Cheltenham Science Festival, 2011 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I am currently about half way through digesting The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty by Simon Baron-Cohen. I came across Baron-Cohen during my work supporting individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) and I now own many of his texts, some of which I hope to discuss here in the future.(Yes, he is related to the ‘comedian’ Sacha Baron Cohen – who has somehow lost his hyphen)
The following post contains the notes on my present read which I really wanted to remember, and which others may find of interest. Most of the hyperlinks to further reading are those given within the references of the book which I wish to look into, others are books and articles I have discovered whilst doing my own research, and those which I have already read and thought were relevant.
Within this book Baron-Cohen attempts to re-define “evil” in terms of the erosion of empathy and looks at why some people have more or less empathy than others. He searches for answers to the questions “how can humans treat other people as objects?” and “how do some humans switch of their natural feelings of sympathy for another who is suffering?” The insight that empathy erosion arises from people turning other people into objects goes back at least to Martin Bauber’s famous book Ich und Du.
Chapter 1 is not easy reading and covers some shocking examples of human cruelty, some of which I found difficult and harrowing to read, such as the brutality, experimentation and extermination which formed part of the Nazi eugenics program and the lesser known Armenian Holocaust in Turkey between 1890 and 1915. He mentions Josef Fritzl, who repeatedly abused his daughter whilst denying her and his grandchildren their freedom and a two sickening reports on rebel soldiers, who in 2002 massacred and abducted whole families and incomprehensibly forced mothers to kill their own children, and also committed horrific acts during the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
Baron-Cohen mentions these factual examples from around the world to eliminate the view that the Nazis were in some way uniquely cruel – as we can see, they were not.
Chapter 2 – Here Baron-Cohen attempts to define empathy, and states that we all lie on an empathy spectrum somewhere, from high to low. Appendix 1 gives the full version of the Empathy Quotient (EQ) which was developed by Baron-Cohen and is used to measure empathy. The results form a bell curve, with a high concentration of the population in the middle of the spectrum and a smaller concentration at each of the extremes.
He suggests that empathy occurs when we suspend our single-minded focus of attention and instead adopt a double-minded focus of attention (when we consider someone else’s interests as well as our own) and defines empathy as “our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion”. This suggests there are at least two stages of empathy: recognition and response.
The remainder of the chapter discusses the Empathising Mechanism, which determines how much empathy each of us has (from level 0: no empathy, to level 6: remarkable empathy) and the Empathy Circuit (the interconnected brain regions involved in empathy). This part of the book reminded me of reading Susan Greenfield’s The Human Brain: A Guided Tour, which gives a much less ‘empathy specific’ description of the roles of different regions of the brain. I may get around to blogging about that book too one day!
Chapter 3 – When Zero degrees of empathy is negative.
I am finding this chapter particularly interesting as it deals with real people and how they are affected by a lack of empathy. It is important for Baron-Cohen to state here that Zero degrees of empathy (Level 0) does not equate to what some would call “evil” but those with such depleted empathy are at increased risk of hurting others. Not all people at Level 0 do cruel things to others, and may just find relationships very difficult. There are at least three well defined medical routes which lead to zero degrees of empathy, and Baron-Cohen describes these as Zero-Negative ‘because they are unequivocally bad for the sufferer and those around them’.
Firstly we meet Carol who is 39 and has Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). Carol had a terrible childhood and adolescence, ignored by her mother who wanted her to become independent from a very young age, her father was depressed and away from long periods, and she was sent away to boarding school at 8 years old. As a teenager Carol formed sexual relationships early in a desperate attempt to be loved. Research into the effects of this early parental deprivation has clearly established that such environmental factors affect brain development, which would have contributed to her BPD. There is currently a discussion among the psychiatric community to rename BPD “emotional dysregulation disorder” or “emotionally impulsive personality disorder” due to this connection.
I can remember struggling with my own mood as a teenager, so reading about Carol really touched a nerve. Her contradictory behaviour comprising of fear of abandonment and craving comfort / love from others versus lashing out in perceived self-protection sounded very familiar. I often felt lonely, depressed, sometimes even ‘cursed’ and although I was desperate to feel close to someone my unstable moods meant I had the capacity to cause arguments and sabotage my relationships with the few close friends I did have. To combat my loneliness I would comfort eat and enjoyed the ‘social lifestyle’ of alcohol and pubs for a time. As a young adult I saw the film Girl Interrupted, which is based on writer Susanna Kaysen’s account of her 18-month stay at a mental hospital in the 1960s, and I later considered if I had some form of personality disorder.
As an older adult I now recognise that although I struggled during my adolescence I do have plenty of empathy and certainly have the ability to put other’s needs first. Conversely, Carol thinks she knows what other people are thinking and feeling but her empathy is twisted and distorted and this leads her to assume others are harbouring hostile intentions towards her. She lives in constant fear of abandonment, emotional pain and loneliness, hatred, impulsivity, and self-destructive, highly inconsistent behaviour. Borderlines rage at those they love and the line between love and hate becomes infinitesimal (I love that word!). They feel empty and lack a core identity. Marilyn Monroe was a well-known borderline with contributing factors from her own traumatic childhood eventually leading to her suicide in 1962.
Appendix 2 gives a list of symptoms for borderlines (from DSM-IV) and “I Hate You – Don’t Leave Me” neatly sums up the contradictory behaviour in borderlines. They display black and white thinking, or “splitting” – and see people as either “all good” or “all bad”.
When discussing the causes of BPD, Baron-Cohen identifies that it was first described by Adolph Stern in 1938 as a borderline between psychosis and neurosis. Blame the Parents is an interesting sub-section of this chapter as it discusses Object Relations theory, which in itself stems from four important psychodynamic ideas.
- That of the “significant other” who is the “object” of a child’s feelings and to whom the child looks to meet his or her needs.
- Sigmund Freud’s stages of development that a child has to negotiate to establish a healthy personality.
- The Freudian principle of the importance of the earliest relationship influencing all later ones.
- Psychoanalyst’s Margaret Mahler’s idea that a typical infant starts in an “autistic phase” of development, feeling fused with their mother before separating. During this “separation-individuation phase” the child establishes a sense of self, crucial for later mental health. A concept of particular interest to me due to my work with individuals with ASDs who often lack a sense of self.
Otto Kernberg developed the above ideas into an explanation of borderlines. He believed infants start in an autistic state and use splitting to develop a sense of self, accepting the self (and parent) as comprising of good and bad parts. According to Kernberg, a child who gets stuck at the splitting stage enters into a “dissociative” state and is destined to become borderline, a child who never achieves a sense of being an emotionally secure adult, possibly caused by too much or too little attention from its mother.
(See also Prof. Margaret Warner’s work on Fragile Process)
Baron-Cohen argues that this theory is hard to measure, and it suffers from a bias towards ‘mother blaming’ whilst neglecting other potential environmental factors (as with the “Refrigerator Mother” Hypothesis of Autism). Baron-Cohen goes on to refer to the evidence which links childhood physical abuse with becoming borderline in adulthood in various journals of psychiatry and mental disease, but states that not all those who are borderline were abused, and not all who are abused go on to become borderline.
Interestingly, borderline brains are shown to be different from ‘neurotypical’ brains, with decreased binding of neurotransmitters to one of the serotonin receptors and abnormalities in the empathy circuit, with less grey matter and/or under/over activity in specific ‘empathy’ areas.
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