Evil exists in the world. It seems almost impossible to read the daily news without coming across stories of great injustice and malevolence brought about by human cruelty. Rather than dismissing these acts of evil as mere acts of insanity, however, it can be highly valuable to investigate what causes people to act so destructively. Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen’s book, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty, does just this. Baron-Cohen, a psychologist specializing in autism, suggests that “evil” is more properly defined as a complete lack of empathy, the ability to understand and respond emotionally to others.
You may also like
Training the brains of psychopaths: Daniel Reisel at TED2013Daniel Reisel is here to talk about our brains. In particular, how we might change them–and how this kind of thinking might just change the tenor of society as a whole.He introduces…
A new study shows that a therapeutic intervention called Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT) appears to improve the mental and physical health of adolescents in foster care. CBCT is a tool that provides strategies for people to develop more co…
Why Would Meditation Make Us More Willing to Act Compassionately?At this point, we don’t know exactly why meditation is increasing compassion. My suspicion is that it’s one of two mechanisms.The first has to do with its ability to incr…
In the last handful of posts, I have sought to demonstrate some rather uncomfortable and infelicitous things about our near-universal celebration of empathy. One is that it is based on a false metaphysical picture of human beings as weak…