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The erosion of empathy | Simon Baron Cohen | TEDxHousesofParliament

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    These two Nazi scientists worked
    at the Dachau Concentration Camp
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    during World War II.
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    They were conducting an experiment
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    to see how long a human being
    could survive in freezing water.
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    Like good scientists,
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    they took systematic measures
    including duration until death.
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    Examples of human cruelty
    of this kind raise a big question.
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    How is it possible
    to treat a person as a mere object?
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    The traditional explanation
    for human cruelty is in terms of evil.
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    I find the concept of evil
    unhelpful and unscientific.
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    It implies that the person is possessed
    by some supernatural force.
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    Even worse it's dangerously circular;
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    if the definition of evil
    is the absence of good,
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    then all we're really saying
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    is he did something bad
    because he is not good.
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    It hasn't really taken us
    any further forward.
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    In contrast the concept of empathy,
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    I'm going to argue
    is scientifically helpful;
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    you can measure it, you can study it.
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    Empathy has two distinct components --
    cognitive and affective.
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    Cognitive empathy is the ability
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    to imagine someone else's
    thoughts and feelings;
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    putting yourself into
    someone else's shoes.
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    It's the recognition part.
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    Affective empathy is the drive to respond
    with an appropriate emotion
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    to what someone else
    is thinking or feeling.
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    I'm going to argue
    that low affective empathy
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    is a necessary factor
    to explain human cruelty.
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    Empathy isn't all or none;
    it comes by degrees,
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    and there a individual differences in it.
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    So it gives rise
    to the empathy bell curve.
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    Most of us are in the middle
    of this spectrum
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    with average amounts of empathy.
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    There are some people
    who have above average levels of empathy.
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    But what are the factors
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    that can lead an individual
    to have low empathy
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    either temporarily or permanently?
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    What are those social factors?
    What are those biological factors?
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    One social factor
    is obedience to authority.
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    The experiment by Stanley Milgram
    at Yale University showed
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    that people are willing to administer
    electric shocks to someone
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    to help them learn,
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    if they're instructed to do so
    by an authority figure.
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    This suggests that simply,
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    following orders may be one factor
    that can erode our empathy.
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    A second social factor is ideology.
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    When the terrorists flew the planes
    into the World Trade Center on 9/11,
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    Ww have to assume
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    that they were in the grip
    of a strongly-held belief
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    that they were doing the right thing.
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    Of course, we don't know
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    whether the terrorists
    who signed up for that action
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    had low empathy to begin with,
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    but it's possible
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    that their ideological beliefs
    were another factor
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    that could erode
    their empathy for their victims.
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    A third social factor
    is in-group/out-group relations.
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    In Rwanda, we saw one ethnic group
    used propaganda
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    to stereotype the out-group;
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    describing them as subhuman
    and as cockroaches.
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    When we dehumanize a group as the enemy,
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    we have the potential to lose our empathy;
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    and we saw the catastrophic genocide
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    that ensued.
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    But none of these social factors
    can explain individuals like Ted Bundy.
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    He started his adult career
    as a psychology student
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    of the University of Washington
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    where he volunteered
    on a telephone helpline
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    and persuaded women to meet him.
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    And over the successive years,
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    he committed rape and murder
    of at least 30 women.
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    We can assume that he had
    good cognitive empathy
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    because he was able
    to deceive his victims,
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    but that he lacked affective empathy
    - he just didn't care -
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    and he lacked it in enduring ways.
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    The evidence that psychopaths
    like Ted Bundy lack affective empathy
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    comes from an experiment by James Blair
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    that was conducted in Broadmoor Hospital.
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    He showed psychopaths and a control group
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    three different types of images,
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    threatening images, neutral images,
    and images of people in distress.
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    What he found was that the psychopaths
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    only showed reduced physiological response
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    when they saw the images
    of people in distress.
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    So this suggests that they lacked
    affective empathy.
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    People with autism have difficulties
    with cognitive empathy.
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    They struggle to imagine
    other people's thoughts,
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    their motives, their intentions,
    and their feelings.
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    But people with autism
    don't tend to hurt other people;
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    instead, they are confused by other people
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    and withdraw socially, preferring
    the more predictable world of objects.
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    People with autism
    have intact affective empathy
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    because when they hear
    that somebody is suffering
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    it upsets them.
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    This leads us to imagine
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    that people with autism
    and psychopaths are mirror opposites.
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    The psychopath has good cognitive empathy
    - that's how they can deceive -
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    but they have reduced affective empathy.
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    People with autism
    have intact affective empathy,
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    but struggle with cognitive empathy
    for neurological reasons.
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    Psychopaths don't come out of nowhere.
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    Many of them have shown
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    antisocial behavior
    and delinquency in their teens.
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    John Bowlby at the Tavistock Clinic
    in London studied delinquents and found
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    that many of them had experienced
    emotional neglect in early childhood.
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    He argued that the absence
    of parental love in early childhood
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    is another factor
    that can erode your empathy.
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    But we know that early experience
    can't be the whole story
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    because not everyone
    who has a bad childhood
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    loses their empathy.
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    Avshalom Caspi at the Institute
    of Psychiatry in London showed
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    that if you've experienced
    severe maltreatment in childhood
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    that increases your risk of delinquency.
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    But your risk of deliquency
    goes up even more
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    if you also a carrier
    of one version of the MAO-A gene
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    shown here in red;
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    so genes and environment interact.
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    Another biological factor
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    that is associated with empathy levels
    is the hormone testosterone.
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    In the fetus, testosterone
    shapes brain development.
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    We've measured testosterone
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    in the amniotic fluid
    that surrounds the baby
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    in women who are having
    amniocentesis during pregnancy.
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    We then wait for the baby to be born,
    and we follow up the children.
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    When the children were eight years old,
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    we asked them which word best describes
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    what the person in the photo
    is thinking or feeling.
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    Here the correct answer is
    he is interested in something.
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    What we found was that the higher
    the level of fetal testosterone,
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    the more difficulties the child was having
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    at this test of cognitive empathy.
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    How much empathy we show
    is a function of the empathy circuit;
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    a network of regions in the brain.
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    Here we can look at just two of them:
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    in red, for left ventromedial
    prefrontal cortex,
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    and in blue, the amygdala.
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    This is Phineas Gage
    who suffered damage
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    to his left ventromedial prefrontal cortex
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    after dynamite blasted a metal rod
    up behind his eye and through his brain.
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    Before the accident, he was described
    as a polite, considerate individual.
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    After the accident,
    he was described as rude
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    and no longer able to judge
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    what was socially appropriate
    for different situations.
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    He'd lost his cognitive empathy.
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    Jean Decety at the University of Chicago
    used brain scanning
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    - functional magnetic resonance imaging -
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    to look at the teenage delinquent brain
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    whilst they were watching films
    where somebody experiences pain
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    such as when this piano player's fingers
    got crushed by the lid of the piano
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    falling down on his fingers.
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    What he found was that teenagers
    with delinquency didn't show
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    the typical levels of activity
    in the amygdala --
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    part of the empathy circuit in the brain.
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    But let's not forget
    the positive side of empathy.
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    Most of us have enough empathy,
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    and some people
    have high levels of empathy.
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    When these two men formed a relationship
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    based on mutual respect and on empathy,
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    it let to the end of apartheid
    in South Africa.
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    Empathy is vital for a healthy democracy;
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    it ensures that we listen
    to different perspectives,
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    we hear other people's emotions,
    and we also feel them.
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    Indeed without empathy,
    democracy would not be possible.
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    I met this two women
    in Cambridge this week
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    when they came to visit.
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    On the left is Siham,
    and she is a Palestinian woman;
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    her brother was shot
    and killed by an Israeli bullet.
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    On the right is Robi;
    she is an Israeli woman.
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    Her son was killed
    by a Palestinian bullet.
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    These two women
    have taken the courageous step
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    of forming a relationship
    across the political divide.
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    They haven't given in
    to the emotion of revenge
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    which would simply perpetuate
    the cycle of violence.
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    Instead, they've used their empathy
    to recognize that they both share
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    the same sorrow, the same awful pain
    of having lost a loved one.
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    Empathy is our most valuable
    natural resource for conflict resolution.
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    We could wait for our political leaders
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    to use empathy
    - and that would be refreshing -
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    but actually,
    we could all use our empathy.
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    As Siham and Robi told me,
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    "The conflict won't stop
    until we emphasize."
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    Thank you.
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    (Applause)
Title:
The erosion of empathy | Simon Baron Cohen | TEDxHousesofParliament
Description:

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

How is it that otherwise intelligent people can inflict such terrible harm upon others? Simon Baron Cohen believes that we should examine the effect on empathy on human behavior, rather than blindly lumping it into abstract categories like "good" and "evil."

Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge.

He is Director of the Autism Research Centre (ARC) in Cambridge (www.autismresearchcentre.com). His books include Mindblindness (MIT Press, 1995), The Essential Difference (Penguin UK/Basic Books, 2003), Prenatal Testosterone in Mind (MIT Press, 2005), Zero Degrees of Empathy (Penguin UK/Basic Books, 2011) and Autism and Asperger Syndrome: The Facts (OUP, 2008). He is a Fellow of the BPS and the British Academy.

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TEDxTalks
Duration:
12:19

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