The Psychology of Cruelty
Sep 16, 2018纵观历史,人们对他人做出了各种残忍、有辱人格和邪恶的行为。
True evil seems easy to recognize: the killing of innocent children; assigning whole populations to death by gassing, or napalm, or aerial bombing. These acts go beyond the criminal, the mean, the bad. But what is the psychology of evil-doers? Are they monsters among us -- just like the rest of us, with one screw a little loose, or are they radically unlike us? John and Ken probe the evil mind with Simon Baron Cohen from Cambridge University, author of《邪恶的科学:同理心与残忍的起源》
约翰和肯一开始就试图理解邪恶本身的概念。他们开始思考邪恶的行为,然后转向邪恶的人,但每次他们都以同样令人不满意的循环结论结束:最简单的形式是,邪恶就是做“坏事”,人们做“坏事”是因为他们是邪恶的。但是谁来决定什么是坏的呢?我们内心是否存在某种可以被衡量的普遍的“邪恶”?
Professor Baron-Cohen offers one solution with his ideas of ‘empathy.’ ‘Evil,’ or as he likes it, ‘empathy erosion,’ can actually be measured, both directly through brain scans, as well as through cognitive testing. What he finds is that the level of empathy we have is normally distributed in the population.
Does that mean some people are naturally more evil than others? Professor Baron-Cohen argues that ‘evil’ is an unhelpful term to use in this context, because it carries philosophical connotations outside the realm of science. A better term would be ‘cruelty,’ which denotes actions carried out with diminished empathy. He says that a propensity for cruelty is indeed found in some people more than others, but not necessarily in direct proportion to our levels of empathy.
To demonstrate this, he cites the example of autism. Whilst both psychopaths and those with autism are severely lacking in empathy, it is only the former who are inclined to act cruelly. Autistic people tend instead to withdraw from action.
In our society we treat severe autism as a disability. Should we apply the same logic to psychopaths? The final segment of the show deals with how we should apply the theory of empathy to our lives. Are we really justified in punishing psychopaths for killing? Is it better to have more or less empathy? Can we develop empathy? Tune in to find out.