The Prisoner, The First Amendment, and The Brain (Blitz)

As an ardent fan of the 1960s television series, The Prisoner, I wanted to begin my first (belated) guest post here with a tribute of sorts to the creator and star of the show, Patrick McGoohan, who died this past January.  The 17-episode series was about an intelligence agent who -- just after resigning from intelligence job without giving a reason -- wakes up to find himself confined to a mysterious village where he is relentlessly pressured by the powers-that-be to provide an explanation for his resignation.  The series is a gold mine for neuroethics and law scholars looking for science fiction examples, given its many stories about futuristic neurotechnologies from mind-swap machines, to dream-watching monitors (equipped with dream-control devices), to subliminal “speed learning” broadcasts that imprint history lessons directly on the watcher’s brain, to various methods of undermining one’s sense of reality. 

But the part of The Prisoner that interests me most (at least for purposes of this blog post) is its reflections on the power of social conformity. While the protagonist (identified only as “Number 6”) can withstand the interrogations to which he’s subjected by the Village authorities, he finds it less easy (in one episode) to deal with ostracism by the entire community.  In a sense, the events of the episode nicely illustrate an observation that John Locke made centuries ago about the nearly-irresistible force of social conformity: While an individual might defy “the laws of the commonwealth,” wrote Locke, he is far less likely to resist “the fashion and opinion of the company he keeps, and would recommend himself to’ since “[h]e must of a strange and unusual constitution, who can content himself to live in constant disgrace and disrepute with his own particular society.”  Locke’s observation has received experimental support and elaboration from the studies on social conformity by psychologists like Muzafer Sherif and Solomon Asch.

These observations present a challenge of sorts for First Amendment jurisprudence -- not unlike the challenge presented to First Amendment jurisprudence by the “sticky” false memories that were discussed in this blog earlier a few months ago, and that interfere with the First Amendment’s ability to advance the truth simply by promoting open discussion and communication.  Our brains also apparently make it difficult for the First Amendment to serve one of the other functions attributed to it by judges and scholars: serving as a guarantor of individual autonomy.  A study recently discussed in CNN and published in Neuron apparently shed some light on some of the biology underlying social conformity observed in experiments like those of Asch and Sherif:  An individual finding herself out of step with her group’s opinion had a neuronal response in two parts of the brain similar to that which occurs with “a prediction error signal,” “a difference between expected and obtained outcomes that is thought to signal the need for a behavioral adjustment.” 

The larger question in all of this for me is what should a legal and social regime do if it places value on the kinds of conduct that our biology (in some respects) makes difficult, including marching to the beat of a different drummer.  In the op-ed on sticky false memories that Adam excerpted from a few months ago, Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt suggest that although “[o]ur brains do not naturally obey” Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “admirable dictum” that free trade in ideas will bring us closer to the truth, perhaps “by better understanding the mechanisms of memory perhaps we can move closer to Holmes’s ideal.”  A better understanding of the biology underlying conformity might likewise suggest ways we might move closer to the individual liberty celebrated by writers like John Stuart Mill and Ralph Waldo Emerson -- and in Patrick McGoohan’s “The Prisoner.”

Comments

[Daniel S. Goldberg]

Marc,

This a great post, but I'm not clear on one aspect:

How exactly is it that greater understanding of the neurobiology underlying conformity suggests ways in which we might move closer to a classically liberal or transcendental notion of individual liberty?

In many ways, the neurobiology, while interesting in its own right, simply seems to confirm in different ways ideas and arguments for which anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists, among others, have documented repeatedly (i.e., that socialization is an inordinately powerful force). As you yourself note, the idea sounds Lockean, and I'm reasonably sure a notion of our strong tendencies to conformity reside somewhere in the Aristotelian corpus, though I can't at this moment say where.

But if all this is so, if Milgram-Asch showed in dramatic and shocking ways the power of socialization and conformity, then what exactly does the neurobiology really add to the story, other than a different kind of evidence from what has already been adduced and conceptualized for a long time? And more so, how is it that neurobiology may hold the keys to preserving a notion of unfettered individualism?

[Peter B. Reiner]

Marc,

A hearty welcome to N&L blog, and I second Daniel's comment about the great post. Having watched the entire Prisoner series from beginning to end more than once, I strongly concur about the appeal of the series. Not having seen it for years, I had not thought about the neuroethical implications, but I think you are spot on.

As the resident neurobiologist in this growing group of N&L bloggers, I feel compelled to respond to Daniel's comment in which he questions the value of investigating the neurobiology underlying social conformity. Neurobiology holds no magic answers, but it does open up the prospect of understanding phenomena on a mechanistic basis (even if the cited study leaves this neurobiologist less breathless than it does CNN) in addition to the insights that have already been derived from disciplines such as anthropology, sociology and their brethren. If we are to move to a "classically liberal or transcendental notion of individual liberty", we may find that a deeper understanding how social conformity works at a mechanistic level has utility. The social goal is worthy but not easily achieved; we need every arrow in our quiver to nudge matters along.

[Marc Blitz]

Daniel and Peter,

Thanks for both of your comments and kind welcomes. In all honesty, I’m not sure what benefits this neurobiology research on conformity will have for our thinking about individualism.

As Daniel points out, the experiments of Asch and Milgram already give us a lot to work with in thinking about to deal with the our powerful tendency toward social conformity, and how and when to loosen it’s hold on our behavior. In fact, Cass Sunstein, wrote a wonderful book five years ago (Why Societies Need Dissent) where he considered how the experiments of Sherif, Asch and Milgram might inform the way we think about the structure and make-up of judicial panels and other decision-making institutions. He was particularly interested in Asch’s finding that even a single dissenter in the subject’s group dramatically increased the likelihood that the subject would reject the majority view herself. I’ve also wondered -- and perhaps you or other readers know of some work that helps answer this -- how a subject’s ability to buck even a unanimous group opinion would be affected if she brought memories of certain past experiences to the situation, like having heard or read about the Asch experiments, or having recently read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, or recently listened to Julian Cope’s song, World Shut Your Mouth, or watched The Prisoner.

I guess in the end, though, I tend to agree with Peter’s sense that understanding the neurobiology behind these tendencies toward social conformity can’t help but better inform us about why it is that we act in the way Sherif and Asch observed, how possible it will be to resist or alter those tendencies, and under what circumstances, and how we can go about doing so. Again, I’m grateful for your thoughts on this topic and would welcome additional thoughts, or recommended reading, from both of you and other readers of this blog.

[Daniel S. Goldberg]

Peter and Marc,

For the record, I do not dispute the idea that neurobiology may provide a different kind of (valuable) evidence for the power of socialization and conformity in human behavior (there's that word again, Peter!). I am not opposed to trying to understand these phenomena from a neurobiological perspective -- though I am, as Peter well knows, vehemently opposed to reducing these phenomena to neurobiological perspectives -- and of using the relevant tools to provide different analyses of socialization and conformity.

I suppose I agree with Peter that, while the neurobiological contribution to this topic is certainly worthwhile, I don't really see any cause for "breathlessness," nor do I understand how it is that the neurobiological contribution itself promises to open up vast domains of explanation and understanding previously unavailable (I'm not opposed to the effort, I just don't see why and how it is that this particular methodology is likely to provide such explanations).

My general feeling on most matters neuroscientific/neurobiological is not that the work lacks worth, but rather than the apparently common notion, from both lay and professional stakeholders, that the work promises to revolutionize our concepts of self and society, seems mistaken to me, or at least unlikely. These commonly held beliefs smack too much of scientism, IMO.

[Anibal]

Nice thread!

This is an interesting reference about the subject:

http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/3/4/353

[Anibal]

Nice thread!

This is an interesting reference about the subject:

http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/3/4/353

[Anibal]

So sorry about multiple posting.

[Marc Blitz]

Anibal,

Thanks very much for the reference! I look forward to learning more from it about Klucharev et al's work on persuasion, expert influence, and conformity. For reasons I'll say more about in an upcoming post, I've been wondering about whether (and how) work of this sort -- in neurobiology, experimental psychology, and research in other fields -- might raise questions about other tenets of free speech jurisprudence. Thanks.