How evil happens: Syndrome E

[phands]

Interesting article on Aeon.....

Why some people choose to do evil remains a puzzle, but are we starting to understand how this behaviour is triggered?


In 1941, en route from a ghetto to a concentration camp in Ukraine, a Nazi soldier beat my grandfather to death. My father witnessed this murder. His is just one of millions of similar stories, of course, and I grew up aware of how death hovered on the other side of life, and brutality on the underside of humanity. The ‘sapiens’ in Homo sapiens does not fully describe our species: we are as violent as we are smart. This might be why we are the only Homo genus left over in the first place, and why we have been so destructively successful at dominating our planet. But still the question nags away: how are ordinary people capable of such obscene acts of violence?


This duality is also a puzzle to ourselves, at the heart of cosmologies, theologies and tragedies, the motor of moral codes and the tension at the heart of socio-political systems. We know light and we know dark. We are capable of doing terrible things, but also of asking ourselves contemplatively and creatively how that is. The self-consciousness that characterises the human mind is nowhere more baffling than in this problem of evil, which philosophers have been discussing since Plato. An obvious place to look for explanations of evil is in the patterns of behaviour that those who commit atrocities display.


This is what the neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried at the University of California, Los Angeles did with his article ‘Syndrome E’ (1997) in The Lancet. A syndrome is a group of biological symptoms that together constitute a clinical picture. And E stands for evil. With Syndrome E, Fried identified a cluster of 10 neuropsychological symptoms that are often present when evil acts are committed – when, as he puts it, ‘groups of previously nonviolent individuals’ turn ‘into repetitive killers of defenceless members of society’. The 10 neuropsychological symptoms are:


1. Repetition: the aggression is repeated compulsively.
2. Obsessive ideation: the perpetrators are obsessed with ideas that justify their aggression and underlie missions of ethnic cleansing, for instance that all Westerners, or all Muslims, or all Jews, or all Tutsis are evil.
3. Perseveration: circumstances have no impact on the perpetrator’s behaviour, who perseveres even if the action is self-destructive.
4. Diminished affective reactivity: the perpetrator has no emotional affect.
5. Hyperarousal: the elation experienced by the perpetrator is a high induced by repetition, and a function of the number of victims.
6. Intact language, memory and problem-solving skills: the syndrome has no impact on higher cognitive abilities.
7. Rapid habituation: the perpetrator becomes desensitised to the violence.
8. Compartmentalisation: the violence can take place in parallel to an ordinary, affectionate family life.
9. Environmental dependency: the context, especially identification with a group and obedience to an authority, determines what actions are possible.
10. Group contagion: belonging to the group enables the action, each member mapping his behaviour on the other. Fried’s assumption was that all these ways of behaving had underlying neurophysiological causes that were worth investigating.


Note that the syndrome applies to those previously normal individuals who become able to kill. It excludes the wartime, sanctioned killing by and of military recruits that leads many soldiers to return home (if they ever do) with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); recognised psychopathologies such as sociopathic personality disorder that can lead someone to shoot schoolchildren; and crimes of passion or the sadistic pleasure in inflicting pain. When Hannah Arendt coined her expression ‘the banality of evil’ in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), she meant that the people responsible for actions that led to mass murder can be ordinary, obeying orders for banal reasons, such as not losing their jobs. The very notion of ordinariness was tested by social psychologists. In 1971, the prison experiment by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University played with this notion that ‘ordinary students’ could turn into abusive mock ‘prison guards’ – though it was largely unfounded, given evidence of flaws in the never-replicated experiment. Still, those afflicted with Syndrome E are indeed ordinary insofar as that they are not affected by any evident psychopathology. The historian Christopher Browning wrote of equally ‘ordinary men’ in the 1992 book of that name (referenced by Fried) who became Nazi soldiers. The soldier who killed my grandfather was very probably an ordinary man too.


Today, biology is a powerful explanatory force for much human behaviour, though it alone cannot account for horror. Much as the neurosciences are an exciting new tool for human self-understanding, they will not explain away our brutishness. Causal accounts of the destruction that humans inflict on each other are best provided by political history – not science, nor metaphysics. The past century alone is heavy with atrocities of unfathomable scale, albeit fathomable political genesis. But it was the advent of ISIS and the surge in youthful, enthusiastic recruits to it that gave Fried’s hypothesis a new urgency, and prompted him to organise, with the neurophysiologist Alain Berthoz at the Collège de France in Paris, three conferences around Syndrome E that between 2015 and 2017 gathered cognitive neuroscientists, social psychologists, neurophysiologists, psychiatrists, terrorism specialists and jurists, some of whose theories and insights I share here. Syndrome E is a useful provocation to an innovative, interdisciplinary discussion of this old problem – and a powerful example of how to frame neuroscientific output in human terms. Already this approach is giving rise to interesting hypotheses and explanations.

There's much more at Aeon...

 

[rousseau]

The thing that's most interesting to me about this kind of behavior is that these people have no off-switch. Some how, some way, it doesn't cross violent people's minds to simply.. not inflict harm on another person. That something so obvious is completely taken for granted suggests to me that violent people aren't rational actors, which is interesting in itself. What is happening in the mind of someone who willingly commits violence? Are they acting with intent? And if not, what is the driving force of their behavior?

I've followed Aeon on Twitter for some time.. they can be hit or miss, but the world's a tough place to pull unique topics out of.

 

[Valjean]

It would be interesting to explore the anatomic and functional features associated with this.

 

[J842P]

The thing that's most interesting to me about this kind of behavior is that these people have no off-switch. Some how, some way, it doesn't cross violent people's minds to simply.. not inflict harm on another person. That something so obvious is completely taken for granted suggests to me that violent people aren't rational actors, which is interesting in itself. What is happening in the mind of someone who willingly commits violence? Are they acting with intent? And if not, what is the driving force of their behavior?

I've followed Aeon on Twitter for some time.. they can be hit or miss, but the world's a tough place to pull unique topics out of.

What does rationality have to do with it? If anything, I expect the more rational people to be more prone. It is people who are driven by the negative emotional affect of inflicting harm on people who would be resistent. If anything, there is generally no good reason *not* to be evil if it is socially sanctioned.

 

[fromderinside]

I'm still trying to get my head around that young black man running away from cops with a gun in his hand saying "I didn't do anything illegal...." for which, it was OK for the cops to gun him down. Please put evil in the context of this scene.

I hope you see my problem with the topic.

 

[rousseau]

If anything, there is generally no good reason *not* to be evil if it is socially sanctioned.

Hard disagree there. It may be the immediately smart thing to do, on a kind of psychopathic, evolutionary logic, but it's not the smart thing to do.

And I guess that kind of hits the nail on the head. Most people are just automatically kind of awful a lot of the time, and it's only the more benevolent people in the world who are able to meld things in the direction of justice.

 

[phands]

I hope you see my problem with the topic.

Frankly, no.

I think it's clear how they are linked. The cop and the innocent dead guy are embedded in a society which embraces, condones, legalizes and sometimes celebrates evil. Just like the nazis, but at a different place on the scale. The evil act is enshrined in the fabric of the USA, just like hating and eventually killing Jews became enshrined in Germany. Ordinary Germans became concentration camp guards. Ordinary Americans become cops and kill innocent people they're supposed to protect. And yet again, all it takes for extremists to flourish is for the moderates to do nothing.

 

[repoman]

I have seen a lot of actual footage of group/mob killings on liveleak and bestgore. The affect of people doing the killing and the happy bystanders is otherwordly.

Mostly South Americans bashing thieves with rocks and then throwing them off bridges into rivers while unconscious, Mexican cartels and chainsaws, Africans necklacing people for whatever reason and some of the ISIS slaughters which were extremely controlled and cold blooded.

The symptoms seem to fit.

 

[BH]

Let's face it. A lot of people are just cruel and get jollies seeing other people suffer.

 

[JohnG]

I don't think "evil" is a good word to use. It implies some sort of possession from some external force (to me anyway), or at least committing a negative act for the sheer pleasure of it with no positive outcome.

It seems to me the default state of people is violence when we are set to compete with one another, and relative harmony when given the opportunity to cooperate for the common good. Even in times of cooperation there is competition, but the positive outcome of the cooperative effort overrides outright violence.

Also, we are an evolving species, maybe it's possible to move away from our violent nature - although I realize that's a bit optimistic.