Coercion changes the sense of agency in the human brain

Abstract

People may deny responsibility for negative consequencesof their actions by claiming that they were‘‘only obeying orders.’’ The ‘‘Nuremberg defense’’ offersone extreme example, though it is often dismissedas merely an attempt to avoid responsibility.Milgram’s classic laboratory studies reported widespreadobedience to an instruction to harm, suggestingthat social coercion may alter mechanisms ofvoluntary agency, and hence abolish the normalexperience of being in control of one’s own actions.However, Milgram’s and other studies relied ondissembling and on explicit measures of agency,which are known to be biased by social norms.Here, we combined coercive instructions to administerharm to a co-participant, with implicit measuresof sense of agency, based on perceived compressionof time intervals between voluntary actionsand their outcomes, and with electrophysiologicalrecordings. In two experiments, an experimenterordered a volunteer to make a key-press action thatcaused either financial penalty or demonstrablypainful electric shock to their co-participant, therebyincreasing their own financial gain. Coercionincreased the perceived interval between actionand outcome, relative to a situation where participantsfreely chose to inflict the same harms. Interestingly,coercion also reduced the neural processing ofthe outcomes of one’s own action. Thus, people whoobey orders may subjectively experience their actionsas closer to passive movements than fullyvoluntary actions. Our results highlight the complexrelation between the brain mechanisms thatgenerate the subjective experience of voluntary actionsand social constructs, such as responsibility.SCOPUS: ar.jinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe