If you have any interest in why people can be rude or cruel to others, this is a must-read. I should say, up front, in the interest of full disclosure, that I've written a book myself that stresses how important empathy is, so I was predisposed to like this book.
There are parts of the book that get into technical details, especially about brain structures, but overall this is a good layman-oriented read, requiring no pre-requisite knowledge -- though the more you know about the subject, the more you'll get out of the book. It's the kind of book that makes you go "Aha!" and leaves you wanting to know more.
Prof Baron-Cohen begins this work by noting that traditional discussions of evil aren't terribly useful, not if you want a secular and scientific explanation. Calling something evil doesn't really explain anything. But by relating evil to a lack of empathy, things start falling into place. We have a set of structures in our brain that participate in an "empathy circuit". This is what allows us to relate to what other people are feeling, what makes us the social animals we are.
Empathy can be divided into cognitive empathy -- the brain function that lets us read others' emotions -- and affective empathy -- the brain function that produces an emotional response in us that simulates what another person is feeling. With both active, we feel sad when others are sad, laugh when they laugh, etc. Where evil comes in is at the low end of the bell curve: those with "zero" empathy. Zero empathy can be either negative or positive. Examples of zero-negative types would be those with borderline personality disorder, psychopaths, and narcissists. Psychopaths may actually have cognitive empathy -- the ability to read others -- but no affective empathy, which allows them to use their knowledge of others' emotions as a tool, without feeling any remorse or guilt about it.
You may recognize some people you know, or know about, from the author's descriptions. E.g., the person who is always rude, because he does not understand or feel the effect of his comments on other people. If we say something hurtful, we'll often feel bad about it later, but the zero-negative won't -- he doesn't get it. (The author briefly discusses a transient loss of empathy.)
An example of a zero-positive personality type would be someone with Asperger's Syndrome, where the lack of emotional understanding does not turn negative and is also accompanied by an ability to systematize -- see patterns in -- things that those with more typical brains would miss. (The author is Director of the Autism Research Center at Cambridge Univ.)
That people differ in the amount of empathy is a product of both genetics and environment, acting together. It's impossible to split them. For instance, a tendency to violence may require a genetic predisposition to violence, but it won't show up in a person's behavior unless the environment enables it.
There's a section in the book called "Reflections on Cruelty" which is interesting. I won't go into that here, but it includes a rejection of Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" , which had been based on the early proceedings of Adolf Eichmann's trial -- before it became clear that he had done far more than just follow orders.
Also worth noting: there are two Empathy Quotient tests in the book, one for adults, and one for parents to fill out for their children. You may not be as empathetic as you think -- or maybe more so.
I'm looking forward to the author's next book.
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Top reviews from other countries
Waldir
Entender melhor o mundo no qual vivemos e agimos
Reviewed in Brazil on March 5, 2017
Renee Schmidlechner
excellent read and based on science
Reviewed in Canada on January 17, 2024