Empathy is the ability to recognize and share someone else’s feelings. For example, when you wince when you watch a game show contestant run head-on into a wall, you’re reacting to the pain he or she feels as if it had happened to you instead.
In separate books released this year, British and American psychologists look to empathy, or the lack of it, to help explain human behaviors such as cruelty and violence. The focus on empathy in the texts, however, may instead highlight the idea that there is more to deterring violent behavior than the capacity to understand another’s pain.
Consider the excerpt from Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker’s recently-released book “The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes” appeared in the Oct. 20 issue of the journal Nature. In the journal commentary, he argued that despite all the stories of war and crime all over the world in the past century, the numbers indicate violent behavior is actually decreasing.
“This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history,” Pinker wrote in the opening sentence of the preface to his book. “Believe it or not—and I know that most people do not—violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.”
In the commentary, Pinker attributed this decrease in violence to increased application of human mental processes such as reasoning and empathy. (Presumably the data to back up this statement is detailed in the book.) For example, he wrote, keeping oneself alive and intact in a community of people who feel the same way can lead to a mutual nonviolence agreement, where people don’t want to hurt others in order to avoid being hurt themselves. He also highlights the importance of letting children learn to make similar logical arguments for themselves through guided reasoning as opposed to being raised with value judgments against an entire group of people.
The relationship between empathy and violence that Pinker touched on briefly was addressed in more detail, and from a different perspective, earlier this year in a book called “The Science of Evil” from British autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen. Pinker argued that reasoning and empathy in tandem can lead to a decrease in violence. Baron-Cohen used case studies to prove his theory that the combination of logic and lack of empathy can lead to people treating other people as objects, which in turn results in inexplicably violent or cruel behavior such as genocide or cutting off a woman’s finger in a supermarket to steal her wedding ring and sell it to buy food.
“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,” Baron-Cohen, cousin to the actor from the movie “Borat,”’ wrote in what he admits early on is a collection of his thoughts on the subject. “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.’” In several case studies, he lays out a ranking system for people with decreased to no empathy, charting their difficulties in social interactions along the way. The anecdotes in the book are memorable and worth the reader’s time and consideration.
Overall though, while Pinker’s journal commentary hints that there are several mental factors aside from empathy—the “better angels” referenced and more extensively covered in his book title—to consider in the decline of violence worldwide, Baron-Cohen seems to rely too much on empathy to prove his case regarding the basis of evil.
E-mail the author at massie@massie.com.