At the time, Dr. Dimberg had trouble getting the paper published: “There was an enormous resistance,” Dr. de Waal says. “This was only 15 years ago, and now it's completely accepted.”
On the subject of embodied cognition, a recent study from researchers at the University of Southern California found that Botox may impede empathy. In an experiment, subjects who has had the muscle-freezing treatment were less able to identify emotions in pictures they were shown, possibly because they could no longer mimic those expressions themselves.
The point, Dr. de Waal says, is that if biology can be used to justify competition – “survival of the fittest,” for example – it can also be used to justify co-operation and empathy, which are just as deeply ingrained in our fibres.
And yet, he notes, such talk is mistrusted in his adopted country: When U.S. President Barack Obama talked about America's “empathy deficit” and said that it was a quality he would seek in a Supreme Court justice, “people jumped all over him – what's so good about empathy?”
This, says Dr. de Waal, is now the elephant in the room. “In the United States, we have this debate about health care, and what is that but a debate about whether we should empathize with people, yes or no?”
And while Prof. Baron-Cohen's book was generally well-received, some critics have taken issue with the determinism they find implicit in his work. A reviewer for the Telegraph wrote, “In dispensing with the notion of ‘evil' as an explanation for anything, he also dispenses with the notion of ‘choice.' ”
The Wall Street Journal's review calls the book “profoundly naïve” and goes on to say: “Wickedness throws a troubling wrench in any attempt, religious or otherwise, to consider the world systematically. That does not mean we are uninterested in figuring out the biological basis for cruelty, just that biology alone is not likely to go far enough in describing our actual experience of life out there in a cruel world.”
As Prof. Baron-Cohen continues his research into how the brain's empathy circuit functions, however, his investigations are more practical than philosophical. He is focusing on how empathy works in the real world. If deficits and damage to the circuit can be identified, can they be rectified?
There are promising avenues, he says, in counselling and therapy. The educational tools that help autistic children understand the minds of others can also be used by those who lack empathy. This could be as simple as teaching emotion recognition – associating pictures of laughing faces with being happy, for example.
The chemical oxytocin may also prove useful. Secreted by mothers after birth to help bond with their babies, “the love hormone” has been shown to increase empathy and trust when given as a nasal spray.
And then there's just good, old-fashioned human endeavour. Last year, Prof. Baron-Cohen was in a synagogue in north London when two men got up to speak. The first, Ahmed, was a Palestinian who lost his son to an Israeli bullet. The second was Moishe, an Israeli who had lost his son to a homemade gasoline bomb thrown by a Palestinian teenager.
Through a charity called Parents Circle for Israelis and Palestinians, Moishe had called Ahmed out of the blue, from Jerusalem to Gaza, and said, “We are the same. We have both lost our son.” Now, they tour mosques and synagogues talking about the need to listen to, and understand, the other side.
“They'd crossed the divide through empathic or emotional channels, by phoning up and saying, ‘I know how you feel,' ” Prof. Baron-Cohen says. “It was really from the bottom up, these two individuals reaching out, not saying, ‘I represent a country,' just saying, ‘I represent me.' ”
Elizabeth Renzetti is a member of The Globe and Mail's European bureau.
Evil; Simon Baron-Cohen; Elizabeth Renzetti; Norway; Anders Behring Breivik; empathy; neuroscience; psychopathy; mental illness; massacre; Frans de Waal; primatologist;
