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Why is there evil, and what can scientific research tell us about the origins and persistence of evil behavior? Considering evil from the unusual perspective of the perpetrator, Baumeister asks, How do ordinary people find themselves beating their wives? Murdering rival gang members? Torturing political prisoners? Betraying their colleagues to the secret police? Why do cycles of revenge so often escalate?
Baumeister casts new light on these issues as he examines the gap between the victim's viewpoint and that of the perpetrator, and also the roots of evil behavior, from egotism and revenge to idealism and sadism. A fascinating study of one of humankind's oldest problems, Evil has profound implications for the way we conduct our lives and govern our society.
- Sales Rank: #365217 in Books
- Published on: 1999-03-19
- Released on: 1999-03-19
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.22" h x .91" w x 6.13" l, 1.11 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 448 pages
From Scientific American
The question of why people hurt others is perhaps humanity's oldest and most urgent, long the subject of literature and religion. Can social science provide any answers? Social psychologist Baumeister assembles the available research, such as experiments on how people justify small transgressions and react to hypothetical situations, as well as close readings of accounts by murderers, rapists and torturers. He concludes that "pure evil"--brutality inflicted on innocent victims for sadistic pleasure--is largely a myth. Most violence springs from the same sources as other human behavior: ambition, lust, fear, pride, idealism. It breaks out when self-control breaks down, often because of group pressures or a slow escalation from seemingly innocuous decisions. Most perpetrators do not enjoy their acts, at least at first, but feel they must be done. "To understand evil,"Baumeister writes, "we must set aside the comfortable belief that we would never do anything wrong. Instead, we must begin to ask ourselves, what would it take for me to do such things?" Although few of these ideas are original to Baumeister, and the book is sometimes pedantic, it is a worthy synthesis both for victims who want to know why and for policymakers who need to know what to do.
Review
"A revealing and unflinching look at a subject usually ignored." -- Booklist
"An impressive book." -- New Scientist
"Blending material from history, literature, philosophy, and anthropology, Baumeister has skillfully presented a picture of the nature of the evil that people do, a picture often at odds with popular and mythological ones." -- Russell G. Geen, Curators Professor of Psychology University of Missouri
"I once met a man who commanded a squad that executed some 10,000 men, women, and children with axes and hoes. Today that man is a humble farmer. I have often wondered what he dreams. Baumeister helps us to see into the dreams of such perpetrators and, indeed, into our own darkest dreams." -- Craig Etcheson, Ph.D. Manager, Cambodian Genocide Program, Yale University
"This is the most important work I have read on the nature of evil." -- Brad J. Bushman, Iowa State University
About the Author
Roy F. Baumeister, Ph.D., holds the E. B. Smith Professorship in Liberal Arts at Case Western Reserve University. Since receiving his doctorate in social psychology from Princeton University, he has received numerous fellowships and awards. He has published nearly 150 scientific works and is cited in numerous sources in the popular media. Baumeister has authored or co-authored nine other books, including Losing Control: How and Why Self-Regulation Fails and Meanings of Life. He lives on the shores of the Great Lakes.
Dr. Aaron T. Beck, M.D., the Father of Cognitive Therapy, is University Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, and President of The Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy. He is the author and co-author of twelve books and over 350 articles and chapters.
Most helpful customer reviews
79 of 87 people found the following review helpful.
Solves Many of the Mysteries of Evil
By Amazon Customer
This is the book for anyone who has ever been the victim of a crime and wishes to understand how or why it happened, or whose profession requires frequent contact with perpetrators of evil and who needs to understand the thinking process of such people. I have read several other books on the subject, mostly approaching it from the perspectives of literature, religion or mythology, but these works tend to provide unsatisfying answers to the basic questions of what inspires evil and what causes it to spread. Dr. Baumeister's work answers both of these questions convincingly, along with many others, such as why evil people almost never consider themselves to be evil; why there is not more evil in the world, considering how often evil goes unpunished; why revenge is usually disproportionate to the initial offense and why it settles nothing and often inspires further and greater evil; why drugs and alcohol so often accompany evil and whether they are actually a cause of evil; whether low self-esteem or high self-esteem is more conducive to evil, and the role which self-esteem, and challenges to self-esteem, play in the initiation of evil; and how the perpetrators of evil manage to live with themselves. This is not only the best book I have ever read on the subject; it is the only one I have read which approaches the problem from the standpoint of empirical research rather than mere ideology. It is also extremely well written, accessible to the general reader and generously illustrated with examples from history and current events.
90 of 108 people found the following review helpful.
Too little result for such a long read
By Paul Vitols
Important topic, promising approach, but the insights offered are too few and too shallow.
I bought this book partly on the strength of its readers' reviews here on Amazon, but found myself disappointed. The book's subtitle, "inside human violence and cruelty," promises much, but the author, I feel, has not really delivered.
A social psychologist, Baumeister avoids a philosophical and theological discussion of evil in favor of a psychological one, based on facts gleaned from history and experiment. This approach is attractive and promising, but somehow, in almost 400 long pages, not much seems to come of it. Too often I felt that the insights offered by Baumeister were mere banalities, such as that evil acts are experienced more strongly by victims than by their perpetrators--a point Baumeister repeats many, many times.
The author uses this observation to conclude that "evil is in the eye of the beholder"--and even launches the book with a clever anecdote about an event in which two people see each other as evildoers, despite no intentional act of harm being committed. But this is surely a special case, and not comparable to the operation of a system of death-camps, or hacking apart defenseless people huddling for safety in a church. Baumeister takes pains (repeatedly) to stress that he wants to see evil acts through the perpetrators' eyes, and not prejudge events from the perspective of victims, but the result is an uneasy or indecisive tone that wavers between a normal-sounding condemnation of evil and a moral relativism that really believes that evil is merely in the eye of the beholder--that is, there's no such thing as evil, as long as you're the one perpetrating it.
Baumeister finds four basic psychological causes of evil: greed/lust/ambition, or evil as a means to an end; revenge for insulted egotism; ideological evil; and actual sadism--deriving pleasure from harming others. The author discusses each of these at length, but does not come up with many conclusions. He observes that crime, for the most part, does not pay as well as even the lowest-level jobs, and that people who commit crimes generally have a poor idea of the long-term consequences of their actions. This, to me, is another banal point, not an insight that requires much discussion.
Baumeister makes much of his conclusion that standard psychology is wrong when it attributes violent, bullying behavior to low self-esteem; he feels that the facts show that bullies and violent people in fact have high self-esteem, in the sense of high or even inflated regard for themselves. As an example, he points out that convicted, incarcerated rapists often think of themselves as "superachievers." Technically this might be called high self-esteem, but I would call it delusional, and I think there is a difference. Maybe I'm alone here, but I think of high self-esteem as being realistic and adaptive, not the fragile egotism of the narcissist. Baumeister spends much time trying to disprove the "low self-esteem" model of violent behavior, but I was never persuaded.
My overall impression is that there is length here, but not depth. I did not feel I got "inside" human violence and cruelty. Having read only the first chapter or so of James Waller's "Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing", I already feel that I am getting a much deeper and also more sympathetic view of how and why evil is committed, from a social-psychological perspective.
27 of 30 people found the following review helpful.
An outstanding attempt to understand human violence
By robert holson
In the course of reviewing over 20 books on the topic of human violence and mass murder, I found this to be far and away the best. Some obviously have problems with the author's attempts to understand and not just demonize killers. I can think of no other way of getting into the heads of those who commit violence in the name of a state, an ideology, an ethnic group, a religion or indeed any other belief system. Confronting the "banality of evil" is indeed an unpleasant exercise, but necessary if we are ever to achieve a deeper understanding of our greatest failing as a species. To summarize, this work is probably the best research-based study of the psychology of human mass violence currently on the market.
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