Attachment/connection

From a sociopath reader:

First of all let me start by saying I am a sociopath. I have been diagnosed but I kept it to myself because people will act differently if they know. There doesn't seem to be any benefits of being diagnosed with exception of the availability of so-called "help". Something which is useless.

I'm smart, very smart. I've been IQ tested by 4 different tests and I've averaged at 167. I breeze through my studies. Although this seems fun I find it rather frustrating. I enjoy puzzles. They interest me. When I say puzzles I don't mean Sunday crosswords and sudoku, I mean people puzzles. For example, if someone is upset then I find it fun to search for the reason why they are upset. Average puzzles are facile.

I want to know what your take on sociopathic connection and attachment to other people is.
I know this girl. We go to college together. She's not that smart but what draws me to her is that she is very similar to me. She's attractive and has a kind of free personality. For the past couple of years we have had what she describes as a "love-hate relationship". We've never dated but we have hooked up. We've fought a lot but I always win as I'm much more intelligent than her. 

I am very attached to her and I *feel* very close to her. I don't like her per se but I think there's a connection. As much as I like her ("like" denoting attachment), whenever we talk meaningfully I find that I never disclose real personal information such as my non-existent emotions.
She interests me.

She is different. She is the only person who I can't easily read. Everybody else is so easy to discern yet I find her puzzling nature very enlightening. While I spend my life searching for distractions, she serves as the best one. I am intrigued by her. 

I believe she has Histrionic Personality Disorder, based on 4 years of evidence to support this. Especially the attention-seeking and dramatic emotions. She is constantly changing which I think is intriguing. Usually I can discern people fairly well but with her it's different.

I feel very protective over her and if anyone (I'm an exception to this, hypocritically) hurts her then I will lose it. I rarely get angry and so I will calmly deal with it. 

I'm just wondering what you think of this. Maybe I should try to act more 'not-sociopathic' around her although she kind of likes that I'm different. She knows that something is up with me but she just doesn't realise what I am capable of or exactly what I am. I would never physically hurt her by the way.


My response:

I think people are the most interesting distraction too. It's like that short story, "The Most Dangerous Game." Would you be sad if she rejected you? Said she hated you? Told everyone your secrets or otherwise exposed you to the world? And if she would and could do those things, is that part of the reason why you find her engaging? I think your answers lie less in an examination of her character or even the nature of your relationship and more in exploring what exactly you get from her now and what you might hope to get from her in the future.

More on IQ tests, intelligence, and sociopaths

From a reader:

The question of whether or not IQ tests are equally valid for sociopaths is an interesting one. Essay tests typically measure not only subject material mastery, but also how closely the opinions expressed by a test taker match those of the test grader. Poorly written multiple-choice questions may follow simple patterns e.g. longest answer is always right. If someone administering a test knows the answers and gives non-verbal cues, then they may just be measuring a Clever Hans effect. And of course having a copy of the answer sheet before the test can reduce performance to an act of memorization.

Any of these systematic difficulties would drastically decrease the g-loading of a test. After going through all the ways that test questions can potentially be `gamed`, we must face the truism that a g-loaded question is g-loaded question. A given question may be solvable by more than one means, but if the ability to solve it by any and all of these means has a strong enough correlation with the ability to solve a diverse enough body of other seemingly unrelated problems involving complexity, then the ability to solve it is a mathematically valid demonstration of general intelligence per Spearman's factor analysis.

I've never heard a good argument against this, so I'm not interested in debating it.

On the other hand, I may be interested in debating subtler points about interplay of the general factor and specific factors amongst different groups of people with certain sets of DSM-IV diagnoses. For example it's generally accepted that high functioning autistics are better than the general population at performing some cognitive tasks, and worse than the general population at performing others. A significant proportion of autistics exhibit such large discrepancies on Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrixes vs. Wechsler tests that the discrepancies in scores actually far exceed what can be accounted for by the sum of these test's specific factors as normed on the general population. This is true even when comparing the Raven's scores against some of the Wechsler subtests considered to have the best g-loading.

Autism is not as well understood as some other DSM-IV diagnoses, but the effect involving IQ score discrepancies appears analogous to the way that ADHD can be accurately diagnosed from disparities between Wechsler series sub-test scores. There are non-IQ related cognitive skills tests which can effectively screen for sociopathy to the extent that test subjects are not aware of how the tests work. Additionally, there's some anecdotal evidence that sociopaths may generally fare better in chronometric IQ testing than in other forms of IQ testing.

There are some parallels between thought processes of autistics, sociopaths, and people with 3+ sigma general intelligence (1 or less out of every 1,000 for the general population, or IQ of 145+ with a standard deviation of 15). This mostly relates to being more rational/calculating as opposed to emotional/reactive. There are ways in which all three groups seem to act stupidly, but most of these don't really relate to lack of general intelligence. Some relate to different emotional needs, or emotion processing deficits in said neuroatypicals, and at least a few actually result from cognitive deficits in the aggregate population.

I know someone who's convinced that sociopathy occurs with a greater frequency among the highly intelligent. Personally I don't think true sociopathy occurs with much greater frequency, but I do think that similarities in dick-head behavior result from similar secondary causes. For example, I've noticed that extremely intelligent people:

* don't feel compelled to follow social norms for the sake of following social norms
* don't hold authority figures in high regard
* don't make decisions based on emotions, including empathy
* can be very adept at using self-manipulation while justifying unreasonable behavior
* tend to experience disdain to a heightened degree when they do experience it

Do sociopaths have high IQs?

A reader asks:

"do you happen to know if sociopaths are typically of extremely high i.q.? from what i've seen from personal experience and posts on your site, most individuals who fit the classification appear to be at least above average in intelligence. is this an accurate observation?"

My response:

I think that sociopaths would typically score high(er) on IQ tests, but I don't know if that would necessarily mean that they are of above average intelligence. Sociopaths are extremely capable of finding the weaknesses in things, people, the social fabric, etc., like a shark sniffing blood or a dog "smelling" fear.

Let's take for example the fact that I have always performed very well on standardized tests. I will readily admit that doesn't necessarily make me "intelligent." Rather, when I read a question, I am not always looking for answers, or even clues to the answers, but rather clues into the test maker's mind. Are they trying to trick me? I think, if I were a test maker, how many different ways could I ask a question on a critical issue? There will always be a limited number of ways that test makers can/will ask questions--you just have to figure out which, and then recognize those particular questions when you see them. I also try to guess what would be the fake answers test makers might come up with. Test makers have fears like everyone else has fears -- fears that a question will be too easy, fears that a question may have more than one answer or be ambiguous. You can practically see a test taker's CYA precautions in some of the questions you read. You know immediately what the answer is, just like when you ask someone, "Where's the safe?" and they say "I don't know," but their eyes look to the wall behind the desk. Obviously the safe is in the wall behind the desk.

Is this ability to sense weakness what intelligence is? I wouldn't think so. Standardized IQ tests don't necessarily test intelligence, they just test someone's ability to correctly mark the right answer -- they don't account for how you managed to choose that right answer. Take the extreme example: you obtained all the answers ahead of time (cheated). Your score indicates a very high IQ. Does that mean you are intelligent? What if, instead of "cheating," you are a mind reader and get the answers that way? What if you are just very good at predicting what answer test makers think is "right"? Does that mean you are intelligent?

But I do think most sociopaths seem intelligent, particularly to empaths. They have different blindspots than you do, and they think out of the box because they aren't in a box, or at least not the same box you are. Have you ever heard a child speak a foreign language? Maybe for a moment you are amazed. "Good lord! That child's speaking Swahili!" But you are amazed because you are framing the issue in terms of how difficult it would be for you to be speaking Swahili, particularly at that child's age. Your mind has forgotten that some people grow up speaking Swahili as their native language, or in bilingual homes. So the sociopath can amaze the empath with his charm, wit, and intelligence, just because that is the sociopath's "native language," so to speak.

But are sociopaths perceived as being above average, charming, witty, and intelligent? Yes, most of us manage to come off that way. And life is almost always form over substance, rarely the other way around.