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[Laiza]

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2017/08/science-good-evil-charlottesville/

A must-read, especially in light of recent events.

For centuries the question of how good and evil originate and manifest in us was a matter of philosophical or religious debate. But in recent decades researchers have made significant advances toward understanding the science of what drives good and evil. Both seem to be linked to a key emotional trait: empathy, which is an intrinsic ability of the brain to experience how another person is thinking and feeling. Researchers have found that empathy is the kindling that fires compassion in our hearts, impelling us to help others in distress. Studies have also traced violent, psychopathic, and antisocial behaviors to a lack of empathy, which appears to stem from impaired neural circuits. These new insights are laying the foundation for training regimens and treatment programs that aim to enhance the brain's empathic response.

At just six months, most children respond to such stimuli with facial expressions reflecting concern; some also exhibit caring gestures such as leaning forward and touching the one in distress. By 10 months, many children also show signs of ”cognitive empathy," that is, trying to understand the suffering they're seeing. Upon seeing a child cry after bumping his knee against a chair, for instance, the kids might shift between looking at the child's face, the hurt knee, and the chair. Eighteen-month-olds translate their empathy into pro-social behavior like giving a hug or a toy to comfort the hurt child.

That's not true of all children, however. In a small minority, starting at ages two and three, researchers see what they term an ”active disregard" of others. ”When someone reported having hurt themselves, these children would kind of laugh at them or even kind of swipe at them and say, ‘You're not hurt,' " says Carolyn Zahn-Waxler, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who collaborates with Davidov. ”Or they would say, ‘You should be more careful'—saying it in a tone that was judgmental." Following these toddlers into adolescence, the researchers found they had a high likelihood of developing antisocial tendencies and getting into trouble.

Children born with a lack of empathy, says Essi Viding, a psychologist at University College London, often are unable to get a break. ”You can imagine that if you have a child who doesn't show affection in the same way as a typically developing child, and doesn't show empathy, that child will evoke very different reactions in the people around—the parents, the teachers, the peers—than a child who's more empathetic," she says. ”And many of these children, of course, reside within their biological families, so they often have this double whammy of having parents who are perhaps less well equipped to parent, less good at empathizing maybe, less good at regulating their own emotions."

Psychopathic criminals show reduced activity in their brain's amygdala—the primary center of emotional processing—compared with non-psychopathic inmates when recalling emotionally charged words they were shown moments earlier, such as ”misery" and ”frown." In a task designed to test moral decision-making, researchers ask inmates to rate the offensiveness of pictures flashed on a screen—a cross burning by the Ku Klux Klan, a face bloodied by a beating. Although the ratings by psychopathic offenders are not that different from those by non-psychopaths, psychopaths tend to show weaker activation in brain regions instrumental to moral reasoning.

The majority of people in the world are neither extreme altruists nor psychopaths, and most individuals in any society do not ordinarily commit violent acts against one another. And yet, there are genocides—organized mass killings that require the complicity and passivity of large numbers of people. Time and again, social groups organized along ethnic, cultural, and religious lines have savaged other groups. Nazi Germany's gas chambers extinguished millions of Jews, the Khmer Rouge slaughtered Cambodians in the killing fields, Rwandan Hutus wielding machetes slaughtered several hundred thousand Tutsis, and Islamic State terrorists massacred Iraq's Yazidis—virtually every part of the world appears to have witnessed a genocide. Events like these provide ghastly evidence that evil can hold entire communities in its grip.

How the voice of conscience is rendered inconsequential to foot soldiers of a genocide can be partly understood through the prism of the well-known experiments conducted in the 1960s by the psychologist Stanley Milgram at Yale University. In those studies, subjects were asked to deliver electric shocks to a person for failing to answer questions correctly, increasing the voltage with every wrong answer. At the prodding of an experimenter, who was actually an actor in a lab coat, the subjects dialed up the shocks to dangerously high voltage levels. The shocks weren't real and the cries of pain heard by the subjects were prerecorded, but the subjects only found that out afterward. The studies demonstrated what Milgram described as ”the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority."

The center attempts, first and foremost, to build a connection with the kids despite their aggressive and offensive behaviors. Even when an inmate hurls feces or sprays urine at staff members—a common occurrence at many correctional institutions—the staff members keep treating the offender with kindness. Based on their conduct, the kids are scored on an anger scale every day. If they do well, they earn certain privileges the following day, such as a chance to play video games. If they score badly, say, by getting into a fight, they don't get penalized. That's different from most correctional institutions where bad behavior invites punishment.

Over time the kids start to behave better, says Greg Van Rybroek, the center's director. Their callous-unemotional traits diminish. Their improved ability to manage their emotions and control their violent impulses seems to endure beyond the walls of Mendota. Adolescents treated in the program committed far fewer offenses over a five-year period after release than those treated elsewhere, a study found. ”We don't have any magic," Van Rybroek says, ”but we've actually created a system that considers the world from the youth's point of view and tries to break it down in a fair and consistent manner."

It's a lengthy read (I haven't even quoted half the article), but it's well worth it. Highly recommended.

Backs up a lot of what we've already seen with regards to how humane treatment of even the worst elements of our society will generally produce superior results to the retributive violence we tend to inflict upon inmates in the US justice system.

 

[All Possible Ways]

A great read. Thank you for this.

I think its inevitable that people who lack empathy would evolve since it would be advantageous for them to exploit society. Its good to know they are not completely irredemeable and can at least to an extent be trained to function in society.