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The Science Of Evil: On Empathy And The Origins Of Cruelty (2011)

by Simon Baron-Cohen(Favorite Author)

3.65 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Basic Books

review 1: Read this book. Now. I give it 5 stars not because Baron-Cohen's writing is sublime (it's workmanlike) but because of the concise and clear manner in which he tackles his subject. This book alongside Lieberman's Social should be required reading for everyone. The glitzy title helps this book sell in America where Empathy is a decidedly "not macho" notion but Baron-Cohen explains the importance of empathy and how neuroscientists are trying to understand both it's absence and how to cultivate it. Read this book.
review 2: This was a rather disappointing book about the psychology of "evil", or as the author re-defines it, "lack of empathy". In changing the label, he is trying to remove the religious connotations that surround human cruelty and talk about it in a m... moreore scientific way. This is a good start. He discusses how parental affection for children actually alters the physical structure of the brain, and changes the areas that seem to be most active when both children and adults express empathy. So his thesis continues well. He has some good case studies to illustrate various personality types. Unfortunately, after this, this slim volume (186 pages of text before appendices and references) tries too hard and doesn't really deliver the goods. When talking about his subject, the author too often uses mechanical terms like "empathy circuit" as if the people he is talking about are computers rather than human. He fobs off the most important parts of empathy onto the physical brain and genetics; clearly this is important, but while he acknowledges the effects of environment on the individual, fails to remind us the that brain structures change over the course of the entire human life, and decides quite early on that those with underdeveloped "empathy circuits" will never gain the ability to fully express empathy like "normal" people - but then goes on to say that people who have been imprisoned after heinous crimes should be released and given a chance to demonstrate what little empathy they have, while forgetting that, according to his argument, their lack of empathy and underdeveloped brains are what caused their crimes in the first place. He seems to be contradicting himself.He pays lip service to the idea that the experience of a lot of cruelty can harden people so they appear to lack empathy, but does not offer a solution on how to restore it. or even that it might be possible. He keeps referring to the Nazis of the Second World War as if they are the only bad guys in history, and neglects both worse and more modern instances of human cruelty, referring to them only vaguely in passing, if at all. He also fails to acknowledge wider systems that openly encourage a lack of empathy in the socializing of people in society at large, and why people who could easily show kindness and understanding tend to conform to unempathic systems rather than resist them. At the end, he becomes warm and fuzzy and recommends empathy as a panacaea, but no practical way in which to harness it - a very unscientific ending to what is supposed to be a scientific book.I would expect much more from a professor of psychology at the University of Cambridge. Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo explains the same thing much better and openly admits that we all have the capacity for evil - given the right circumstances, ordinary people like you or me can also be very, very nasty. less

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