《The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists, Psychopaths and Everyone In-Between》中文版為《恐懼的力量》，看書名還以為是勵志成長書，其實不然，它是頗為札實的科普書。作者本人正是這題目的研究先鋒。

作者 Abigail Marsh 專門研究「精神病態者」(Psychopathys) 以及她所稱為的「反‧精神病態者」(Anti-Psychopaths)。「反‧精神病態者」即「超級利他主義者」，這類人能夠無差別關心任何人，與無辦法關心任何人的精神病態者剛好相反。這本書剛好可解答我們最常問的倫理學問題：人性本善還是性本惡？

書中有一段文字：

……As a result, people who are themselves highly selfish tend to believe that others are too, whereas those who are highly compassionate believe that others are as well.

• for example, of Anne Frank, who concluded, despite all she had seen and experienced, that ‘people are truly good at heart‘,
• or Nelson Mandela, who believed that ‘our human compassion binds us one to the other’.
• Or Martin Luther King Jr, who in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech said, ‘I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality … I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.‘
• Or Mahatma Gandhi, who proclaimed, ‘Man’s nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.‘

……By contrast, those who themselves are callous or cruel tend to falsely believe that their values represent the consensus. Compare the beliefs of Frank, Mandela, King and Gandhi to the beliefs of –

• Richard Ramirez, the notorious serial murderer – nicknamed “The Nightstalker’ – who brutalised and killed thirteen people during the 1980s. Although his actions placed him far outside the bounds of normal human behaviour, he viewed himself as relatively typical, once asking, ‘We are all evilin some form or another, are we not?‘ and claiming that ‘most humans have within them the capacity to commit murder‘.
• The serial murderer Ted Bundy concurred, warning, ‘We serial killers are your sons, we are your husbands, we are everywhere.‘
• Even Adolf Hitler framed his own horrific misdeeds as reflecting basic human nature, retorting, when questioned about his brutal treatment of Jews, ‘I don’t see why man should not be just as cruel as nature.’
• Perhaps Josef Stalin best demonstrated the relationship between the possession and perception of human vice: he once proclaimed that he trusted no one, not even himself.

兩個極端差異的人群，你接近哪一類？

附加書摘

以下是劇透。

They paid particular attention to facial movements that, when combined, yield one of six widely recognisable emotional expressions: anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, surprise and – of particular relevance to altruism – fear.

Once the proto-mammalian brain was equipped with the wholly novel and evolutionarily necessary capacity to care about the welfare of other beings outside the self, there was no limit to what other kinds of love could theoretically be felt. It’s little wonder that the ethologist Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt viewed the emergence of maternal nurturing as ‘a turning point in the evolution of vertebrate behaviour – one of those celestial moments that [a poet] would call a star hour’.

That the reinforcing nature of altruism can ultimately make it self-sustaining is entirely consistent with the neuroscience literature. For example, an intact maternal care system is necessary only to kick off maternal care in rodents like rats, not to keep it going. Once a mother rat has had the experience of successfully caring for offspring, even blocking all her oxytocin receptors and completely disabling the maternal care system will not affect her well-learned ability to mother.

The deep-seated emotional urge to care may be a vital springboard for altruism, but once altruistic behaviour has taken root, it can self-perpetuate through sheer force of habit.

This may help to explain why the amygdala lesion patient S.M. is not a psychopath. She shares with psychopaths many neurocognitive deficits, including a near-total blindness to other people’s fear. But whereas these deficits are lifelong in psychopaths, S.M.’s deficits were acquired – she had a partially intact amygdala until well into her teenage years.

For more than a decade of her early life, she had ample opportunity to develop the habits and rewards of altruistic behaviour, which seem to have been sufficiently reinforcing that she remains a kindly and generous person to this day, without any amygdala at all.

This fact reinforces the critical point that the amygdala is not by itself the source of care or altruism or compassion.

These are complex emergent phenomena that arise from activity in a network of interconnected brain regions. The amygdala is a vitally important node in this network, but it is only one node.

The importance of practice also helps explain why the techniques that have been empirically demonstrated to increase the capacity for altruism usually boil down to increasing opportunities for practising it.

One recent tantalising study found that a virtual reality experience that provides people with superhero-like powers to help others may increase prosocial behaviour back in the real world (or at least the laboratory).

And a twenty-year-old programme with demonstrated success in increasing compassionate behaviours in schoolchildren is Roots of Empathy, developed by Mary Gordon. The programme, which provides children with the opportunity to practise caring for an infant that their classroom ‘adopts for a school year, seems well designed to capitalise on children’s capacities for alloparenting.

During the year, children engage in caring behaviours that include recording lullabies or poems for the baby and writing down wishes they have for the baby’s life.

Children who complete the programme are better able to recognise an infant’s cries as signalling emotional distress and tend to show fewer aggressive behaviours and more everyday helping towards one another as well.

The most robustly supported way to enhance altruism appears to be via either of two related Buddhist practices called compassion and loving-kindness meditation, both of which are basically compassion boot camp.

The fact that humility is an essential ingredient for altruism helps to explain another curious feature of extraordinary altruists: so many of them are middle-aged or older.

Humility, happily, is one of those rare and wonderful qualities that tends to grow stronger and more robust from youth through adulthood and into middle age.