“The Dark Side of Social Encounters: Prospects for a Neuroscience of Human Evil”
This article discusses how findings from social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience might contribute to our understanding of human evil. Integrating theories of personality and social psychology as well as the notions of deindividuation and dehumanization with recent neuroscientific insight, the authors elaborate on the nature of human evil and its potential roots in brain systems associated with affective processing and cognitive control. (via)
Dehumanization, the erosion of empathy, right? So, what I’m working on now will be involving the functional integrity/neural corelates of evil. And, ya know, if my Bronx hero, Zimbardo is on board with it saying, “…investigating the neural correlates of human evil may advance existing areas of inquiry, such as aggression research and somatic marker theory, and also reveal new findings and further research questions”, then I’ve got my ticket to ride.
img ”Lucifer the Morning Star, descending to the Abyss” by Kazuya Akimoto.
This painting is just begging to be on my wall. B E G G I N G.
Is Neuroscience Incompatible with the Idea of Evil?
Most evil acts are not committed by the serial killers, the deranged, the lone demon. (…) Hitler may have been innately evil, but many of the Nazis who did the most gruesome acts were no more evil than your or I. Sad to say, but the subjects in Zimbardo’s infamous prison experiment were just regular college students. There was nothing in their brain structure that would predict their cruelty. Most of it came from the situation. Even if we understood 100% of the human brain, there is every likelihood that we would still just barely begin to understand why people can be so cruel, until we understand the environent itself.
I feel like Psychology Today is where people write opinions that attempt to please with an uplifting spin on semi current issues or cliche, kicked-to-death topics. The Glamour magazine of psychology sites. This happens to be one piece close to a actual critique, even though I still take issue with most of it.
