The Black Prince: Empathy and ego

I've been reading The Black Prince, by Iris Murdoch. I thought this was an interesting reflection from the protagonist on having helped out his sister, whom he does not like, but feels that he must “do what one has to do,” and how that is motivated ultimately by a self-love:

That human beings can acquire a small area of unquestioned obligations may be one of the few things that saves them: saves them from the bestiality and thoughtless night which lies only a millimeter away from the most civilized of our specimens. However if one examines closely some such case of ‘duty’, the petty achievement of some ordinary individual, it turns out to be no glorious thing, not the turning back by reason or godhead of the flood of natural evil, but simply a special operation of self-love, devised perhaps even by Nature herself who has, or she could not survive in her polycephalic creation, many different and even incompatible moods. We care absolutely about that which we can identify ourselves. A saint would identify himself with everything. Only there are, so my wise friend tells me, no saints.

And one more about ego, the nature of being "good," and the role of "morality" (or at least "duty" or "habit") in a functioning society:

The natural tendency of the human soul is towards the protection of the ego. The Niagara-force of this tendency can be readily recognized by introspection, and its results are everywhere on public show. We desire to be richer, handsomer, cleverer, stronger, more adored and more apparently good than anyone else. I say 'apparently' because the average man while he covets real wealth, normally covets only apparent good. The burden of genuine goodness is instinctively appreciated as intolerable, and a desire for it would put out of focus the other and ordinary wishes by which one lives. Of course very occasionally and for an instant even the worst of men may wish for goodness. Anyone who is an artist can feel its magnetism. I use the word 'good' here as a veil. What it veils can be known, but not further named. Most of us are saved from finding self-destruction in a chaos of brutal childish egoism, not by the magnetism of that mystery, but by what is called grandly 'duty' and more accurately 'habit'. Happy is the civilization which can breed men accustomed from infancy to regard certain at least of the ego's natural activities as unthinkable. This training, which in happy circumstances can be of life-long efficacy, is however seen to be superficial when horror breaks in: in war, in concentration camps, in the awful privacy of family and marriage.

Sociopathic savior

When I was growing up I had such insight into the psyches of others (and when I was younger, not enough of a filter from saying creepy things to people's faces), that people would tell me that I should be a psychologist. Often I feel like people either seek me out because they are interested in having me see through them or someone else they're trying to understand, or at the very least it contributes a lot to what my friends seem to get out of our relationships. That's why I thought this email from a reader was an interesting take on the reasons why a sociopath might choose to help people:

First of all, I just wanted to thank you so much for Confessions... I personally have several male sociopath friends (we just attract each other!), but no fellow female sociopaths have ever come my way. As such, I was naturally curious how other women display their sociopathy, and how the display of my own characteristics "measured up" to other females. I'm happy to say that much of your book felt like stream of consciousness coming from my own mind. There were even a couple of adages or quotes I found within your book that I've been saying for years, haha. It was a pleasure to read.

All gushing, flattery, and gratitude aside, I wanted to take a chunk of my own life and throw it to the wolves, as it were ;) I'm not asking for clarity on whether or not I'm a sociopath (I know I am, and I don't need "reassurance" for such things), but I suppose I would like to initiate a bit of discussion among your readers as to how sociopathy can play out.

Growing up, I had all of the classic symptoms of a sociopath. I used my parents' divorce to manipulate, guilt-trip, and ultimately profit from both parents, I would get in fights at school, covering up quickly by claiming the other child wanted me to hit them because they wanted to see what I was learning in martial arts, I learned how to fake guilt in that "I guess I took it too far," with crocodile tears to boot. I would lie about the most mundane of things, like whether or not I had brushed my teeth a particular morning, and sometimes I would lie just to create emotional outbursts "for the fun of it" (ie: I was homeschooled by my stepmom, who I despised entirely, so occasionally I would come to my dad in tears, confessing I had "failed" a really important test, that I felt like I wasn't taught any of the material covered. In reality, I always got very high marks, but I gained a sort of satisfaction in watching my dad blow up at my stepmom for "ruining my education.")

All of this took a turn when I was sixteen, when my dad, in one of his outbursts, killed my stepmom, baby sister, and himself. (I was also shot, but survived.) I was "sentenced" to court mandated therapy, which was entirely necessary as I was having flashbacks, nightmares, etc. But my therapist noticed something: aside from my dad--who, at very least, had sociopathic tendencies, though his primary dx was bipolar... he was incredibly intelligent, however, and through his own wits and ways of "bending the law," he went from being a high school dropout, son of a hooker to a multimillionaire by his early twenties. I still admire and respect him, probably more than any other person--aside from my loss of this influential role in my life, I did not grieve. I was not concerned for my losses, except the man I saw as most contributing to my education and growth (he spent hours every week teaching me about social manipulation, business strategy, etc)--someone I had seen as "useful." My therapist chalked this up to a delay in grief caused by shock, but five and a half years later, I have never been so much as concerned to think of the others. 

Though I was not grieving, being in therapy taught me how I "should be" grieving. My therapist used a lot more suggestive questions than she probably should have, likely to try to draw me "out of my shell" or to help me put a name to emotions I was "experiencing," but didn't "understand." So I created a persona based on this "grieving me." My performance won me a full-ride scholarship to college, many families opened their homes to me, and I noticed something odd--people came up to me, seemingly out of the blue, to talk to me about their problems, thinking "if anyone could relate," it would be me.

Having been in therapy, and having keenly observed my therapist, I simply played counselor to these people. And they would look at me and tell me how much I inspired them and gave them hope... Several told me, eventually, that had it not been for me, they would've killed themselves. The power and influence I had over these people was astonishing--and I loved it. 

So I used my education to get my BA in psychology, and in the near future, I will be pursuing a MA in Grief and Trauma Therapy. I currently volunteer once a week at a grief center for teens (I specifically work with teens who have lost someone to suicide, which earns me double points for 1. working with "the toughest cases," and 2. for being "strong enough to open up to relate in such a personal way to these teens"). I also work at a residential treatment center for adolescent girls who have been through trauma and abuse. Everyone I tell my persona's story to gushes at me in admiration, and more often than not, opens themselves up ever so completely to me. They trust me, in many cases, more than anyone else they've ever met. Trusting someone is laying down your defenses completely and being bareboned honest, fearless of the consequences. People trust me so much as to let me in where no other may go. I saved their lives, and in essense, now control their lives. The power of that is incredibly intoxicating.

So, yes: these days, I help people. And I am damn good at it. But I'm tired of hearing so many people (mostly empaths and wanna-be-sociopaths) tell me that no "real" sociopath would want to help people the way I do. Even some sociopaths are skeptical. But the display of sociopathic behavior is rooted in what we want. We want power. For me, I've found the most success in gaining power through letting people trust me on what they believe to be their own terms. Yes, I could ruin them, and that is a delicious fantasy (and one, admittedly, I play out now and again with lovers)... but if I did so with clients, my reputation could be ruined more than it would be worth. By being "responsible" with my power, I gain more of it. 

I'm curious what you and yours would remark on my endeavors. I don't help people because I feel "compassion" or any nonsense like that. I don't feel any sort of "trauma bond" either. Simply, I'm good at something, and people admire, praise, and depend on me (to the point of stopping themselves from suicide) for that. Any other "savior sociopaths" out there? (After all, being a Savior entails being someone's God...)

How to Manipulate People

This was a good Lifehacker article on how to manipulate people (quick read, worth reading in its entirety). The following are the headings from the article along with my thoughts on each suggestion:

• Emotion vs. Logic: Appealing to emotion rather than logic in manipulation is a little bit of a no brainer. Not only do most people respond better to emotion than logic, irrational people often best (only?) respond to fear. 

• Master Your Own Emotions: Mastering your emotions means essentially two things -- being able to divorce your emotions from what is happening externally (look at this article for helpful suggestions of how) and being able to project the right emotions in the right circumstances to create the desired illusions. 

• Be Charming and Flirt Often: I love to flirt. I flirt with everyone. I used to flirt only with people that I could see myself wanting to seduce, but then the person who first called me a sociopath famously told me that she flirts with everyone, gay or straight because everyone likes positive attention everyone wants to be seduced.

• Overcome Trust Issues and Heal Doubt: Building trust with your target is often critical, see number 2 here (does Lifehacker read this blog? or have a sociopath on staff cluing them in?)

• Conceal Evil in Altruism: This step means pretty much what it says and is super popular with celebrities, billionaires and politicians.

• What to Do If You're Discovered: In addition to backpedaling and creating doubt in your target's mind as to whether you were actually manipulating them, I also suggest starting a counter insurgency campaign against them where you are spinning the message to favor you and disfavor them (Oliver North is a good example of this) if they're an enemy, or possibly proposing some sort of alliance if they're a friend or loved one (think Skyler White in Breaking Bad). Of course the best course of action is to prophylactically insure against this by building an actual, legitimate reputation for good (at least in certain areas) for people to cross-reference. 

Also, beware the anti-seducer, for they cannot be manipulated.

Generosity

Maria Konnikova writes for Scientific American Blogs about the psychology behind gift giving. She cites research on how generosity is a winning game theory strategy, even seen from an self-maximizing economic perspective, because it is so difficult to tell whether you'll ever see that person again:

A group of psychologists from UC-Santa Barbara set out to test the long-standing conundrum that even in anonymous, one-shot games—in other words, in situations where you know that (1) you will never again encounter your partner and (2) no one has any idea what decision you’ve made—people more often than not choose to incur costs themselves in order to allocate benefits to others; an irrational behavior by traditional economic standards if ever there was one. In their model, the team managed to isolate an asymmetry that had previous been ignored: in an uncertain world, it is far more costly to incorrectly identify a situation as one-shot when it is in fact repeated than it is to mistake an actual one-shot encounter for a repeated one. Put differently, it is better to always assume that we will in fact encounter the same partners over and over. So costly is it to make a mistake in the opposite direction that, even absent any reputational or other mechanisms, it makes sense for us to behave generously to anyone we encounter. As the study authors conclude, “Generosity evolves because, at the ultimate level, it is a high-return cooperative strategy…even in the absence of any apparent potential for gain. Human generosity, far from being a thin veneer of cultural conditioning atop a Machiavellian core, may turn out to be a bedrock feature of human nature.”

That makes a lot of sense to me. Often people ask me, as a sociopath, whether I would leave a tip for a service professional whom I thought I would never see again, but I find that hard to imagine because one time I was accosted outside a restaurant by a service professional who felt that I undertipped him. Tipping generously not only had prevented that from happening since, it has also made a positive impression on my some of my dining companions that have had the chutzpah to actually check the tip that I've left, to ensure it was generous enough. So I find the hypo of never seeing a victim again difficult to imagine.

And if you're going to bother giving a gift, better make it count by getting something that they would particularly appreciate, or perhaps that could only come from you. Ariely describes these gifts:

Instead of picking a book from your sister's Amazon wish list, or giving her what you think she should read, go to a bookstore and try to think like her. It's a serious social investment.

The great challenge lies in making the leap into someone else's mind. Psychological research affirms that we are all partial prisoners of our own preferences and have a hard time seeing the world from a different perspective. But whether or not your sister likes the book, it may give her joy to think about you thinking of her.

I understand exactly what Ariely is talking about, having always made this type of tailor-made gift-giving myself. Konnikova suggests that people could do just as well with empathy (or maybe she is saying that this can only be done with empathy?):

Ariely singles out this type of gift as one that makes the mental leap from your own vantage point to that of someone else. It’s a leap that is incredibly difficult to take—exhibiting empathy, let alone perfect empathy to the point of complete confluence with the mind of another person, is a tough feat even in the most conducive of circumstances—but that may be worth taking all the same. For, even if you fail to make it as accurately as you may have wanted, the effort will be noted. The actual accuracy is somewhat beside the point. What matters is that you try to make the shift from your own mindset to someone else’s, that you make the effort to think about what present would be best suited to another person.

What if you don't use empathy to make the leap from your own vantage point to that of someone else? Is it still the thought that counts? 

Easy to love

Under the title "Bad Dog," a writer tells the story in the NY Times of her relationship with her dog -- a creature that did not get along well with others, was unpredictable, and overall poorly behaved. Her thoughts on what it means to love unconditionally:

It’s easy to love a well-behaved dog. It’s harder to love Chance, with his bristly personality and tendency toward violence. Yet in the end, I measure the success of my relationship with Chance by its challenges, because if I can’t love him at his most imperfect what use is love?

I had a work colleague who gushed about his new dog when we first met. He worked in a remote office, so we didn't see each other that frequently, but when we did, I would always be sure to ask him about his dog (I have found that dog owners love to talk about their dogs). One day I asked him  about his dog and he told me that he was thinking of giving the dog back to the pound. I was pretty shocked. The dog was hard to potty train and tore up the furniture, so had to be kept at doggy daycare almost every day. The dog was expensive and time-consuming, more than the owner had anticipated. Owning a dog was not as convenient and rewarding as planned, so he was going to return it like you might return a television set that had failed to live up to expectations.

Of course I don't care what people do with their pets, but I did think this was an odd turnaround. Man expects unconditional loyalty and devotion from his best friend but he does not return it? Not quite Old Yeller material. Then again, what did the dog do to deserve a good life? Should we feel obligated to be nice to things that are not nice to us -- to give to people or things that cannot or do not give back to us in commensurate ways?

Along those lines, I got a little bit of pushback from this recent tweet and subsequent exchange:

"Being friends with a sociopath is fun as long as you are OK that to them your friendship is just a series of mutually beneficial exchanges"
— M.E. (@sociopathworld) September 10, 2013

@sociopathworld That's exactly what friendship is?
— Samantha Barruel (@Name_Namae) September 10, 2013

@Name_Namae @sociopathworld bahahahaha umm no. Giving to get is fake. People these days who confuse transactions with depth makes me smh.
— Erin McCaslin (@CaliWanderlust) September 10, 2013

Ok, but does that mean people should have no problems being friends with someone who is a parasite, leech, or a sociopath? If there's such thing as unconditional love for all creatures, does that include sociopaths? And relatedly (but even more puzzlingly), some people act as if empathy is this great thing, but empathy doesn't seem that powerful or that special if it doesn't allow you to empathize with people who can't empathize back. Can you empathize with sociopaths? 

Sociopathic altruism?

A female reader who relates to the sociopathic mentality writes about a lot of things that I relate to -- being a disruptive force in my family and provoking people emotionally to manipulate them until I grew older, then started using my people reading and manipulation skills to smooth things over. And now I am the peacemaker/powerbroker in the family:

I've been reading through your blog, and feel a lot of familiarity in your posts and fact section.

I lie constantly and can't control it, I have a grandiose opinion of myself, many admirers both male and female, a chameleon personality, and in the past have been prone to a quick temper--saying intentionally and specifically hurtful words to the people closest to me. As a defense mechanism usually, but I always knew how to hurt someone the most, how to put the ball in my court; how to manipulate and control. It was the worst with my family when I was younger. I've since learned this is rather unacceptable behavior among other people.

I often think to my childhood. My father was an angry man, his own father suffered from PTSD and my father inherited some violent tendencies and anger management problems. The thing is, I'm much smarter than he is--much smarter than most people, and when I was a young powerless little girl and into adolescence...well it grew to be a very dramatic power struggle. Shouting matches, crying, drama, anything to break him out of his rages--sometimes outrageous displays of emotion(though, intentional).

At the current age of 22, I now have the most influence on every member of my family. Thing is, I had to, in order to repair what was so broken and dysfunctional. Get into everybody's head, maybe control them, manipulate a bit sure--but I fixed things, eventually. Seemingly altruistic, but when it comes down to it, isn't altruism also selfishness?

I remember when I was 7 or 8, my grandma died. I'd met her many times, she'd given me plenty as a child. We were at her funeral and my mom was crying, leaning on a church pew. I had no real tears, but I forced myself to bawl that day. I remember thinking simultaneously, while crying and exaggerating my shoulders, that this is what she wanted from me though I had no inner emotional response. I knew instinctively that this would also benefit me. Turns out I've been painting the picture of myself as a very loving, innocent, and caring person for a very long time...

I'm wondering if sociopaths ever use their abilities to altruistic extremes, in which the end result benefits them, as well as everyone else? I also feel like I have the capacity to feel strong feelings, but it's more of an intensity. Romantic relationships can be very intensely positive, and intensely negative. When sleeping with people I either have absolutely no attachment to the person, or an unhealthy obsession.

Found your website and was engrossed. I've always known I was different. When my roommate found out she was pregnant, and told me and my friend--she was crying hysterically and my friend was visibly distressed. I didn't react at all. I had to think first how I was going to react to this, what was appropriate, because I had no immediate response. It didn't affect me at all.

I have consciously on several occasions admitted to myself that my personality can very dramatically change depending on my location, situation, and who I'm surrounded by. I somehow easily win people's trust, respect, and admiration--I seem to cater my approach to each specific individual, and it doesn't take me much time. I always chalked it up to being charismatic and understanding, and I'm not entirely sure if I'm a sociopath who's grown up and figured out how to truly blend in and still get everything I want--or something else.

I've been viewing life from this perspective lately and have realized that I am different, but have been lucky enough to be surrounded by certain influences and experiences growing up which have developed into a great and generous moral code I can abide by. 


There has been much growth and change since my teenage years especially, and even now and this past summer, such constant change. Seriously, thank you for all the work you've put into your site, it's contributed a lot to my growth and helped me navigate my own relationships and the way I am. Understanding. I didn't understand why I am the way I am for so long. 

Can sociopaths be altruistic? I don't know, but they certainly can be very effective at relating and interacting with people. I was listening to a talk from LDS primary children President Rosemary Wixom in which she discusses trying to think like a child in order to better relate and deal with children. It's such an easy concept but so hard for a lot of people to put into practice. Sociopaths very naturally understand and adapt to the needs of the people around them, though, whether people of different ages, cultures, genders, ethnicities, etc. That's obviously going to be a very useful and welcome trait in almost any situation. It's funny, though, what the reader said about not understanding herself -- I think especially younger sociopaths find it easier to understand other people than they understand themselves.

Economics and sociopathy

I was talking to an economist friend recently. We were talking about how economics is not just a dismal science, but that economists have a pretty dismal view of human nature, possibly because economists themselves are not generally altruistic or prosocial? He told me that economists are different enough from the general population that economics researchers can't use economics undergraduate students for their experiments because they tend to give very different answers than the average person. Specifically he told me about a game where everyone chooses to either put in a black marble or a white marble in a bag. If you put in a white marble, you increase the overall size of the payout/pie, but you just have one piece of that pie. If you put in a black marble, you get two pieces of the pie, but of a smaller pie. The optimal result would be for everyone to put in white marbles, and a lot of people actually do put in white marbles either because of altruism or optimism or guilt or whatever else. Economists and economics students, however, almost always put in black marbles. My economist friend was using this as evidence that economists are not good people. And if this one scenario was the only thing you knew about economists, perhaps you could say that the results of the experiment are consistent with the economists-as-bad-people hypothesis too.

But I gave him another quick scenario to see how he would handle it: imagine that you are at war, just you and five other fellow soldiers, all standing around in a circle. A grenade gets launched into the middle of the circle. If someone jumps on the grenade, only one person dies. If no one jumps on the grenade, there's a 20% chance someone might die and everyone will suffer moderate to critical injuries. Everyone is equidistant from the grenade and has an equal opportunity to jump on the grenade. Before I tell you what he said, I want the sociopaths who are reading this to think what they would do.






So, I asked my economist friend what he would do and he immediately replied, "I would jump on the grenade." Of course he would. He's rational and cares about efficiency. He would be the type of person in the trolley problem to throw the switch and kill the one to save the five, and apparently that answer doesn't change even when he is the one who needs to die. I think his answer surprised even him, though I'm not sure why. Perhaps because he had convinced himself that economists are soulless or at the very least selfish (i.e., rationally self-interested). But there's nothing remotely selfish or even self-interested about jumping on the grenade.

The reason I knew that this example would "work" on him is that he and I think similarly and it's something that I think I might do too. I like efficiency, and it would be efficient to fall on the grenade. Also I like winning, and it would be "winning" to thwart the enemy. It would be powerful, to smother the force of such a powerful device with just my body. Also I'm impulsive and not particularly attached to life. I actually think that a lot of sociopaths would do the same for one or more of those reasons. In fact, and I wish there was some way to accurately test this, I predict that a higher percentage of sociopaths would jump on the grenade than non-sociopaths, if for nothing else than the indecision or paralyzing fear that a lot of non-sociopaths might experience -- by the time they got around to making the decision, it might be too late. These are just guesses, but I don't think it's crazy to think that sociopaths might be braver and more pro-social in certain situations than normal people, just like economists might be more selfless than the average person in certain situations.

Whether or not my prediction is correct, I think this example also illustrates how dangerous it is to perform a couple experiments in controlled situations and extrapolate the data far beyond those particular situations. Sloppy science writers (and even serious researchers) make this mistake all of the time, e.g. if sociopaths seem to not show empathy in one situation, it's easy to make the (apparently incorrect) presumption that they never feel empathy. The truth is context matters immensely and we only know a sliver of all there is to know about ourselves and others. 

Can we eliminate evil?

A reader suggested this Morgan Freeman narrated special "Through the Wormhole: Can We Eliminate Evil?" Not surprisingly, it features sociopaths and studies on the brain that give interesting insight to how we decide what to do and what constitutes evil.

The first clip is about empathy, and illustrates well the recent study that found that sociopaths feel empathy when directed to put themselves in the shoes of others.




If you have the genetics of a killer and the brain anatomy of a killer, are you destined to become a killer? James Fallon.




And finally this was an illustration of this experiment regarding the moral lives of babies.

Not as good as you think you are

To be filed in our ever expanding good-people-aren't-as-good-as-they-think-they-are file, Adam Alter, author of the book "Drunk Tank Pink: And Other Unexpected Forces That Shape How We Think, Feel, and Behave" writes for the NY Times about how people's behavior often depends on context, "Where We Are Shapes Who We Are". First he explains research from the 1970s about whether people would go out of their way to post an already stamped and addressed envelope that they had found on the ground. Even though only 6 out of 10 students in crowded dorms posted the letter, "when the researchers asked a different collection of students to imagine how they might have responded had they come across a lost letter, 95 percent of them said they would have posted it regardless of where they were living." Alter continues:

Most people, in fact, think of themselves as generous. In self-assessment studies, people generally see themselves as kind, friendly and honest, too. We imagine that these traits are a set of enduring attributes that sum up who we really are. But in truth, we’re more like chameleons who instinctively and unintentionally change how we behave based on our surroundings.
***
For example, people behave more honestly in locations that give them the sense they’re being watched. A group of psychologists at Newcastle University in northeast England found that university workers were far more likely to pay for tea and coffee in a small kitchen when the honor-system collection box sat directly below a price list featuring an image of a pair of eyes, versus one with flowers. The researchers alternated the pictures of eyes and flowers each week during their 10-week experiment, using eyes from both men and women, to make sure that no single image affected the outcome. In every week featuring the eyes, the “honesty box” ended up with more money.
***
Other environmental cues shape our actions because they subtly license us to behave badly. According to the heavily debated broken windows theory, people who are otherwise well behaved are more likely to commit crimes in neighborhoods with broken windows, which suggests that the area’s residents don’t care enough to maintain their property.

What does this mean in terms of whether people are inherently good or evil?

These studies tell us something profound, and perhaps a bit disturbing, about what makes us who we are: there isn’t a single version of “you” and “me.” Though we’re all anchored to our own distinct personalities, contextual cues sometimes drag us so far from those anchors that it’s difficult to know who we really are — or at least what we’re likely to do in a given circumstance.

It’s comforting to believe that there’s an essential version of each of us — that good people behave well, bad people behave badly, and those tendencies reside within us.

But the growing evidence suggests that, on some level, who we are — litterbug or good citizen, for example — changes from moment to moment, depending on where we happen to be.

These environmental cues can shape and reshape us as quickly as we walk from one part of the city to another.

These studies are not unusual and they are not isolated. There are myriad examples of incredibly bad behavior from people who never would have predicted (or later admit) they would act that way, both experimental and historical (see also here and here and here and here, and for the limitations of good behavior here and here, and why despite all of this evidence, people still think that they are good people who could never do any real wrong, and that their definition of good is an expression of objective truth). Maybe the best common example of normal people behaving badly is what happens during a riot. Riots are not populated entirely of sociopaths, not hardly. They are ordinary people who either have let their emotions get the best of them or are using a breakdown in the social fabric to act reprehensibly. Taking advantage of a devastating national disaster and the ensuing chaos to rape 7 and 2 year-old children? Football fans killing each other? Riots to me are a good indication that ordinary people absolutely love to act out when everyone else is doing it or when they think they won't get caught.

Empaths like to pretend that they are immune to any bad thoughts or impulses, and sometimes I almost find myself believing them, so adamant and unyielding are their assertions. But the data doesn't support their self-assessments. Not only that, but they must be either lying on the self-assessments to make themselves look better than they are or they are lying to themselves to make themselves feel like they're better than they are. So... they're also hypocrites.

This is probably what I'm most worried about when people talk about rounding up all of the sociopaths and putting them on an island somewhere. Will we even make it there safely if the boat is being run by hypocritical and situationally exploitative empaths who are prone to emotional outbursts that may lead to murder? Empaths sound pretty dangerous to me.

Targeted altruism

Or, a rose by any other name... from Superfreakonomics:

Some of [Gary] Becker's most compelling early research concerned altruism. He argued, for instance, that the same person who might be purely selfish in business could be exceedingly altruistic among people he knew -- although, importantly (Becker is an economist, after all), he predicted that altruism even within a family would have a strategic element.

Summers empirically demonstrated Becker's point. Using data from a U.S. government longitudinal study, they showed that an elderly parent in a retirement home is more likely to be visited by his grown children if they are expecting a sizable inheritance.

But wait, you say: maybe the offspring of wealthy families are simply more caring toward their elderly parents?

A reasonable conjecture -- in which case you'd expect an only child of wealthy parents to be especially dutiful. But the data show no increase in retirement- home visits if a wealthy family has only one grown child; there need to be at least two. This suggests that the visits increase because of competition between siblings for the parent's estate. 

This illustrates an interesting problem in defining altruism not just as good acts, but good acts done selflessly:

How can we know whether an act is altruistic or self- serving? If you help rebuild a neighbor's barn, is it because you're a moral person or because you know your own barn might burn down someday? When a donor gives millions to his alma mater, is it because he cares about the pursuit of knowledge or because he gets his name plastered on the football stadium?

Sorting out such things in the real world is extremely hard. While it is easy to observe actions, it is much harder to understand the intentions behind an action.

After an interesting discussion of several lab experiments, researchers conclude that true altruism (if it exists as all) is elusive as a unicorn or Nessie:

If John List's research proves anything, it's that a question like "Are people innately altruistic?" is the wrong kind of question to ask. People aren't "good" or "bad." People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated -- for good or ill -- if only you find the right levers.

Sociopaths = team players

So says the Psychology Today blog ("Despite Popular Opinion, Psychopaths Can Show They Care"):

The quintessential psychopath shows callous disregard for others, a complete lack of empathy, a glibness and superficial charm, and an impulsive and antisocial lifestyle. We would never, given this set of qualities, expect such individuals to make decisions that would benefit anyone but themselves. Their lack of empathy should make it nearly impossible for them to understand how other people are feeling. Yet, when you think about it, the ability of psychopaths to con and smooth talk their way into situations that allow them to take advantage of people requires some pretty sensitive people-reading skills. Perhaps behaving in psychopathic ways isn’t a matter of lack of ability to empathize, but is instead due to lack of proper incentive. If that’s the case, it should be possible to put the psychopath’s people-reading skills to good use.

Following this logic, psychologists Nathan Arbuckle and William Cunningham (2012) explored the possibility that, under the right circumstances, people high in psychopathy would willingly behave in ways that would benefit someone other than themselves. The people in this study were not hardened criminals, but were drawn from the somewhat ordinary psychology study population of college undergraduates. However, based on the notion that psychopathy isn’t an all-or-nothing kind of trait, Arbuckle and Cunningham reasoned that even college students can have at least some of the remorseless selfishness and glibness shown in clinical populations. In fact, the questionnaire measure they used to measure psychopathy seems capable of sniffing out the “everyday” psychopaths who stroll through college campuses.

They set up a game where "participants would either benefit themselves alone, or benefit themselves and the person for whom they were playing (team member vs. stranger)."

In the first study, the findings supported the hypothesis that people high in psychopathy would be more likely to take bets that would benefit their team rather than a group of strangers. However, the findings could suggest that the people high in psychopathy were simply trying to improve their own situation, and not necessarily that of the group’s. Therefore, in the second study, the setup was slightly different. Now the bets would benefit only the team, not oneself alone. With this slight tweaking of the experimental condition, the people high in psychopathy continued to make decisions that would benefit their team even when they, personally, didn't stand to benefit from their bets.

Along that same vein, my sister emailed my family this recent NY Times op-ed, "The Gift of Siblings." My brother said he cried at this paragraph:

My siblings have certainly seen me at my worst, and I’ve seen them at theirs. No one has bolted. It’s as if we signed some contract long ago, before we were even aware of what we were getting into, and over time gained the wisdom to see that we hadn’t been duped. We’d been graced: with a center of gravity; with an audience that never averts its gaze and doesn’t stint on applause. For each of us, a new home, a new relationship or a newborn was never quite real until the rest of us had been ushered in to the front row.

How to become a (good?) sociopath

I was recently asked whether there are any famous good sociopaths:

Famous good sociopaths? I don't think you would ever say that a sociopath was "good," per se, the same way you might about Mother Theresa, etc. They're always complicated. They can be good in the fact that they aren't bad... they can also be great, without necessarily being good. Is Dick Cheney bad? What about Julius Caesar? Sociopaths often lust for power, which can put them at odds with the people that they rule, but they can also do a lot of good things like keeping governments stable, or fighting off the invading hordes, or being a spy, or whatever else. Does that make them good? I don't think sociopaths have any sort of urge to do good things, just scratch their power-hungry itch. A lot of sociopaths specifically choose to use their powers for good instead of evil, but they're end game is not doing good, it's power or whatever else the sociopaths is after.

I think that a good analogy would be a corporation. There are a lot of corporations that do things that you like, maybe even good things, but the primary motivation is to make a profit. But just because you are trying to make a profit doesn't mean you can't do it by doing things you like, or that you are good at, or that comport with the way you see the world or want the world to see you. I terrorize bullies. Is that good? I help out friends and neighbors for all sorts of reasons. Actually, coincidentally, one of my readers sent this to me recently -- it deals with the idea of not having the same sort of of emotional connections to your actions as empaths do: "a comprehensive beginner's guide to becoming a sociopath." When I read it, I thought all of the good things were things that I might actually do or have already done. My bad things were different, though -- I guess I just have different tastes. But I see what the point of the exercise is -- divorce your normal emotional reactions from certain behavior. I bet it would work. I bet there a lot of things people would want to be a little sociopathic about, like having no fear if you do a lot of public speaking, or not having an emotional connection to food (I would bet the percentage of obese sociopaths is 1%, for purely genetic reasons). But maybe it is difficult to do, like being a little bit pregnant. A little bit anorexic? Or alcoholic? Or blood thirsy?

Living multiple lives

This was an interesting recent comment:


There are ways to help people that still allow the rush of power, said power is simply less benevolent. People who've been helped tend to rely upon those who helped them, respecting their advice and guidance once the results come piling in. Knowing the game can allow you to work around the usual resistances people put up against advice, and can make for faster changes in the individual for the better, making the world ever so slightly a less monotonous place, while still practicing the talent for control in ways that still show results. People in such cases are sort of like rescued pets from an animal shelter; hurt, damaged, needing the help of others because they are too blinded to help themselves, and then there I am, willing to take them in, psychologically nurse them back to health, and turn such a person back upon society who suddenly carries views that partially reflect my own, spreading it. 

I've tried to be a good person, but at certain points of trust, it becomes tempting to see how blindly they'll follow obviously bad advice, much like leading an animal around with a laser pointer. Helping someone become a better person is like watching a plant grow, slow and gently rewarding, where using a lighter to ignite the plant is exciting, but immediate gratification that is as quick as it came. There's pride in one's achievements, but achievements in the realm of life-crushing are seldom as nostalgic as an unburnt bridge you just helped reinforce. Plus, the typical need for reciprocity can have yields for keeping such people around until it's no longer desirable, which, with life-helping prospects as a prior context, can leave you the 55 in a 45/55 split perception of power; the perception of being one step ahead. 

The main part that sucks the most is when good advice has a bad outcome. For myself, it makes me feel as if I failed them in some way, which is damaging to my sense of pride, and I cannot tolerate failure from myself quite as easily as I can from others with reduced senses of awareness, who really can't help but make mistakes as they feel around life blindly in the dark, relishing what few things they can see (could easily have this argument reflected back at me, for in some ways I am blind too). 

I thought this was an interesting comment, the idea that helping someone become a better person is like watching a plant grow. In some ways for me helping people allows me to live multiple lives, alternative realities. It's like a chessmaster who is playing multiple games at once. A blackjack player playing multiple hands at once. It is not enough for my brain to want to maximize my own success, but also to imagine what it would be like to live another life, and succeed in that one as well.

I don't do it for the other person. In fact, a lot of times the people I "help" would rather I had not. A lot of my friends ask me for stock advice. I gave one friend some advice right before the market crash in 2008. They followed my advice, but only in broad strokes and lost a significant sum of money. Interestingly, I used an even more risky strategy with my own money and managed to come out ok. But that is just the nature of probability and risk. Maybe I understand probabilities better than most people because I have a larger pool of observations from which to draw. One major benefit of living these multiple lives -- I understand that there are very few "sure things" in life.

Altruistic punishment

I had not heard of the phrase altruistic punishment (or had forgotten it), until I read this BBC article talking about why motorists hate cyclists for what they perceive to be cheating in the typical rules of the road, e.g. passing on the right, not waiting their turn, etc. Some motorists hate cyclists so much they would like to run them down. Why? Altruistic punishment:


Humans seem to have evolved one way of enforcing order onto potentially chaotic social arrangements. This is known as "altruistic punishment", a term used by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter in a landmark paper published in 2002. An altruistic punishment is a punishment that costs you as an individual, but doesn't bring any direct benefit. As an example, imagine I'm at a football match and I see someone climb in without buying a ticket. I could sit and enjoy the game (at no cost to myself), or I could try to find security to have the guy thrown out (at the cost of missing some of the game). That would be altruistic punishment.

Altruistic punishment, Fehr and Gachter reasoned, might just be the spark that makes groups of unrelated strangers co-operate. 

The researchers set up a game in which players were incentivized to cheat in repeated rounds of the game, until...


A simple addition to the rules reversed this collapse of co-operation, and that was the introduction of altruistic punishment. Fehr and Gachter allowed players to fine other players credits, at a cost to themselves. This is true altruistic punishment because the groups change after each round, and the players are anonymous. There may have been no direct benefit to fining other players, but players fined often and they fined hard – and, as you'd expect, they chose to fine other players who hadn't chipped in on that round. The effect on cooperation was electric. With altruistic punishment, the average amount each player contributed rose and rose, instead of declining. The fine system allowed cooperation between groups of strangers who wouldn't meet again, overcoming the challenge of the free rider problem.

So this was interesting to read, because for the most part I don't participate in altruistic punishment. And by that I mean to say I don't think I do or ever have, but I'm reluctant to say something so certain without its having been on my radar for the entirety of my existence.

To give an example, on a recent trip my phone was stolen. I have tracking software installed on it and was able to track my phone going away into a sketchy part of the city where I was visiting until it stayed there. I sent some messages offering a "found" reward and sort of threatening police action, but really it was a longshot. The next morning I went to the store to buy a new phone. I asked the guy if I could transfer my extended warranty on the phone to the new phone and he said no, but he could label it as "stolen".

"What happens when it gets labeled as stolen? Do you somehow prevent them from using the phone?"

"No, but if they bring it and ask to have it repaired, we tell them it's stolen."

"Do you confiscate it?"

"No, usually they just walk out of the store with it immediately."

"Well, what's the point?"

"They wouldn't be able to use our services or benefit from the warrantee."

"Oh, well, then no. I want them to benefit from the warranty. I paid for that, someone should benefit from it. And good on them for managing to steal my phone."

Maybe the store owner thought that I was being particularly forgiving, and in a way I guess I was, but really it was just realizing that I had gotten beat at a game whose rules I of course had understood and accepted when I bought the expensive phone and traipsed around with it all over.

I suppose even if I had listed it as "stolen" it wouldn't have even been that altruistic because there didn't seem to be any additional cost to me in terms of time lost or whatever. But this makes me think it's even less likely that I would actually altruistically punish people. This doesn't mean that I don't hold grudges or keep score sometimes and try to punish people for benefits that accrue directly to me somehow (reputational or establishing a particular power dynamic). And I guess I might from time to time take on someone else's "cause" just for the sake of having an excuse to rabble-rouse -- but I don't really believe in the righteousness of the cause.

Why don't I altruistically punish? Could have something to do with the origins of the impulse:

They dished out fines because they were mad as hell. Fehr and Gachter, like the good behavioural experimenters they are, made sure to measure exactly how mad that was, by asking players to rate their anger on a scale of one to seven in reaction to various scenarios. When players were confronted with a free-rider, almost everyone put themselves at the upper end of the anger scale. Fehr and Gachter describe these emotions as a “proximate mechanism”. This means that evolution has built into the human mind a hatred of free-riders and cheaters, which activates anger when we confront people acting like this – and it is this anger which prompts altruistic punishment. In this way, the emotion is evolution's way of getting us to overcome our short-term self-interest and encourage collective social life.

Of course because it is emotionally driven and not necessarily rational, it leads to such anti-social behaviors as advocating for violence against cyclists.

Sharing is caring?

Are sociopaths happier for being selfish?  Probably:


Although we are taught the benefits of kindness and altruism, it seems we are happiest when simply told to pursue our own self-interest.

Researchers found the key to contentment is feeling we have no choice but to be selfish.

In contrast, the study, carried out by psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania, found that those who actively choose a selfish path usually have to battle with guilt.

They speculated that because we're taught as children that 'sharing means caring', if we make a decision out of self-interest, we often feel bad for prioritising ourselves over others.

But that frequently means we forego the things we know will make us happy.

That's odd, why would being unselfish not make us happy?

Promoting prosocial behavior

This was an interesting recent article in the NY Times, "Understanding How Children Develop Empathy," but I thought some of the parts about the source and development of prosocial behavior were just as interesting--particularly that it is not just about (or even primarily) about empathy:


By itself, intense empathy — really feeling someone else’s pain — can backfire, causing so much personal distress that the end result is a desire to avoid the source of the pain, researchers have found. The ingredients of prosocial behavior, from kindness to philanthropy, are more complex and varied.

They include the ability to perceive others’ distress, the sense of self that helps sort out your own identity and feelings, the regulatory skills that prevent distress so severe it turns to aversion, and the cognitive and emotional understanding of the value of helping.

And this part about how people can be taught to feel the rewards of prosocial acts:


Experimental studies have shown that the same brain region that is activated when people win money for themselves is active when they give to charity — that is, that there is a kind of neurologic “reward” built into the motivational system of the brain.

“Charitable giving can activate the same pleasure-reward centers, the dopaminergic centers, in the brain that are very closely tied to habit formation,” said Bill Harbaugh, an economist at the University of Oregon who studies altruism. “This suggests it might be possible to foster the same sorts of habits for charitable giving you see with other sorts of habits.”



The other theory of prosocial behavior, Dr. Huettel said, is based on social cognition — the recognition that other people have needs and goals. The two theories aren’t mutually exclusive: Cognitive understanding accompanied by a motivational reward reinforces prosocial behavior.

But shaping prosocial behavior is a tricky business. For instance, certain financial incentives seem to deter prosocial impulses, a phenomenon called reward undermining, Dr. Huettel said.



I thought that made a lot of sense, that a lot of prosocial acts stem from a greater cognitive understanding that other people have needs and goals. I feel like the more aware I have been taught to be about the inner worlds of others, the more I am naturally inclined to defer to those needs and goals, especially when it is hardly any trouble to me and means so much to them.

Altruism, cruelty, and sociopathy

I have been thinking recently about whether lack of altruism is a sociopathic, but not necessarily sociopath-specific trait. I have also been thinking about whether, if altruism is the result of an excessive amount of empathy, is cruelty necessarily the result of too little empathy?

A reader recently wrote questioning whether he could meet the diagnostic criteria for ASPD (Asperger's). After listing the behaviors that he considered sociopathic, he equivocated:

Then again, I do care about my friends and all. I'm not a hundred percent sure, but I think I feel a little bad when I walk over someone's heart. And I never walk over someone with the sole intention of hurting them. So I am definitely not a sociopath. Yet, if your blog is anything to go by, then I can't be too far from being a sociopath (a mild sociopath, of course).

My response:

Yeah, I was just going to say, not all sociopaths are out there hurting people just to hurt them. What does that even mean? That you gain pleasure from their pain? I never hurt people to watch them suffer. I do it for my own purposes, to get in a better position, etc. I feel like a good analogy is the stock market. When you short trade stocks you are basically doing a wealth transfer from you to whomever you are buying low from and selling high to. It seems like you would have to be a sociopath to engage in that sort of business, no? But people do it all the time. They just probably don't like to admit that that is what they are doing. Same thing in the emotional/social realm. You make alliances, you may consider certain people "on your team," in a way of self-insuring should disaster strike. But people who are not on your team are people who will either gain from your loss or vice versa. That's just the way of things in this mostly zero sum game.

Is my worldview cruel? Does seeing the bulk, if not the entirety, of human relations as a zero sum game part of what makes me a sociopath? Or am I just seeing the world clearly?

Sociopaths and impulsive helpfulness

At Narcissistworld, they featured this video about helping people.


And this quote about how there might be situations in which sociopaths are most likely to help:

Normal people get too bothered witnessing suffering to keep seeing it. Narcissists don’t care – they are too focused on their own story, judging the losers in a way that makes them feel good about themselves, etc. But sociopaths can really see the suffering and keep going.

Good cocktail conversation tidbits

For that social function you have coming up soon at which it might be fun to subtly suggest that sociopaths are not as bad as people think they are, Wisdom of Psychopathy author Kevin Dutton shares
Some Surprising Things You Never Knew About Psychopaths:

• Psychopaths can sometimes be more empathic than the rest of us. This is especially the case in sadistic serial killers. As one senior FBI profiler told Dutton: “Sadistic serial killers feel their victims’ pain in exactly the same way that you or I might feel it. They feel it cognitively and objectively, and emotionally and subjectively too. But the difference between them and us is that they commute that pain to their own subjective pleasure.” Studies have also shown that some psychopaths have more ‘mirror neurons’ (empathy brain cells) than normal people.
• They can be more altruistic than the rest of us. Studies have shown that psychopaths are quicker to offer help to people in need than everyday folk.
• They don’t take things as personally as the rest of us. Research in the field of neuroeconomics has shown that psychopaths make more money than the rest of us in negotiation games because they are more willing to accept unfair offers.
• As well as taking lives, they can also be better at saving lives than the rest of us—especially in knife-edge situations when the chips are down. 
• Psychopaths make really good customs officers. In one experiment Dutton ran, psychopaths were better at picking out people with contraband concealed about their person than were non-psychopaths.
• James Bond is a psychopath. A recent study shows that James Bond epitomizes the profile of the successful psychopath: ruthless, fearless, charming, persuasive, non-conformist, extraverted, thrill-seeking, philandering, and decidedly lacking in the conscience department.

Sociopathic pig

Unless this pig experiences emotions and used empathy or altruism to decide to save this goat?