my my initial thinking about this issue of course being influenced by by major work uh

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mostly of course by christopher browning uh the seminal book ordinary men and of course other accounts in in following years such as the jean hutchfield of the terrible killings

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in rwanda of course in the background you know all the you know what what we cannot talk about in in detail now you know the milgram experiment the stanford prison experiment you know

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that in 1971 the abu garri prison reality not experiment that we have that we have heard about i can breathe you know that we are seeing you know in

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in this time and and in this age so this is something that that we we need to to understand he probably will not but at least this quest you know

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is continuing in my mind and i think in the mind of of many people so this is why you know uh already over two decades ago i was able to actually publish in the

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landsat this hypothesis of syndrome e and my my main question was was really what is happening in this transformation of this seemingly non-violent people or

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people with no history of violence what is really at the core of this transformation this was really the issue at hand and i decided at that point to

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really look at it as a medical model and i try to understand first the symptomatology and this is how i really approach it at the the time and again you know i focus on

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this very single moment of what is happening here you know you see here an individual shooting there are two other guns on there on the left side and there is really you know i think

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what freedom there looked as is a sense of uncanniness really that indeed intrigued by uncertainty as to the true nature of the perpetrators you know in

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browning account really eighty percent you know of those people in battalion 101 which he investigated were actually participants in that in that massacre

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um let me just see here [Music] okay so those symptoms were essentially a compulsive repetitive of violence obsessive ideation

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perseveration rapid decentralization to violence diminished effective reactivity a hyper arousal a sense of elation you know with the totality of

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destruction intact intellectual ability such as language memory and problem solving skill isn't compartmentalization individual being able to conduct activities

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which are seemingly in cognitive stage which are in conflict normal family life yet killing entire families obedience to authority and finally you know a central element of this

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essentially a being a group dependent uh phenomena which really exists in groups and indeed the main concept from from this uh

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a pathophysiological model which i tried to to bring forward at the time was what i call cognitive fracture that is essentially a cessation to generate emotion appropriate to images conjured

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by certain categories and stimuli that is a prefrontal cortex essentially functionally disconnected from lower centers and this is what i call cognitive fracture

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it was very different from a model of a primitive animal being unleashed in the human on the contrary it's really the human the prefrontal the most advanced centers

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of the human brain being essentially uh working hyperactively and not getting the necessary normal feedback from the lower centers which would restrain

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such be behavior in animal uh or or in a brain which is not human and again those central structures that you can see here the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and the the amygdala

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which is probably the center of this disconnection again we are talking here about values and and rules and we'll talk today about values the rule system which sometimes

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is placed in in the prefrontal cortex on the lateral aspect and the value system in the medial prefrontal cortex you know work by by many individuals now nowadays

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really juxtaposes those two elements which are sometimes in conflict and probably to an extreme extent in this syndrome there is a simply effect which i try to emphasize that

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there are probably physiological changes which are at the root and today we do have tools to study such in in this study by mullenberg and al uh

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which really showed people playing you know video games of actual killing in video either civilians or soldiers and they've seen really a change in the perception you know when

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when people were actually playing video games killing uh soldiers they were actually not even activated areas which

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have to do with perception of faces but actually treated those faces as objects and at the same time you know those areas associated with guilt in the lateral um

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[Music] prefrontal cortex those areas were really not active during this kind of behavior so basically uh you know this is work which

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was had wonderful opportunity to have many disciplines participating in these three sets of conferences in 2015 2016 and 17

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the brains that pull the triggers where we actually try to approach this from a multi-disciplinary approach bringing not only a neuroscience but obviously social sciences

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psychology the legal profession and in other aspects and essentially the question which we made and the question which i want again to raise today and the main question is how do

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ordinary individuals capable of undergoing such extreme change in behavior to repetitive killers in groups and can neuroscience dialogue really with the human

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and social sciences lead to new insights and finally can anything be really done to meet the challenge of prevention and containment so these questions were dealt with in those three

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conferences and essentially gotten a quite a a positive review even in nature rephrasing this question as what makes peaceful

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neighbors become mass murderers and rephrasing our transformation is that striking transformation is a kind of a kill switch which which

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to which the human brain may be unfortunately vulnerable and that really brings us to this book which just came out which summarizes those

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this discussion by odile jacob publishings i'll just say very briefly that the book deals really with those three questions one is really are we dealing with mad

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people with bad people i mean who are the perpetrators the second question is what happens when brains make decisions what are really the

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substrates of this type of behavior can neuroscience have dialogue with other disciplines and then of course prevention and containment and finally

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a responsibility and judgment i just want to take you know this opportunity to to really uh bring the sad news that one of our dear colleagues

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emil bruno who participated very actively in the second a conference and you can see here his chapter the marionette thread how the tags of

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embassy and dehumanization can lead to intergroup conflict emil has done wonderful work in in this area but unfortunately past passed away a last last year

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due to in incurable illness so our thoughts of course are with his families and with his friends so i would just like to uh conclude here to bring us to the present

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age and just really try and think where do we see this today are those trends obviously existing today or are we going to really

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follow the lead of stephen pinker and saying saying that really the better angels really are in our nature and things are actually getting better

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so with this statement and with this question i will conclude and thank you again for the opportunity to talk here and i look forward to a very interesting afternoon

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thank you very much i'd like uh now to ask susan fiske from princeton university to present us with her ideas

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and facts please susan perfect so i'm i'm honored to be here and quite humbled to be asked to address

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these uh monumental questions but what i hope to do is to illustrate some of the ways that social neuroscience can inform our conversation about

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these issues and i should say that um uh this is i'm an amateur social neuroscientist um so these these data are from the beginnings of the times that people were beginning to do social

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neuroscience but i i hope that there's some insight here to share so the main point i want to make is to talk about some of really what are psychological mechanisms as represented in the brain and the ways

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that people dehumanize other people if you get nothing else out of these 15 minutes i would like you to get the message that dehumanization comes in different forms but they're knowable and systematic

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so we think about dehumanization as being a function of two dimensions one is warmth which is the dimension of the other person's or group's intent and the other one is

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confidence their ability to enact it so for example um when people are thinking about the in-group and these are in-group people nominated by princeton students

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but all over the world people see their own citizens and their own middle class as the in-group and they express pride and those are fully human beings to them this is in contrast to different kinds

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of out groups so for example the worst kind of out groups in every country are people without a home also drug addicts and people express disgust toward these

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people and as if they're talking about animals particularly rodents and vermin many ethnicities fit into this quadrant mostly their ethnicities

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uh that are wanderers or who are um for example roma in europe um bedouin travelers in the uk uh so it depends on the on the country in his particular history

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who these people are but there's something about not having a fixed address that makes other people particularly ruthless and dehumanizing these groups and seeing them as having

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no redeeming positive features so these are groups that are low on both dimensions but some groups are mixed so older people and disabled people elicit pity because they're seen as

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being well intentioned but incompetent and they get objectified so people take care of them um but uh don't treat them as fully human they're objects bodies to be taken care

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of very few ethnicities fit into this quadrant most places but occasionally that might be the case and then finally this is

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uh the quadrant that is the most dangerous um and elicits genocide the most often so groups that are seen as highly competent uh but not well intentioned

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um are illicit envy which is a very volatile emotion and often groups that are outsider successful entrepreneurs in a given society when their social breakdown they're the ones who are

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attacked so uh in the united states at this time for example asians are viewed that way we've had terrible violence toward asian women just in the last few days

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so this is the a schematic of what i just said what i want to do is concentrate on each of the out group quadrants and give you a picture of how the brain responds if these are basic there ought to be

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neural signatures associated with each so let's start with envy so the envy quadrant the envied out groups are seen as competent but cold they don't have good intentions

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besides besides asians currently in the united states jewish people have been viewed this way repeatedly in history and in current circumstances some places

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so groups like this elicit shading for you that is um so this is this guy has a yacht he looks very happy about his yacht and you think just what happens if he steps backward a

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little bit well he would fall in the water you know i see on my screen some of the other speakers smiling about this you know we wouldn't be sorry we don't want to kill him but not not just yet

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because there's not social breakdown but um envied people elicit particularly feeling good about their bad events and bad about their good events and this

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is unique to this quadrant so people will report this but also psychophysiological data reflected so if you put if you put emg electrodes on people's faces

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you can pick up people's tendency to smile and what you see is that people smile at the good events of most groups even the disgust out group

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except for the envy out group they smile more to their bad events so this is a very direct indicator of of malicious

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pleasure at somebody else's bad events let's look at a contrasting category that is the pity quadrant uh so with pity it's a different dynamic when somebody

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uh is disabled for example um they're seen as warm but incompetent and the attitude toward them is uh sort of patronizing care of the

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body as an object so they they they get pity only if they adhere to prescriptions because it's a top-down kind of attitude and they must not be at fault for their

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um disability or else they don't get pitied so uh this gets us in the brain territory the the part of the brain that i'm going to talk about in the next

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remaining minutes is the medial prefrontal cortex so the medial prefrontal cortex it's a very reliable result it's involved when people are thinking about other people's minds

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and as a social psychologist i'm particularly interested that this part of the brain is so uh easily activated when people think about what's going on in somebody else's mind

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so for the pity quadrant um the mpfc comes online if people are contemplating whether the person is at fault for their disability this is a very different dynamic from

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the low low quadrant or well i'll tell you that in a minute let me give you another example that may seem quite different but it's not really that different

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um women's bodies get objectified too but in in a and also in a patronizing way and the medial prefrontal cortex is involved here too so we showed people the kinds of photographs that you see

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below men and women clothed or relatively unclothed and uh what you see is that um when we split the photographs between faces and bodies

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uh people remembered the bodies but not the faces of the women who were in bikinis um and but they were not so they were d they were dehumanizing them in the sense

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that they didn't recognize their faces but they did recognize the body only and this is correlated with the mpfc being activated so what you see is that sexism correlates

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in these are male viewers correlates positively with remembering uh naked male bodies but it but it correlates negatively with remembering the faces of the women who are bikini clad

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so this is a form of dehumanization for the sexist men uh they they the more sexist they are the more the mpfc

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fails to activate when they look at when they're looking at the women okay um so let me let me close here by talking about the most dehumanized group of all which

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is the people who are homeless this also applies to refugees and poor people generally so um a homeless

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person um i've already said we've the npfc activates normally in social cognition attributing intent but maybe this isn't true so much for people who are homeless

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or refugees or disgusting to people so the way that people behave when they encounter a person who appears to be homeless is they don't make contact they don't

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look at the person in the face they stay away from them as if they're feeling their might be contaminated and what you see uniquely in this quadrant is disgust as if they're seeing

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a pile of garbage and what happens here is that of all the quadrants that we show people pictures of the mpfc does not activate when they look at pictures of people who appear to

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be homeless it's as if they're looking at a pile of garbage and instead you know other parts of the brain come online that are associated with disgust so for for me this is the most

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dehumanizing spot for somebody to be in is to be viewed as not even worthy of of thinking about their minds okay um so

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i have a couple more minutes what i want to talk about is how you can use these kinds of techniques to see what the value of people's lives is depending on what part of the space they fit into

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so there are two features to this one is that high status people in general so that would be the in group middle class people also admittedly rich people and professionals and

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outsider entrepreneurs they're higher status than the other two quadrants if you think about how insurance companies value a life they value people who make money and who

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have status and i'm going to argue that ordinary people do this too but the particularly valued people are the in-group versus the the most dehumanized

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outgroup the discussed quadrant so we're going to use the trolley dilemma to judge value so the trolley dilemma

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is like this there's a trolley a street car out of control going down going up the track if it goes all the way to the end of the track it will kill five people

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joe is standing on an overpass and he can push the person next to him onto the track and stop the stop the trolley car but it will kill that person and the question is is it okay for him

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to do that he's not allowed to jump off and sacrifice himself so this is the dilemma that participants are posed with 85 percent of participants say it's not

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okay for him to to do this that you can't sacrifice make the decision to sacrifice a human being it's not up to you but what we did was we added out groups

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from all these different quadrants on the track and on the overpass to get at the the value of different people we got acceptability ratings and mpfc activation

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from embedded in a social choice network what you see is now remember the baseline is 80 to 90 percent of people say it's not okay to do this but if it totally changes when you put

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different groups on the bridge and on the tracks so 69 of people say it's okay to sacrifice that is to push low status low competence groups

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so a homeless person or an old person it's okay to push them off the bridge to save five people who do you save it's okay to do this sacrifice if you're saving high

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competence high status groups 77 percent say it's okay to do that and the combination of sacrificing one poor person to save five in group members that is five middle class

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people eighty-five percent eighty-four percent say it's okay to do that so you completely reversed people's spontaneous judgment about whether it's okay to sacrifice one person to save five

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mostly they say no unless it's a homeless person you're pushing and it's middle class people you're saving and this differs from all the other combinations moreover people are not doing this

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lightly um so if you look at brain scans of that particular comparison what you get is activation of what is viewed as a difficult social choice

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network but the mpfc is back again so people are thinking about the minds and worth of the people that they're sacrificing and saving all right i'm going to close by

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offering some hope so uh the in group for all of us is characterized by our interdependence with each other and when people are interdependent that

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is when we need each other we care about each other's intentions because that predicts what people will do next and the mpfc is come as an indicator that people is correlated with people thinking about

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each other's intentions so we set up a situation where people were independent of each other as a control group we looked at what was activating in the mpfc when they were getting expected

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information about groups where they're independent from each other the expected information activates the mpfc but what if you really want to learn about a person what if you want to get

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over your stereotypes and dehumanization of them you need to look at the unexpected information the counter stereotypic information and when people are interdependent with each other that pattern completely

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reverses and the mpfc indicates it we have decades of data showing that people pay attention they think about it and they reconsider their expectations about the other

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when they're interdependent so what i want to argue is that one of the ways of making people rehumanize each other is by interdependence because then they really consider each other as fully functioning human beings

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with expected and unexpected attributes and these are my interdependent lab members so i want to thank you and thank them for their work

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thank you very much susan thank you that was very clear and now could i ask berenger doctor bernard who is from united

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rochelle clinic pierre denicker said hospitalia laboratory was headed by professor neymar jafari to give

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her contribution berenger bonjour so first of all i would like to thank professor miodel and freed and bertos for inviting me today um i will present uh the summary of the

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chapter that professor alberto and i have written in in the book entitled the brains that pull the triggers so the topic of my talk is the following question

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are embassy and violence compatible sorry [Music] um so at first sight the answer is no empathy and violence

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are not compatible because they refer to uh two antagonist phenomena but uh throughout history there is a large number of examples that seems to contradict this postulate

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so as described by uh it's agfrid this is the case in uh syndrome e um syndrome a uh i won't go too deep into the detail but it is a

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as a similar symmetrical characteristic that is to be a clinical paradox combining contradictory uh elements so in addition to obscenities reduced affective reactivity uh people

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with uh syndrome e commit repetitive acts of violence again against specific and different less group so odd group members and they lead at the same time

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a normal social life so with their in-group members and also a normal family life so they protect them to love their friends and and families and they show normal behav empathic

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behaviors that's um the question of the compatibility of embassy and violence is much more complicated that's originally sought and i think the first question to

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address is to know what is a compatibility so compatibility refers to two elements systems ids beliefs etc that work well together or can exist

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together successfully so we assume that embassy and violence are in fact compatible they are compatible because empathy is not a continuous trait but a dynamic mental

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state that can vary over time so there are two resulting questions how is the brain able to render the compatibility of embassy and violence possible

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and the second question what does this compatibility mean at a special and particularly at the temporal level of the brain functional organization so in the next slide i will show how

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embassy relates to morality uh suggesting firstly that empathy and violence are not compatible but then i will also show a contradictory argument

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suggesting that embassy and violence can be compatible and for that i will focus on on two points that is a first point that uh embassy is not a continuous trait and the second point that empathy needs

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to be distinguished from sympathy so um empathy is the english translation from the german einflunk which means to feel into

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as introduced by the continental philosophy so empathy refers to the capacity we have to feel and understand relieved experience of someone else and is our associated mental state

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while and that it's important adopting his her vision spatial and psychological perspective and while maintaining self-further distinction so empathy relies

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upon bottom-up and turned-on processes and as such it integrates several brain networks and activity within these networks these networks are partly uh cooperating

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partly uh competing so that is activities in the neural neuron systems of course in the theory of my network but also in the vestibular system as we

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have shown with albertos in our previous eeg work and particularly in the tpg so temporal parietal junction also invest integrates the central executive system

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and the dlpfc the acme data in the emotional system but also two important resting state networks that is the default mode network and the silence network so empathy is extremely complex

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phenomenon and the complexity of its phenomenology is reflected in the complexity of its neural physiology and probably because of this complexity

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empathy is a privileged way to mentally reach another person as a subject is in is her authority that is to reach the other as other it's

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also a very important way to feel and understand as objectively as possible uh the beliefs the thoughts the emotions representations of someone else but that it's possible if

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only at the same time uh once pre-ips is preserved it means that in a real emphasis relationships there is no cell for their confusion there is no hypertrophy or hypotrophy of

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the self or of the other there is a balanced relationship between two individuals between two perspectives and that's why a real empathy relationship

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leads to intense objectivity that is this this balanced relationship between two perspectives and two individuals but also to its correlate that is objectivity

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that is the fact that people can understand each other on the same object of thought despite they can have different perspectives on the same object so it's a reason why embassy is also

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considered a driving motivation of moral behavior and justice as proposed by by the city and coel and that it has been shown that an embassy favors pro-social altruist

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behaviors inhibit anti-social behaviors is a protective factor against violent violent and anti-social behaviors and that training empathy reduces aggressive behaviors

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but um a meta-analysis on 5400 subjects with 3100 offenders shows that the negative correlation between low empathy and offending disappears

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when intelligence and social economic status have been controlled for so it means that the alteration of embassy as a continuous trait in offenders which was the hypothesis in this study

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does not explain violence if empathy is tested between outbreaks so it means that there is probably a complete breakdown of embassy during outbreaks

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but that the embassy level of offenders between outbreaks is normal so there are two observations what is the appropriate time for evaluating embassy and the second

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observation is that embassy is probably much more dynamic a dynamic mental state that's something that is continuous um empathy can also generate parakill

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moral behavior so as already said individuals always favor in group members and they tend to more identify and cooperate with people from the same group

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it leads to bias moral decision making for example there is abnormal activity in the orbital frontal cortex when people from the same group are seeing their in-group members being

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armed by all group members which also elicits greater empathic responses so this is this is a mysterious interesting hypothesis but we think that it also partially

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conflates embassy and sympathy uh indeed uh empathy uh means to feel into when sympathy means to feel

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with that is the same thing at the same times as someone else so empathy relies uh upon self-further distinction when sympathy on the contrary relies on self-further

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confusion in empathy there is a balanced interplay between one's one's own ego-centric viewpoint and the viewpoint of the other that is people in embassy are

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mentally adopting the viewpoint of someone else in order to experience what the other are experiencing but while keeping their own obscenity in the contrary in simplicity

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people are keeping their own egocentric viewpoint and they are self-attributing to themselves what the other are feeling and experiencing and we have shown that this leads to a

00:45:15

much greater activity of the neural neural system in sympathy so in in the red part here in the brain um and this greater activity of the mirror neuron system

00:45:26

is not associated with activity in the vestibular system particularly in the left tpg which is known to enable the mental shift between perspective that is between one

00:45:40

one's own angular centroid perspective and the other perspective so in contrary to embassy so we propose that uh sympathy may lead to buyer's judgment

00:45:51

to barrier to buyers moral judgment in contrary to to embassy due to self-attribution and self-identification processes and that will be particularly important within in-group members

00:46:04

the second point is that a a real emphasis relationship is the first necessary step for the development of morality and justice because there is this previous preservation of one's obsidian and of

00:46:17

the other's alterity which is not the case in sympathy um the second point is that we have also shown in our previous work that embassy varies over time in healthy individuals

00:46:30

depending upon their psychological state but also in psychiatric patients with schizophrenia ocd substance use disorder depression we also found the same variation of

00:46:42

embassy but depending upon their clinical state so it means that empathy is much more dynamic a dynamic functioning that a continuous trait

00:46:53

so based on on this results and and data we have uh a proposed with along directors what we have uh called the threefold intersubjective clinical model of syndrome e

00:47:06

so uh at the semilogical level syndrome e is a clinical entity which combines so normal and basic behaviors towards close friends and families it means that lack of embassy in this

00:47:20

syndrome is not constitutive of the syndrome that lack of empathy in this syndrome is not a continuous mental state secondly synthesis relationship to the in-group members

00:47:32

which leads to self-identification and alteration of the sense sense of identity and group contagion second third point there is a complete but transitory breakdown

00:47:43

of empathy targeting specific ad groups and under specific social historical conditions but what does it mean at the brain level and particularly

00:47:56

at the special level of the brain functional organization uh as previously uh shown by etc there is there is doing outbreaks uh disorders in the prefrontal cortex

00:48:09

and also to the to the the connection between the prefrontal cortex and the subcritical uh and the cortical areas so uh there is a normal activity

00:48:20

of the the dlpfc because people with syndrome e are still able to plan and to solve problems but there is an hyperactivity of the orbital from philadelphia cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex

00:48:34

leading to obsessive mediation repetitions of violent acts and motivation for purporting atrocities so this cognitive fracture impacts the emotional processing because

00:48:47

the um prefrontal cortex is stopped on modulating the activity of the middle but we propose that that there is also additional mechanisms particularly

00:49:00

abnormal activity in the vestibular system and the mirror neuron system that is during outbreaks there is probably an hyperactivity of the right tpg which normally sustain once a good central

00:49:14

viewpoint this would lead to the incapacity to disengage from one's egoism threat reference frame but also an hyperactivity or the left tpg leading to the capacity to shift

00:49:27

perspective and hyperactivity of the neural nervous system leading to adding capacity to feel what the victims are feeling so there is a cognitive affective fracture of the

00:49:39

experience of the other as others associated to an hyper hypertrophy of the self so there is a normal brain functioning during normal embassy behaviors but during sympathetic behaviors

00:49:51

so towards in group members we postulated that there is an hyperactivity of the mineral immune system and logic system but hyperactivity of the orbital frontal cortex and medial prefrontal cortex this would

00:50:05

lead to self-identification exaggerated adhesion of the emotional system to social beliefs and representations and that without cognitive evaluation and criticisms

00:50:17

last question it will be my last slide what does this mean what does this mean what does this simultaneity mean between that is between abnormal and normal processes because it's not possible

00:50:30

at a temporal level that there are normal and abnormal activity in the same weight networks so we hypothesize that there is also additional dysfunctional brain mechanisms but at rest

00:50:43

uh it's well documented just just uh 20 seconds that the stability of large large-scale brain networks at rest depends upon noise propagation and that neural noise and brain state that are

00:50:57

close to the stabilization contributes to the development of a given mental state and switch between states so we propose that there is a too fast generation of noise propagation leading to an increased facilitation of

00:51:10

switch between brain states that are antagonists impacting the dm and fpn interplay so the disruption between the processing of ongoing internal source the ideation the

00:51:22

obsessions and the external information that is the suffering of the odd group members in conclusion syndrome e shows that empathy and violence may be compatible in the same individual

00:51:36

it's probably due to the nature of embassy which is a dynamic mental state and not a continuous trait probably also due to the functional organization of the brain in which the same networks may have

00:51:49

normal or abnormal activity in different time windows under specific social historical conditions but now it's time to really understand what does this compatibility mean because there is no

00:52:01

simultaneous activity so it's now time to understand the interaction between the spatial and temporal aspect of syndrome e at the brain level phenological level psychological

00:52:13

sociological and historical level pico syndrome is a perfect example of a biopsychosocial pathological phenomenon many things for your attention

00:52:25

thank you very much beranji i would like to ask simone luke if he can tell us what are the questions which have been

00:52:38

received and if he like to give us these questions and give the floor to the people who ask questions and then we will see who are the speakers who want to

00:52:51

eventually answer these questions yes hello everyone we have no questions yet so i remind everyone that you can ask a question a written question

00:53:06

by clicking on q and r at the bottom of your screen so you can write down your question and uh we will uh answer them okay

00:53:19

let's give one or two minutes uh for is there any speaker who likes to ask another speaker for a question while we wait for the audience to ask questions yeah i think you know

00:53:34

one thing which i will float over over this round table so it looks like a linear table here you know on the on the zoom the screen it really is really the que you know what uh what's what

00:53:47

susan was actually talking about this issue of theory of mind and you know i thought it was quite intriguing that you know these areas

00:53:58

you know with risk respect to to this lowest of the groups right that in in a sense what is happening i think that when we essentially see

00:54:11

people as objects it really is reflected in various brain areas you know in our perceptual area when we look at the face you know of a victim if we are a

00:54:23

perpetrator then really those face areas are probably not activated as was seen in that fmri study and what susan showed that in fact that area of theory of mind

00:54:36

is not activating meaning we cannot we don't attribute when we are a perpetrator we don't attribute to to the victims any mind really you know they are completely objects so it's really both

00:54:48

on the perceptual level and on the on the level of theory of mind that we have this this whole sort of in in in our functional brain so i wonder you know what you know my other

00:55:02

colleagues will have to say about it and so i i agree very much and i think it also relates to what bernoullia was talking about um in that as a social psychologist i'm

00:55:14

more interested in um the situations people are in and how those can change their uh their empathy so in in essence when you're thinking about somebody else's mind you're empathizing with them

00:55:27

and in the case of the failure of the activation of the theory of mind interested media prefrontal cortex so if you tell people that when they're looking at the homeless

00:55:39

people's pictures if you say you're working in a soup kitchen and you have to decide what he'll eat for lunch would he like broccoli something as trivial as that brings back

00:55:50

online the social cognition theory of mind related areas and so um you know you can do something as elaborate as making people interdependent putting them on the same

00:56:03

team together but that's not practical on a large scale and i think um to just get people to think about somebody else's preferences as trivial as what they would eat for lunch

00:56:15

can engage them more deeply and other people as humans okay okay i was really interested at the study that shows difference of perception of the soldier and the civilian

00:56:27

for video gamers do we have something similar with hunters i mean the difference between game and humans well again you know this would be an interesting question i guess you know

00:56:43

the question is how does the hunter views the the hunted right exactly yeah probably yeah exactly yeah that's similar so we we've applied our framework to

00:56:56

animals and [Music] people eat animals in the pity quadrant okay so sheep and cows they're seen as kind of stupid but

00:57:08

well-meaning we don't tend to eat predators who are you know highly competent but i'm not threatening we don't tend to eat vermin okay thanks

00:57:21

patrick yeah thanks very much a very interesting set of talks all three talks absolutely fascinating and uh really exciting and i just have a couple of thoughts which occurred to me as sort of

00:57:36

brainstorming i suppose so several speakers talked about the idea that one can treat a person as an object and i think we're particularly interested here in the

00:57:48

unfortunate cases where one person treats another as an object with malicious intent or with bad intent and i just wondered whether we can think about contrasting that with the case where one

00:58:03

treats another person as an object but with good intent so for example there are some fantastic people at the moment who are sticking needles into millions of other people

00:58:14

um and i was lucky enough to benefit from this and i really didn't have time to even see the person who came at me with a needle shoved it into my arm and potentially saved my life so there's a lot of good

00:58:26

intent there but i think for the nice i can't remember whether it was a woman or a man who who vaccinated me i i don't think they treated me as anything more than an object so i just wonder whether that's a a

00:58:40

topic which could be picked up and then i have one other um uh sort of thought which is really related to the the evolution of society and it picks up on

00:58:52

the the comment you made susan about how much we dislike the people who are not settled the people who have no fixed abode the homeless the immigrants

00:59:04

so i think there's room for some very interesting cross-cultural comparisons to see whether equal things apply in less settled societies such as nomadic societies and it's also interesting to think about

00:59:18

how long we have ourselves being settled as a species it's not that long in terms of evolutionary time so presumably this is all just cultural learning that we've

00:59:29

learned something about property which is causing us to to have violent and unpleasant interactions to to other agents i find that really scary thank you

00:59:43

um you know i i've thought a lot about what it is about people without an address that makes them um outside of consideration as human and not part of society and i think part of

00:59:56

it is um that if they were competent they would own things you know given that we equate status and owning things on the one hand with

01:00:08

confidence on the other and so they're they're disrespected in that way but then also they're not trustworthy because if they do something bad you can't find them and they're not invested in the

01:00:20

community so i think nomadic peoples are particularly you know prone to be dehumanized in that way um to your to your other point about um the medical

01:00:32

uh interventions uh there's been some work done that shows that um when people are treat actually in the process of treating somebody like doing surgery they have to dehumanize them and turn them into a piece of meat

01:00:45

so it's a good thing we're anesthetized when they do that well you know they actually also awake surgeries which are done right but i i can tell you definitely as a surgeon that the whole process of

01:00:58

surgery is really geared toward you know creating an object really you know you cannot drape the the the person right the person is now under drapes you know it's not really

01:01:11

any you know any human object but it's just an object now and and i think you do have to create a mini fracture in order to be able to really concentrate you know on the meticulous

01:01:25

steps that's that so it's not really a full-fledged community fracture but i think it sort of is a well-planned mini fracture that you are creating you know as a

01:01:36

surgeon and very carefully regulated so well planned and well thank you thank you did you get anything from our audience we know do have several questions or the first one was from

01:01:52

valerie who asks that is in particular directed to you anna and berenger how do you relate the neural basis of your definition of empathy to moral values such as

01:02:06

justice you have the floor you mentioned uh well berenger mentioned the work by jean de ceti who has actually concentrated his work

01:02:21

recently you know gender city is now in uh america is in chicago and he has mainly concentrated his uh work on this aspect of morality behind can you answer the questions

01:02:34

briefly briefly i will try to yes um i i would say that the neural basis of empathy and how emphasis functioning is the

01:02:46

condition of possibility of moral and values and justice so a whole different integration of activity leads them to a more more

01:03:00

prefrontal and frontal activity associated with justice so there are the condition they are conditioning the activity in the prefrontal cortex during uh moral injustice situations if i

01:03:13

understood right the correctly the question so we could uh we could refer uh the uh valerie who is a historian that we know

01:03:25

and she has been actually a fellow at the institute of advanced studies working on the ladam justice so thank you valerie for your question any other question simone

01:03:39

yes so a question from don weaning who says thank you to the presenters and has a question on causality is syndrome e a description a description

01:03:50

or a causal mechanism and related to that violence in is bodily action so how can we conceptualize the relationship between brain processes and bodily processes it suck

01:04:05

you can at the same time answer the question concerning morality right if you have something i'm sure you have something to say about the relationship you know just with respect to the issue of uh causality of course you know we can only

01:04:18

talk about correlation you know at this point in terms of the hypothesis uh but you know maybe you know one aspect which is kind of interesting and came out in in uh

01:04:31

in the dr robin stark trevor robbins uh the issue that you can essentially elicit a such states you know with with certain a pharmacological in intervention but

01:04:45

there are certainly some some drugs you know which may instigate a situation you know which is similar to to that in syndrome meaning that you

01:04:57

you got in hyper arousal and a very efficient hyperactive situation you know where for instance at a terrorist who would be really you know hundreds of of people but at

01:05:10

the same time you you have this diminished effective reactive reactivity so that's actually create you know quite an efficient you know killer situation so that may indicate that that you can

01:05:23

actually in instigate or you can cause you know those states in the the brain which are more conducive to this type of syndrome

01:05:40

yes there are others uh and that was also the part about the link between the the mind and the body in the syndrome e theory and how you conceptualize the relationship between

01:05:52

brain processes and bodily processes yeah so i mean i mean are we are we going to to try and solve the mind body problem here or are

01:06:05

we or are we you know push into a dualist uh you know no no we are sure or not like that's the question it's not in the program of the round table

01:06:16

yeah i think you know obviously there is always and you know and one of the criticism is always that we are trying you know to be reductionists in our approaches but you know i think at this point you know most

01:06:29

of our arguments are really correlative and and we're not really you know able to to address you know causal inferences except for you know the thing which i just mentioned about

01:06:40

pharmacokinetics okay see more another one there are two more questions one i guess is more for susan why do we usually tend to search or to

01:06:52

define people based on their faces we often hear people say this person did not look mean well the two dimensions that i've mentioned

01:07:07

warmth of intent and competence to enact it have been shown in facial dimensions too so uh alex todorov's work for example shows that trustworthiness

01:07:18

is inferred from facial structure and also dominant so dominance not surprisingly more masculine faces they're seen as more dominant and higher status and

01:07:32

more feminine faces are seen as less dominant and lower status and so um yeah and then there's a trust there's a trustworthiness dimension too which is the warmth one

01:07:46

um so you know it's not that there's necessarily any truth in it but people do have expectations about people based on their faces when you're interacting with somebody or even seeing them from a little bit of a

01:07:59

distance the face is one of the first cues that you can pick up i mean apart from if they're brandishing a weapon or something [Music] so i don't know why we use faces except

01:08:12

that they're the center of interaction thank you very much uh you have a last question i think uh yes from daniel who asked

01:08:26

well he remarks that there are fewer uh far fewer female than male mass murderers and he wonders if that is the result of a lack of opportunity or if there is

01:08:38

a common factor that would be leading to less participation in situations favoring mass murder and to lesser propensity to mass murder in women so thank you daniel daniel is a

01:08:52

both mathematician and philosopher he is an academician and thank you who is going to answer this question issac well i think you know when i

01:09:03

sort of pointed out as this is as a you know clinical syndrome i did put risk factors as as part of it and obviously based on experience

01:09:15

of what we have seen and observed there is definitely male uh you know male gender is is a risk factor based on history and you know whether

01:09:27

so i i really want to understand you know is the question are the male female differences or what what is the question really can we ask daniel what is the question

01:09:40

i would nominate testosterone as an important variable probably you're probably right okay okay i think it may be uh if we have no more questions even from the speakers from one speaker

01:09:55

to another speaker as far as okay let me just make a very small comment which is not a criticism but a comment we we heard two very different

01:10:08

presentations concerning the brain on one hand susan who picked up very specific areas like middle needle cortex as if something crucial was happening

01:10:22

there and the roger who in the contrary gave us uh what may have seen a complex set of complex networks

01:10:33

and i think we none it should be clear to the audience unless some speaker disagrees with me that none of us think that any of these things happened

01:10:46

in only one area in the brain but that the brain is always working in networks either cooperating or competing do we agree with that yes i want to say that um

01:11:00

you know i was working on these things a while ago at the beginning of the social neuroscience revolution and people were much more oriented at that time toward specific brain areas rather than networks and i recognize that it's a

01:11:13

sort of naive analysis so thank you so we are ready now if you are ready to to hear from sadilalu

01:11:26

who is both professor at the london school of economics and the president of the paris institute for advanced studies he's a sociologist but he has many many

01:11:41

multi-disciplinary uh arrows in his uh casket sadie perfect okay so so um thank you so much for for inviting

01:11:52

me so i'm going to talk also not just about what's in the brain which is not really my my specialism but also about what's outside of it and and brings uh what we have have observed and uh so

01:12:06

about framing and context um so we're we're wondering about these mass killers because they have no inhibition to kill no no shame no guilt no regret but pride perhaps even excitement how did they get

01:12:20

there and the question is how can we rehabilitate them um i may be a bit pessimistic because i'm a psychologist but the question of how do they get there also asks us

01:12:32

i mean are they so strange there are other situations pretty similar if you look at hunters who enjoy mass killing of animals or we see here on on the right um the victory marks on on this

01:12:45

bomber of uh how many people have been killed or hoped by these bombers or how many planes have been downed and uh they express pride so hunting and war

01:12:57

are other examples where we seem to see similar um you know patterns and indeed uh aggression and violence are very usual behaviors in in animals and i think it's quite important

01:13:10

to distinguish two types one which is interspecific like uh hunting another which is intraspecific violence and these are connected with very different patterns uh there are many causes for for

01:13:24

aggression and violence and killing it could be predation defense stress fear and colleagues have noted another series uh rivalry uh envy status uh you know hatred

01:13:37

uh and also appropriation of fear can be uh can be um good reasons for that and in humans um intraspecific violence doesn't seem to be problematic we call this uh hunting or

01:13:51

eradication while in fact uh it is very regulated uh to be violent uh against conspecifics right we have regulations for that but it's it's okay to kill vermin it's not okay to kill people

01:14:04

and uh we have similarly uh analogous behaviors of which some are authorized and even recommended like war or you know executions and some which are completely forbidden

01:14:19

uh like terrorism or assassination and there's a big difference between killing louis the 16th on the bottom left and assassination of president kennedy on the bottom right

01:14:31

and so it's a matter of values of who is the target and what is the process pretty much and if you look at things that have already been hinted at by our colleagues depending on target status it is

01:14:43

okay or not okay to uh to kill the first main distinction is between human and non-human and basically it's it's okay to kill non-human and it's really okay to kill vermin right in terms of human it really depends

01:14:56

whether they're in your in group and then it's not okay to be violent it's forbidden uh if it's the art group it's a bit different uh there's a difference between the adversaries where it's not so okay to kill them

01:15:08

uh but you can be bad to them and the enemy where it's okay to kill i mean that's the difference between a soldier and a civilian uh from uh uh the art group for example as has been shown by my colleagues

01:15:19

and so the most important probably uh feature of our problem here is is uh what uh jacques simla described very well in his in the what happens in uh mass killings

01:15:32

is the assimilation of targets to non-humans which is the start of the whole thing the whole process and this actually brings them into the interspecific mode where the kill is guilt-free basically i

01:15:44

mean that's okay to kill them if they're non-human right but this is not so simple and uh some some killers may still be aware that these are humans and we also have uh

01:15:57

you know to consider the fact that they are aware they're killing con specifics and uh there are a series of violence safeguards uh first it's not that easy to kill

01:16:09

somebody with bare hands i mean the humans are pretty resistant and if you beat someone it's hard to beat someone to death with your bare hands the other thing is that we all have a natural inhibition to kill i mean

01:16:22

people don't like to kill con specifics even before i mean uh acculturation and training there seems to be an inhibition to kill that's been well described by ethologists seems to be universal

01:16:36

then we have institutional uh you know safeguards uh law religion ideology most uh cultures uh severely repress intra-specific violence and especially

01:16:48

uh killing some some fellow uh man is uh is an in internalized you know ban in most cultures and finally there's the rational

01:16:59

uh approach to it which means that people might um be hesitant to kill somebody else because of fear of damage or retaliation because the defendant might

01:17:12

actually defend uh uh herself or himself so in most societies killers are abnormal they're severely punished normal individuals have strong natural aversion and cultural aversion to kill fellow

01:17:25

humans nevertheless um this as i said is is prohibition towards uh other humans so intra-specific and four people of the in group and

01:17:38

there are bypass techniques right well-known for example weapons enable killing people easier than bare hands you if you uh do not have sensory uh

01:17:49

or or a mental i mean closeness to the victim it's easier to kill it's easier to kill by pressing a button or a trigger than to kill someone with bare hands institutional you know clearance or

01:18:03

incentives can actually be something that waives all the the moral problems and and finally the the rational fear of retaliation

01:18:15

uh can be uh you know outpowered by a power balance or protection of the killers which is what we actually see in most mass mass killings so um this all these uh

01:18:29

things plus the fact that as we know very well most humans i mean humans are not teddy bears right most of them will easily commit intra-specific violence if they're put in specific conditions and the context

01:18:42

is pretty important uh we have again uh cited the the seminal works of of stanley milgram in 61 and we know that about two-thirds of normal subjects i mean can

01:18:57

actually go to a deliver a lethal electric shock to what they believe is a real person in the next room and they many of them do that do that even if they have to touch the person as they do

01:19:10

it and we know by experience that during war and a lot of normal persons end up as as killers without that so many difficulties

01:19:23

nevertheless again it seems that the first time you kill is more difficult and it's not just the first time you kill it's the first time you do something that is deviant

01:19:35

behavior well howard becker noted that outsiders feel strong inhibition to perform the divine behavior the first time and they feel what he calls a strong impulse to law abiding right

01:19:48

and what happens is that in divine groups there have been have been a series of uh techniques of neutralization to go beyond uh this uh strong impulse to a low binding or

01:20:00

respect the social norm like denial of responsibility denial of injury denial of the victim condemnation of the condemners appeal to higher loyalties for example then we have

01:20:12

seen techniques routinely employed by various governments or groups of brainwashing which means uh you train the the the novice subjects by putting them in a group with people who

01:20:24

are more advanced in the ideology the work of edgar shane on this is really interesting you can also have the use the scapegoat mechanism or you target frustration and

01:20:37

into hatred to specific groups i mean it's very well known that the jews for example have been the targets but it's been a lot of minorities have often been the targets of of this uh you know

01:20:50

targeted uh hatred and the frustration and then what seems to happen and and i i have no idea of how it works in in you know in the brain but my observations is that

01:21:07

there seem to be a sort of combat mode where people uh get into uh you know the the the spirit of being in battle and and so that's when you you the out group is the

01:21:21

enemy and there's a mixture of excitement group loyalty obedience groupthink and also endurance and seems to be a something quite common in war times but not just in wartime would be catastrophes and stuff like that

01:21:34

so there are a series of of techniques that are used to uh to sort of uh decondition uh the humans to let the violence uh uh you know uh operate

01:21:47

but if you talk about mass killing this is not just about individual uh you know uh reconditioning or or brainwash or institution if you look at it these things are organized first there needs to be

01:22:00

a mass ideological framing you have the use of media you have creation of content you have a training of speakers and leaders institution you use language rules to make these things acceptable in the local culture

01:22:13

i'm showing on the bottom left nazi a propaganda poster and you also have organization and mass equipment and logistics right weapon weaponry training identification control

01:22:28

to uh make people who are opposed comply camps transportation organization mass graves and a lot of thing it's it's a whole business it's a large organization and this is when we can see

01:22:40

starting what is going to become mass killing this is not happening like just one isolated you know a person this is usually organized and planned

01:22:52

and so this creation of installation that is systems multi-layer system that channel a specific set of people into doing these mass killings is something that that is

01:23:05

distributed over three layers first the material affordances like the logistics the weapons the killing grounds the camps and also the killing procedures for scaling that up okay then the layer the second layer

01:23:18

which we were most interested in the first part of of this this conference uh the how to gradually use propaganda to to move the target status from fellow to out group to vermin

01:23:30

using values arguments because its values as as susan has shown very well that distinguishes in groups and out groups okay so these are the arguments based on values then you can leverage frustration to

01:23:42

produce and target the collective hatred community building is essential to keep group pressure and then you have these techniques of neutralization i talked about and finally you need social regulation

01:23:55

that's a larger layer of the organizers who create the earth i mean the ideology the rules the law the affiliation perhaps a whole you know philosophy and authority system and then

01:24:07

the social division of labor and the organization of these mass killings and so this whole layer structure is quite resilient and and so it enables

01:24:19

nervouses to learn by doing right by observing how the others and then the group pressure they do it and then once the first kill is done embodied competencies are required and external scaffolding can be

01:24:31

reduced because people become autonomous they know how to do it on their on their own uh incentive and this is perhaps the moment something has changed in their in their brain um so um

01:24:44

to to sum up and this is my last my last slide if you want to do um efficient prevention and containment of the problem of of mass killing you must consider all the aspects of its

01:24:57

construction beyond the individual brain i mean we humans are easily to be conditioned and and they potentially can be violent right especially

01:25:09

against other species right but the construction of mass killings is is uh is something that can be counter if you address constantly with vigilance uh the terrain you know people who can

01:25:22

become killers those who are frustrated the process of group affiliation that will be necessary for this kind of conditioning also look at the mechanisms of framing and conditioning the individuals

01:25:34

and it's quite easy to see when the propaganda starts on a large level that something bad might happen if you don't stop it right and also be aware when you start seeing these engagement and neutralization techniques

01:25:47

in groups i mean this is the beginning of some problem the training in a way to do this and uh also the institutional framework planning and organizing because usually this is planned at large level otherwise

01:26:00

it never gets too massive scale and this is also visible by the logistics that that gets uh installed uh gradually and after 14 minutes i'm stopping

01:26:12

so you don't have to ring thank you for your attention thank you so much very nice thank you sadie and now we are ready to hear

01:26:22

patrick haggard from university college london volition agency violence patrick

01:26:38

can you hear me and can you see my screen yes good okay well first of all i'd like to begin by thanking uh the iea in its uh full um uh full range and

01:26:51

we're thanking itsec in particular for uh many links into this project over the years i think i first went to a syndrome e conference in 2016 or so and i've spoken to it's

01:27:05

betty and many others about it over the years and um always found the conversations very challenging um but the topic is important and it's been a pleasure to be associated with the

01:27:17

intellectual work i'd like to thank um uh this uh paris sectly share which allowed me to continue thinking about these things a little bit when i was at iea last year so i'm an experimental cognitive

01:27:30

psychologist and i've been studying human actions so how can the study of human action tell us about violence i'm going to begin with some fairly textual points

01:27:42

so we can assume that people normally have volitional control over their actions that means that people decide for themselves what to do and this includes many of their violent actions i

01:27:55

i'll come on to why i say many later on so violent behavior is often a personal choice right just like most of the other things that i may do maybe a personal choice now people's action choices depend

01:28:08

strongly on sociocultural instruction and reinforcement learning so what people choose to do depends on many factors but one of the factors is whether you've been told that it's a good thing to do whether you've been told that it's a right thing to do

01:28:20

whether you've been punished for it choosing that in the past or whether you've been rewarded for choosing that in the past so it follows that social environments can either discourage violence or favor it and i think the uh

01:28:33

uh what i'm going to be telling you about today is just one way in that so in which this social influence um on action can work now one big question uh that we always

01:28:46

have in psychology is how do you measure it how do you measure the functions of the mind and when people make volitional actions when people decide for themselves what to do and then do it

01:28:57

then their actions are associated with a sense of agency over their actions so wittenstein family famously asked what is the difference between the fact that my arm goes up

01:29:10

and the fact that i raise my arm now wittenstein thought that was a stupid question i think it's quite a good question and i think the answer is i have a sense of agency when i lift my arm but if you come running up to me and you lift

01:29:22

my arm then i don't have a sense of agency so the sense of agency gives us this uh sort of subjective correlate of our own will uh and and voluntary control of our actions

01:29:35

and it it's also essential for having the experience of being responsible so you're if you're responsible for something happening then you will feel a sense of agency

01:29:47

over that thing and you will have uh it will be a product of your voluntary control system and a few years ago we after thinking about the sense of agency and the whole sort of process of volition for a long

01:29:59

time we decided that maybe we can actually measure it and i just want to very briefly present you with a sort of an attempt to scientifically measure the sense of agency which is based on a chronometric effect in the lab

01:30:12

called intentional binding so what happens is uh the participant is invited to press a button so that's the action you press a button and 250 milliseconds

01:30:24

later the button press causes a beep so the beep is the effect or the outcome of the action and we use a set of techniques that i won't go into in detail called mental

01:30:38

chronometry where you ask people when they think things happen and in the history of psychology asking people when they think things happen is a very good way to find out how those things are

01:30:50

represented in the mind so if you just have an action by itself it turns out that people don't perceive it to happen when it actually happens there's a bit of a an error in when you think actions

01:31:02

happen and if you just have a beat by itself there's a bit of an error in when you think beeps happens so these dashed lines here indicate the subjective time that at which people think an action happens and the subjective time at which

01:31:15

people think a beep happens and what we've done in these experiments is now to put the action and the beep together and to ask people when do you think the action happens given that it's followed by a beep

01:31:28

or when do you think the beep happens given that you caused it by your own action and you get these shifts which i've shown here in orange such that actions that cause beeps are perceived to happen later

01:31:40

than actions that don't cause beeps and beeps are perceived to happen much earlier if you've caused them through your own action than if they just happened by themselves so these numbers here are the change in

01:31:53

the perceived time of an event in milliseconds so people perceive the action and the beep as happening closer together than they really are when it's a voluntary action and in this lower condition

01:32:06

we've got involuntary movements which we actually produce by stimulating the brain with magnetic stimulation which produces little sort of twitches a little bit like you might press use to press a button and you don't get this binding effect so there's

01:32:19

something about the temporal association between i pressed the button and it produced the beep which causes these things to be perceived as close together and you don't get that if the same physical events occur without

01:32:32

my volition i don't feel the sense of agency over the beep i don't feel responsible for the beat so now we've got a a sort of implicit low-level measurement of how much people feel responsible

01:32:45

for beeps a little bit boring but nevertheless at least a way to measure sense of agency which is relevant to responsibility now um how can this be relevant to syndrome e what has this got to do with violence well

01:32:57

um here you're pressing a button and you're producing a beep but of course quite often you'll make an action which rather than producing a beep will cause will cause some horrendous outcome you'll hurt somebody you might kill somebody

01:33:10

so what about violent actions that produce nasty outcomes so um when thinking about syndra me recently it's always quite useful to think what is syndrome e not and i want to talk a little bit about something which contrasts rather clearly

01:33:22

with syndrome e which is the phenomenon of loss of control so loss of control is a legal phrase it's a phrase in english law and other legal systems have similar ideas and it's the acknowledgement that

01:33:34

violent actions triggered in extreme fear or anger may be involuntary so there are some cases where the law might not actually hold you responsible

01:33:46

for for the outcomes of your action or at least it will hold you less responsible so these are classically um classic situations for this are depicted here so suppose some

01:34:00

horrible aggressive person um approaches me and i am of course uh terrified so i'm in a state of fear and in the state of fear there are three very low level responses which seem to happen in many species

01:34:14

fight flight and freeze now if i end up choosing the fight option then this is thought to come from a low level circuit very possibly um based on the amygdala and there's a sense in which my fight

01:34:28

response is not now voluntary i fight back in in involuntary ways so if i happen to injure the aggressor am i really responsible and according to the loss of control defense maybe you're less responsible i'm not going to talk about anger today

01:34:40

the key thing to think about here is that we're thinking about the person who who is um about victims fighting back we're not thinking about aggressive person perpetrators and syndrome e is not this right so

01:34:52

syndrome e is much more about what the aggressor does rather than about the victim who might make an involuntary movement to find an involuntary reactive aggression to fight back so

01:35:04

syndrome is not about the loss of control in fact in syndra in syndra me it looks as though it's actually too much control or a lot of control so let's look now at um social situations

01:35:18

where volitional actions and free choices are strongly guided and this fits very nicely with what saudi was just saying so there are some social environments where we don't want people doing whatever they want we really don't want people to just sort

01:35:31

of make up their mind and have a go and feel free so under military command it's imperative that soldiers obey orders and it's interesting to note that under military command some forms of violence are actually encouraged and we expect the soldiers

01:35:43

to obey the orders but there are other sort of perhaps less scary cases like air traffic control so in air traffic control you have to follow the rules you don't want people saying oh i didn't feel like um changing the runway for that plate you

01:35:56

really have to constrain free choice so in these kind of constrained environments who is actually responsible for you know the press of the button which pulls the trigger or which diverts the

01:36:08

plane from one runway to another is it the person who gives the gives the orders or is it the person who follows them is it the rule makers or is it the rule takers so we've already heard the milgram

01:36:20

experiment and the focus on the milgram experiment has been the claim the original claim from milgram that most people obey orders i'm not going to redescribe the experiment here um there are lots of problems with this experiment i'm i'm really really unhappy

01:36:33

about the military experiment um and we uh started looking at the sense of responsibility under orders with a rather different question so the question that i'm going to talk about is

01:36:46

do people feel a sense of agency over bad outcomes when they are told what to do when they're given coercive instructions and the reason this is important is perhaps people

01:36:58

obey orders this is what milgram do attention to perhaps people obey orders because coercive instruction alters their free choice and causes a low sense of agency

01:37:10

maybe the reason why milgram was apparently able to get people to obey orders so much is because when people obeyed all his orders they didn't feel responsible for what they were actually

01:37:22

obviously doing that is the the line of thought so um we have been studying coercion and sense of agency and we've got an experimental design which i think in some ways improves improves on milgram's experimental

01:37:36

designs um i don't think it's perfect but it avoids some of the things i don't like about his so um here is the experimenter and the experimenter tests a pair of uh

01:37:49

volunteer participants healthy volunteer participants one of them is the agent who will press a button and one of them is the quote victim unquote who will receive a moderately painful electric shock and

01:38:02

the victim actually the quote victim does actually receive a moderately painful electric shock through a medically approved pain stimulator and the agent knows that it's the agent knows that this is real pain because the

01:38:14

agent has previously experienced the pain that pain themselves so um we use the victim word in quotes because these are not actual actually victims these are people who are volunteer participants

01:38:27

in a sort of helsinki experiment the participants work in pairs so in the second half of the experiment the roles of agent and and quote victim are reversed so the method is at least

01:38:40

um reciprocal it's not very pleasant but at least it's not um at least it's as it were balanced and in one condition the experimenter gives a coercive instruction to the agent about which button to press

01:38:52

which means that the agent presses either one button which gives the victim a shock or another button which does not give the victim a shock and whichever button is pressed there's always a beep which occurs sometime

01:39:05

after the agent presses the button so there's always a beep and sometimes it's accompanied by a shock or not in another control in the other condition the agent freely chooses which button to press and thus

01:39:17

whether she gives a shock to the quote victim or not and the experimenter remains in the room but doesn't play any role so here the point is that the you you freely choose whether you want to give the other person a shock or not now why would you ever possibly do that

01:39:30

well remember that um the roles previously were reversed so it may be that this person shocked you and you want to shock her back um all of the participants in these experiments um are female and we can go into the the

01:39:42

reasons for that uh later but we didn't want to include any uh gender um asymmetries in these designs for obvious reasons so what i'm showing here is the

01:39:54

perceived time that the agent thinks elapses between pressing the button and hearing the beep which accompanies the shock or non-shock that the victim

01:40:08

experiences and on the x-axis i'm showing the actual interval between pressing the button and hearing the beep so at random the uh the beep happens 200 500 or 800 milliseconds

01:40:21

after the agent presses the button and the agent simply reports how long they think think that interval was and what you can see is that in the free choice condition

01:40:32

agents reliably report the interval between the action and the beep as shorter than in the coercive condition where the experimenter has told them exactly which button they're going to press and whether they're going to be

01:40:45

giving a shock to the other person or not so the gap between these lines corresponds to a reduction in the perceived interval between pressing the button and getting

01:40:56

the outcome which we interpret as a reduction in the sense of agency so the agents feel a reduced sense of agency when they've been given a coercive instruction by the experimenter

01:41:08

and remember that we're not using words like coercion or anything like that in this experiment it's a completely implicit measure all you're asked to say is how long is the time delay now an interesting feature of this um

01:41:22

yeah this is just some brain data which shows that this is the brain's response to the tone and in the dark line you can see that the brain response to the tone is actually less in the coercive condition than in the free choice condition so the brain

01:41:35

somehow doesn't register the outcome so much interestingly you get this effect both in the trials where you press the button that produces the shock and also when when you press the button which produces

01:41:46

no shock so there's no difference according to what the outcome is it's not an effect of bad outcomes it's an effective choice context so when we're coerced we don't have the

01:41:59

sense of our relation to the outcome that we have when we freely choose that's the point here so coercion really reduces the sense of agencies now i just want to go through some text implications of this now of course it's

01:42:13

well known that people often claim reduced responsibility when they're only obeying orders that's sometimes called nuremberg defense and there are lots and lots of concerns with this defense this this claim of

01:42:24

reduced responsibility when obeying orders is highly problematic it's always viewed with suspicion and absolutely rightly so because of course it's easy to say that and there's a secondary gain from making that claim

01:42:37

the interesting and i think rather sort of scary finding from our experiment is that people who are obeying orders may not just claim reduced responsibility but may actually experience less responsibility

01:42:50

to the extent that they show reduction in this measure of intentional binding which we think is at least a proxy for the sense of agency so that's a concern because it means that maybe things feel different when you're told to do

01:43:03

something bad an altered sense of agency under coercion might explain why some people sometimes obey bad orders so if i am given a coercive instruction to do something bad

01:43:15

and i do it and i feel less linkage to the outcome less sense of agency over the outcome then that may be one of the reasons why i can actually cope with doing such a a bad action we didn't haven't had time

01:43:29

to talk about this but in another experiment uh with emily caspar we looked um at what does it feel like for the experimenter what's the subjective experience of agency with the person who gives the orders and it turns out the person who gives

01:43:42

the orders also experiences reduced responsibility so it's not the case that responsibility is passed up the chain from the agent to the um commander it just seems to disappear nobody seems

01:43:54

to feel um this intentional binding over the outcome um and i think this is obviously for me really worrying because it means that coercion undermines responsibility it it it is

01:44:06

capable of reducing the way we feel about what we are actually doing there is no doubt that in these experiments people are actually pressing the button which is actually causing a painful shock there's no deception there's no way that you cannot understand what you're doing

01:44:20

and i think what this means is that societies need to very carefully manage manage the social transfer of the sense of agency and responsibility and there needs to be a clear way of controlling

01:44:33

the potential corrosive power of coercion to take away this important feature of our cognition that we know what we're doing

01:44:45

we potentially know what the outcomes of our actions are and we can potentially have a sense of agency and thus have a society based on responsibility so coercion threatens that and to that

01:44:58

extent it needs to be very very carefully managed in social structures the state monopoly of coercion is perhaps a conventional political doctrine which can protect us

01:45:11

from the kinds of cognitive phenomena that we've discovered in these experiments thank you thank you very much patrick for this extremely clear

01:45:24

talk thank you so much and now we are ready to listen to leo smigrot who is from university of cambridge and also

01:45:37

a fellow the paris institute for advanced studies and she will speak about violence values and ideology ideology thank you very much

01:45:50

uh thank you very much the organizers as well for inviting me to speak amongst such a wonderful set of panelists so i'll be talking today about a set of empirical work

01:46:03

experiments that i've done on the topics of violence and ideology and how we can use the cognitive sciences and neuroscience in order to unpack these processes and it's actually nice

01:46:16

that patrick just ended up sorry could you turn on your video so we can see you at the same time i don't know if it's on

01:46:27

okay so sorry it is all good no problem um so patrick just spoke of coercion and one of the the kind of the best ways that we've had

01:46:41

to think about ideologies and how they promote violence has been by thinking about the ways in which they coerce individuals and naturally one of the most prominent political philosophers to

01:46:53

think about this was hannah arendt who really thought about how ideologies totalitarian ideology specifically coerced not just our behavior but our minds as well and she wrote that what totalitarian

01:47:05

ideologies aim at is not the transformation of the outside world but the transformation of human nature itself and i think that that's a really interesting um and relevant metaphor for just thinking about the brains that pull the

01:47:18

trigger in general and for thinking about all the ways in which ideologies really become internalized by the mind and so i'll be talking about some empirical work that hopefully taps out this question but before

01:47:31

looking widely at how violence is promoted um and encouraged it's good to think about what ideologies are more generally and just to take a step back and to some degree we can think about

01:47:44

ideologies as these really compelling stories as these narratives that tell us about what the world is what the world ought to be and so in many ways they describe human action and the conditions in which

01:47:57

humans live in the natural world and they prescribe it as well so they prescribe how we ought to think how we ought to act and how we ought to interact with others as many of the speakers have been talking about and because there is that there are

01:48:09

those prescriptions that creates always a relational element to ideologies they are always going to be in groups and out groups and that is starting to be the difference between simply values

01:48:20

and ideologies it's when ideologies occur or take place psychologically when we are also really viewing people in terms of their in-group association to us our out group and when we begin to

01:48:33

demonize show hostility and prejudice towards out groups that is when ideo ideologies can start fermenting into something that can turn violent now ideologies exist in all these different forms the political

01:48:46

and the religious and the nationalistic and all these different social realms and that's a really important part of how we think about it because often there's this tendency to

01:48:57

look at the content of the ideology its missions the beliefs that it proposes or rejects but really and i think many of the speakers today have been thinking about it in that way about the structure of ideologies how does it regardless of its content

01:49:09

shape people's minds and reciprocally uh how minds give rise to these kinds of ideologies now these ideologies play a really critical role in people's lives in in every every person's life and i

01:49:22

think that's an important question that maybe we'll get back to a lot of the discussions around syndrome e look at it in its very extreme manifestation but perhaps it's also useful to really think about it in its continua

01:49:34

in all the ways in which there are precursors um and more normative forms of ideologies that still are reminiscent enough of the the kind of violent forms that ideologies sometimes take

01:49:47

so we know that ideologies in terms of religion in terms of politics they play a very active role in people's lives and as we've been talking about in conflict so many people are harmed by by violence in the name of

01:49:59

ideological causes and commit violence in the ideological causes so when we're starting to unpack the psychological origins of ideological thinking it's important to think about

01:50:11

what are causal mechanisms that we're proposing so which where do the causal arrows point towards and one way to think about it is the role of situations and we just heard a little bit about

01:50:23

that about how potentially ideological doctrines are thought to coerce people through these kind of powerful situations that really almost everybody is susceptible to and is susceptible to them becoming uh

01:50:36

very obedient to authority conformists and all those precursors that allow violence to to emerge so situations is kind of one the situational narrative of ideology

01:50:49

there's one important way to think about it another way that's emerged over the last 50 60 years is really thinking about motivations so how do particular motivations that all humans have motivations to belong

01:51:01

motivations to achieve meaning and coherence about the world motivations to seek significance to feel that one's life is meaningful how do all of those motivations make us gravitate towards

01:51:13

ideologies get us to see them as very attractive and very appealing and so looking at situations looking at motivation is incredibly important and what i think the past probably mostly five years

01:51:26

um i've really looked at in political psychology and political neuroscience is the relationship between cognition more broadly and ideologies as a bi-directional relationship as looking at how certain cognitive

01:51:40

traits of the mind might induce people to search for ideologies or commit to ideologies that kind of reflect those cognitive needs or those cognitive tendencies

01:51:51

and on the other side important to think about how immersion in particular ideological situations can shape cognition and shape the brain in return and i think all of this is really relevant

01:52:02

to how we think about syndrome now i'll give a very broad overview of the research i've done rather than the particulars but all of these can be uh found and read about elsewhere for anybody who's interested

01:52:16

so the the question that i've really been thinking about is why do some individuals get swept up in ideologically motivated violence while others do not so i think earlier professor

01:52:28

it's itza mentioned how about 10 to 20 percent of people in all those classic social psychological tasks don't obey the the authority don't actually go on to commit violence sometimes we think of those as weird but

01:52:42

i think it's really important to to look at those as a continuum and think about how do those people relate to the people who are actually very quickly drawn to ideologies into engaging in violence so in the same way that there are the people who resist

01:52:55

there are also some people who are more prone than other people so interesting to think about those individual differences and in the experiments i've conducted basically using thousands of participants online what

01:53:09

we've looked at is the relationship between people's ideologies their kind of like tendencies towards violence and their cognition so when we measure individuals and these aren't normative

01:53:22

samples in the us and the uk and france and germany everywhere we're looking at how much people are reporting that they're willing to endorse violence to protect their group and even how willing they are to die for their group how willing they are

01:53:35

to sacrifice their life for the group and those are all of those kinds of precursors to really radical action that we can measure in individuals individuals that vary on these

01:53:47

kinds of metrics and on the other side of it we have been giving them these cognitive tasks from the cognitive psychology literature that tap at various psychological tendencies

01:53:59

so as as you can see for those of you who are familiar with psychology and for those of you or not these tasks very much are perceptual so they require people to resp respond to changing start changing

01:54:12

rewards so they're learning certain rules and then suddenly those rules change and we want to see how adaptable people are so that's for instance a measure of cognitive flexibility we also look at how they make decisions in these kind of perceptual

01:54:25

environments so very similar to the ones that patrick has been talking about when we give people these perceptual stimuli how do they learn from them how do they respond to them how do they form decisions um and we also give them these slightly

01:54:38

more higher level complex or strategic cognitive tasks that require them to plan to mentally simulate intricate steps and so basically we give these participants a battery of all sorts of tasks that tap at individual differences in

01:54:52

cognitive functioning and so i'll broadly summarize the kinds of results that we're seeing in terms of who are the individuals who appear to be most susceptible to thinking in extreme

01:55:04

and dogmatic ways that also support violence even at that normative level so first of all we do find very consistently that people who perform poorly on tasks of cognitive flexibility so those who are

01:55:17

highly cognitively rigid on these non-political perceptual tasks tend to also endorse ideological violence and ideological rigidity as well so that is starting to show us that

01:55:30

there are these parallels between the ways in which people are perceiving the world generally and the ways in which their cognitive and perceptual architecture is just engaging with the world around them and how it then translates into how

01:55:43

they uh kind of relate to ideological phenomena and this is really relevant if you already read the syndrome e the first uh paper in 97

01:55:55

he was already talking about perseveration and considering how perseverative and compulsive behaviors might contribute to violent thought so here we even see at the normative level that individuals who are

01:56:08

highly cognitively rigid tend to kind of endorse ideological violence we also find we've been talking a lot about emotion we do find that these individuals are

01:56:20

emotionally dysregulated they tend to be more impulsive they tend to be more sensation seeking so seeking of of um thrills and sensations and that really makes sense when we think about the kind of individual who's

01:56:32

willing to engage in violent collective action we also see all sorts of perceptual impairments of these individuals when they're performing these kinds of psychological tasks that the the very way in which their

01:56:45

minds are processing visual stimuli is not the same as individuals who are very resilient very open-minded very flexible and tolerant in their thinking and we see

01:56:57

a range of kind of dysfunctions or difficulties in dealing with complex cognition so when they are required to process a lot of mental steps create simulate a lot of difficult

01:57:10

um mental kind of components they struggle and so that is starting to also hint at maybe people who naturally struggle with cognitively complex stimuli or complex planning and mental sequences

01:57:24

maybe they're more drawn to simplistic ideologies that offer absolutist descriptions of the world and those are also the ones who promote violence later on so thinking about that that kind of

01:57:37

transition from just having normative values to adhering to an ideology and potentially extreme strong maybe violent degree and then the actual actions one of the things that we really need to

01:57:49

think about is what what pushes individuals along that spectrum what kinds of contexts what kind of biological dispositions what kinds of experiences push people along that spectrum and why are some people pushed more

01:58:01

easily and why are other people more resilient and i think that is really pertinent when we're thinking about the syndrome e and what it means to um in some sense think about it as a clinical condition

01:58:14

and what does it mean to have subclinical symptoms of it so the key questions that i think um are worthy of discussion and further investigation is first of all the question

01:58:25

can we map about the extremes what does it mean to map it out which is basically what all the talks today have been gearing towards and part of that is that the ethical the political question of should we try to map

01:58:38

out what the extremist brain looks like what does that knowledge give us what kind of dangers does that knowledge pose so a lot of important ethical questions when we're trying to figure out who are the brains

01:58:50

that pull the trigger part of this is also about causality and unpacking what is sometimes called the chicken and egg problem in political neuroscience so the question of what comes first is it that we have these psychological

01:59:03

traits that predispose some people especially towards ideological violence or is it on the other hand that immersion in ideological environments shape cognition and brain returns i mean it is likely and it is

01:59:16

most feasible possible that it's a bi-directional relationship but teasing apart those causal mechanisms and arrows is very important and finally as others have echoed how does this bear on

01:59:28

our prevention or our support for people who are vulnerable at the individual level who are vulnerable because of the nature of their contacts and communities or because of societies undergoing particular kinds of conflict particular kinds of scarcity

01:59:40

that we know contributes to thinking in these ways so coming back to to hanaren's quotes thinking about how ideologies not only transform our world they also transform

01:59:53

our human nature our human minds fundamentally i think the question the optimistic constructive question now becomes well how can we craft a certain kind of resilience both in the situational conditions

02:00:05

uh that surround people as they are confronted with these potentially violent contexts and also in their cognitive and neural characteristics how can we promote

02:00:17

resilience um against violence and totalitarian thought so thank you very much i know that was a very brief tour um and broad overview but very welcome to ask questions i'm happy to elaborate

02:00:31

thank you very much thank you day off and i'm sure we are going to discuss later because you've used the world extremists

02:00:43

although itsak has pounded us with the idea that these people are not extremists but eventually normal people but this is for further discussion

02:00:55

whether they are extremists or not and now last but not least greti mirdal will give her comments and ideas concerning violence

02:01:10

values and the brain across scientific cultures which have already been mentioned before thank you grete thank you very much

02:01:22

the aim of the city of paris and the 13 universities of the paris area when they decided to establish an institute of advanced study in the french capital was to strengthen the human and social

02:01:37

sciences less sshs as they say in france interdisciplinarity was not a priority the idea was to attract the best scholars

02:01:48

and international researchers to paris and to create a living active inspiring center for research in the humanities and social sciences

02:02:00

but very soon it became evident for us that some of the questions we were studying necessitated the collaboration of the natural sciences especially the cognitive and neurosciences

02:02:13

we needed their input and we believed without false modesty that we also had something to offer it's hatfried was very courageous to put his hand in the

02:02:26

mouth of the lion by accepting to become the first neuroscientist fellow at the institute he was most welcome as the inspiring

02:02:38

person he is but his work on syndrome e got a rather rough reception for one thing we were speaking different languages

02:02:50

it's that fried was speaking brain we were speaking mind but what was the most provoking for the scholars that we were was the fact that mass violence was being presented

02:03:04

in a medical context as a pathophysiological mechanism and with a potential use for predictive purposes we must admit that researchers in the

02:03:18

humanities and social sciences have been generally reluctant to take the neurosciences on board especially regarding research on violence historians sociologists psychologists

02:03:31

and literary scholars have studied mass violence for decades the literature on massacres especially after the second world war is extremely rich and we saw a danger

02:03:44

that syndrome e could lead to the assumption that mass violence is primarily neurologically determined and more practically we feared that the

02:03:57

neurosciences would shape the agenda of research on mass violence i remember that in those years we hardly received any applications at the european research councils

02:04:10

the erc that did not include some kind of brain imaging whether these cerebral measures were relevant or not the fear that the neuroscientists

02:04:22

would dominate the field and take it off was not totally unwarranted at the institute we had hidden heated discussions even disputes i would call them

02:04:35

but we managed to create the program on brain culture and society with a lambertos as president and invaluable and very generous support and the book that we are presenting

02:04:48

today is one of the results of this interdisciplinary work in the 10 minutes i have left i'd like to give a few concrete examples of how the confrontation between the two

02:05:02

cultures actually took place and to describe what made the difference in generating new insights modifying hypotheses

02:05:14

and formulating more pertinent research questions in other words shortly questions where working together made sense

02:05:28

and were not working together does not make sense the first in in general the research presented in the book supports the hypothesis

02:05:49

that most perpetrators that commit mass murder do indeed manifest symptoms of syndrome this is freed's original hypothesis and that these symptoms that have been

02:06:02

described characterize many perpetrators during the act of mass killing that has been sort of supported by the different research but some of the contributions in the

02:06:15

book among others christopher brownings who revisits his famous research on battalion 101 point at the necessity of differentiating between

02:06:27

the types of perpetrators and the different ways in which these contribute to the mass killings browning describes five categories

02:06:39

ideologues and true believers experts mild and lower echelon functionaries party activists face to face killers it is the behavior of

02:06:50

one segment of the face-to-face killers the non-violent ordinary men who are transformed into killers that concerns us today the hypothesis of syndrome

02:07:04

they were among them those who enjoyed the killings those who did it with flat effect and those who evaded according to browning this

02:07:22

differentiation should raise doubts about fred's contention that most perpetrators respond uniformly with symptoms of syndrome that was one of the

02:07:33

questions that we discussed where one could say that it was a contribution of history to the neurosciences

02:07:47

another venue of research was psychopharmacology which contributed to refine our knowledge of possible brain processes

02:08:03

it is i will not very very shortly touch upon this question on the similarity between syndrome e behavior and drug abuse that the itac has already mentioned it in his

02:08:17

talk several syndrome e symptoms resemble those of people who are under the effect of drugs and these are for example compulsive

02:08:29

repetitive violence obsessive beliefs uh desensitization to violence and the light there are two chapters in the book uh jean-paul tassens and

02:08:42

trevor robbins that suggests that the extreme violence used by terrorists exhibiting syndrome behavior can be caused or at least exacerbated by

02:09:02

drugs this implies that the sudden transformation that freed cold or that was called the killing switch could as in the case of drugs also be

02:09:15

due to shifts in the activity and creativity of a subgroup of neurons called modulatory neurons that are the specific targets of drug abuse

02:09:28

this is an important task to investigate further both for the neural and scientists neuroscientists and for the socio-political

02:09:39

scientists and scholars the next question that where our interactions really gave uh sense is

02:09:57

the importance of differentiating between traits states and what that means for prevention beranger with other words

02:10:16

talked about traits and states are syndrome-e behaviors for example lack of empathy permanent personality traits or transient states

02:10:28

that perpetrators manifest in the latest phase of radicalization and during the killings in friede's original conception this assumption was that the symptoms of syndrome were

02:10:42

personality traits in other words pre-existing vulnerabilities that could be identified prior to becoming violent it has so far not been able to we have

02:10:55

not been able to identify such traits and this touches intimately upon the question of whether syndra me is the cause of violence

02:11:09

that's what we're talking about with the question of cause and effect or whether it is simultaneously developed with the killings and thereby the assumption that syndra

02:11:24

me can be prevented is very heavily challenged the next theme or problem i'm going to touch upon or show you talk to you about is the

02:11:44

question related to the affiliation of in groups and out groups as a trigger for syndra me now both susan fiske and many of you

02:11:56

who have already spoken have touched upon this question and i can't resist going back to sigmund freud

02:12:07

who talked about i have this pictures of us in my thank you freud wrote in 1920 a religion even if it calls itself

02:12:22

the religion of love must be hard and unloving to those who do not belong to it fundamentally indeed every religion is the same way a religion of love

02:12:33

for all those whom it embraces while cruelty and intolerance towards those who do not belong to it are natural to every religion

02:12:49

several chapters in the book provide us with biological evidence for freud's assumption julie graz and jorge harmony refer in their chapter to fmri studies

02:13:04

which have examined the brain correlates of group bias a network of brain areas has been shown to be more activated when perceiving in groups compared to outgroup faces

02:13:17

now that is in line with what susan fiske was telling us and you will find more details in the book about the cerebral networks that are involved

02:13:31

also scott at trump considered group related factors as essential to radicalization and willingness to kill and to die a trunk has studied three consequences of strong

02:13:44

group affiliations that can lead to syndrome e commitment to non-negotiable sacred values to which the group's actors

02:13:56

are holy fused readiness to forsake commitment to kin for those values you're willing to sacrifice your parents your mother your children

02:14:09

and three perceive strength you feel stronger by belonging to the in-group versus the foes finally i'd like to talk about something

02:14:24

that we have not worked on and that could possibly be the next steps of our trans disciplinary cooperation it is words

02:14:37

as triggers of violence they are has talked about ideology as triggers of violence this is a step lower down

02:14:49

the level but emil bruno who is no longer among us conducted extensive research on the effect of collective blame which is particularly pernicious in that

02:15:02

it does not just losing restrictions or harming others it gives perpetrators a license to kill in context where dehumanization and collective blame

02:15:13

prevail the two explain a large chunk of the variance in nearly all outcome measures wrote bruno and i will close by quoting autoclamper

02:15:31

1947 the language of the third raj language does not simply write and think for me it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual

02:15:45

being the more questioning unquestioningly and unconsciously i abandoned myself to it and what happens if the cultivated language

02:15:57

is made up of poisonous elements or has been made the bearer of poisons words can be like tiny doses of arsenic you didn't know of

02:16:11

captagon at the time they are swallowed unnoticed appear to have no effect and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all

02:16:27

thank you thank you very much uh greaty for this very thoughtful summary and also comments and this concludes

02:16:45

the formal speakers expose and now it's time to ask our colleague denis peshansky my co-chairman if he would like kindly to give us

02:17:00

some comments about what he heard his views and maybe how his experience concerning the the very large study

02:17:12

he made on the victims of the terrorist attacks and his general knowledge about this problem what is what does it inspire to you denis merci beaucoup thank you so much it was

02:17:28

this meeting absolutely fascinating and i want to thank you to participate to these exchanges and also to perhaps to explore these new

02:17:40

tracks proposed by uh glitty but here as we said in france uh where are you talking from comrade so it was lot of decades ago

02:17:58

but i therefore an historian a specialist of world 2 but also uh specialists in memory sciences to use an expression that with my my friend as an european

02:18:11

psychologist with uh francis so we wish to put forward rather than memory studies we are implementing a long-term trans

02:18:25

transdisciplinary work and the memory of the terrorist attacks of number november 13 2015 as you know can you say

02:18:37

so however what characterise this meeting and this collective work either the from mark and w is the crucial importance of transdisciplinary tea to

02:18:51

the the phenomenon and to understand what analyze its suck approach and his e syndrome so i will start from the case of the association a matter of samuel patty

02:19:04

you know would die simply for having fulfilled this role of as a teacher by reminding the very simple of republican secularism

02:19:16

so we're not a mixture between an extreme islamist radicalization of segments of french society the role of transmitters

02:19:28

i would almost say of neurotransmitters of the social networks the action uh initiated by an individual the church and perpetrator with

02:19:42

at the same time totally taken in a collective cultural and ideological framework a real but limit that network of mutual aid

02:19:54

and an individual conviction of the passage to the act so we find all the for my point of view all the elements present in this book so

02:20:06

some specific question please and for all of the for all of you so first i read is this shift from desimonization to violence that either allah means speculating to c

02:20:25

syndrome e the greatest evil is reserved for the weakest for those who belong to a group of outsiders with a lower status in society

02:20:37

susan yes so can we really generalize this letting other jews in the holocaust buy bullets because there was also a social

02:20:51

hatred and revenge for the local peasants you don't have to be at the bottom of the social ladder to suffer the worst so it's rather what we could call the

02:21:04

competition of proximity another development about makes of analysis including molecular genes cells circuits circuits

02:21:20

psychology behavior and self-report so about the rdoc rdoc and dsm it's clear that there is a

02:21:33

complementarity the dsm providing a symptomatology the rdoc seeming to be perfectly adapted to what we are doing uh within the framework of the november

02:21:46

13 program uh on ptsd we could have some exchange about this uh question but it's not the the end of my purpose so the dsm seems

02:21:59

to me to be upstream of the disciplinary question but if the dlc responds perfectly to this transdisciplinary

02:22:11

approach inside and between the life sciences it seems to live out the humanity and social sciences so what do you think about this

02:22:22

so it seems to me that several contributions ask this question find answers as well as the cross reflection of the phenomenology philosopher and the neurobiologist among

02:22:35

others we will be able to answer those so question what is the role of neurotransmitters and in particular

02:22:46

gaba logic on which we are beginning to work to understand the effects and functioning pensioning of ptsd but beyond that so another factor to to be analyzed

02:23:00

to be analyzed sorry is a social position i will i would have just like to straight the importance of the notion of cognitive fracture proposed by uh it's alfred

02:23:12

uh as a concrete case he works the example of ronda where the utu is unable to kill his uh own animals but will massacre

02:23:27

so it's very interesting to illustrate this dissociation at work from a simple exam but is it not a difference in representation wouldn't the tutsi become below the

02:23:41

beast in the process at play another question that is more a neuroscience issue i read in addition to because i

02:23:55

read the book so an extract in addition to pfc per excitation syndrome e is characterized

02:24:08

is characterized by amygdala the activation which is responsible for emotional flatness and lack of fear so for me it's a little surprising it's

02:24:21

very interesting but surprising because is amygdala totally inhibited or focused on other emotional reactions i wonder about the functioning of the

02:24:33

amygdala hippocampal complex and not only with the amygdala so this preeminence of the pfc which stifles the amygdala

02:24:45

may seem counterintuitive as feeling of revenge and fear for the life of one's own group may suggest an overactivation of the amygdala

02:24:58

and one absence but perhaps you have work about that the compass all the more interesting it seems to me that according to leighton and crickerian's shame

02:25:13

i'm sure you know it is after a common progression and increasing excitation of the amygdala is accompanied by an inhibition

02:25:25

of the hippocampus so what about encoding at the time of the act and its immediate aftermath another

02:25:38

question that concerns pharmacology more directly the use of drugs such as captain and so on

02:25:49

what is very interesting in that the perpetrators of november 13 they didn't use such drugs so here again how can we distinguish

02:26:02

between conditions cinequan and for the passage to the act and factors favoring it empathy and empathy now

02:26:12

another crucial issue against the idea that syndrome e will be a matter of nature alone outside of cultural frameworks the breakdown of

02:26:25

empathy would be a transitory state linked to specific social historical conditions i heard so i regularly repeats namely

02:26:38

the irreductible irreducibility sorry of the event and even happens i can explain it perfectly after the fact uh including

02:26:51

by is crab being it in the long term the opposite depends i would be just as capable to explain it so it seems to me that we too often

02:27:05

neglect the absence of fatality in history and i think that this applies to human being so to conclude

02:27:18

yes uh all or almost all of you are asking the question what is the part of the individual and reactions and what is the part of the

02:27:34

social context so to finished i returned the question to you thank you thank you very much do you want to answer to denise comments

02:27:50

before we give the floor to questions your microphone microphone sorry about that yeah i think uh you know obviously uh you know there were quite a few uh questions raised here and i'm not sure

02:28:10

you know i'll take the the time to to answer all but i do want to actually comment on on the issue of our dock and i think we absolutely agree and in fact i think we we have covered

02:28:22

this in the book and it was a main issue that we we dealt with the issue of dsm you know five or you know whatever dsm of the future

02:28:36

versus outdoor and definitely the outdoor is really the right frame to to really deal with it in the sense that you know in the out dock you you have units of analysis

02:28:48

in in you know in in the general cases gene molecules cell circuits physiology behavior and even even self report so all these some of these are actually present in

02:29:01

our analysis you know we obviously have dealt you know of the self report of the observation of behavior to to an extent also in physiology cells and circuits pharmacology is

02:29:14

really dealing with the issue of molecules okay in terms of domains you know we really looked at emotions and we looked at cognitive systems uh and any psychological construct which

02:29:26

are mainly dehumanization emphasis and agency i think this is really you know the only approach feasible so i totally agree with you on that

02:29:38

aspect you know i think maybe we'll just open it now so other people can also comment and we can hear also you know other questions any way play okay so we we have one

02:30:05

question uh that is more for patrick it's about chains of command involving a sequence of order what what about them what about chains of commands involving a sequence of orders wouldn't

02:30:19

they nearly dissolve the sense of responsibility altogether yeah great question thank you very much so um traditionally in in military hierarchies

02:30:34

this is supposed to work in a quite structured and organized way so um traditionally in a military system um the officer commands

02:30:46

and the soldier obeys and uh that means that the soldier doesn't really make free choices they are coerced um but the counterpart of that arrangement

02:31:00

is that the officer is responsible for the consequences of the action not the soldier uh that is the the sort of theory um and that led us to do

02:31:11

uh uh uh emily kaspar to do experiments where we we looked at if you have three people um a coercive experimenter an agent and a quote victim

02:31:26

unquote we know that the agent doesn't feel a sense of agency when they perform an action that has a bad outcome for the so-called victims so we hypothesize that maybe the

02:31:37

uh the responsibility somehow transfers from the agent to the person who gave the orders and we started measuring the intentional binding effect in participants who played the role of the

02:31:52

experimenter which is equivalent to being the officer in a military hierarchy but actually they don't seem to experience much sense of agency over the bad outcomes either so um this idea that somehow

02:32:06

responsibility is passed along the the chain of command i mean that that works in terms of the actual military process of getting the command from the center to the

02:32:20

to the place of action um so it works if you like in terms of actual uh factual agency but in terms of sense of agency in terms of who experiences responsibility it doesn't

02:32:32

work um in quite the same way so i think i'm i'm sort of feeling that maybe chains of responsibility in fact dilute the subjective

02:32:44

responsibility even though they might successfully transfer the kind of operational responsibility they might dilute the sense of responsibility that's that's my response thank you

02:32:57

thank you very much uh patrick may i question you concerning before i give the floor to sadie what a question can we can i ask you to maybe say a few more words about what

02:33:09

you name coercive behavior called the question yeah the book in the book we have a very interesting chapter by etienne keckler

02:33:23

who has proposed a theory that the lateral prefrontal cortex which is involved with setting rules rules yeah the world we have not learned heard

02:33:36

this afternoon can eventually inhibit the medial temporal cortex who who is involved eventually with values and we have not heard very much this

02:33:48

afternoon in the world inhibition as you know i have a an addiction to inhibition disinhibition system as as important in the brain as activation

02:33:59

but in that case coercion does not concern adjectivity as such but it's just inhibition of the attribution of value what do you think of that um i think

02:34:13

there is a link so the medial frontal system which you've called the value system is also the system which allows you to choose endogenously

02:34:26

an action according to your subjective preferences so it can also be thought of a system for volitional choice as opposed to cued instruction whereas the lateral um prefrontal cortical system

02:34:40

is capable for example of of of learning contextual mappings so i always think of the lateral system as being able to guide our actions according to rules like uh green means go and and red means stop

02:34:53

and this is of course a very very useful rule in in social um social cohabitation um in urban societies that's why we're able to use cars and bicycles without killing

02:35:05

each other um but i think the important point about the medial frontal cortex is that you use your subjective uh evaluation of the different alternatives

02:35:19

rather than an externally imposed link to action or or a potential action meaning uh so that would be my my my argument what then is coercion well coercion would be anything which reduces

02:35:36

your autonomous choice so anything which restricts your ability to choose quote freely unquote among alternatives and uh anything which guides your choices

02:35:52

so at that point and really all stimuli are slightly coercive and people telling you you must press that button are just a very explicit and very sort of canonical uh form of coercion

02:36:07

thank you uh sadie and then we will ask one more question from the floor yeah that was also for that coercion uh issue uh patrick you you you

02:36:19

concluded in a way of saying that coercion undermines uh social responsibility and dilutes it and i i would completely agree on that and i know i know what you just said but um there have been also very interesting

02:36:32

variants of of um the milgram experiments by amuse and rainmakers right do that you know the utrecht uh experiment on administrative violence and that it was not about authority or coercion

02:36:45

it was about some kind of a contract that the subject would take with the experimenters and and so what happened is that in a way when you make a contract you acknowledge the new status

02:36:58

and what you have to do so it's a matter of rules and not a matter of coercion and and this also goes um with another effect in time that is dissonance and i mean humans want to

02:37:11

align what they believe and what they do and if they're forced into doing something whether by rules or coercion or authority or by imitation whatever at some point they have the choice if this

02:37:23

does not align with their beliefs either they stop doing it or they change their beliefs and pretty often what we see is that people start to endorse

02:37:35

right the ideology that in the beginning forced them to do or induce them to do something more or less unwillingly and and so this this this is why all this thing is interesting that once people

02:37:48

have started doing it something changes perhaps in the brain perhaps in the way they categorize their action or the targets perhaps in their relationship with the group

02:38:00

because now you've been initiated into doing something you're part of it and so the whole installation gets stronger and stronger as as it is reinforced by your action

02:38:12

and so there's a vicious circle in this that then actions are aligned with thoughts and with the group and you know everything flows and and um and it's very difficult to stop that thing

02:38:24

sorry they did yep um do you want me to try to reply i think it's a really interesting idea i i was very excited by your concept of a tipping point

02:38:38

um and what you just said was more like a continuous slope but i think the first time does seem to be uh uh very important so i think that that seems like an interesting potential area for future um

02:38:52

research when you when you mentioned contracts uh i thought that was quite interesting because contract is in a sense coercive right you're bound by it but you voluntarily enter into it and uh

02:39:03

there is a really interesting uh way in which our societies have sort of dealt with or changed volition to allow these kinds of contracts and

02:39:16

what you were saying reminded me of a really interesting issue and legal responsibility um why are you legally responsible for something you do when you're highly intoxicated so i let's suppose i get completely drunk

02:39:27

um and i don't know what i'm doing and i punch somebody in the face um and of course i hurt them and obviously we want to hold me responsible for doing such a horrible thing and the way that the law does that is by

02:39:39

a concept of so-called prior fault so um the the voluntary act that i made which was wrong was opening the bottle and having the first drink and uh because i knew that this would

02:39:53

then lead to uh me becoming intoxicated and then i might get into a fight and uh cause this harm so this idea that you have these sort of chains of action which have these consequences which

02:40:04

you're able to understand um and therefore are able to still deploy your volition on even though the volition is displaced from the moment of action i think are rather similar to your concept of

02:40:16

of contract and in that sense i would say that contracts are coercive but we agree to be coerced that's the very nature of society we are society is like that doing these things

02:40:27

it's a profound truth to avoid violence sorry we have to we have to give the audience some chance you will give them plenty of time to discuss in the iaea right okay see i'm sorry to

02:40:42

to be such a coercive chairman [Music] yeah thank you for the audience we actually have two interesting questions by uh former fellows of the institute italian

02:40:58

former fellows the first one is uh is for leo but i guess it's also part of our speakers and maybe among among them sadie um what's the what's the impact of

02:41:10

education on on extremism i think that's a fascinating question because part of all we're discussing here is about the developmental trajectory of what brings a person to

02:41:22

that tipping point or that repetition also all the rituals that contribute to why people are able to commit some such actions so i guess i have two points to break about

02:41:34

that so the first about education and kind of the relationship between psychology and ideology or extremism all of the kind of um methods that we use all the analyses that we always control for things like

02:41:47

educational attainment demographic things like gender and um age so they're all consistent and they're all present even after we account for education but that's not to say that these we know

02:42:00

that these psychological domains are very malleable they're very flexible and so they can be enhanced or trained or kind of made more resilient and i think the interesting question is what kind of education

02:42:11

and at what point in time to citizens obviously children it's the most vulnerable period but we would also like to be able to have citizens that we can educate to be tolerant and open-minded and against violence so what kind of

02:42:25

education would that be would that be about critical thinking would that be about promoting flexibility would that be about promoting perspective taking a theory of mind and all those things that contribute towards humanization rather than dehumanization

02:42:38

so i think it's a great question i i have some longitudinal work on that but that's for another day well just you know with that respect and i just wanted to raise one more issue because essentially the issue of

02:42:51

education and i ideology it all comes to the issue of information now all the methods of propagation of information consumption of in

02:43:03

information you know have really changed right so the question is to what extent you know is the current modes of propagation of information i mean can you quarantine you yourself

02:43:15

and i'm using this you know by intention can you quarantine your yourself from information to what extent are we all stuck in one room you know where we are essentially susceptible to

02:43:27

contagion right uh how how do how does the present age really affects in the syndrome e so everybody take they undertake this question or yeah very nice

02:43:41

i would like to myself make uh a comment on on the question which was asked concerning the role of education i i have proposed that there is a crucial

02:43:55

age some somewhere between eight to free puberty which was already said by piaget to be an age which was fundamental

02:44:09

for understanding for changing point of view and i have proposed the idea that there is a cognitive

02:44:21

critical period in the biological sense for acquisition of the capacity of tolerance in this frame of age if it is a critical period it would mean that if it if children of

02:44:35

this age are shut down into a single ideology or into a single view of others they may have further

02:44:47

difficulties and become fanatics and this is what has happened over history it was the case of the younger young italian italian

02:45:01

soldiers as you know it has been the case for in uganda it's the case all over the world now that the terrorists recruit children at this particular

02:45:12

age between 9 to 12. brainwash them and then they can do anything with them afterwards and so i'd like just to mention that

02:45:25

that i've been fighting also not fighting but trying to get in the institute of human rights some specific protection for children for the acquisition of what i call the

02:45:38

right to a change point of view at this particular age it's also it's also done in the giadas today they pick up and steal children at this age and so i just wanted to say that i think

02:45:52

there is a among all problems of education there is this particular thing this is it's just a just a little comment so uh you know simone

02:46:05

yeah so it's uh it's more question for patrick it's related to command hierarchy the military example seems to be a situation where responsibility gets diluted so neither the soldier nor the officer felt

02:46:18

responsibility for a negative or violent outcome but how about the experience of those who by contrast feel vicariously responsible for the outcomes of action that they did not personally perform for example

02:46:32

uh parents who feel responsible for the children's behaviors in this case we can have sense of responsibility without sense of agency maybe a really interesting point

02:46:51

a number of studies have noted the astonishing variability in the age of criminal responsibility across different jurisdictions uh i can't remember all the details

02:47:03

in in in the united kingdom children under 10 are not commonly responsible um i can't remember i think in several countries in europe it's 18. um some countries i think don't really

02:47:19

have any concept of there being an age of responsibility in quite the same way but it's there isn't one age that's really clear and that i think um

02:47:31

hints at the point that there are many sort of social traditions and cultural factors which govern the idea of a responsibility for the actions of others

02:47:44

i was recently told by uh my friend and colleague valerian chamber about a really interesting legal debate in ancient rome uh regarding the responsibilities of

02:47:59

slaves so if you were a uh a rich roman citizen you might have a slave and the slave was an object that you owned and if the slave then committed some

02:48:12

crime let's say the slave punches somebody in the face who is responsible um is the slave responsible or are you responsible given that the slave is only

02:48:23

is merely an object and has no legal um status and is effectively reduced to the uh the level of a tool so are you responsible for not controlling the uh the

02:48:36

the slave so this concept was called noxual abandonment and was quite uh heavily discussed in legal theory in roman law i don't know much more than that but i think the case of children is

02:48:49

perhaps slightly um slightly analogous and i think uh i wouldn't i'd hesitate to make an expert comment on it but i think it's really striking how some parents do feel

02:49:03

a sense of responsibility for what their children do and others don't so i suspect it's a very strongly culturally mediated practice see more any question more no more questions

02:49:22

okay may i give you some questions yes please don't need one or two minutes yeah uh i've put a question about hippocampus uh it sucks i use some

02:49:34

information and you are you know other in case about the impact on hippocampus the role of memory and so on because we are working on that and

02:49:47

it's absolutely crucial it's only and yeah at the end of the process the you know one one thing is really the ability to assimilate

02:49:59

new in information right because you know the campus is where you will assimilate new in in information you know so so one of the uh you know characteristic of the

02:50:11

symptoms is really that infla flexibility in assimilating new information for instance the death marches is the end of world war ii right

02:50:22

they all knew and they assimilated maybe the information but they didn't really that the war is lost yet you know they continuous essentially so they were unable to to really assimilate

02:50:35

new in information and act on it so it's probably has to to do with with frontal hippocampal uh relationship but the the ability you know to really assimilate for capital information

02:50:49

into into action but i think obviously it's something that that we cannot directly study you know we can only you know make a hypothesis of what is happening innovation yeah

02:51:04

okay and also i wanted to to read uh what you know a a letter we have uh included in calm memorial you knew the memorial in france dealing with the

02:51:18

world world war ii it's a letter in which an ss officer recalled massacre in which he had participated in the morning in a in

02:51:29

a village he was a shooting as in a backdrop at babies babies thrown into the air by his colleagues and his justification what

02:51:44

if we are not done it later as adults they would have come to kill our children or grandchildren so um it's only a justification of perhaps

02:51:58

a place of revenge in in the process of you have described the process we have described after me

02:52:12

or not it sucks yeah well i think you know this this kind of just justification you know was common i guess in the sense that they say why are you killing children well you

02:52:25

know they will you know become uh you know in 20 years you know they may become an enemy of the of the rice right so again i think it's the the the effect of ideology in a

02:52:38

sense and the question is you know what uh great mentioned words are really toxic eventually they are assimilated into an ideology you know which justifies action but

02:52:50

obviously it's a highly you know abnormal situation you know we do have an aversion to throwing babies in the air it is clear yet here you know the rules are able to

02:53:02

really override you know this value system but you have understood it's not on in a trial you know it's a two or three days after in a letter written to his uh to his wife you know so so

02:53:16

you know these letters you know and photos and send home you know essentially part of that idea ideology it wasn't just a momentary thing you know it was a state i mean he could

02:53:30

send all these things to his wife he can love you know his own babies he can you know shut her from killing a dog but yet he's able to to do this to a baby because the baby is an object you know

02:53:44

the object is a threatening threat to him by the ideology so he has no no problem in doing that but that's a major transfer transformation we have to find

02:53:55

an explanation for it but i think it's all this combination of elements of seeing the baby as an object of having a justification of maybe not feeling their

02:54:07

responsibility i mean all those things which we mentioned here about you know agency responsibility perception you know theory of mind all this really come to one point you know you saw a baby in

02:54:20

the air right or you throw a baby against a wall something that you know a quote normal person would never do right yeah thank you we are coming

02:54:32

very close to the end and uh of course we have not been able to summarize for our audience all which is in the book which has been published now or as we

02:54:47

have seen the incredible complexity of the problems that we've been talking about i just wanted to show you for the audience which may be interested the book which

02:54:58

appeared last year because we have spoken about identity and denial this is called li dentite it's a encyclopedia which has been

02:55:12

written under the direction of the regretted philosopher jean gayle who unfortunately died two years ago this has been written by more than 100

02:55:24

participants it's a kind of dictionary on identity with contributions from uh people of very very different disciplines from neuroscience biology uh philosophy etc so that may be

02:55:38

interesting because we had this uh discussion and i i would like to thank uh everybody who participated and maybe give the last word to greti mirdal who

02:55:51

was uh the organizer of this adventure that we all [Music] participated and thank her very much grete you will have the

02:56:03

last word for that thank you very much i i think has been a fascinating experience to listen to all of you and still leaving the

02:56:19

round table with a feeling of hunger for more a feeling of not having uh dealt into all the questions

02:56:31

that we must go back to and and still work on and maybe that is really the best way to to feel after such a conference that you you want to meet again you want to do

02:56:45

more work you want to hear more research and and together i am convinced that we could not have done it neither us that who were interested

02:57:00

from the humanities point of view who had read all the literature on the holocaust and lived with it uh when you came you made a difference for

02:57:12

our understanding of what we knew and i hope that we made a difference for you attack on the way in which

02:57:23

you now conceive syndrome e and the impossibility of doing prevention on the basis of

02:57:35

what you started with