Zero Degrees of Empathy: A new theory of human cruelty

Simon Baron-Cohen

Dis 2011 · Penguin UK

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In Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty and Kindness Simon Baron-Cohen takes fascinating and challenging new look at what exactly makes our behaviour uniquely human.

How can we ever explain human cruelty?

We have always struggled to understand why some people behave in the most evil way imaginable, while others are completely self-sacrificing. Is it possible that - rather than thinking in terms of 'good' and 'evil' - all of us instead lie somewhere on the empathy spectrum, and our position on that spectrum can be affected by both genes and our environments?

From the Nazi concentration camps of World War Two to the playgrounds of today, Simon Baron-Cohen examines empathy, cruelty and understanding in a groundbreaking study of what it means to be human.

'Fascinating ... dazzling ... a full-scale assault on what we think it is to be human' Sunday Telegraph

'Highly readable ... this is a valuable book' Charlotte Moore, Spectator

'Important ... humane and immensely sympathetic' Richard Holloway, Literary Review

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Simon Baron-Cohen is Professor at Cambridge University in the fields of psychology and psychiatry. He is also the Director of Cambridge's internationally-renowned Autism Research Centre. He has carried out research into social neuroscience over a career spanning twenty years. The Essential Difference (Penguin 2003) has been translated in over a dozen languages and put forward the theory of 'the extreme male brain'.