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A review by darlinglemon
Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty by Roy F. Baumeister
4.0
While parts of this book are outdated it remains a very important and insightful look into human nature, culture, and violence. Throughout his work, Baumeister makes a distinction between what we know as "the myth of pure evil" and how evil actually occurs. How we think and talk about evil rarely matches up with how evil is actually carried out. Usually we think of evil in terms of victims and perpetrators, but this leaves out the responsibility of bystanders. It also brings up how evildoers don't view their actions as evil, they always have a justifiable reason (to them).
This is a work of sociology, but is very readable with lots of world examples. It covers a lot of comprehensive ground and gives a great deal of thought to nuance. The scope and scale that are covered in this book are very important. This might be one of the most important books I have read in the name of research.
That being said, I had a few misgivings about this book. First, there is one sentence about how testosterone is tied to aggression. Not only does the meta analysis not support this, the studies that do claim high testosterone is connected to aggression were conducted with biases and done on male prisoners. This wasn't discussed at length, and at the time this was written this was highly accepted as true, but nonetheless it bothered me. Secondly, Baumeister goes out of his was to not use the term racism or sexism. Maybe this was on purpose, as to not bring in the perspective of the victim (which he was attempting to avoid) but it was still annoying.
This is a work of sociology, but is very readable with lots of world examples. It covers a lot of comprehensive ground and gives a great deal of thought to nuance. The scope and scale that are covered in this book are very important. This might be one of the most important books I have read in the name of research.
That being said, I had a few misgivings about this book. First, there is one sentence about how testosterone is tied to aggression. Not only does the meta analysis not support this, the studies that do claim high testosterone is connected to aggression were conducted with biases and done on male prisoners. This wasn't discussed at length, and at the time this was written this was highly accepted as true, but nonetheless it bothered me. Secondly, Baumeister goes out of his was to not use the term racism or sexism. Maybe this was on purpose, as to not bring in the perspective of the victim (which he was attempting to avoid) but it was still annoying.