Author(s): Barbara Oakley

Reference

Have you ever met a person who left you wondering, 'How could someone be so twisted? So evil?' Prompted by clues in her sister's diary after her mysterious death, author Barbara Oakley takes the reader inside the head of the kinds of malevolent people you know, perhaps all too well, but could never understand. Starting with psychology as a frame of reference, Oakley uses cutting-edge images of the working brain to provide startling support for the idea that 'evil' people act the way they do mainly as the result of a dysfunction. In fact, some deceitful, manipulative, and even sadistic behaviour appears to be programmed genetically - suggesting that some people really are born to be bad. But there are unexpected fringe benefits to 'evil genes'. We may not like them - but we literally can't live without them.Oakley deftly ties together the big picture implications of revolutionary neuroscientific and genetic discoveries, showing the eerily similar behavioural tics of Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Slobodan Milosevic.