Professor Elam

Weekend Feb 1 2015

Socionomic theory holds that endogenously generated mood governs behavior. In this excerpt, Chuck Thompson, writer for  the Socionomist, explains a recent experiment analyzing tendencies towards herding. I asked the Ethics Class to read an excerpt from Shadow Account. In that fictional story a CPA explains how this sort of thing occurs between a client and external auditor.  for more on this idea se

http://www.socionomics.net

Socionomists have long been interested in how individuals make decisions while under the influence of a group. In The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior, Robert Prechter explains that investors herd, which leads to poor choices and financial losses.

In this brief article, socionomist Chuck Thompson explores another effect of group membership – a loss of individual ethics. 

Here is an excerpt of the December 2014 article.

A recent neurological study conducted by Dr. Mina Cikara, assistant professor of Psychology at Harvard, and three other researchers sheds light on how “Otherwise decent individuals can be swept up into ‘mobs’ that commit looting, vandalism, even physical brutality.” When groups compete, the tendency of group members to think for themselves can be superseded by a strong desire to express loyalty to the group. In turn, group loyalty can morph into hostility toward members of other groups. The researchers cited three common explanations for the behavior:

1. It serves the greater good of the group;
2. Groups provide anonymity to individuals, which diminishes a sense of personal accountability; and
3. To act as a group member separates individuals from their personal moral standards.

Regarding the third explanation, some researchers have proposed that acting in a group reduces self-awareness. To test this hypothesis, Cikara and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of study participants. They focused on “self-referential processing,” which happens in the brain’s medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). They said that dozens of studies have shown this region of the brain is engaged when people access self-knowledge or reflect on their own personality, mental state, or physical characteristics.

Their hypothesis is that when individuals act in a group, they experience reduced self-referential processing regarding personal morals, which shows up on fMRI scans as reduced mPFC activity.

The researchers discovered that when competing in a group, some participants showed a decreased level of mPFC activity when reading moral statements about themselves—indicating that these participants had lost touch with their moral selves while acting as members of a competitive group.