Book description
Simon Baron-Cohen, expert in autism and developmental
psychopathology, has always wanted to isolate and understand the
factors that cause people to treat others as if they were mere
objects. In this book he proposes a radical shift, turning the focus
away from evil and on to the central factor, empathy. Unlike the
concept of evil, he argues, empathy has real explanatory power.
Putting empathy under the microscope he explores four new ideas:
firstly, that we all lie somewhere on an empathy spectrum, from high
to low, from six degrees to zero degrees. Secondly that, deep within
the brain lies the 'empathy circuit'. How this circuit functions
determines where we lie on the empathy spectrum. Thirdly, that empathy
is not only something we learn but that there are also genes
associated with empathy. And fourthly, while a lack of empathy leads
to mostly negative results, is it always negative?
Full of original research, Zero Degrees of Empathy presents a
new way of understanding what it is that leads individuals down
negative paths, and challenges all of us to consider replacing the
idea of evil with the idea of empathy-erosion.
Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor at Cambridge University in the fields
of psychology and psychiatry. He is also the Director of Cambridge's
internationally-renowned Autism Research Centre. He has carried out
research into social neuroscience over a career spanning twenty years.
The Essential Difference
(Penguin 2003) has been translated in over a dozen languages and put
forward the theory of 'the extreme male brain'.
