Borderline personality disorder, autism, narcissism, psychosis, Asperger's: All of these syndromes have one thing in common-lack of empathy. In some cases, this absence can be dangerous, but in others it can simply mean a different way of seeing the world. In The Science of Evil, Simon Baron-Cohen, an award-winning British researcher who has investigated psychology and autism for decades, develops a new brain-based theory of human cruelty. A true...

A collection of essays explores empathy, using topics ranging from street violence and incarceration to reality television and literary sentimentality to ask questions about people's understanding of and relationships with others.

Thunderstorms are rolling across the summer sky. Every time one breaks, Rose Bowan loses consciousness and has vivid, realistic dreams about being in another woman's body. Is Rose merely dreaming? Or is she, in fact, inhabiting a stranger? Disturbed yet entranced, she sets out to discover what is happening to her, leaving the cocoon of her family's small repertory cinema for the larger, upended world of someone wildly different from herself. Meanwhile...

Our ability to understand others and help others understand us is essential to our individual and collective well-being. Yet there are many barriers that keep us from walking in the shoes of others: fear, skepticism, and power structures that separate us from those outside our narrow groups. To progress in a multicultural world and ensure our common good, we need to overcome these obstacles. Our best hope can be found in the skill of empathy. In Social...

Collects five separate stories that celebrate persistence as displayed in everyday life.

An exploration of the human mind's capacity for instinctive undertanding about the feelings and desires of others explains how the ability or inability to understand the minds of those around us leads to connection or conflict.

As a boy searches his backyard for the perfect pet, his mother asks him to consider where a squirrel, frog, or bird would like to live.

When Hyena puts a banana skin in Giraffe's path, causing a chain reaction of accidents that Hyena finds hilarious, he soon learns what it is like to be the butt of a joke.