The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty"

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THE SCIENCE OF EVIL

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By Simon Baron-Cohen

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The Montréal Review, October 2011

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 "The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty" by Simon Baron-Cohen (Basic Books, 2011).

Published in the UK under the title of "Zero Degrees of Empathy" (Penguin UK)

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"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."

-- Michael Gazzaniga, Professor of Psychology, University of California - Santa Barbara; author of  "The Ethical Brain"

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When we try to explain acts of human cruelty, there is no scientific value in the term 'evil' but there is scientific value in using the term 'empathy erosion'. The key claim in my book is that when people commit acts of cruelty, a specific circuit in the brain ("the empathy circuit") goes down. This might be temporarily (for example, when we are stressed) or in a more enduring way. For some people, this empathy circuit never developed in the first place, for reasons of environmental neglect and/or for genetic reasons. Whatever the reason this circuit in the brain did not develop in the usual way, or is not functioning in the usual way, it is the very same circuit that is involved.

The functioning of the empathy circuit determines how much empathy a person has, and empathy is "normally distributed" in the population: from zero degrees at the low end through to six degrees at the high end. Most of us are somewhere in the middle, and in my book I explore the different routes that can lead a person to end up at zero degrees of empathy. There are some medical/psychiatric conditions that cause this outcome and most are negative (Zero Negative). These include the personality disorders, such as psychopaths and people with Borderline Personality Disorder.

But one is surprisingly positive (autism spectrum conditions) because although people with autism struggle with empathy, they do so because they have a mind that is highly tuned to spot patterns (rules) in the world. I call this "systemizing", and in people with autism or Asperger Syndrome the "systemizing mechanism" is tuned to an extreme degree. This can have remarkable advantages when trying to figure out how a system works (hence Zero Positive), but leads to disability when applied to the world of people and emotions, because people and emotions are hard (if not impossible) to systemize.

Whilst acts of cruelty always entail zero degrees of empathy, it is not a symmetric relationship: zero degrees of empathy does not necessarily lead to acts of cruelty. In the case of people with autism spectrum conditions, their low empathy usually leads them to avoid other people because they find other people confusing. Their low empathy doesn't lead them to commit acts of cruelty any more than anyone else in the population, but it does often lead them to feel socially isolated, with the risk of depression.

The key difference between autism and psychopaths seems to be that in psychopaths the 'cognitive' component of empathy is intact but the 'affective' component is not. In autism, both components may be impaired, and in Asperger Syndrome just the cognitive component is impaired. In addition, their strong systemizing leads them, through logic, to develop a moral code based on 'fairness' and 'justice'. People with autism spectrum conditions often end up as 'super-moral', developing a set of rules they expect people to live up to consistently (such as honesty), arriving at the conclusion that one should 'treat others as you would have others treat you' because it is the most logical approach.

Whilst even adults with Asperger Syndrome may have difficulties figuring out why someone else's remark was considered funny, or why their own remark was considered rude, or may judge others as liars when they simply are inconsistent in not doing what they said they would do, they may nevertheless have a highly developed emotional empathy, caring about how someone feels and not wanting to hurt them. If they do hurt them it is often unintentional and they feel mortified when it is pointed out, and want to rectify this. In this respect, they do have some of the components of empathy.

For the criminal justice system to work, it is vital to hold onto the notion of people being responsible for their actions. We ask the defendant to plead guilty or not guilty. I am not trying to upturn this principle of the legal system as I think it provides a valuable method for society to decide how to deal with someone who has broken a law. But, if someone who is Zero Negative is violent or abusive because of how the empathy circuit in their brain currently functions, or because of the empathy circuit in their brain did not develop in the usual way, then perhaps we should see such behaviour not as a product of individual choice or responsibility, but as a product of the person's neurology.

We do not hold someone with schizophrenia responsible for having a hallucination, just as we don't hold someone with diabetes responsible for their increased thirst. In the case of the person with diabetes, we 'blame' the person's low levels of insulin, or the person's cells for not responding normally to insulin. That is, we recognize the biomedical causes of the behaviour. Equally, if someone's behaviour is the result of their low empathy, which itself stems from the underactivity of the brain's empathy circuit, and which ultimately is the result of their genetic make-up and/or their early experience, in what sense is the 'person' responsible?

These are complex medico-ethical issues. We need to keep our socio-legal framework since it serves many valuable functions, including recognizing the victim or their family want to see justice done; but those with low empathy who end up in the criminal justice system also warrant our compassion, and may even warrant treatment within the health service.

My book has an optimistic message, namely, that empathy can be increased. For some people it is simply a matter of waiting for development, and gaining experience. For others it may be a matter of either education or therapy. Imaginative approaches are being taken in many fields to facilitate empathy, and I do believe in the idea that people can change - because the evidence supports this.

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Simon Baron-Cohen is a Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge. A recipient of the McAndless Award from the American Psychological Association, he lives in the United Kingdom.

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Parts of this essay appeared at www.science20.com

Excerpt

‘The Science of Evil’

By SIMON BARON-COHEN

Published: June 6, 2011

Explaining “Evil” and Human Cruelty

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When I was seven years old, my father told me the Nazis had turned Jews into lampshades. Just one of those comments that you hear once, and the thought never goes away. To a child’s mind (even to an adult’s) these two types of things just don’t belong together. He also told me the Nazis turned Jews into bars of soap. It sounds so unbelievable, yet it is actually true. I knew our family was Jewish, so this image of turning people into objects felt a bit close to home.

My father also told me about one of his former girlfriends, Ruth Goldblatt,i whose mother had survived a concentration camp. He had been introduced to the mother and was shocked to discover that her hands were reversed. Nazi scientists had severed Mrs. Goldblatt’s hands, switched them around, and sewn them on again so that if she put her hands out palms down, her thumbs were on the outside and her little fingers were on the inside. Just one of the many “experiments” they had conducted. I realized there was a paradox at the heart of human nature—people could objectify others—that my young mind was not yet ready to figure out.

Years later I was teaching at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in London. I sat in on a lecture on physiology. The professor was teaching about human adaptation to temperature. He told the students that the best data available on human adaptation to extreme cold had been collected by Nazi scientists performing “immersion experiments” on Jews and other inmates of Dachau concentration camp, whom they put into vats of freezing water (see Figure 1). They collected systematic data on how heart rate correlated with duration of time in the water at zero degrees centigrade.3 Hearing about this unethical research retriggered that same question in my mind: How can humans treat other people as objects?ii How do humans come to switch off their natural feelings of sympathy for another human being who is suffering?

These examples are particularly shocking because they involve educated doctors and scientists (professions we are brought up to trust) performing unethical experiments or operations. Let’s assume (generously) that these doctors were not being cruel for the sake of it—that the scientists doing the immersion experiments wanted to contribute to medical knowledge, to know, for example, how to help victims rescued after being shipwrecked in icy seas. Even the Nazi doctors who had sewn poor Mrs. Goldblatt’s hands back to front may not (I assume) have been motivated to do cruel things for cruelty’s sake: They, too, were presumably following their scientific impulse, wanting to understand how to test the limits of microsurgical procedures.

What these scientists lost sight of, in their quest for knowledge, was the humanity of their “subjects.” It is an irony that the human sciences describe their object of study as “subjects” because this implies sensitivity to the feelings of the person being studied. In practice, the feelings of the subjects in these experiments were of no concern. Nazi laws defined Jews as genetically subhuman and ordered their extermination as part of the eugenics program of the time. Within this political framework, “using” the inmates of concentration camps as “subjects” in medical research might even have seemed to these doctors to be ethical if it contributed knowledge for the greater good.

Cruelty for its own sake was a part of ordinary Nazi guards’ behavior. Sadly, there is no shortage of horrific examples, but I have selected just one from the biography of Thomas Buergenthal.4 At just nine year old, Thomas was rounded up with thousands of Jews and taken to Auschwitz. There he had to watch while an inmate was forced to hang his friend who had tried to escape. An SS guard ordered the inmate to put a noose around his friend’s neck. The man couldn’t fulfill the order because his hands were shaking so much with fear and distress. His friend turned to him, took the noose, and, in a remarkable act, kissed his friend’s hand and then put the noose around his own neck. Angrily, the SS guard kicked the chair away from under the man to be hanged.

Nine-year-old Thomas and the other inmates, watching the man kissing his friend’s hand, rejoiced at that simple act that said (without words) “I will not let my friend be forced to kill me.” Thomas survived Auschwitz (perhaps because his father taught him to stand close to the shed when Dr. Mengele was making his selection of who would die)iii and described this story in his book A Lucky Child.4 The empathy within the friendship comes through so powerfully in this awful situation, as does the extreme lack of empathy of the guard. If the aim was to punish or to set an example, the guard could have just shot the escapee himself. Presumably, the guard chose this particular form of punishment because he wanted the two friends to suffer.

Today, almost half a century after my father’s revelations to me about the extremes of human behavior, my mind is still exercised by the same, single question: How can we understand human cruelty? What greater reason for writing a book than the persistence of a single question that can gnaw away at one’s mind all of one’s conscious life? What other question could take root in such an unshakeable way? I presume the reason I find myself returning to this question again and again is because the question of how human beings ignore humanity of others begs an answer—yet answers are not forthcoming. Or at least, those answers that are available are in some way unsatisfying. If the answers were sufficient, the question would feel as if it had been answered and the matter settled. There would be no need to restlessly and repeatedly return to it. Clearly, better answers are still needed.

The standard explanation is that the Holocaust (sadly, as we shall see, echoed in many cultures historically across the globe) is an example of the “evil” that humans are capable of inflicting on one another. Evil is treated as incomprehensible, a topic that cannot be dealt with because the scale of the horror is so great that nothing can convey its enormity. The standard view turns out to be widely held, and indeed the concept of evil is routinely used as an explanation for such awful behaviors:

Why did the murderer kill an innocent child? Because he was evil.

Why did this terrorist become a suicide bomber? Because she was evil.

But when we hold up the concept of evil to examine it, it is no explanation at all. For a scientist this is, of course, wholly inadequate. What the Nazis (and others like them) did was unimaginably terrible. But that doesn’t mean we should simply shut down the inquiry into how people are capable of behaving in such ways or use a nonexplanation, such as saying people are simply evil.

As a scientist I want to understand what causes people to treat others as if they were mere objects. In this book I explore how people can treat each other cruelly not with reference to the concept of evil, but with reference to the concept of empathy. Unlike the concept of evil, empathy has explanatory power. In the coming chapters I put empathy under the microscope.

Turning People into Objects

The challenge is to explain, without resorting to the all-too-easy concept of evil, how people are capable of causing extreme hurt to one another. So let’s substitute the term “evil” with the term “empathy erosion.” Empathy erosion can arise because of corrosive emotions, such as bitter resentment, or desire for revenge, or blind hatred, or a desire to protect. In theory these are transient emotions, the empathy erosion reversible. But empathy erosion can be the result of more permanent psychological characteristics.

The insight that empathy erosion arises from people turning other people into objects goes back at least to Martin Buber, an Austrian philosopher who resigned his professorship at the University of Frankfurt in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power. The title of Buber’s famous book is Ich und Du (I and Thou).5 He contrasted the Ich-Du (I-you) mode of being (where you are connecting with another person as an end in itself) with the Ich-Es (I-it) mode of being (where you are connecting with a person or object, so as to use them for some purpose). He argued that the latter mode of treating a person was deval‎uing.

When our empathy is switched off, we are solely in the “I” mode. In such a state we relate only to things or to people as if they were just things. Most of us are capable of doing this occasionally. We might be quite capable of focusing on our work without sparing a thought for the homeless person on the street outside our office. But whether we are in this state transiently or permanently, there is no “thou” visible—at least, not a thou with different thoughts and feelings. Treating other people as if they were just objects is one of the worst things you can do to another human being, to ignore their subjectivity, their thoughts and feelings.

When people are solely focused on the pursuit of their own interests, they have all the potential to be unempathic. At best in this state, they are in a world of their own and their behavior will have little negative impact on others. They might end up in this state of mind because of years of resentment and hurt (often the result of conflict) or, as we see, for more enduring, neurological reasons. (Interestingly, in this state of single-minded pursuit of one’s own goals, one’s project might even have a positive focus: helping people, for example. But even if the person’s project is positive, worthy, and valuable, if it is single-minded, it is by definition unempathic).iv

So now we’ve made a specific move: aiming to explain how people can be cruel to each other not out of evil but because of empathy erosion. While that feels marginally more satisfying as an answer (it is at least the beginning of an explanation), it is still far from complete. Empathy erosion as an explanation begs the further questions of what empathy is and how it can be eroded. But at least these are tractable questions, and ones we shall attempt to answer as we proceed through this book.

By the end of our journey, there should be less of a nagging need for answers to the big question of understanding human cruelty. The mind should be quieted if the answers are beginning to feel satisfying. But before we delve into the nature of empathy, let’s look at a handful of factual examples from around the world to prove that the awful things the Nazis did were not unique to the Nazis. We have to go through this if only to eliminate one (in my opinion) absurd view, which is that the Nazis were in some way uniquely cruel. As you’ll see, they weren’t.

Empathy Erosion Around the Globe

Erosion of empathy is a state of mind that can be found in any culture. In 2006 I was in Kenya with my family on holiday. We landed in Nairobi, a massive international city swirling with people. Sadly, Nairobi is home to one of the largest slums in Africa. People sleeping on the streets, mothers dying of AIDS, malnourished children begging or doing anything they can to survive. I met Esther, a young Kenyan woman, one of the fortunate ones who had a job. She warned me to be careful of the rising crime in Nairobi.

“I was in the supermarket,” she said. “Suddenly, a woman near me who was queuing to pay for her groceries let out a scream. A man behind her had cut off her finger. In the commotion, the man slid the wedding ring off the severed finger and ran off into the crowds. It all happened so quickly.”

This is a shocking example of what one person can do to another. Formulating the plan to go out into the crowded supermarket to steal is easy enough to comprehend, especially if a person is starving. Formulating the plan to take a knife along is a bit harder to identify with, since it indicates clear premeditation to cut something.

But for me the key is to imagine the mind of the person in the seconds just before the act of cutting. At that very moment presumably all that is visible to the thief is the target (the ring), a small object that could feed him for weeks. All that is lying between him and his next meal is the woman’s finger that has to be severed. The fact that the finger is attached to a hand is mere inconvenience, and cold logic points to the solution: Detach it. The fact that the hand is attached to a person, with her own life and her own feelings, is at that moment irrelevant. Out of mind. It is an example of turning another person into (no more than) an object. My argument is that when you treat someone as an object, your empathy has been turned off.

This example might suggest that someone capable of this crime had a momentary blip. Could the perpetrator’s desperation, hunger, and poverty have been so overwhelming that he temporarily lost his empathy for the victim? We have all experienced, or observed in others, such transient states, where afterward one’s empathy recovers. I’m guessing that during your transient lapses in empathy, nothing as awful happens as we saw in this example. This suggests that what this man did to this woman was more than a transient lapse. My concern in this book is with this more enduring phenomenon—the result of more stable traits where it is harder, if not impossible, to recover empathy and where the consequences can be extremely serious. We are going to take a close look at people in the population who desperately need empathy but who, for various reasons, don’t have it—and probably never will.

But more of that later. For now, I am going to limit myself to four other examples of empathy erosion around the planet because we don’t need lots of distressing examples to have proof that this can happen in any culture.

Josef Fritzl built a cellar in his home in Amstetten, in northern Austria.6 You probably heard about this case, since it made worldwide headline news. On August 24,1984, he imprisoned his daughter Elisabeth down in the cellar and kept her there for twenty-four years, telling his wife she had gone missing. He raped Elisabeth—day after day—from age eleven until well into her young adulthood. She ended up having seven children in the basement prison; one died at three days old, and her father (the child’s father and grandfather) burned the body to dispose of the evidence.

Repeatedly during those twenty-four years Josef and his wife, Rosemarie, appeared on Austrian television, apparently distressed by Elisabeth’s disappearance, appealing to the public to help them trace her. Josef claimed that three of Elisabeth’s children mysteriously turned up on his doorstep, abandoned by their mother, and he and his wife (their grandmother) were raising them. The other three children grew up in the basement prison, ending up with major psychological disturbance. How could a father treat his daughter as an object and deprive her and three of his children/grandchildren of their right to freedom in this way? Where was his empathy?

The next example of empathy erosion that stopped me in my tracks was a report on BBC’s Newsnight program. On July 24, 2002, rebel soldiers entered the Ugandan village of Pajong. Esther Rechan, a young mother, recalls what happened next:7

My 2 year old was sitting on the veranda. The rebels started kicking him. They kicked him to death. . . . I had my 5 year old with me, when the female rebel commander ordered all of us with children to pick them up and smash them against the veranda poles. We had to hit them until they were dead. All of us with children, we had to kill them. If you did it slowly they would beat you and force you to hit your children harder, against the poles. In all, 7 children were killed by their mothers like that. My own child was only 5.v

What was going through the minds of these rebel soldiers that they could force a mother to batter her own child to death?

Now consider an example from a lesser-known holocaust, one not committed by the Nazis. I heard about this when I went to Turkey last summer. The Turks are renowned for their warm, welcoming, friendly culture, but when they were under Ottoman rule, they regarded Armenians (a Christian sect) as second-class citizens. Indeed, as far back as the 1830s, Armenians were not even eligible to give testimony against Muslims in court—their evidence was considered inadmissible. By the 1870s Armenians were pressing for reforms, and during the 1890s at least 100,000 Armenians were killed. On April 24, 1915, 250 Armenian intellectuals were rounded up, imprisoned, and killed.8 On September 13 the Ottoman parliament passed a law decreeing the “expropriation and confiscation” of Armenian property, and Armenians were marched from Turkey to the Syrian town of Deir ez Zoor. En route and in twenty-five concentration camps (near Turkey’s modern borders with Iraq and Syria), 1.5 million Armenians died. Some were killed in mass burning, others by injection of morphine, and yet others by toxic gas. It is a history that is not often told, and the genocide of the Armenians is clear proof (if any were needed) the Holocaust was not unique to the Nazis.

Here’s my last example of extreme human cruelty, this time from the Congo. Mirindi Euprazi was at home in her village of Ninja in the Walungu region of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1994 when the rebels attacked. She told her story: “They forced my son to have sex with me, and when he’d finished they killed him. Then they raped me in front of my husband and then they killed him too. Then they took away my three daughters” (italics added).9

She hasn’t heard of the three girls since. She describes being left naked while her house burned. I imagine—like me—you are astonished beyond words by this event. How do rebel soldiers lose sight of the fact that this person was a woman, no different from their own mothers? How can they treat her as an object in this way? How do they ignore that this boy—forced to have sex with his mother—is just a teenager, with normal feelings?

But that’s more than enough examples of human cruelty from different cultures to remind us of what humans are capable. If I’m right that such acts are the result of no empathy, then what we need urgently are answers to two basic questions: But that’s more than enough examples of human cruelty from different cultures to remind us of what humans are capable. If I’m right that such acts are the result of no empathy, then what we need urgently are answers to two basic questions: What is empathy? And why do some people have less than others?

Reprinted by arrangement with Basic Books, from “The Science of Evil” by Simon Baron-Cohen.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/07/science/07evil-excerpt.html?pagewanted=all

Review - The Science of Evil
On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty
by Simon Baron-Cohen
Basic Books, 2011
Review by Wendy C. Hamblet, Ph.D.
Dec 6th 2011 (Volume 15, Issue 49)

The title of the new book, The Science of Evil, is straightway revealed to the reader as a misnomer, when author, psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, opens with the familiar argument that the language of "evil," with its religio-mythological baggage, adds nothing to our understanding of the phenomena that it names. Instead, Baron-Cohen, (rightly) recommends to the serious investigator a scientific approach to the problem of radical harmdoing, which employs terms such as "cruelty" and "lack of empathy" in place of the antiquated and unhelpful language of popular use.

Having rejected the language of its title, then, Baron-Cohen proceeds in this work to unfold scientific explanations of conscience-free cruelty, giving detailed accounts of a series of conditions, from Borderline Personality Disorder to Psychopathy, to Narcissism, Autism, and Asperger Syndrome, all of which give rise to a common condition that short-circuits the healthy aversion that most people have with regard to causing pain to their fellow human beings: a lack of empathy for one's victims. Baron-Cohen discloses, across the pages of this very readable book, accessible to non-scientists as much as to specialists, that some people lose, while others never had, their fair share of the "natural inhibitors" that famed ethologist Konrad Lorenz long ago cited as sadly lacking across the breadth of our species (On Aggression 1963; Eng. trans. 1967). Baron-Cohen narrows the ethologist's broad account of a general human propensity for aggression by offering detailed explanations of the neuroscience behind the lack of empathy, showing instead that particular anomalies in human brain anatomy short-circuit the "empathy circuit" that normally holds true within the human brain. Malfunctions in the empathetic circuitry of certain individuals, the author explains, permit them to break through the normal inhibitors and commit conscience-free cruelty toward others.

Anthropologists of cruelty have long understood the genetic predisposition of all human individuals and communities to ostracize and "scapegoat" different others from within their ranks, and to make conscience-free war on external "alien" groups, but Baron-Cohen adds to the discussion of causes of cruelty a critical aspect of explanation that helps us to understand the far more thorny paradox of how people, prone to reject outsiders, end up focusing their violent urges on precisely those people closest to them—their intimates. In every society, the mass of violent acts is almost exclusively an ingroup phenomenon. People may readily fear and loathe strangers, but they lash out at their own loved ones, including their helpless children and elders. This has long composed the greatest mystery about violence in human societies. Baron-Cohen uses his psychological expertise to resolve for us this baffling mystery.

Drawing upon examples from his practice, Baron-Cohen offers not only the neuro-chemical explanations for cruelty, but specific portraits of empathy-free patients that will inspire in readers chilling resonances with people they meet every day, people in our workplaces, leaders in our societies,  and members of our family circles. The Science of Evil makes us fearfully aware of the fact that, beyond the general level of violence already well recognized and well documented in modern industrial-capitalist societies, a great many particular time-bombs slip by our polls unnoticed, ticking away toward fresh explosions of cruelty.

This book, though fearsome in its implications, is a worthwhile read and a welcome extension of previous studies of cruelty. It is an easily accessible book for any educated reader interested in the age-old question of human inhumanity toward human and non-human species. It would also serve as a valuable text in higher education studies on human cruelty.

© 2011 Wendy C. Hamblet

Wendy C. Hamblet, Ph.D., North Carolina A&T State University

The Science of Evil and Variations in Empathy

What is your empathy level?

Published on June 6, 2011 by Darcia Narvaez, Ph.D. in Moral Landscapes

Simon Baron-Cohen's new book describes empathy and evil. Evil comes from empathy erosion and "turning people into objects." He gives graphic examples of this kind of evil throughout the book, from  sadistic cruelty by soldiers in the Democratic Republic of Congo to the criminal in a supermarket line who robs a woman's ring, taking her finger with him.

What I liked about the book was the descriptions of different levels of empathy.

Level 0 represents a person with no empathy at all. These people find relationships difficult and don't understand remorse for an action because they cannot understand how another is feeling. They may or may not be cruel to others. Zero-negative personalities have no empathy for others and include the disorders of borderline personality, psychopaths and narcissists. Individuals with Asperger's (high functioning autism) are zero-positive because they have a sense of fairness and learn moral codes through fierce logic, making them more systematic than the average person.

 

Level 1 represents a lack of self-control. Level 1 people hurt others because when they get upset they cannot control their behavior.

Level 2 people have  difficulty with empathy but have enough empathy to understand that they have hurt someone afterwards. But they continually commit faux pas without understanding why.

Level 3 people still have difficulty having and showing empathy. They know they don't understand something that everyone else does. Social interaction is hard in part because they try to be normal but can never quite be normal.

Level 4 people have a low-average amount of empathy. This level more typical of normal men. They prefer not to talk about emotions and base friendships more on shared activities.

Level 5 people are slightly above average on empathy and more typically female. They are careful about how they interact with others, trying to be sensitive to the feelings of others.

Level 6 represents people with unusually high levels of empathy. Their empathy is in hyper-mode. They can pick up on the feelings of others and are deeply interested in them.

The back of the book has an Empathy Quotient measure that you can take and score.

My only complaints about his descriptions are (1) I would not put these different types into a scale as he did because they have qualitative not just quantitative differences, in ways we yet do not understand; (2) I'd break the normal range up a little more---I'm not sure I fit any category.

Another disappointment with the book is that although he mentions parenting effects in passing, he gives an enitre chapter to an "empathy gene," completely neglecting the larger role that epigenetics (environmental effects) have on personality development. For example, we are finding in our work that parenting behaviors like touch are linked to empathy development in three-year-olds (check out Development Optimization paper at my blogger profile site). There is considerable longitudinal work by Grazyna Kochanska showing that when parents have a mutually-responsive relationship with a child, the child is more empathic and agreeable. Clinicians like Allan Schore have been documenting how emotion and self-regulation develop through the intimate dance that the caregiver and child engage in from the beginning of their life together.

Also missing from the book are guidelines for developing empathy. So let me say a little about that.

I grew up with what might call, suppressed empathy. It was not an emotionally safe household and was a lonely place. Plus I was a tomboy. But I did cry for suffering children when I saw or thought of them. When I was in college, I recognized that my compassion was low and set its cultivation as a goal for my life (with hopes that by the end I would have a good amount of compassion-still working on it!).

How can one develop empathy and compassion? Perhaps you have suggestions. These are things that I have found helpful:

• Get to know viewpoints other than your own through reading and/or watching films about real-life experiences and struggles (e.g., Hands on the Freedom Plow, female members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee working for civil rights; Freedom Riders, about those who risked their lives for the U.S. civil rights movement, in 1961, to challenge existing segregation in light of the Supreme Court's ruling against it).

• Commit yourself to a relationship in which you live with that person's struggles and challenges. A marriage relationship can do this, and/or raising children. Because there is an emotional connection, you are more likely to learn patience and listening habits than you would be with a stranger (although some loners may do better with listening to strangers). I was married to a man with a degenerative disease-I had fallen in love with him before I knew he had the disease (and he had just found out). We were together the last ten years of his life. I developed patience for those with disabilities and I learned kindness and respect for people who use wheelchairs

• Take (respectful) responsibility to help others. This week was the anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination (June 5, 1968). In the C-SPAN special on him, an aide described Kennedy's shocked encounter with starving children, bellies distended, in Mississippi. For a long while, Kennedy tried to engage an emaciated child who could not stand from weakness. Later at home with his family, Kennedy told his children, as he had been told as a child by his parents, that they had to take responsibility and do something to help those children and others who suffer. This experience led to the establishment of the free Food Stamp program of the U.S. government.

I find such stories inspiring. But the caution is to be respectful in our acting-from-responsibility for the welfare of others. Too much damage has been done by well-meaning folks from wealthier placed who arrive in a poor place (e.g., sub-Saharan African country) and think they know what is best for the locals. They usually don't have the understanding of the culture, the lifestyle, the social structures-the on-the-ground knowledge needed to make changes that are positive and lasting. Interventions also need to be transparent, avoid corrupt governments, be fragmented to local initiatives. See William Easterly's work on these matters (links below).

On a personal level, one might have an empathic reaction to a sad situation. But the reaction does not help the victim. It's only with careful deliberation and effort that we can make our empathy into habituated empathic concern, action that helps the homeless and suffering. J.D. Trout, The Empathy Gap, suggests that setting up structures--- like automatic deductions from our paychecks for an aid organization--- are the way to make empathy into certain action. I agree. It's especially worthwhile in a society that encourages distraction from and inattention to the needs of others.

If you are looking to show your empathy in action, food banks in my community are at a low ebb now that summer has come. You might check on the needs of your local food bank and make a donation.

Addendum

Here is a resource a reader pointed out,The Center for Building a Culture of Empathy, http://Facebook.com/EmpathyCenter

References

Baron-Cohen, Simon (2011). The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty. New York: Basic Books.

William Easterly's work:

Rhetoric versus Reality: The Best and Worst of Aid Agency Practices by William Easterly and Claudia Williamson, forthcoming from World Development

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/moral-landscapes/201106/the-science-evil-and-variations-in-empathy