| Popis: |
People’s ability to question and resist immoral orders is a fundamental aspect of individual autonomy and of democratic societies. To wit: the history of nations is plagued by horrendous acts of obedience that have caused wars and the loss of countless lives. But today, experimental research on neuro-cognitive processes that prevent an individual from being coerced into causing pain to others is almost completely inexistent. Since Milgram’s studies which mostly investigated psychological and contextual components which make an individual to obey or disobey immoral orders (Haslam et al., 2014), some studies have tried to understand how obedience to authority impacts several neuro-cognitive processes (Caspar et al., 2016, 2021; Caspar, Ioumpa, et al., 2020; Caspar, Lo Bue, et al., 2020). Yet, the neuro-cognitive processes supporting resistance to immoral orders have almost not been investigated. The major reasons to explain this lack of research were the ethical issues associated with Milgram’s studies, the difficulty to adapt Milgram’s protocol to imaging studies, and the difficulty to develop an experimental set-up to make participants disobey. By using a new protocol developed by Caspar (Caspar, 2021) addressing these issues, in the present fMRI study we will explore the neural signature of disobedience to immoral orders received by an experimenter in civilians and a military population. Based on previous studies (Caspar et al., 2021; Caspar, Ioumpa, et al., 2020), we will particularly focus on two key neuro-cognitive processes which have been proposed to be involved in (prosocial) disobedience: the sense of agency (SoA) and empathy for pain. In an exploratory fashion, we will also target other neuro-cognitive processes such as the interpersonal feeling of guilt and cognitive conflict. |
