Subjects in an experiment first listened to people reading trivia, such as “A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can,” and then judged whether the sentence was true or false. If the sentence was read in a foreign accent, subjects were more likely to say that it was false than if it was read in the native accent. Subjects voiced this opinion even though the experimenter told them that the reader was not expressing an opinion, but merely reading the passage as instructed. In a second experiment, British subjects listening to a non-guilty plea by a person on trial were more likely to judge the person as guilty if he committed a blue collar crime and spoke with a non-standard British accent (e.g., Australian). In contrast, they were more likely to judge a white collar criminal as guilty if he spoke with a standard British accent. Even within the class of British accents, biases emerged: subjects from the Worcester region were more likely to judge supposed criminals as guilty if they spoke with a Birmingham accent than with a Worcester accent. Together, these studies paint a bleak picture: accents from an out-group are perceived as less truthful than others, and in the context of a criminal case, more guilty as well.
Accents are learned early in life, and once in place, are both clear markers of your origins and difficult to undue. As such, they are honest indicators of at least one dimension of group membership. What about dimensions that can readily be acquired at any point in life, and just as easily dropped? How do these influence not only our perception of those who share these dimensions in common, but how we treat them? In the last chapter I discussed a study by Tania Singer in which both men and women showed more pain empathy — as revealed by activation in the insula region of the brain — when they watched a cooperator experiencing pain. Further, men showed a reduction of activity in this area when a cheater experienced pain, and increased activity in a reward area— the nucleus accumbens. This pattern fits well with the research on human and nonhuman animals showing that winning, and watching winners win, triggers a choreographed ballet of physiological responses associated with reward. Singer took this work further, asking whether an individual’s support for a sport’s team might similarly modulate both the feeling of pain empathy as well as reward. Subjects, all soccer fanatics, sat in a scanner and watched as a player from their favorite team or a rival experienced pain. Next, Singer provided subjects with three options for interacting with these players: help them by personally taking on some of the pain they would receive, letting them take on all the pain but watch a video as distraction, or let them take on all the pain and watch as it happens. Option one is costly altruism, two is blissful ignorance, and three is schadenfreude.
In parallel with the earlier work on fairness, here too Singer observed greater pain empathy when the favorite team player experienced pain than when the rival experienced pain. She also observed that subjects were more likely to help favorite team players by taking on some of their pain, but more likely to watch rivals receive pain. The higher the activation level in the insula, the more they took on their
favorite team player’s pain session — the more they helped. When they watched rivals experience pain,
Hauser Chapter 3. Ravages of denial 97
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