Brutality of the Worst Kind

Last month, Occupy protesters uploaded videos of University of California Davis police pepper-spraying a line of sitting protesters. The videos have since gone viral, and the following week UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi announced that the police chief had been placed on administrative leave. The recordings show a police officer holding a can of pepper spray a few feet away from the protesters’ faces and walking up and down the line a couple times, all the while calmly spraying their faces.

The reported incidents of police brutality vis-à-vis the Occupy movement are disillusioning because they consist of violent harm by those who exist to prevent just that. The nonchalant manner in which the police officer pepper-sprayed the peaceful protesters, along with other incidences of brutality, is disheartening. However, such behavior is not surprising from an evolutionary perspective. What we see in scenes of police brutality are social mechanisms that had tremendous utility in the Pleistocene era but are now disruptive to civil society.

The primary factor that creates mutual antagonism between Occupy protesters and police forces is group formation. Group identities are strongly ingrained by both physical demarcations—badges and riot gear or casual clothing—and the type of words spoken by each group. The police form in tactical positions while the protesters hold signs and bind arms; each group is physically separated and clearly distinguishable. This can lead to what psychologists call in-group favoritism and out-group homogeneity; in the former phenomenon individuals of one’s group are considered favorably for little other reason than similarity, and in the latter members outside one’s group are deindividualized and perceived as homogeneous, resulting in a loss of empathy. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, this psychological phenomenon may have strengthened group cohesion and aided survival, but today it can be heavily detrimental.

With group identities firmly established a high-stress environment such as a protest can invoke other evolutionarily adaptive phenomena that can turn a peaceful assembly into a public relations disaster. Survival instincts make the opposing group seem to be a dangerous and potentially lethal force that must be apprehended. This can lead to aggression, clearly visible in the rough treatment of protesters at UC Davis and the at Harvard on November 9 when protesters grabbed a police officer’s gun belt outside of the Yard. Additionally, in the chaos of the protest, groupthink can quickly kick in as critical thinking gives way to rushed, consensus-based decision-making. That the police officers who did not themselves pepper-spray protesters did not question their group’s actions provides strong evidence that groupthink was a powerful impetus behind the events at UC Davis. Training that emphasizes a strong knowledge of group psychology and the self-awareness to sense it within one’s own group would mitigate needlessly violent police behavior.

To prevent police brutality and violent protest, we need to remember that behind a riot mask lies a face, within a mob exist individuals; our in-group should contain both protesters and police. If we cannot destroy the negative consequences of our evolutionary past, we can at least manipulate them to fit our society. Awareness of our human psychology is essential—we can only change our behavior by starting at the cognitive level. Constant metacognition, in which constituents of groups monitor themselves, is necessary for all parties involved.

When we identify psychological reasons for horrifying actions, we try to understand them in a deeper way and recognize that we are animals. We have evolved to behave a certain way in certain situations and often have less control over how we act than we realize.  That does not mean that such actions are permissible, of course; we are responsible for our own behavior and its consequences. As complex and reasoning humans, we can transcend evolutionary impulses such as aggression and in-group and out-group biases.

What this means politically is that the Occupy movement along with its subsequent governmental reaction is limited by human factors. However, similarly limited is our evaluation of Occupiers. Already, the distinction between “Occupiers” and “non-Occupiers” is bound to create an in-group and out-group mentality, leading to prejudiced judgments that become exaggerated by groupthink.  When we don’t listen to others’ opinions or stereotype them to fit our personal narratives, we destroy any potential societal gains that could result from lending the protesters a sympathetic ear and in doing so harm ourselves. The worst brutality is not always physical violence—sometimes it is out-grouping.

Whan Lee ‘15, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Stoughton Hall.