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Borderline personality disorder, autism, narcissism, psychosis, Asperger's: All of these syndromes have one thing in common--lack of empathy. In some cases, this absence can be dangerous, but in others it can simply mean a different way of seeing the world.
In The Science of Evil Simon Baron-Cohen, an award-winning British researcher who has investigated psychology and autism for decades, develops a new brain-based theory of human cruelty. A true psychologist, however, he examines social and environmental factors that can erode empathy, including neglect and abuse.
Based largely on Baron-Cohen's own research, The Science of Evil will change the way we understand and treat human cruelty.
- Sales Rank: #136270 in Books
- Published on: 2012-09-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.10" h x .80" w x 5.40" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 272 pages
Review
New York Times
"A simple but persuasive hypothesis for a new way to think about evil."
Paul Harris, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education
“Simon Baron-Cohen displays once again his ability to bring science to bear on troubling and controversial issues. Arguing that we explain nothing by describing acts of wanton cruelty as evil, he explores the simple but powerful hypothesis that such acts can be traced to a distinct psychological state&mdaash;a lack of empathy. He backs up his claim with a wealth of research—from developmental psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience and genetics. Those who have to deal with the aftermath of cruelty may not agree with Baron-Cohen’s analysis but they will surely be informed and provoked by his boldness and originality.”
Michael Gazzaniga, Professor of Psychology, University of California - Santa Barbara; author of The Ethical Brain
“Horrific crimes usually freeze the mind, leaving only a desire for retribution. Simon Baron-Cohen has taken us beyond those mental inadequacies. In this book, proposing a new way to think about evil people and empathy, he has laid the scientific groundwork for a future and brighter science of understanding the dark side of the human condition.”
Marco Iacoboni, Professor, UCLA; author of Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others
“The Science of Evil is a compelling journey into the ubiquitous power of empathy in our lives. The devastating effects of ‘zero degrees of empathy’ are masterfully described and thoroughly analyzed. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen’s book shows how, with its unexpected and unsettling absence, empathy reveals its foundational role in human sociality.”
Dr. Helena Cronin, Co-Director, Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science, LSE
“Bringing cruelty triumphantly into the realm of science, this pioneering journey into human nature at last delivers us from ‘evil.’”
Uta Frith, Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development, UCL
“A compelling and provocative account of empathy as our most precious social resource. Lack of empathy lurks in the darkest corners of human history and Simon Baron-Cohen does not shrink from looking at them under the fierce light of science.”
Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist
“Simon Baron-Cohen combines his creative talent with evidence and reason to make the case that evil is essentially a failure of empathy. It is an understanding that can enlighten an old debate and hold out the promise of new remedies.”
Andrew N. Meltzoff, co-director of University of Washington Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences and co-author of The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us about the Mind
“What makes someone evil? What’s the brain got to do with it? Baron-Cohen confronts the most urgent and controversial questions in social neuroscience. Both disturbing and compassionate this brilliant book establishes a new science of evil, explaining both its brain basis and development. Baron-Cohen fundamentally transforms how we understand cruelty in others and in so doing forces us to examine ourselves. Reading this book invites us to widen our own circle of empathy—compelling us to grow and comprehend, if not forgive.”
Boston Globe
“The Science of Evil contains a huge amount of useful information for a rather short read…it’s an important early step in building a more robust understanding of our species at its most horrific.”
Psychology Today
“Rigorously researched…[Baron-Cohen’s] discussion of how parents can instill lifelong empathy in their children is particularly useful.”
Terry Eagleton, Financial Times
“Attractively humane…fascinating information about the relation between degrees of empathy and the state of our brains.”
Richard Holloway, Literary Review
“Ground-breaking and important.... This humane and immensely sympathetic book calls us to the task of reinterpreting aberrant human behaviour so that we might find ways of changing it for the better.... The effect…is not to diminish the concept of human evil, but to demystify it.”
The Spectator (UK)
“Short, clear, and highly readable. Baron-Cohen guides you through his complex material as if you were a student attending a course of lectures. He’s an excellent teacher; there’s no excuse for not understanding anything he says.”
Times Higher Education Supplement (UK)
“Engaging and informative.”
Dorothy Rowe, The Guardian (UK)
“A book that gets to the heart of man’s inhumanity to man.... Baron-Cohen has made a major contribution to our understanding of autism.”
Ian Critchley, Sunday Times (UK)
“Fascinating… bold.”
Science Focus
“Easy to read and packed with anecdotes. The author conveys brain research with verve.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Baron-Cohen’s professorial background shines through in the book’s tone and in step-by-step, engaging prose urging both academic and lay reader alike to journey with him in scientific inquiry.”
Library Journal
“Clearly written and succinct, this book will enrich but not overwhelm interested readers…provides a useful perspective for understanding human pathology, including events like Columbine and the Holocaust.”
About the Author
Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology in the departments of Experimental Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. He is the Director of the University’s Autism Research Centre, and a Fellow of Trinity College. He has received the Spearman Medal, the May Davison Award for Clinical Psychology, and the Presidents Award from the British Psychological Society. He has also won the McAndless Award from the American Psychological Association. His previous books include The Essential Difference and Mindblindness. He lives in Cambridge, England.
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Understanding Empathy
By Karyll Banadera
How does someone hurt another person without feeling a bit of remorse? Are they pure evil? Or should we use the term “empathy erosion”? But what is empathy, and how does it relate to people doing evil? Simon Baron-Cohen, the author of this book, achieved his PhD in Psychology at University College London and has previously written three books about psychology. Baron-Cohen wrote The Science of Evil: On Empathy and The Origins of Cruelty to explain to the readers how empathy works and what empathy’s role to humans is.
In the first chapter entitled “Explaining “Evil” and Human Cruelty”, the author introduces the book by giving examples of cruel acts known worldwide such as: the inhumane experiments that Nazis did to the Jews, the Armenian genocide, and also common crimes like robbery and theft. Baron-Cohen reveals in this chapter that people with lower empathy tend to see other living beings as objects and can’t entirely relate to them. Baron-Cohen also perfectly made clear in this introductory chapter that the lack of empathy is not the only reason why people could hurt others, but argues that a lack of empathy is an important factor for how others can be cruel.
“The Empathy Mechanism: The Bell Curve”, which is the second chapter, is the portion of the book where the author defines what empathy means. Baron-Cohen warns the readers that empathy has a lot of meanings and doesn’t have one solid definition. The author states that some definitions of empathy include: being able to identify and read other people’s emotions and ignoring our own personal needs to accommodate other people. The second chapter continues with the author displaying a way to measure one’s level of empathy which is a scale called Empathy Quotient (EQ). Through the Empathy Quotient questionnaire, a person would have a rough idea of how much empathy he or she has. The levels of empathy ranges from 0 up to level 6; wherein 0 is a person having no empathy at all, and 6 is a person with an extraordinary amount of empathy. The book also talks about the Empathy Circuit. The Empathy Circuit is composed of different parts of the brain that plays a part in a person’s empathy. The latter part of the chapter is where the readers will know some of the most important parts of the brain that have a role in the Empathy Circuit such as the amygdala and the somatosensory cortex.
The third chapter is entitled “When Zero Degrees of Empathy Is Negative”. The third chapter mainly talks about people who have low empathy. This chapter reveals that people in the zero-negative spectrum are the people experiencing the bad effects of lacking empathy, and those people are the ones who will most likely do cruel things. Chapter three especially focuses on the people with psychological issues. These psychological issues are called The Three Forms of Zero-Negative which is composed of: Borderline personality disorder, Psychopathy, and Narcissism. While the fourth chapter entitled “When Zero Degrees of Empathy Is Positive”, tackles the issue of people who lacks empathy but is engaged in cruel or destructive behavior. The author uses as an example people with autism who can excel at the fields of art and literature.
The fifth chapter of the book, “Empathy Gene”, shows that there is a biological component to empathy. Chapter five enumerates and describes the genes that might be involved on a person’s level of empathy. While the last chapter of the book, “Reflections on Human Empathy”, is where the author reiterates the purpose of the book. The purpose is to realize more about the realm of empathy. Baron-Cohen also introduces the new ten ideas that he wanted the readers to remember in regards to understanding more about empathy. The author finally concludes the book by giving the readers food for thought about empathy.
Overall, choosing and reading this book is the best decision. The information and data presented by the author in this book were easy to grasp and process. Baron-Cohen did a great job in making the readers understand how empathy works even though the reader might not be an expert in psychology. The author also includes the Empathy Quotient at the back of the book, so that the readers could test the amount of empathy they have. If you want a good read to help you understand the “evil” side of humans, this book is highly recommended. This book will surely make you question your idea of “evil”.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A great book but too short
By Jon Reisdorf
I read Science of Evil: On Empathy and the origins of Cruelty by Simon Baron-Cohen at one sitting. That's rare for me. I usually like to dip in a little and then think it over for a day or so but the material was so gripping that I was on the edge of my seat. I waited quite a few days before writing this review to process what I read. Here is what I've concluded: if you want to truly understand evil, its source and a possible direction for a solution to evil this book is for you. It gave me valuable new insights into evil as well as providing a solid, scientific basis for conclusions I've reached through study and experience. And it lead me to pursue deeper research on the study of evil and empathy.
What made this book so gripping was its relevancy. Like all of us, I have had way too many exposures to evil in my life. I submit that on a bell curve evaluating those who have personal knowledge of evil I would be on the downward slope toward the extreme range. Without going into the grim details, I've seen, heard, and experienced evil from the inside out. I live it as a victim of sexual abuse. I studied it as a historian. And I observed it working in a maximum security prison for two years. I am a counselor on the GI Rights Hotline and have been trained in suicide intervention. Today I take calls and work on cases of men and women who in many cases have experienced evil first hand. I hear their stories as well of the stories of vets suffering from PTSD trying to get help for their suffering.
While working in the prison system, 1978 - 1980, and more recently in my career as a public school teacher I worked with the emotionally challenged. Public school teachers, particularly if you taught in inner city schools, work daily with some children who are severely emotionally and sometimes physically damaged. And finally, my wife and I spent years living and working unsuccessfully with a family member who is emotionally disturbed. We know only too well how lonely, difficult, and relatively unsupported such work is. Reading Science of Evil, I realized the sad soul why were trying to help was suffering from undiagnosed Asperger's. That discovery was a huge relief. We finally understand why he was so unempathetic and, yet, thankfully did not seriously harm others. So I have more than a passing interest in the subject of evil and empathy, the two subjects of Baron-Cohen's important book.
Most of the books I've read about evil have been from the perspective of depth psychology. Since 1980, I've read and reread pretty much everything Erich Fromm has written on human destructiveness and aggression. These books delve deeply into evil and its causes. Fromm has written fascinating case studies of Martin Luther, Hitler and Himmler. But these studies, while based on impeccable logic and the best available science of the time, are subjective. Baron-Cohen's book is based on sound objective science.
Both men were serious men of science. Fromm (1900- 1980), founder of Scientist Against Nuclear Energy (SANE) was a psychoanalyst and sociologist who had advanced degrees in both. Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. Both share the perspective of a Jew, in the case of Fromm a German Jew, who knows evil all too intimately. This gave both a unique ethnic/racial perspective unavailable to most gentiles.
Both Fromm and Baron-Cohen also write that evil is closely related to the objectification of the other. Viewing people as non-human or deeply "other" is necessary for a human to rape, beat, mutilate, enslave or murder. Fromm explains the process of evil from a sociological/psychological perspective that while profound is not fully objective. He, like Baron-Cohen, concludes that close to zero empathy occurs with those who commit evil actions. Baron-Cohen, however, provides a modern, scientific basis for similar conclusions reached by Fromm working before modern neuroscience.
The book Science of Evil is not all science. Baron-Cohen shares his horrors reading as a child about Nazi's who ran concentration camps by day and went home at night to read nursery stories to their children from a light with a shade made of human skin. Such stories jolted me out of my white- male privileged comfort zone but imagine how much more affecting if I had had relatives who were murdered in a such camps.
Baron-Cohen also shares lessons learned from years of cutting edge research with the autistic. Serial rapists, murders and the autistic and those suffering from Asperger's Syndrome share being at or near zero on the empathy scale Baron-Cohen and his colleagues developed. However, people with autistic and Asperger's seldom if ever hurt others. The difference is they have developed a moral code that keeps them from harming others. In Baron-Cohen's analysis it's the difference from zero-positive from the zero-negative of the narcissist, Machievellian, and psychopaths. This is a powerful insight with enormous implications. Even people with zero empathy - with autism and Asberger's can be trained or train themselves not to harm others which they see as essentially objects. But what about psychopaths? Are they even capable of empathy? I've known a few psychopaths in my day and the question haunted me but the answer was not available in Baron-Cohen's Science of Evil.
I looked online for answers to this question. In the Netherlands brain imaging research of psychopaths in prison for violent crimes revealed that "charming" (Machievellian?) psychopaths can turn on and off empathy. See - Coldhearted Psychopaths Feel Empathy Too by Tanya Lewis, July 24, 2013 07:19pm ET posted in livescience.com Researchers had psychopaths while being imaged see a film which consistently evoked empathetic brain response in "normal" humans. There was no empathetic brain response in the psychopathic subjects. Asked to watch the film again while "trying to be empathetic" their brains lit up like normals.
This is proof that zero-negatives could potentially become zero-positives. However, as my own experience with criminals suggest caution is needed. When I worked at Narconon at the maximum security prison in Minnesota (SRM) my partner and I concluded that what we were producing in our program were "happy criminals." Leopards don't easily change their spots. Most prisons are universities of lower learning where criminals become better, more successful criminals. Not that they can't change nor that we shouldn't keep trying but it's a long hard slog with many setbacks and few successes.
In the title to this review I suggested the book was too short. Like any good read, Baron-Cohen left me wanting more. But could more be less? Not in this case. Obviously, Baron-Cohen couldn't include research that happened after publication. However, I think the author might have shared some of the research of neuroscientist Dr. Richard J. Davidson, who leads the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center, University Wisconsin-Madison. Davidson and his colleagues conduct rigorous scientific research on healthy qualities of mind such as kindness, compassion, altruism, forgiveness, mindfulness and well-being. Their findings support Baron-Cohen's thesis.
For further theory read A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon, three San Francisco Bay psychiatrists, who popularized limbic resonance which arise as we experience empathy and intuition. For ways to deepen your own empathy I recommend A Path With Heart and A Wise Heart by Jack Kornfield a clinical psychologist, meditation teacher and former Buddhist Monk in the Theravadin tradition.
Length aside, this is a wonderful, important book that deserves five stars, with a little more stuff.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Review of The Science of Evil by Baron-Cohen: un-empathically applying categories about degrees of empathy
By Lou Agosta
Strengths: Baron-Cohen appreciates that it is empathy or lack thereof that makes us human and that empathy can be used for good as well as evil. As such, the narrative begins with examples of atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis and modern day perpetrators of genocide. Not for the faint of heart. Contains a rough-and-ready quantifiable "empathy quotient" test that is sure to be useful for something, given our evidence-based insurance world, even if the test is easy to second guess, There is much truth in the position that there are disorders of empathy, where empathy is missing, and "takes down" related aspects of our shared humanity.
Weaknesses: As benefits a work that aspires to popularity, it maps empathy to broad levels of pathology such as psychopath, borderline personality disorder, and narcissism, thus un-empathically putting human beings into categories based on lack of empathy. Autism spectrum disorders (e.g., Asperger's as Zero Positive) is the ultimate absence of empathy. Identifies a neurological "empathy circuit" in the brain in an exercise that would have been described as "brain mythology" [Gehirn Mythologie] in the days of Theodor Meinert, Moritz Benedikt, and Sigmund Freud. Remember the latter abandoned his celebrated Project for a Scientific Psychology as unworkable, among many reasons, because there is a conceptual abyss between the language of neurology and that of human meaning. Baron-Cohen made an astonishing and inspiring contribution in his 1995 Mindblindness. Rather than rework the later to integrate empathy - an assignment that is easier said than done - the latter (empathy) has been added on with relatively limited integration. The result is engaging and worth reading but ultimately disappointing and, in a strange and uncanny way, lacking in empathy.
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