Science of Evil

dr. sigmund rascher was a respected scientist. his work on human adaptation to temperature was systematic, rigorous, and insightful. it’s still taught in universities today. but rascher conducted this research as a nazi physician, and its horrifying truth would soon come to light

rascher had a practical interest in reviving the human body after it had suffered hypothermic shock: his research supposedly aimed to help save pilots who crash-landed in the north sea. however, in pursuing this research, rascher became one of hitler’s willing executioners. 

between 1942 and 1943, hundreds of inmates at dachau concentration camp were subjected to his brutal experiments. they were stripped naked, placed in tanks of freezing water until they passed out, then plunged into a second tank containing either hot, warm, or tepid water. up to 90 inmates died under rascher’s supervision.

the guilt of men like rascher was easily established at the nuremberg trials, but a larger question remained: what enabled these extraordinary acts of cruelty? there was an obvious answer: evil. but while there were outright sadists and ideological zealots among them, the most striking aspect was the ordinariness of many defendants. their actions were harder to explain. how had apparently normal people – possessed pen-pushing careerists and cultured scientists – committed such evil? 

using “evil” as an explanation creates problems. to stretch a concept so far weakens its explanatory power. that’s not the only problem: this explanation is also circular. if evil is the absence of good, which is what most definitions boil down to, all we’re saying is that nazis, terrorists, or murderers do bad things because they’re not good. we’re falling into circular reasoning – assuming the very thing we’re trying to prove. 

so what’s the alternative explanation? 

in this chapter, we’ll look at simon baron-cohen’s answer. his approach shifts the focus away from vague notions of evil onto a tangible psychological attribute: empathy. as we’ll see, the absence of empathy doesn’t only explain human cruelty – it can be measured in concrete, scientific ways.

with that in mind, let’s step into the darker corners of human psychology, where our investigation begins.

that humans are capable of causing extreme harm to one another is well known. we bear witness to this distressing fact every time we open a newspaper or turn on the tv. the history of our species is, in part, a long tale of genocide, persecution, and torture. so if we move beyond the concept of evil, we need to find another way to explain this capacity for cruelty. 

the answer, we’ll see, lies in empathy erosion. unlike evil, which is hard to define and harder still to measure, this concept has sturdy scientific foundations. 

but before we get to that, we need to clarify our terms. 

erosion is simple enough: it’s the gradual destruction or diminution of something. empathy is a little more complicated. originally derived from the german word einfühlung, it literally means “feeling into.” it’s sometimes conflated with sympathy – a related but ultimately distinct concept. to sympathize is to feel compassion or sorrow with or alongside another person: while sympathizing, you maintain your own perspective. to empathize, by contrast, is to consider things from another person’s point of view – to “climb into his skin and walk around in it,” as the lawyer atticus finch puts it in harper lee’s novel to kill a mockingbird. 

here’s what makes empathy special: when we take another person’s view of things, we don’t forget our own point of view – we straddle both perspectives. empathy has a “double focus:” we’re thinking about our own minds while taking another person’s mind into account. this helps us understand what might happen when our empathy is eroded: we become single-minded. our attention is like a spotlight with a narrow focus; it only illuminates our own interests and perspectives. the other person disappears from view. 

more precisely, the other person as a person disappears from view. to understand this better, we can turn to the twentieth-century philosopher martin buber. according to buber, we adopt one of two modes in our relationships with others. when we’re in the “i-thou” mode, we treat people as complete beings – that is, we see their inherent dignity and worth and act accordingly. when we’re in the “i-it” mode, we see things differently. we prioritize our own goals and treat others as a means to those ends. in this mode, we discount the other’s subjectivity and intrinsic worth. 

this brings us to a working definition of empathy erosion: it’s a state of mind in which we relate to people as if they were things that either serve or interfere with our own interests. 

so far we’ve focused on cognition: empathy, we said, is the ability to think about our own minds while taking account of others’. but that’s only half the story. cognition is a necessary condition for empathy, but it’s not sufficient. 

empathy requires us to imagine another person’s inner life –  to mentally step into their world and understand what they’re thinking and feeling. but here’s the important part: this act of recognition has to be followed by a drive to respond with appropriate emotions of our own. put simply, when we empathize, we don’t just ask someone how they’re feeling – we’re also mindful of how our actions affect them. we’re careful not to hurt their feelings; we consider whether it’s more appropriate to laugh or commiserate when they tell a self-deprecating story; we say things that make them feel good. this kind of “affective” or emotional empathy is about listening to what people say, but it’s also about interpreting tone, parsing body language, and reading faces. 

we can see this split between understanding and feeling in real medical cases. people with psychopathic personality disorders can often read thoughts and feelings while remaining indifferent to others’ suffering. they’re like actors who can perfectly mimic emotions without feeling them. people with autism spectrum conditions sometimes exhibit the opposite profile: they struggle to read feelings while being highly responsive to suffering. 

these profiles are outliers on opposing ends of a spectrum – as we’ll see, most people fall somewhere between them. in these extreme cases, empathy erosion, whether cognitive or affective, is hardwired and often permanent. for the rest of us, though, it’s like a muscle that can get tired but recover.

for example, imagine searching for something important – let’s say you have a flight tomorrow morning and you can’t find your passport. as you frantically rummage through drawers and cupboards, your attention is like that spotlight we mentioned earlier: it’s entirely focused on your current goal. other people with all their thoughts, feelings, desires, and needs may as well not exist. 

if someone interrupted you and asked what you were doing, your reply would likely demonstrate this one-sided state of mind: it would be a self-focused report of your current preoccupation. some people can shift out of this kind of intense self-focus; others are trapped in it. for them, it’s not a temporary state – it’s all that’s available for them. but there’s more to empathy than just how we see others. let’s look deeper at how it actually works in our minds.

empathy, as we’ve seen, isn’t simply on or off. when our focus narrows to ourselves, empathy dims; when it expands to include others, it brightens. between these extremes lies a spectrum of possibilities. think of empathy less like a light switch and more like a dimmer – it can be turned up or down.

at the lowest setting, empathy is imperceptible; at the highest, it’s turned all the way up, resulting in an overwhelming hypersensitivity. most of the time, most of us fall somewhere between the lowest and highest settings. what moves us up and down this scale? several powerful social factors come into play. 

in an experiment conducted at yale university in 1961, psychologist stanley milgram revealed that seemingly well-adjusted and empathetic people were willing to inflict pain on others. participants were told to administer electric shocks to a “learner” each time he answered a question incorrectly. despite the learner’s visible pain, participants continued delivering shocks when told to do so by a scientist in a white lab coat. simply following orders was enough to override their normal empathy.

the same pattern appears with strong beliefs. the september 11 hijackers’ belief that their cause was just was enough to erode any empathy they may have felt for their victims. propaganda is another factor. when out-groups are portrayed as subhuman threats to a people, otherwise ordinarily empathetic people can become capable of extreme cruelty, including genocide.

but these factors can’t account for a psychopathic serial killer like ted bundy. he appeared entirely normal – a student volunteer for a telephone helpline at washington university, bundy persuaded dozens of women who called in to meet him privately. he went on to rape and murder at least 30 of them between 1974 and 1978. bundy’s cognitive empathy was intact – it was his ability to imagine his victims’ thoughts and feelings that enabled him to manipulate them. the key difference was that he didn’t care how these women felt; they were simply a means of satisfying his desires. 

nor can they explain people with autism spectrum disorders who struggle to imagine people’s thoughts, feelings, motives, and intentions. as we saw earlier, affective empathy often remains intact in these cases: people with these disorders are upset by the suffering of others. rather than hurting others, they tend to withdraw from social life into the world of objects. people with autism and psychopaths, in other words, appear to be mirror opposites. we know that autism can be explained by neurological reasons. so what explains psychopathy?

many adult psychopaths have two things in common: they experienced emotional neglect and showed consistent patterns of antisocial behavior as children. the link between abuse and conduct disorders in early life is well documented. however, this isn’t a simple cause-and-effect relationship – plenty of people who experience difficult childhoods grow up to be empathetic adults. so what’s the missing piece of the puzzle?

scientists looking for an “empathy gene” typically focus their search on genes that regulate serotonin, a neurotransmitter linked to aggression. one gene in particular has caught their attention: monoamine oxidase-a, or maoa. this gene produces an enzyme that breaks down serotonin. higher levels of this enzyme mean that serotonin clears from the synapse more efficiently. that in turn decreases aggression. 

there are two variants of the gene – maoa-h, which produces high levels of the enzyme, and maoa-l, which produces low levels. the maoa-l variant is so prevalent among warrior cultures such as the maori of new zealand that it’s earned the nickname “the warrior gene.” when the israeli-american psychologist avshalom caspi was investigating the link between childhood maltreatment and adult psychopathy, he found that mistreated children with the maoa-l variant were much more likely to develop psychopathic traits than their peers. 

but genes aren’t the only biological factor at play. a study carried out by a team of researchers at cambridge university in 2009 identified another biological risk factor: testosterone, a sex hormone that shapes early brain development. their fascinating discovery? the higher the level of testosterone in the amniotic fluid surrounding a fetus, the more difficulty that child would later have in reading other people’s thoughts and feelings.

then there’s the brain’s “empathy circuit.” one of the most dramatic illustrations of this neural network’s importance comes from a nineteenth-century accident. phineas gage, an american railroad engineer, was a kind and well-liked man. that all changed on a fateful day in 1848 when an iron rod shot through his skull, entering through his cheek and exited through the top of his head. gage made a remarkable recovery. he regained his powers of speech and movement and soon returned to work. but he was a changed man. gone was his consideration for others’ feelings and respect for social norms – the accident had effectively broken his brain’s ability to process empathy.

while these findings suggest that empathy erosion has clear biological roots, they’re only part of a more complex story.

there may be neurological reasons why some people’s empathy diminishes, but that doesn’t mean that everyone else is wired to be empathic. how, then, do we develop empathy?

one possible explanation can be found in the work of peter fonagy, a professor of psychoanalysis at university college london and a practicing clinical psychologist. fonagy theorizes that children gradually acquire the ability to see the world through other people’s eyes by attempting to “mentalize” their caregiver’s mind. think of mentalization as a child’s earliest attempts to understand what others – particularly their caregivers – think and feel about them.

for example, when a child learns that their drawing makes their parent proud, they begin to see themselves through their parent’s eyes. they might then make more drawings, not just because they enjoy it, but because they understand it creates positive feelings in someone else. this growing awareness of how their actions affect others’ emotions is mentalization at work.

this vital developmental process, however, depends entirely on one thing: the child must feel emotionally safe with their caregiver. if they believe that that caregiver resents or hates them, the mentalization process ends. the thought that the person they depend on for survival – for food, shelter, warmth, and love – might wish them harm is simply too devastating. as a result, the child represses this disturbing insight into another’s mind – and abandons further attempts to see the world through others’ eyes. 

these insights build on groundbreaking research from john bowlby, a british psychoanalyst and child psychiatrist who practiced in the mid-twentieth century. one of his best-known books is entitled forty-four thieves. in this work, bowlby documented his observations of juvenile delinquents, all of whom he described as “affectionless psychopaths.” what united these troubled youth? they had all experienced severe emotional neglect, abuse, or abandonment, spending their young lives moving between children’s homes. this research inspired bowlby to develop what’s now known as attachment theory.

at the heart of this theory lies a powerful metaphor: caregivers can give children something more precious than gold: a “secure base.” this emotional foundation of love and acceptance provides children the confidence to explore the world, knowing they can always return home for what bowlby called “emotional refueling.” 

picture a toddler at a playground who ventures away from their parent to explore a new slide. after a small tumble, they run back to their caregiver for a quick hug and words of encouragement. once comforted, they’re eager to head back out and try again – that’s emotional refueling in action.

this self-confidence emerges from what bowlby termed a secure attachment to the caregiver. children who experience this kind of nurturing relationship typically grow into more resilient, affectionate, and empathetic adults. 

the flip side is equally powerful: emotional abuse and neglect can fundamentally alter the structural development of infant brains, demolishing confidence, sowing distrust, and inhibiting empathy. bowlby’s ultimate conclusion was both sobering and hopeful: while some people might be born with a predisposition toward reduced empathy, the way we treat our children plays a decisive role in determining whether they develop into empathetic adults. in other words, “evil” people are made as well as born.

in this chapter to the science of evil by simon baron-cohen, you’ve learned that morality begins with an act of empathy: seeing the world through another person’s eyes. to do this is to see them as another human subject worthy of respect. cruelty, by contrast, becomes possible when we treat others as things – as means to our own ends. for that to happen, our empathy must be eroded. our childhoods can diminish our empathetic potential; so too can our genetic makeup. we can’t control those factors. what we can do is choose to cultivate empathy in our children. 

okay, that’s it for this chapter. we hope you enjoyed it. if you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always appreciate your feedback. see you in the next chapter.