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YOU PROBABLY think you're a really lovely person. And, for all I know, you are. But your brain isn't so pretty. It is a lumpen mass prone to making quickfire judgments based on prejudices you didn't even know you possessed.

The researchers were particularly interested in whether a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) whirred into action. The MPFC is activated when we think about ourselves or other people. It turns out that photographs of people that elicited disgust triggered little MPFC activity. The researchers claim in Psychological Science that this is proof that "members of some social groups seem to be dehumanised". These outgroups are perceived as having alien moral values, social norms and beliefs; so alien, the observers' brains appear to conclude, that they are not even members of the same species.

“Many of the groups who have been subject to mass killings . . . were once seen as entrepreneurs but perceived as outsiders,” she explained. Such killings are sometimes termed “ethnic cleansing”, which illustrates, if only lexically, that we intuitively grasp the disturbing relationship between bigotry and disgust.

The pictures were chosen to elicit emotions suspected by psychologists to be associated with prejudice: pride, envy, pity and disgust.

In any case the article buttresses my contention that all individual humans have the capacity for maleficent behavior to some degree

The pictures were chosen to elicit emotions suspected by psychologists to be associated with prejudice: pride, envy, pity and disgust.