The science of evil

I wanted to write a response to this NY Times review of Simon Baron-Cohen's book "The Science of Evil," but I already expressed most of my outrage about the book and it's theory that a lack of empathy is the root of all evil here. Today, however, there was an interesting response to both Baron-Cohen's book and Jon Ronson's "The Psychopath Test" by Yale professor of Psychology Paul Bloom, again in the NY Times. Under the title "I'm Ok, You're a Psychopath":

For Baron-Cohen, evil is nothing more than “empathy erosion.”
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Now, one might lack empathy for temporary reasons — you can be enraged or drunk, for instance — but Baron-Cohen is most interested in lack of empathy as an enduring trait.
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For Baron-Cohen, psychopaths are just one population lacking in empathy. There are also narcissists, who care only about themselves, and borderlines — individuals cursed with impulsivity, an inability to control their anger and an extreme fear of abandonment. Baron-Cohen calls these three groups “Zero-Negative” because there is “nothing positive to recommend them” and they are “unequivocally bad for the sufferer and those around them.” He provides a thoughtful discussion of the usual sad tangle of bad genes and bad environments that lead to the creation of these Zero-Negative individuals.

People with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, Baron-Cohen argues, are also empathy-deficient, though he calls them “Zero-Positive.” They differ from psychopaths and the like because they possess a special gift for systemizing; they can “set aside the temporal dimension in order to see — in stark relief — the eternal repeating patterns in nature.” This capacity, he says, can lead to special abilities in domains like music, science and art. More controversially, he suggests, this systemizing impulse provides an alternative route for the development of a moral code — a strong desire to follow the rules and ensure they are applied fairly. Such individuals can thereby be moral without empathy, “through brute logic alone.”

This is an intriguing proposal, but Baron-Cohen doesn’t fully elaborate on it, much less address certain obvious objections. For one thing, if people with autism can use logic to be good without empathy, why can’t smart psychopaths do the same? And what about the many low-functioning individuals on the autism spectrum who lack special savant gifts and don’t spontaneously create moral codes? On Baron-Cohen’s analysis, they would be Zero-Negative. But this doesn’t seem right. Such individuals might be awkward or insensitive, but they are not actively malicious; they are much more likely to be the targets of cruelty than the perpetrators.

I think there’s a better approach, one that involves breaking empathy into two parts, understanding and feeling, as Baron-Cohen himself does elsewhere in his book. Individuals with autism are unable to understand the mental lives of other people. Psychopaths, by contrast, get into others’ heads just fine; they are seducers, manipulators, con men . . . and often worse. . . . The problem with psychopaths lies in their lack of compassion, their willingness to destroy lives out of self-interest, malice or even boredom.

Bloom goes on to criticize Baron-Cohen's theory by pointing out that everyone can suffer from a lack of empathy due to circumstances or sometimes through choice. Unfortunately Bloom does not then take the final step of questioning whether a lack of empathy should actually be the scientific definition of "evil," as Baron-Cohen advocates, but instead makes a nod to the I-hate-sociopaths camp, quoting: "'Why should we care about psychopaths? They don’t care about us.'" At least people are starting to think twice before drinking the Hare et al. Kool-Aid of fear-mongering.

Pseudo-science

Psychologists who study personality disorders frequently make unwarranted and unnecessary value judgments and other normative statements. In this article, Psychologist and "autism expert" Simon Baron-Cohen promotes his new book on empathy and makes what I believe are some unsupportable statements that betray a bias that is wholly inappropriate in a man professing to give an accurate, objective opinion on the role empathy plays in human interactions. Here are some illustrative quotes:

• As a scientist I want to understand the factors causing people to treat others as if they are mere objects. So let's substitute the term "evil" with the term "empathy erosion".
• Zero degrees of empathy means you have no awareness of how you come across to others, how to interact with others, or how to anticipate their feelings or reactions. It leaves you feeling mystified by why relationships don't work out, and it creates a deep-seated self-centredness.
• People said to be "evil" or cruel are simply at one extreme of the empathy spectrum.
• Zero degrees of empathy does not strike at random in the population. There are at least three well-defined routes to getting to this end-point: borderline, psychopathic, and borderline personality disorders. I group these as zero-negative because they have nothing positive to recommend them. They are unequivocally bad for the sufferer and for those around them.
• Empathy itself is the most valuable resource in our world.
• Empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble. It is effective as a way of anticipating and resolving interpersonal problems, whether this is a marital conflict, an international conflict, a problem at work, difficulties in a friendship, political deadlocks, a family dispute, or a problem with the neighbour. Unlike the arms industry that costs trillions of dollars to maintain, or the prison service and legal system that cost millions of dollars to keep oiled, empathy is free. And, unlike religion, empathy cannot, by definition, oppress anyone.

Mixed amongst these statements, he cites two extreme examples to justify his conclusions: a BPD wantonly screaming at her kids and an ASPD who bottles a hapless barfly to death for looking at him funny. The odd thing is that although Baron-Cohen acknowledges that there is a spectrum of empathy, he firmly places both the BPD and the ASPD at absolute zero. Interestingly although he is an autism expert he does not mention the relative position of autistics on the scale, presumably because any stories of auties being violent would destroy the symmetry between his zero empathy = evil parallelism. Frankly, this type of hackjob excuse for science sickens me, particularly since I know that the natural consequence of something like this is the masses blindly following it as "truth," self-congratulating themselves while they embark on a modern inquisition ratting out the heretics that dare differ from them in any way. And this guy is worried about religion oppressing people? Doesn't he realize that his pseudo-science is its own religion with zealous adherents ready and waiting to oppress? The hubris of it all is simply astounding.

Manipulation 104: words

This was an interesting video about how word choices are basically by their very nature manipulative:

I love the references to Barack Obama's political campaign phrases and Occupy Wall Street. I'm not saying it's bad to use words in a way that is clearly manipulative. When I was writing the book, some of the people involved in the publication were concerned that the book was going to be manipulative. I told them that the book was going to be manipulative no matter what as long as it involved word choice -- the question was only about degree of manipulation and which way it slanted. I have spoken before about loaded word choices from journalists, even so-called objective journalism is naturally manipulative in that it is trying to get you to actually read or watch the feature. And of course one of the most loaded and pejorative terms you can call someone is a sociopath. I guess that's because you are inhuman unless you empathize? (Except people with autism, asperger's, some limited types of brain damage, some mental handicaps, or other things that Simon Baron-Cohen does not deem to be one of the "evil" types of lack of empathy).

Sociopathy as spectrum disorder

I thought this was an interesting and straightforward explanation of what it means for something to be a spectrum disorder, particularly when we're talking about psychopathy, and the difficulties it introduces in terms of understanding and diagnosing individuals with that particular disorder. From a Wall Street Journal book review of the Wisdom of Psychopaths:

In one of her stand-up comedy routines, Ellen Degeneres riffs on those commercials for depression medications that begin: "Do you ever feel sad?" Ms. Degeneres's sardonic response: "Yes, I'm alive!" Everyone occasionally feels down, so mild depression might indeed be considered part and parcel of living. Recent research suggests that, like pain, it may be a way of coping with a bad situation by making a change. One problem with most psychological diagnostic tools, in fact, is that they attempt to squeeze into a well-defined box behaviors that are, on some level, not all that unusual. So the criteria lists grow and the diagnostic labels broaden into what psychologists call "spectrums."

"Psychopathy" is a spectrum personality disorder characterized by callousness, antisocial behavior, superficial charm, narcissism, grandiosity, a sense of entitlement, poor impulse control, and a lack of empathy or remorse. Popular culture invariably associates psychopathy with serial killers like Ted Bundy, who, after raping and murdering numerous women in the 1970s, boasted that "I'm the most cold-hearted son of a bitch you'll ever meet." Yet a slate of publications on psychopathy over the past two decades—from Robert Hare's path-breaking 1993 book "Without Conscience" to Simon Baron Cohen's 2011 "The Science of Evil"—reveals that about 1% to 3% of men in the general population could be classified as psychopaths. That is more than four million people in the United States alone, and they aren't all potential Ted Bundys.

The spectrum of psychopaths includes CEOs, surgeons, lawyers, salesmen, police officers and journalists. According to Kevin Dutton, the rest of us could learn a thing or two from many of them. In "The Wisdom of Psychopaths," the Cambridge University research psychologist notes that in many circumstances, such as in business, sports and other competitive enterprises, it is beneficial to be a little charming, tough-minded, impulsive, risk taking, courageous and even a bit socially manipulative. We have the makings of a dangerous psychopath only when that little bit of charm becomes devious manipulation; when self-confidence escalates to grandiosity; when occasional exaggeration morphs into pathological lying; when tough-mindedness devolves into cruelty; and when courageous risk taking slides into foolish impulsiveness. 

It's this sort of fuzziness that has led me to sometimes question whether I think that psychopathy is even a real thing. The difficulty is the heterogeneity in the psychopath population and fuzzy dividing lines between normal behavior (if perhaps a little extreme or rare), and disordered behavior. Of course there is evidence that psychopath brains look different, although the research is still very young. Still, I often have wondered what my brain would look like in one of these fMRI tests that some psychopath researchers perform, would it look normal or abnormal and in the same ways that psychopaths brains appear? I have often thought that my brain has to look abnormal, that there is no way I could have such a different way of thinking than everyone else without my brain reflecting that difference. But people say that is a common fallacy -- believing that you are different from everyone else. Then again, I probably prefer that error than to erroneously assume that everyone thinks exactly like me.