More than half of the studies within the ERC project have now been completed, resulting in four published papers (with one additional manuscript under review). Notably, we were able to develop a task designed to study resistance to immoral orders from an authority figure, while ensuring ecological validity and respecting ethical standards. This task has been successfully used with civilians in Belgium, military personnel, as well as former genocide perpetrators, rescuers, and bystanders in Rwanda, using both electroencephalography (EEG) and fMRI. It has enabled us to complete all work packages of the project and will continue to be used in future research, beyond the present ERC grant.
Through this paradigm, we identified several key neurocognitive and affective processes involved in resisting immoral orders, including empathy for pain, interpersonal feelings of guilt, sense of agency, and cognitive conflict. Interestingly, military participants rely on similar neural mechanisms as civilians to disobey, but to a different extent. For example, military personnel recruit brain regions linked to emotional empathy when disobeying an experimenter’s orders, whereas civilians rely more strongly on brain regions associated with cognitive empathy.
We also observed that the neural empathic response to a victim’s distress is a key factor distinguishing rescuers from former genocide perpetrators and bystanders—a process that also supports resistance to immoral orders. Why rescuers exhibit such enhanced neural empathic responses remains to be further investigated. Importantly, former genocide perpetrators and bystanders did not differ in the neural processes underlying their decision-making and disobedience. This finding suggests that participation in genocide is not linked to stable inherent predispositions, but rather shaped by contextual factors present at the time of the events.
