Why People Fail To Notice Horrors
The miraculous history of our species is peppered with dark stories of oppression, bloody wars, murder and genocide. Looking back, we ask: Why weren’t the horrors halted earlier? How could people have lived with them?
A significant part of the reason for this points to the rules that govern the operations of the human brain.
Extreme political movements and deadly conflicts often escalate slowly. When threats start small and increase gradually, they end up eliciting a weaker reaction, less resistance and more acceptance. The slow increase allows larger and larger horrors to play out — taken for granted, seen as ordinary.
One of us is a neuroscientist; the other is a law professor. From our different fields, we have come to believe that it is not possible to understand the current period without appreciating why and how people do not notice so much of what we live with.
The underlying reason is a pivotal biological feature of our brain: habituation, or our tendency to respond less and less to things that change slowly. You enter a cafe filled with the smell of coffee and at first the smell is overwhelming, but no more than 20 minutes go by and you cannot smell it any longer. This is because your olfactory neurons stop firing in response to a now-familiar odor.
Human beings habituate to complex social circumstances such as war, oppression, misinformation and extremism. Habituation does not only result in a reduced tendency to notice immoral deeds around us; it also increases the likelihood that we will engage in them ourselves.
A famous study was conducted in the 1960s by the psychologist Stanley Milgram, done to understand the rise of authoritarianism, as it happened in Germany before and during World War II.
Milgram showed that regular citizens were willing to administer electric shocks — even those that appeared to be painful — to others when told to do so by an authority figure. Volunteers were asked to deliver small shocks, only very slowly, and by increments, to ramp up the voltage.
By asking the volunteers to increase the voltage one step at a time, Milgram was inducing emotional habituation. They may have felt some guilt at first, but because the shocks increased by small increments, any feelings of guilt were likely less intense than they would otherwise have been. By the time the volunteers reached the high voltage, many appeared to have habituated to the idea of causing dreadful pain.
Milgram’s study tells us about how people can get used to not only lying and cruelty, but also horrors — including their own.
You might now be thinking about alarming developments in the United States and Europe. If so, you are entirely right to do so.
Resistance efforts often do emerge in response to injustice or horror; consider the French Resistance, the civil rights movement and #MeToo. These movements tend to be initiated by what might be called “dishabituation entrepreneurs.”
Those are people who have not habituated to the evils of their society; they both see the wrongdoing for what it is and call it out to cause dishabituation in others. Often, dishabituation entrepreneurs are individuals who experience the horror or discrimination themselves, but refuse to get used to it. Malala Yousafzai, Mohandas Gandhi and Nelson Mandela are powerful examples.
Can dishabituation entrepreneurs be produced? We think so. A key is what John Stuart Mill once described as “experiments of living.” Mill emphasized the importance of seeing one’s beliefs, values, norms and situations from a distance, to be able to evaluate them and perhaps learn that a change would be desirable. To do so we need to diversify our experiences.
If people intentionally expose themselves to different cultures, different practices and different forms of government, the injustices around them may no longer seem natural and inevitable.
In the words of the philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel: “We must learn how to be surprised, not to adjust ourselves.”
Step by little step, we habituate ourselves to cruelty.