Quote: Rough men and violence

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

George Orwell

Sociopath quotes: hunting

"Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter.

Ernest Hemingway, "On the Blue Water," Esquire, April 1936

Borderline personality disorder vs. sociopathy

This was an interesting article from the Psychology Today blog relating an experiment done examining the brain activity of sociopaths and comparing it to that of people with borderline personality disorder. Why these two disorders? Apparently, sociopathic and borderline traits occur with equal frequency among violent offenders, but they reach their antisocial behavior in different ways:

Typically, antisocial offenders with borderline personality disorder are emotionally reactive, unable to regulate emotions, bereft of cognitive empathy (knowing how another person feels), rageful, and reactively aggressive. By contrast, antisocial offenders with high psychopathic traits can be characterized as emotionally detached, cognitively empathic, morally problematic, exploitative, and proactively and reactively aggressive.

The experiment:

The investigators took MRI scans of the two groups of antisocial offenders, with the aim of exploring differences in the cerebral structure of their brains. All offenders had been convicted for capital, violent crimes (including severe bodily injury such as murder, manslaughter, robbery, or rape) from high-security forensic facilities and penal institutions and were formally diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. There was also a comparison group of healthy men.

The results:

The antisocial offenders with borderline personality disorder had alterations in the orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex regions, which are involved in emotion regulation and reactive aggression; there were also differences in the temporal pole, which is involved in the interpretation of other peoples’ motives. By contrast, the antisocial offenders with high psychopathic traits showed reduced volume mostly in midline cortical areas, which are involved in the processing of self-referential information and self reflection (i.e., dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate/precuneus) and recognizing emotions of others (postcentral gyrus). 

I thought this was interesting. I wrote previously about the connection between sociopathy and alexithymia, or the decreased ability to identify, understand, and describe one's own emotions. This trait has been linked to a lack of empathy, the idea being that if you are unable to understand your own emotions, you don't stand much of a chance of understanding the emotional worlds of others. I feel like I don't understand my emotions, that they feel out of context to me, like I'm getting only snippets of a movie played backwards. This feeling probably contributes to my weak sense of self. This brain scan study seems to comport with this theory -- that sociopaths suffer from an ability to process self-referential information and to self-reflect, and that consequently sociopaths have flexible understandings of not only morality, but basically every human trait.

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.

Outrageous behavior

I can lose my temper sometimes. When I do, it can flip me from normal, even easy going, into someone possessed by a murderous rage. It's not hotheaded, it's coldhearted. It's also predictable, to an extent. Like everyone, it happens more when I am tired, frustrated, or distracted. Through the use of sleeping medications, I force myself to sleep more than my body naturally wants to, partly to keep a more level head when I am actually awake. I also try to avoid situations in which someone may unpredictably provoke me, typically strangers who don't know me or my triggers, and I am careful to schedule in a lot of downtime and alone time in which to decompress. I've gotten so good at this, it's been a while since my last rage attack. And all of the recent ones have been while I am traveling, when I am most likely to be forced to deal with strangers.

The most predictable aspect of these rages, though, is when someone "calls" me on something that I have done "wrong" when I feel like I have done nothing that would warrant their disapproval. I get angry at the flight attendant who tells me to turn off my electronic device, the metro worker who tells me to not use a particular set of stairs, etc. I know why, I feel like it is underhanded, that they are trying to force me to follow a particular set of rules that I think don't acknowledge, for whatever reason.

The particular set of rules, I realized, are called "social exchange rules." From a Wall Street Journal article about why folks throw temper tantrums when these rules are broken (try Googling the title "Big Explosions, Small Reasons" to get past the subscriber only):

Researchers at Duke University, in a yet-to-be-published study, looked for explanations of why people melt down over small things. Their findings suggest we are reacting to a perceived violation of an unwritten yet fundamental rule. It's the old, childhood wail: "It's not fair!"

Researchers call these unwritten laws of behavior "social exchange rules." We're not supposed to be rude or inconsiderate; we are supposed to be polite, fair, honest and caring. Don't cut in line. Drive safely. Clean up after yourself.

"We can't have successful interactions in relationships, mutually beneficial to both people involved, if one person violates these rules," says Mark Leary, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke and lead author of the study. "And we can't have a beneficial society if we can't trust each other not to lie, not to be unethical, not to watch out for our general well-being."

What makes my losses of temper different, I wondered. Am I the same as these people? I behave civilized, even charmingly. I say please and thank you, wait my turn in line, etc., but largely because this is the best way to get what I want. These are some of the most obvious social rules, whether kept or broken, so I am sure to be seen as a rule follower particularly for these little niceties.

No, when I lose my temper, it's not because I feel like someone has not held up their end of a social bargain, it is because I have been reminded about how powerless I am. The flight attendant has power over me. I try to pretend that we are equals and I could ruin her if I wanted to, but ultimately she could get me kicked off a flight and I would have no recourse. The metro worker looked like God's mistake, but he also has a certain sort of power over me, power to tell me where I can walk and where I can't or else he'll call security. I hate feeling like someone has power over me, hate it so much that I will almost always try to flip the power dynamic in whatever way I can. And apparently get really angry about it when I'm reminded how many people have control over me in countless ways in my daily life. I don't know, it was interesting seeing how the reasons I lose my temper are both similar and different from the way that other people lose their temper. And now I know better how to provoke people (or not) when I choose.