Zero Degrees of Empathy
14th Jun 2011; 18:00
Listen to the audio(full recording including audience Q&A)
Please right-click link and choose "Save Link As..." to download audio file onto your computer.
RSA Keynote
Why are we sometimes moved to tears by someone else’s suffering? What makes us want to risk our lives to save a stranger? How do we experience and acknowledge the feelings of others over our own, and how does this alter our behaviour? What if we can’t do any of these things, and find it difficult to treat others as anything other than objects?
Simon Baron-Cohen, expert in autism and developmental psychopathology, has always wanted to isolate and understand the factors that cause people to treat others as mere objects.
"Empathy is our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling, and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion," according to Baron-Cohen. People who lack empathy can often cause exceptional damage to others, and have hitherto been categorised as ‘wicked’ or ‘evil’.
Baron-Cohen’s research has led him to propose a radical shift, turning the focus away from evil and on to the central factor, empathy. Unlike the concept of evil, he argues, empathy has real explanatory power.
Putting empathy under the microscope he explores four new ideas: firstly, that we all lie somewhere on an empathy spectrum, from high to low, from six degrees to zero degrees. Secondly that, deep within the brain lies the ‘empathy circuit’. How this circuit functions determines where we lie on the empathy spectrum. Thirdly, that empathy is not only something we learn but that there are also genes associated with empathy. And fourthly, while a lack of empathy leads to mostly negative results, is it always negative?
Join Simon Baron Cohen as he presents a new way of understanding what it is that leads individuals down negative paths, and challenges all of us to consider replacing the idea of evil with the idea of empathy-erosion.
Suggested hashtag for Twitter users: #RSAempathy
Get the latest RSA Audio
Subscribe to 
iTunes | 
RSS | 
Mixcloud
You are welcome to link to, download, save or distribute our audio/video files electronically. Find out more about our open access licence.
Share