"When we look at examples of people doing horrible things to others, we need to go beyond accounts like 'he did it because he was evil' and look instead at behaviour as an expression of individual differences in empathy. Empathy is more explanatory, not just because you can trace it to particular brain regions, but because you can look at what influences how much empathy a person has, so it's measurable in a way that evil isn't.
You can also look at what modulates brain activity in the empathy circuit and identify the risk factors that influence whether someone might have more or less activity in those regions - either environmental risk factors or genetic ones. Using empathy takes things out of the religious framework and puts them squarely in a scientific one."
Simon Baron-Cohen / New Scientist/read more
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