On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty - The Science of Evil

I am not a scientist; I know very little about science, not much about anything. Since the Nazis stopped me from attending school when I was thirteen years old, I have been trying to educate myself since the libration from a concentration camp. The Baron-Cohen's thesis in THE SCIENCE OF EVIL is that evil is caused by the absence of empathy. The lack of empathy is caused by abnormalities in the empathy circuitry in the brain.

I was captive in camps for three years and 123 members of my extensive family were murdered, because of an evil Hitler and his cohorts. I experienced and witnessed Nazis' looting, deporting, beating, torturing, shooting, hanging, babies smashed to death. The perpetrators carried out those atrocities with impetuosity and enthusiasm; they didn't cringe! Ergo, it is surprising to read (p.36) "No wonder we wince involuntarily when we see someone else get hurt." I think that "some of us do wince" (qualitatively) would be more accurate than "we wince" (generally) I saw many German guards evincing pleasure (shadenfreude) when seeing us (captives) suffering. Reading about the Zero-Negative type P (p64), I wonder if all those Germans could be classified as psychopaths and that there might have carried a genetic element. The Germans considered themselves to be superior to other people, but obviously not all of them could be classified as narcissists. Nazi laws defined me; a Jewish boy, as genetically subhuman. They wished to turn me into despicable body without a soul. If they deemed me to be a subject or an object wouldn't matter; they were evil, period. Marilyn Monroe is classified as borderline. Her terrible childhood and adolescence might be a factor, as suggested in the book. According to this criterion Holocausts survivors who had been terribly abused, as youngsters, should all be inflicted with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPS). In my observation, this is not the case.

In the year 2000, the FBI declassified documents pertaining to Hitler. In one of the documents, Dr. Ferdinand Sauerbach, Hitler's personal physician, in 1937, stated that the German dictator was showing signs of growing megalomania. Hitler was mentally unbalanced in any clinical sense. He may have been a genius, but insane at the same time.

Simon Baron-Cohen's list of brain regions whose functioning determines how much empathy a person will show. I have understood that Hitler's ideology, his true character, his ruthless and tyrannous ambitions, and his diabolic mind were the major factors in his monstrosity. THE SCIENCE OF EVIL evokes and provokes many valid questions and makes it interesting to read and learn from it. I did.

According to the journalist and writer Curzio Malaparte (as reported in his book Kaputt), Hans Frank, the Governor-General of the "Government General" - the Polish territories occupied by the Nazis - would first play classical piano with great feeling, then go and shoot Jewish children trying to escape from the Warsaw Ghetto.

He would be evil in my book. I'm not sure that it would fit the author's definition, for he defines as "evil" someone who is structurally unable of empathy, i.e. unable "to suspend his single-minded focus of attention and adopt a double-minded focus of attention" (pg. 16) - a "mechanism" that allows one "to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion". "Evil" in this definition is a binary condition: you either have (varying degrees) of empathy or you don't. Consequently, an evil person would treat everyone in equally "evil" fashion.

Frank, however, switches effortlessly from empathy for the music (empathy for Chopin) to single-mindedness against Jewish children (no empathy for what he had labeled "scum"). He certainly would not have even conceived of shooting German children in Berlin. Japanese and the German doctors, who performed appalling experiments on POW, would have recoiled in horror if asked to do them on their own innocent citizens (note the "innocent" - had they been condemned to death, they may have done it). So, where do such "selectively" evil people stand in the author's conceptual world? In fact, in contrast to the author, I'd define "evil" by the ability selectively to override our basic empathy, and do harm.

To pile doubts on doubts about the definition of "evil": Hitler was a vegetarian wallpaper hanger, probably harmless and dull in private (or this is what Eva Braun related), yet he persuaded millions to commit evil - to please him. He thus knew how to manipulate others - empathize with them. The worst "evil people" in my book are those that counsel evil - like Lucifer - and manage to get under the skin of many by manipulating them.

And what about those who let themselves be manipulated into committing evil? When no longer under the influence of the evil counselor they revert to being upright citizens - an indication that "evil" is a temporary condition. In fact, "evil" need not even have a distinct origin: mobs (and in-groups) are mostly mindless, and evanescent. Yet we may all be swept up by mob hysteria and commit or participate in unspeakable crimes.

These examples highlight the first of the two fundamental difficulties I have with this book. The author's definition of evil is crudely reductionist and binary - you either have X degrees of empathy or you don't - and never change from this "status", for it is imprinted in a brain "mechanism" (it is also monogenetic, and would not allow for interplay of different genes). On the contrary, it would seem to me, empathy works selectively, and in context - though it may have a physical basis, it plays out culturally. How this all works together we don't know. So the definition only touches a scruple of the problem.

The other problem I have with this book relates to the "empathy mechanism" the brain array author describes as underlying empathy. He baldly asserts knowledge, and describes an "empathy circuit" in the brain comprises of several components. He bases himself on fMRI - a scan which measures blood flow changes of "areas" of the brain in response to activity. But this is akin to asserting that one knows the "functioning" of a most complex chip by observing that, when yielding an output, electricity flows in particular through some parts of it. First, we are talking of correlations here, not causations, and then we do not know the design of the chip parts, the logic of the circuitry.

One must finally object to the use of deterministic terminology like "mechanism" and "circuit": it is an analogy from mechanics and implies specificity and segmentation, which is anatomically alien to the brain. We are talking rather of "zones" of activity concentration, with no clear boundaries, or enclosures. What we know is that they are involved in certain mental processes - better, that certain mental processes are disrupted if these elements no longer function - but we have no idea whether they function in isolation, or how they relate to the rest of the brain.

The premises on which the book is based are flawed. "Evil" has been spuriously redefined to elide "culture" - despite the overwhelming evidence that we are a culturally evolving ape. Brain "mechanisms" have been identified, despite our persisting deep ignorance of how the brain actually functions, let alone how "culture" emerges from it (it may be an emergent phenomenon of complex systems). So the book cannot make good on its promise to explain "The science of evil".

What it does contain is a far most modest account of the limited world of psychopaths and borderline cases - people at the far limits of society's "bell curve" (another bald assertion of the author - there may be "long tails" ha has no idea of) - interesting in its own right, but of little value beyond the specifics of the medical case. We may not extrapolate from these to the society at large.

Just what the autistic community needs: another of Baron-Cohen's poorly conceived "theories", not only once again claiming that autistics lack empathy, but equating them with "evil." Autism should not even be a part of a discussion of "evil" or "empathy" as it is linked to any concept of evil. But Simon Baron-Cohen appears to be intent on making his career at the expense of people already struggling because of a lack of public awareness and understanding.
Lumping cognitive empathy in with emotional empathy as though these were the same thing, is sophomoric at best. Building on the damage that he caused by declaring that people on the autism spectrum lack "empathy", he continues to create more damage and misunderstanding, despite the fact that the Sally-Anne test, on which the claim is based, deals exclusively with the ability to understand another person's thoughts, not the capacity for empathy. In addition, Baron-Cohen bases his "theory" on an extremely poorly-designed test that has been resoundingly criticized and a tiny data set (20 autistic children). There are too many confounding factors (language difficulties, issues with gaze etc.) and variants of the test have shown no difference in how autistic children perform.

And yet here he is, equating autistics with sociopaths once again. He is intellectually dishonest - and that is the best thing I can say for him. This book, like the bulk of his "research", belongs in the trash.

Two things to start off with. I am a researcher but not a forensic psychologist (although I've read a lot of its scientific literature) and I greatly admire the author's research on Theory of Mind and autism. Unfortunately, that's where he should have stayed. This book is well-intended, but is also a mish-mash of theories and concepts that illustrate the author's lack of familiarity with the literature and theories he describes as he overlooks, confuses, and/or conflates important research.

His argument is that researchers have overlooked the importance of empathy in studying evil. Despite the fact that psychopathy researchers have noted, and studied that, for decades, he pretends (or really thinks?) that he's come up with something new here. Frick developed the Callous Unemotional traits that includes a lack of empathy. Book has talked about Callous Empathy as a descriptor of psychopathy. So forensic researchers have known about the issue of empathy. Coined years ago, the "Dark Triad" of Psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and Narcissism is a recognition of the links between these different facets of "evil". Baron-Cohen calls his new empathy link between two of these traits "blindingly-obvious". It should be, because it's been recognized for decades now! So Baron-Cohen is really reinventing the wheel here. Worse in fact, as he leaves out the troubling (for his theory) case of Machiavellians, who can flip back and forth between empathy as it suits their needs.

And he reinvents a really odd (oval?) wheel by referring to psychopathy, borderline, and narcissism as being negative zero-empathy while autism is positive zero-empathy. Because everyone would chose to "cure" the first three if they could (although I'm quite sure psychopaths and narcissists wouldn't!), while there is some social value to autism, because you can become a savant/genius, so you wouldn't automatically "cure" it. Yes, it's true that there is some value to being a savant/genius, but I'm quite sure we'd all equally chose to be empathic savants/geniuses (like Einstein) if we could. So he has a silly definition meant largely to protect autistic individuals and/or his own research. He even gives an actual example of an autistic child punching a strange infant in an elevator to quiet it as an illustration of how it's still "positive" zero-empathy. I don't think the angry mother of that poor infant would much care whether the stranger who punched her baby was autistic or psychopathic. The difference lies in the intentions of various disorders. Psychopaths are predatory, borderline are manipulative, narcissists are mostly ignorant of others, and autistic individuals are mostly-completely ignorant of others.

Baron-Cohen also conflates/confuses psychopathy with general antisocial behavior. One of the fascinating things about psychopathy is that it isn't strongly correlated to the parenting one received. In direct contrast to what Baron-Cohen reports, Lalumiere and colleagues have done excellent research showing that compared to general criminals, psychopaths are LESS likely to have suffered from pre- or post-natal trauma. As much as I admire the work of Bowlby too, attachment theory doesn't explain psychopathy despite decades of research in that area. Mealy and others have argued, convincingly, that psychopaths aren't so much the product of screwed-up development as they are evolutionarily-designed cheaters or parasites. Baron-Cohen also ignores fascinating new research showing how adolescent psychopaths may be treatable. So he's very clearly writing this book without having read, or is not commenting on, a lot of really relevant material.

What makes it worse yet is that his thesis is disjointed. He talks about balancing biology and the environment, but makes no attempt to discuss the plausible evolutionary mechanisms by which these genes originated and were selected for. Why have these negative genes for zero-empathy stuck around? He suggests that autism is related to the ability to see patterns, a plausible explanation. But what about psychopathy? He gives no answer. Rather, he simply lists areas of the brain and genes with no attempt to connect them to adaptive functions and phylogenetic histories. He has exactly one sentence on the possible evolutionary functions of negative zero-empathy (or to be precise, why there has evolved a range of empathy).

Equally bad is his dismissal of environmental factors. He only pays the briefest of lip-service to the tremendous work done by Milgram and Zimbardo on environmental factors. I consider Stanley Milgram's work on obedience to be FAR more important in explaining "evil", particularly that of the Nazi's. Milgram got 65% of average American citizens to painfully "kill" a fellow citizen!!!!! What does that say about zero-empathy and evil? Zimbardo's work (and others) on group conformity and group-group aggression, where he got a dozen average university students to turn on each other with severe verbal and mental torture in less than a week(!!!), is far more descriptive and predictive than Baron-Cohen's ambiguous talk of empathy. Daly & Wilson's work on the causes of homicide, from an evolutionary/ecological perspective, is also much more revealing and predictive. You can't claim to be inventing a new science of evil when you ignore tremendously important and relevant research on the subject from the past simply because it doesn't mention "empathy" explicitly. A good theory fits past data, incorporates good elements from past theories. Baron-Cohen's does none of this. He simply presents his idea (an admittedly good, if familiar one) that empathy is important in understanding evil as being new and of utmost importance. Citing Freudian or psychoanalytic theories doesn't really help build support for his argument either.

Overall then, I can't help but feel that this is Baron-Cohen's attempt to branch out his work on autism and empathy towards the larger field of forensic science. Unfortunately, his lack of familiarity with the field is glaring. This book tops out at roughly 180 small, large-print pages. Less than 2/3 of that are devoted to actually describing relevant research. So it's not surprising that the 120 "science" pages of this book fall flat. It's too little, too poorly thought, and reveals surprisingly little that's new. I appreciate his efforts to try and tackle this topic, and I welcome reading more about how brains, genes,and empathy relate to antisocial behavior. But as someone also on the outside of that field, I think he should really read up a lot more before making another attempt.

IMPORTANT: THE BOOK ZERO DEGREES OF EMPATHY BY THE SAME AUTHOR IS THE SAME BOOK WITH A DIFFERENT TITLE! I almost would have ordered that one as well not realizing this!

I was suprised at the negative reviews and I may not be a psychologist enough to see if all statements hold. The positive and important aspect of this book is that the somewhat difficult word "evil" can be understood much better by being in part a varying degree of lacking empathy. Baron-Cohen argues that a large part of being evil is the complete inability to put oneself in someone elses perspective. Alone this message is extremely important to spread, since it is much more helpful than otherwise "black/white" good versus evil attitudes -- especially in religious contexts -- without the slightest understanding why someone is doing good deeds and someone else evil ones.

The subtitle "a new theory" is not really true. The general idea of a lack of empathy being part of the core of being evil was for example addressed by Scott Peck in his "People of the Lie". Also Ken Wilber has this thought, also arguing that human development contains the growth of empathy, being able to encompass larger and more foreign circles of people. For example being able to have understandning of someone from a own tribe or nation, but not yet in someone from a completely different culture.

Interesting in Baron-Cohen's presentation that a complete lack of empathy does not always mean evil acts -- for example an autist may not be able to see the world through someone elses eyes but may not committ cruel acts in the same way a mass murderer would.

I know it is in the title that it is the SCIENCE of evil, but it really is all about science. I wish it went more into the minds of the psychopath and gave more examples rather than just the brain. I got too bored half way through.

One of the best books I've ever read. Dr. Baron-Cohen delivers the basics of brain science including neuroanatomy, symptoms of mental health disorders related to psychopathy, and neurotransmitter activity in a straight forward, easily to read and follow manner. I teach psychology at a community college and have recommended this book often to my 101 and abnormal psych students. It's wonderful in it's explanation of the workings of the brain and empathy. I hope he writes books for the layman more often. Thank you, Dr. Baron-Cohen.

I was really disappointed in this book. It falls into the general readership trap of using 14 pt. font size and monosyllabic words. Just because you don't read Science and Nature for fun doesn't mean you are only capable of reading on the eighth grade level.

Secondly the author puts people lacking in empathy into "good" (positive) and "bad" (negative)zero degree categories. The "bad" people are psychopaths, boarderlines, and narcissists. My heart was sinking but I slogged on, hoping the categories didn't have a value judgement attached, but it was not to be. Good autistic and Asperger's zero positive people are deemed so because they can "systemize" information--use patterns to make art and understand math. How unfortunate that I know people formally diagnosed with BPD who studied with me at Cooper Union, being granted a full scholarship for outstanding artistic ability. "Zero negative" people are defined by their challenges in this book, and clearly fall into the author's own empathetic blind spot.

Already people romanticize people with Asperger's through movies like Rain Man and traveling demonstrations of those who can tell you the area code of any geographical area, and demonize "zero negative" people as being willfully cruel and selfish. We don't really need a book like this to support those types of simplistic stereotypes. (And speaking of Nazis, which the books opens by referencing, I'm sure we don't want to live in a society where autistics have their "use" as mathematical protegees and other empathy zeros are "useless.")

I'm an applied behavioral scientist and in that capacity I review the clinical and laboratory research and apply it to work groups to help leaders connect with their teams, implement change, improve customer relations, and grow their organizations. I'm asked to do a lot of work with emotional intelligence as a leadership and team development initiative, and once in a while I discover, through assessment instruments, that teams tend to score similarly in a cluster of areas. One of these areas is empathy.

Having recently assessed a technical team where most members are very low empathy and some are also--understandably--struggling with client-relationships, I realized I needed to go deep into the literature and understand empathy more fully. I wanted to know all the upsides and all the downsides of low empathy. I wanted to know more about the ties of low empathy to the autism spectrum. And I wanted to know more about how empathy ties into personality disorders. I hit gold when I found Simon Baron-Cohen's book, "The Science of Evil."

I couldn't put the book down. As well as being informative about the latest research on the empathy circuit of the human brain, Dr. Baron-Cohen has an enjoyable reading style. I could feel his empathy radiate from the pages and enjoyed the stories that illustrated the science. I was patient with the pages on the hard science (which I have to admit I love), and enjoyed the connections he was making with real examples of what that science looks like when it translates to behavior. He also makes a great business case for the importance of empathy, but also notes that low empathy-positive individuals are gifted and should be respected as such in organizations where they can be given credit for solving puzzles, understanding patterns deeply--seeing things that others don't, and for helping organizations run smoothly and avoid problems.

At the end of the book there is the best reading list I could ask for that will keep me busy in the months to come.

I expected this book to be an exploration of the social dynamics of evil underscored by a scientific approach. Instead, much of the book was dedicated to discussing individuals with Aspergers and Autism, on the premise that they lack empathy, and lack of empathy relates to evil. No one, of course, would call Autism sufferers evil - they lack empathy because they lack most ability to interact socially on account of their severely impaired mental state. We might as well include inanimate objects in a discussion of evil, as inanimate objects also lack empathy.

Cohen does discuss pyschopathic personality disorder (briefly), as well as narciscistic personality disorder and borderline personality disorder, which is interesting. However, the discussion doesn't even address larger-scale social evil, such as some of the tragedies discussed in the first chapter. The case of mentally ill individuals is clear-cut; but so much that could be considered evil is committed by perfectly 'sane' people, who commit evil acts. How and why does this happen? This book provides no insights.

Lastly, it's difficult to take a book seriously which starts on page one with falsehoods - in this case that the Nazis made soap and lampshades out of human victims. This is not a book about history, but nevertheless, while the Nazis did many, many terrible things, making lampshades of human skin was not one of them. This claim stems from unsubstantiated anti-German propaganda after World War II, but it has never been proven in any court, including at Nuremburg. For starters, it doesn't make sense for the simple reason that human skin is rather delicate, which you may have noticed by virtue of being covered in it. You can research it for yourself:
[...]

It's quite ironic that a book about evil begins with a propaganda story meant to dehumanize the enemy in time of war, without even realizing it. It ultimately points to a shallow understanding of evil; how evil is not something we are immune from simply because we are psychologically normal. We would like to believe that evil is something committed by "the other" - the Nazis, people with personality disorders, etc., but this type of thinking, while comforting, guides us to ignore acts committed by those we sympathize with - for example, the fire-bombing of civilians at Dresden or Nagasaki by people who look and talk like us and who never entered a mental institution.

At the same time, I give this two stars, because Cohen is pointing to something extremely important, which is that deficits in empathy are related to evil and are related to structures in the brain. For books in this subject, however, I would recommend books by Robert D. Hare or the groundbreaking works by Andrew M. Lobaczewski.

This book by Cohen is a MUST read for anyone in the field of education; anyone who works with Autism and Asbergers; and for common folk who realize that the erosion of empathy is one of the most pressing issues in society today. There are other books that address individual components contained in this book, but this text views the absence or weakened empathy in a very thoughtful and constructed manner. Cohen moves the argument of the cause of evil (no empathy) away from religion and into the realm of science. He also looks carefully at the 10 major brain circuits with environmental and genetic factors. He makes a solid argument that the DSM needs to include Zero Degrees of Empathy so people are not misdiagnosed, or not diagnosed at all, and therefore missing out on important treatment. His studies on Autism are insightful and meaningful. As the book draws to a close, he offers some well argued 'opinion.' It is up to the reader to decide what our role is as a compassionate society.

I suspect it will be a long time before Dr. Andrzej Lobaczewski's master work, Political Ponerology: A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes can be surpassed in depth, scope and practical application. The repeated obstructions to its publication (the third time, by a familiar political power-broker in America) only give further credence to all that Dr. Lobaczewski discovered studying the effects of psychopathy as it infected Polish society in the decades following WW2.

Political Ponerology (A Science on the Nature of Evil Adjusted for Political Purposes)

If you are looking at this book, then you have read others pertaining to personality disorders. The idea that the lack of empathy is a root cause of actions that would be considered evil fits nicely within other discussions of psycopathology. I do not share the author's ideas regarding the death penalty, but looking at severe personality disorders from the perspective of an inability to empathize helps round out the various view points.

Simon Baron-Cohen is – unfortunately – one of the most influential researchers in the field of Autism Spectrum Disorders.
It was him who proposed the “lack-of-empathy”-theory, as well as that of the “extreme male brain” and the “systemizing – empathizing” theory.
None of these theories is scientifically plausible, which unfortunately has not prevented them from being published in renowned scientific journals, being watered down by popular science and being quoted again and again.
In his new book “Zero Degrees of Empathy – The Science of Cruelty”, however Baron-Cohen gives a clear, unambiguous answer – the answer to a question that only arises after reading the book: How many decades did it take for the memory of the survivors of concentration camps and prisoners of world-war II to fade, so that the atrocities of the Nazi regime can be used to stir people up emotionally, to stir them up for a new type of witch hunt: the persecution of people with an alleged “lack of empathy”.

Baron-Cohen professes to have identified the root of all evil, all cruelty: people with “Zero Degree of Empathy”.
The incomprehensibility of human cruelty is explained in a simple, pseudoscientific way: People with a “lack of empathy” are to blame, that is those with Narcissistic Personality Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder, Psychopaths … and to a certain degree also autistic people, although he does concede that the latter are “zero positive”: they lack empathy, but on the other hand, they don’t really do anything evil.

Baron-Cohen’s line of argument is that of a witch hunt:
Witches have red hair, so whoever has red hair is a witch.
What his EQ-Test measures is (lack of) empathy and empathy is what is measured by his test.
The only proof that Baron-Cohen cites for the alleged validity of his test is a point that he has laboured repeatedly: his results have a normal distribution, they form a bell curve.
Like the mythical Procrustes, who mutilated his visitors to make them fit the size of his bed, Baron-Cohen claims that his test measures empathy, because the results form a bell-curve. In other words: if the measurement of the distribution of hair colour is a bell curve, it thus follows that red-haired women are witches.

But let’s take a minute to listen to the voices of those who have apparently faded into oblivion way too quickly:

Jean Améry: “…. that an untruth – be it a lie or an error – begets atrocities.”

Viktor E. Frankl, Das Leiden am sinnlosen Leben, Introduction:
“When people ask me how I would explain the origins of this existential vacuum, I normally offer the following formula: In contrast to animals, man doesn’t have any instincts that tell him what he must do and in contrast to people in the past, today’s man hasn’t got any traditions that tell him what he should do. Now, neither knowing what he must nor what he should do, he often doesn’t seem to know anymore what he basically wants to do. So he only wants to do what others do – conformity! Alternatively, he wants to do what others expect him to do – totalitarianism.”

Horst Eberhard Richter: Die Chance des Gewissens, chapter “Psychiatrie mit unmenschlicher Vergangenheit” [The opportunity of
conscience, "Psychiatry with an inhumane past"]
“How could psychiatrists justify burdening the ‘national collective’ [‘Volksleben’ – life of the ethnic group/nation] with the ‘heavy and annually growing weight’ of ‘stupid’ and ‘helpless’ crazies, whose life dragged on for decades?
Soon after he posed this question, the professor of Psychology Alfred Hoche co-authored a book with the renowned Professor of Law Karl Binding. Published in 1920, that book would have serious repercussions.
In his section of the book, Alfred Hoche elaborates:
‘The question whether the effort that is made on behalf of this ballast to society [people with severe learning difficulties] is justified wasn’t an urgent one in the by-gone days of prosperity; now things have changed and we have to deal with this question seriously ….’
The title of the book was “The authorization to eliminate lives unworthy of life.” [Die Freigabe der Vernichtung unwerten Lebens. Ihr Maß und ihre Form."]
Without a doubt, like many others who absorbed the thoughts of the authors or had independently reached the same conclusions, Hoche and Binding perceived themselves to be motivated by a special sense of responsibility. Eminent anthropologist, human geneticists and behavioural scientists were among those who – long before Hitler’s rise to power – were worried that the ‘national body’ [‘Volkskörper’] would be increasingly ruined and degenerate if unworthy lives weren’t eliminated.
But how could one come to terms with the fact that a large part of the idealized medical profession began to be converted into a cruel travesty of its humane vocation?”

Horst Eberhard Richter, Der Gottkomplex, Chapter 7 “Verwandlung des Leidens in projektiven Hass. Mittelalterlich und moderne
Phänomene magischer Austreibung von Hexen, Rassenfeinden, “erblich Minderwertigen”, Extremisten, Parasiten, “Risikofaktoren” [The God Complex, “The transformation of suffering into projective hatred. Mediaeval and modern phenomena of the magical exorcism of witches, enemies of the race, the ‘genetically inferior’, extremists, parasites and ‘risk factors’.]:
“The strategy of eliminating suffering plays a crucial role in our culture. This strategy has appeared in different guises in the course of history. In some of its manifestations it is characterized by raw instinctiveness. At other times, it is so masked by obsessive-neurotic and intellectualising tendencies as to be unrecognizable at first glance.
Witch trials have been a thing of the past for a long time now, but there are numerous offshoots of the witch hunts which continue to be characterized by this tendency to eliminate suffering by categorically denouncing or physically eliminating demonized outsiders.
When it comes to the primitiveness of the projection and unmasked sadism, several recent excesses of racism are on a par with the classic witch hunt. The gas chambers of the Nazis are the 20th century equivalent of the stakes at which witches were burnt. The ‘achievements’ of modern technology make possible the administrative and bureaucratic perfection of the ‘criminal investigation’ and the technological automatization of killing. But it would be misleading to look for this process of defence against suffering only in such horrifying and extreme examples: after all, the underlying pattern of reactions is one of the most widespread coping strategies in everyday life.”

Arthur Kӧstler, Der Mensch – Irrläufer der Evolution, chapter 4 “Ad majorem gloriam” [Man – A freak of evolution]:
“The fundamental error is to blame everything on egoism, greed and the allegedly destructive nature of man, that is to blame everything on the self-asserting tendencies of the individual. Nothing could be further from the truth, as is demonstrated by both historical and psychological evidence.
No historian would deny that the significance of personality motivated crimes is minimal compared to the slaughter of entire ethnic
groups that is perpetrated in the name of loyalty to a jealous god, king, country or political system.
The personal atrocities of Caligula are dwarfed by the bloodshed ordered by Torquemada, the Spanish Grand Inquisitor.
The number of people who are murdered by bandits, highwaymen, gangsters and other antisocial elements hardly equals a fraction of the masses that were casually beaten to death in the name of the true religion or for a so-called just cause.
Heretics aren’t tortured and burned out of anger, but out of concern for the well-being of their immortal soul.”

The following questions are as yet unanswered:
- How long will it take for the scientific community to throw Baron-Cohen’s dangerous superstition in the bin of science?
- How much more suffering will be caused until then, not by his theory itself but by the ‘scientists’ who parrot it mindlessly?
- How many autistic people will be suspected of having a “lack of empathy” until an end is put to this madness?
- When will Baron-Cohen only be cited as a “a wrong turn on the road of science”, as an example of how not to do it, like ‘refrigerator mothers’-theory?

What one can learn from the book are the mechanisms of rabble-rousing:
- Immunisation against criticism by stressing one’s own standing in the scientific community and by pointing out the error of others, e.g. the theory of refrigerator mothers, to distract from one’s own errors.
- Emotional sensationalism by describing one instance of cruelty, arbitrarily selected from the ocean of incomprehensible human cruelty.
- Individualization of evil, personified by people with an alleged “zero degree of empathy”.
- Dehumanisation of people with psychological disorders, such as Narcissistic or Borderline Personality Disorder …. Just like under National Socialism! We are no longer talking about human beings, individuals with a psychological disorder, but ‘the whole lot of those with zero degrees of empathy.’

Mr. Baron-Cohen makes use of the data from extensive testing done on animals; rats, monkeys and chimps. From the infamous cloth mother/wire mother test to those in which electrodes are implanted in the heads of living animals, a good percentage of Baron-Cohen examples and data come from discredited animal "tests." Yet he does not mention the lack of empathy that would allow any human being (scientist or psychopath) to cause great pain or death to another living being simply to "see what would happen." Observing pain, like a psychopath with curiosity but without empathy, is exactly what these scientists are doing.
Mr. Baron-Cohen finds scientists using data collected by the Nazis during their horrific "experiments" on Dachau inmates especially heinous. He says, "I was personally repulsed by this use of data -- even for medical teaching -- feeling that the ends did not justify the means. Unethical science is unethical science." Yet he has no trouble using data collected by scientists torturing animals. His definition of "unethical" science applies to experiments done on people but not on other living beings. Mr. Baron Cohen would therefore would receive a number of points signaling a lack of empathy on the "Empathy Quotient" test used in his book. As the test tells us, and as Dr. Robert Hare tells us in "The Psychopath Test," cruelty to animals (classified under "early behavioral problems") is one of the hallmarks of the psychopathic personality.
Using these criteria, Baron-Cohen and all the animal testers he cites are good examples of a shocking lack of empathy. The author offers himself up as an object lesson in zero degrees of empathy.
In place of this specious text, I heartily recommend the ground-breaking work of renowned primatologist Frans de Waal, "The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society" to gain knowledge of empathy from an author who is himself empathic. de Waal's work and writing are a revelation.
[ASIN:0307407772 The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society]

Curve Ball

I was initially impressed with Baron-Cohen's analytical method using extensive research, recorded data, and bell curves to support his premise that there is a relationship between evil and lack of empathy. I suspected that he might be more of an "educator" than a "scientist" because of the liberal bias in his initial assumptions about the normal distribution of "empathy" in mankind. On the bell curve of empathy, with high empathy on one end and low empathy on the other, where women and journalists tend to be high and men and scientists tend to be low, he establishes the position that high is good and low is bad. Not only has it been a liberal concept over the last few decades that inherent female behavior is affirmed while inherent male behavior is denigrated, but also, female behavior should be entitled to social supplementation. Baron-Cohen goes on to state that the only "zero (empathy)-positive" folks are those persons who are autistic. That leaves "zero (empathy)-negative" folks as predominantly males without autism. This bias not only influences the research, but, in my mind, negates the conclusions and results.
Baron-Cohen has one thing going, to his credit. He displays extreme bravery (for a liberal) by stating and successfully demonstrating that there is a genetic component to empathy. He even identifies the genes that are responsible for encoding the proteins, and the parts of the brain that are responsible for empathy. He judiciously straddles the nature/nurture hurdle by noting that environment plays a major role in addition to genetic predisposition for low empathy, which results in evil. Most true liberals think that bad behavior is totally a product of the environment which was ruined by successful business persons.
Baron-Cohen gives absolutely no consideration to the possibility that high empathy persons may be evil too. I can think of gossips, busy-bodies, and even stalkers, who don't have a life of their own, so they snoop, judge, expose, and get involved in the lives of others, like tabloid journalists who love to feel the pain of their victims. He doesn't even try to find any evil doers with a high empathy quotient, though he mentions a "high (empathy) - positive" person like Desmond Tutu.
In the last third of the book there is no mitigation of his liberal bias. Like feminists who redefined autism into a "spectrum" so more females could be included in a predominantly male disorder, Baron-Cohen actually tries to demonstrate that female eating disorders are a form of autism and lack of empathy. He goes on to note that mothers who kill their own babies have low empathy and should be excused because of their "diminished responsibilities". In fact he maintains that zero empathy should be the reason to reduce the jail sentence for any criminal. He states that empathy is a better solution to crime than guns, law, or religion. He says religion oppresses people, but it "has an important place for individuals and communities whose identities are tied up with such cultural traditions, rituals, and practices." He says religions promote the devil as the source of all evil rather than a lack of empathy (due to genes and the environment) as he believes. He states that it's his aim to get "evil" out of religion and into the biological and social sciences. Obviously he couldn't imagine a religion that tries to guide the free will of individuals and their choices away from evil. I can understand his frustration when the liberal media always goes to religious fundamentalists rather than biologists with questions like "When does life begin?" or "How do same sex partnerships contribute to the survivability of the species?" That's a liberal media problem, not a religion problem.
I've saved the best for last. In regard to the wars between Israel and Palestine, and Washington and Iraq or Afghanistan, he states, "for every day that empathy is not employed in such corners of the world, more lives are and will be lost."
Baron-Cohen uses several bell curves to depict empathy and related human behavior, but curves alone don't make science. Here is another example of a "high (empathy) - negative" person, a professor who feels so much empathy for his students that he disguises his extremist socio-political opinion as science.

The title alone is offensive. As a parent to a child with Asperger's, I am offended that this "researcher" could so callously equate any of the mentioned disorders as evil. My child may lack empathy, but she is most certainly not evil! Obviously, the author lacks empathy himself.

I love this part of one person's review: This book is well-intended, but is also a mish-mash of theories and concepts that illustrate the author's lack of familiarity with the literature and theories he describes as he overlooks, confuses, and/or conflates important research.

Here is a wonderful quote which expounds upon this person's brillant comment:
Everybody is a genius. But, if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it'll spend its whole life believing that it is stupid." - Albert Einstein

IT is very clear to me, this author is avoiding his true identity, which is a fish! He overlooked a lot of important research and has made himself out to be a genius as far as connecting empathy or the lack thereof to evil. Why? He does not want to be judged by his ability to climb a tree, and spend his whole life believing that he is stupid or a fish! In his own mind and alone by himself, without others research, he is a genius! Don't we all do that, some of the time?! We just don't go so far as to publish our thoughts and take a BIG HUGE BOW AND see ourselves as masters of the universe! Gee! Sounds like what psychopaths do. :)

What could have been a good subject turned into a product of academic la la land. Society would be well served if words such as empathy would be removed from the English language. I want my money back.

Okay, so perhaps the review of my review is a bit sensationalistic. But I nonetheless think that this book comes about as close to evil as a "scientific" book can. Because trying to pass yourself off as a quality work of science that the general public can sink its teeth into, when it's really just a big, smelly piece of uneducated garbage is, in my opinion, dangerous. Thankfully, there are at least as many people on here who have given the book 1 or 2 stars as there are people who have given it 4 or 5...but the fact of the matter is that there are still some people out there who have read this book and bought into the pile of stinky poo that's been written on its pages. Sad, really, because Baron-Cohen is (was?) a good researchers.

I cannot emphasize enough how terribly uneducated this book is. If you bought it, do yourself a favor and start a fire.

I was really curious about this book, until I saw that it lumps Asperger's syndrome in with 'evil'. There is nothing evil about Asperger's. It is a form of Autism, which is completely and entirely different from psychosis. Autism is a developmental disorder. Psychosis is a mental disorder. They do not belong in the same category. It is for that reason that I have decided not to purchase this book. I have a young family member with Asperger's syndrome, and he is the furthest thing from 'evil' that there could possibly be; and he is a -very- empathetic child. Narcissists and psychopaths lack empathy -- children and adults with Autism or a form of it do not always. Psychopaths and Narcissists usually, if not always cannot be helped -- people with Autism can.