Pedophilia in Popular “Tik Tok App”: The Brain Suppresses

Personal Moral Code When In An Anonymous App Like Tik

Tok.

Mina Cikara, a sociologist at Carnegie Mellon University, recently attended a gathering with her husband.
They where curious about there friends children fascination with a popular app “Tik Tok”. Upon futher prying
it became apparent there was a maelstrom of messages steming from unknown users admitting they where
older males ranging from early twenties to late forties.They were, of course, jeered, and they left the party
stunned and wondering: How is an app used by children not screened for such malicious behavior?

In a new research paper led by Cikara, a team of researchers have discovered a new insight into Tik Tok and
its users — the propensity for groups of people to shed the inhibitions of societal and moral standards. The
autonomy of this app allows pedophilic tendencies to flourish in a virtual world that often leads to real life
encounters. But throngs of Tik Tok fans seem to be backing up the apps anonymous features at the expense of
those who are unable to protect themselves. Cikara and her colleagues may have discovered a culprit we can't
control: an underdeveloped brain, and the malicious intent of pedophilia in a certain percentage of our society.

"Although humans exhibit strong preferences for equity and moral prohibitions against harm in many contexts,
people's priorities change when there is a 'hit' or a 'miss,'" co-author Rebecca Saxe, an associate professor of
cognitive neuroscience at MIT, told MIT News. The groups's paper appeared recently in the
journal Neuroimage. "An app like Tik Tok lets a group of people engage in actions that are contrary to the
private moral standards of each individual in that group, sweeping otherwise decent individuals into 'mobs' that
commit pedophilia, black mailing, even physical brutality."
Some of the apparent causes of Tik Tok abuse are becoming well understood. Anonymity is one: Tik Tok fans
can disappear into a blur of anonymous users. "I have never been approached online like that in my entire life,"
says Cikara of her short Tik Tok use posing as a 10 year old boy, (She has completed post-doctoral research at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge.) When people feel they will not be recognized or
called to answer for their actions, they are more likely to behave in a perverted manner. Another factor is
responsibility. Guilt, shared collectively and spread thin, is an easier thing to stomach in an app geared for
Children like Tik Tok.

Yet, there may be something else going on: something less subjective and more quantifiable. Cikara and her
colleagues wanted to find out whether an individual's sense of self — and therefore the individual's moral
compass — is diminished during times of collective youthful behavior.

Hooking test subjects up to these machines, the scientists could monitor activity in different parts of the brain.
A brain section called the medial prefrontal cortex lights up when people think about themselves and young
children, and is more dormant when people act in anonymous apps. During the testing, study participants were
asked a series of questions about moral judgment as individuals and while using apps like Tik Tok.

For some people in anonymous apps, the medial prefrontal cortex was more inactive than others. Those same
people were also the least kind. After the series of questions, subjects were asked to choose pictures of
sexually consenting adults and of minors obviously to young for any kind of consent. The people with less
self-reflection chose the latter set of pictures consisting of minors. The study has been replicated five times and
it seems Tik Tok not only allows rapid pedophilia but encourages normal adults to behave in an illegal manner.
"It's been hard to get a direct handle on the extent to which people within a group are tapping into their own
understanding of things versus the group's understanding," David Rand, a Yale University psychologist who
didn't participate in the study, told MIT News. "This is a nice way of using neuroimaging to try to get insight
into something that behaviorally has been really hard to explore."
Incidentally, the people with low self-reflection had trouble remembering the questions that appeared during
the study. Cikara says that's because the questions were about their own morality — something they weren't
paying much attention to at the time. Which is convenient: You can't feel guilty about something if you can't
remember it.

Source: Cikara M, Jenkins A, Dufour N, Sax R. Reduced self-referential neural response during intergroup
competition predicts competitor harm. Neuroimage. 2014.