Failure to conform to social norms

One of the primary characteristics of a sociopath is a failure to conform to social norms. Interestingly, this appears to be linked to a particular part of the brain and such that activity in that segment predicts whether and how someone will conform to social norms. From Science Daily:

"We discovered that the decision to follow the fairness norm, whether voluntarily or under threat of sanctions, can be directly influenced by neural stimulation in the prefrontal cortex."

Researchers asked the participants to participate in a classic sharing game:

"[T]hey received money and were asked to decide how much of it they wanted to share with an anonymous partner. A prevalent fairness norm in Western cultures dictates that the money should be evenly split between the two players. However, this contrasts with the participants’ self-interest to keep as much money as possible for themselves. In another experiment, the participants were faced with the same decision, but knew in advance that they could be punished by the partner for an unfair proposal."

Stimulating the right prefrontal cortex changed people's willingness to conform to social norms, but in odd, and seemingly contradictory ways depending on whether there was a threat of punishment:

When neural activity in this part of the brain was increased via stimulation, the participants’ followed the fairness norm more strongly when sanctions were threatened, but their voluntary norm compliance in the absence of possible punishments decreased. Conversely, when the scientists decreased neural activity, participants followed the fairness norm more strongly on a voluntary basis, but complied less with the norm when sanctions were threatened. 

But is that because people's perception of the fairness of the game shifts as well? In short, no:

Moreover, neural stimulation influenced the participants’ behavior, but it did not affect their perception of the fairness norm. It also did not alter their expectations about whether and how much they would be punished for violating the norm.

What does this suggest? Researchers concluded that it is quite possible to know something is wrong, but be more or less likely to conform your behavior to that knowledge based on brain activity:

We found that the brain mechanism responsible for compliance with social norms is separate from the processes that represent one’s knowledge and beliefs about the social norm," says Ernst Fehr, Chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich. "This could have important implications for the legal system as the ability to distinguish between right and wrong may not be sufficient for the ability to comply with social norms." Christian Ruff adds: "Our findings show that a socially and evolutionarily important aspect of human behavior depends on a specific neural mechanism that can be both up- and down-regulated with brain stimulation."

This was a particularly interesting finding to me because sometimes I have felt like the reason I do wrong things is not because I don't know that they are wrong, but that I don't recognize in that moment that they are or I don't care about the particular consequences, i.e. no threat of punishment. I feel like I respond really well to incentives. If there is a very clear consequence I actually care about (e.g. the certainty of a dismemberment or the possibility of something good), my behavior will naturally maximize that incentive structure. It makes me wonder, if there are people like me who respond best to material consequences (high activity in this part of the brain?), are there people who respond best to just the thought of fairness and being a good person (low activity in this part of the brain?). Either way, I really like the point made at the end about the legal definitions of insanity not just for psychopaths, but for other disorders characterized by a failure to conform to social norms like Asperger's and others on the autism spectrum.

Book responses (part 2)

From a reader:

I just finished reading your book and I wanted to say that I found it utterly fascinating. I am not a sociopath but I definitely displayed antisocial traits as a child. Perhaps if my childhood had been different I would have ended up different. I enjoyed reading your points of view on nature and nurture for antisocial children. But more than anything I appreciate the perspective you brought on the issue of sociopaths in society.  Before reading your book I never truly recognized  the unfair bias and often outright double standards (I have multiple aspies in my family) society places upon sociopaths. Being a member of the gay community I am well aware that it was not so long ago that I would have been considered a "monster" or "deviant". Maybe one day more people will see that there are good, highly functioning sociopaths out there just like there are violent and dangerous ones--as is the case for any variant of humans. 

I remember I took a psychology class in college, just for the hell of it, and on a test we were asked to write several paragraphs about what we believed to be the worst of the personality disorders. I thought it was silly because there is no unbendable mold for psychological disorders; they can be good, bad, or both. Most people in my class wrote that sociopaths were the worst kinds of people and I wrote that if I had to choose, I would list BPD as the worst. My teacher actually pulled me aside and asked me to further explain why I felt that way. I guess many others listed socios because of the link to violence and people with BPD are not typically known to be violent. The only reason I had was personal experience; I've known several sociopaths and remain friends with some of them, but everyone I've known that had BPD was just awful. Awful in a sense of massively annoying and using extreme emotions to manipulate--often resulting in hysterics and acts of self-harm. All of which I found extremely time-consuming and obnoxious. I'm sure there are BPDs out there that aren't bad--I just haven't met any yet. 

I've never talked at length with my socio friends about how they think or process things--I just know they are different and leave it at that. Thank you for providing insight I might otherwise have never been exposed to.

Sociopaths on television: Hannibal

One of my friends told me I needed to start watching NBC's Hannibal. He was right. It's great and it's very topical. The main character, Will Graham, is played by the same guy who played a raging aspie in in the movie "Adam" and he says in the pilot episode that he is closer to the "autism and asperger's" side of "the spectrum" than the "sociopaths and narcissists" side. He is also apparently what we would call here an "uber-empath," one who is so empathetic that he can even feel for the killers that he helps the FBI to track. He gets inside the killer's heads in order to predict who they are or their next movement. Unfortunately (spoiler alert!), after having to kill a man in the field who was trying to harm someone else, he acknowledges that he felt a certain thrill in ending a man's life.

The adequately creepy but fortunately not over-the-top Hannibal is played by a Dane (wearing 1970s suits and sports coats even though the setting is contemporary), not surprising casting choice for anyone who has seen Riget or is otherwise a fan of Lars von Trier. Hannibal is also an FBI consultant and quickly becomes something of a sounding board for the protagonist.

Hannibal and will have a conversation his feelings about killing.

Hannibal: It wasn't the act of killing Hobb's that got you down, was it? Did you really feel so bad because killing felt so good?

Will: I liked killing Hobbs.

Hannibal: Killing must feel good to God too. He does it all the time. And are we not created in his image?

Will: It depends on who you ask.

Hannibal: God's terrific. He dropped a church roof on 34 of his worshippers last wednesday in Texas while they sang a hymn.

Will: Did God feel good about that?

Hannibal: He felt powerful.


Overall the show is not too overblown. Not all of the murderers are just flatly labeled sociopaths (as if that alone should explain their evil impulses), although so far all of the sociopaths are murderers (actually, this is not clear yet, there are a couple of characters that could turn out to be more sociopathic than they initially appear). This show has a lot of potential, particularly if they introduce a character who is a sociopath and not a murderer -- there's a lot of ripe ground there and a great chance to really explore the mindsets of different personality types.

On a side note, watching the show makes me wonder what would have happened if I had pursued working for the FBI. I had applied once. I took the tests and passed, even the personality/psychological  test (and people fail this one all of the time, I knew a guy who failed this particular portion). All I had to do was schedule a physical fitness exam to move on (no problem since I actually can do pull-ups, thank you swimming for my upper body strength). I never did, though. One of my friends insisted that I should never work for the government, that the things I get away with in my current field might risk a prison sentence in the government sector. I didn't know if that was really a reasonable concern, but the logic was compelling enough for me to move on to something else.

Common genetic risk basis for psychiatric disorders

The NY Times reports the findings of a new study that links the same genetic glitch to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, major depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. And sociopathy? I see autism and ADHD on there, both of which I think are related to sociopathy.


Their study, published online Wednesday in the Lancet, was based on an examination of genetic data from more than 60,000 people worldwide. Its authors say it is the largest genetic study yet of psychiatric disorders. The findings strengthen an emerging view of mental illness that aims to make diagnoses based on the genetic aberrations underlying diseases instead of on the disease symptoms.

Two of the aberrations discovered in the new study were in genes used in a major signaling system in the brain, giving clues to processes that might go awry and suggestions of how to treat the diseases.

“What we identified here is probably just the tip of an iceberg,” said Dr. Jordan Smoller, lead author of the paper and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. “As these studies grow we expect to find additional genes that might overlap.”
***
Researchers had already seen some clues of overlapping genetic effects in identical twins. One twin might have schizophrenia while the other had bipolar disorder. About six years ago, around the time the new study began, researchers had examined the genes of a few rare families in which psychiatric disorders seemed especially prevalent. They found a few unusual disruptions of chromosomes that were linked to psychiatric illnesses. But what surprised them was that while one person with the aberration might get one disorder, a relative with the same mutation got a different one.

Jonathan Sebat, chief of the Beyster Center for Molecular Genomics of Neuropsychiatric Diseases at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the discoverers of this effect, said that work on these rare genetic aberrations had opened his eyes. “Two different diagnoses can have the same genetic risk factor,” he said. 

In fact, the new paper reports, distinguishing psychiatric diseases by their symptoms has long been difficult. Autism, for example, was once called childhood schizophrenia. It was not until the 1970s that autism was distinguished as a separate disorder.

I thought this was very interesting, especially the one twin schizophrenic and the other bipolar. I get a lot of emails and see a lot of comments where people mention that there is someone in their family who is a narcissist or BPD or bipolar. It could be that being exposed to these people in an intimate, familial setting could be the environment that is triggering otherwise unrelated genes in sociopaths, etc.? Or maybe we all share more in common genetically than we had previously considered. Right aspies?

Of course the predicament here is that if we killed sociopaths or put them on an island, that really wouldn't weed out the gene, would it? Sterilize sociopaths? Same argument would apply to anyone who shared the genetic risk factor, maybe bipolar, autistics, etc.? Genocide targeting sociopaths may have gotten just a little bit more complicated.

You will always be my son

From a reader:


So tired of explaining my son and trying to figure out the dark mystery he is but your experience reflects a part of who my son is. At three diagnosed with Asperger's. Had some classic traits but still didn't quite fit the mold. Socially inept, uncoordinated, wanted friends but was awkward and inappropriate. The boy's IQ is 150. Thought that coping with all the Asperger's problems as a single parent with no support would be as bad as it would get. Then at 15 he had a "psychotic break" in which I came home from work as a case manager for mostly psychotic schizophrenics to find my own son crying hysterically begging me to stay away from him because he was having possible instrusive thoughts, not sure, and the urge to kill me. I stayed in clinical mode as I tried to calmly take his hysteria down and brought him to crisis. The clinician, who I knew and didn't really like me, told me to take him home and he would be okay. Oh yeah, he also told the clinician that he wanted to rape me. No big deal. I could handle it. And I did. Horrifying and heartbreaking.

At 16 he said he had begun hearing voices but I knew many clients who heard voices and my son did not present as they did. He never responded to the voices which is something people are compelled to do. Didn't make sense. Two weeks later he vividly described a visual hallucination saying that cops were at the door with guns drawn. He seemed fascinated by it. I had heard 100's of accounts of visual hallucinations and they weren't as clear as his.  About four months ago after complaining to me daily that he was having suicidal thoughts and the urge to strangle me I saw the intent in his eyes one day. Did not know this child. He was not my son. Back to crisis where he was clear and said he felt "good" in waiting area but presented as the perfect psychotic, demeanor, body language, voice when being evaluated by the clinician. This time he was taken to an adolescent psych hospital 90 miles away. I almost collapsed a few times that day during the process. I was so drained from weeks of waiting to be strangled. My denial enable me to cope but every time he would surprise me I involuntarily jumped and let out a small animal-like yelp. My subconscious knew to be scared.

While he was in the hospital everything changed as far as my perception of this innocent victim of mental illness. He would call several times a day crying and begging me to get him out. Then his voice changed and he was quite in control stating with hostility and threat that I'd better get him out AMA. One particular visit turned the switch in me. As he sat across the table crying and begging again making outragious complaints about staff and other patients I shut down and did not react. This accelerated his determination and manipulative tactics. He couldn't believe that I was calmly countering all he said. 

Then he began yelling and tried to leap across the table to get to me. I told him now I could really see the hatred and how much he really did want to hurt me. Not done, he put his hands around his neck in an effort to show he would strangle himself. His acting abilities did not impress me. I had been through so much in an effort to help him to this point, now I felt taken advantage of and betrayed. He had shown signs before of switching in seconds from the tortured victim to an arrogant kid just screwing around. He didn't know I had witnessed these incidents. And the lies were always there. He is home and still has the thoughts and urges. I don't know him anymore. Now that he knows I have caught on no more coming to me for sympathy just an uncomfortable distance. Need help. There is a Forensic Psychiatrist in San Jose, Ca not for from us, Dr. Arturo Silva, who has a theory that Asperger's can turn into psycopathic traits as a teenager. Been trying to get in touch with him but not successful. I feel in my gut he might have answers that I need. Can you help?


M.E.:

I don't know if there is anything I can do to help. If he is a sociopath, you should appeal to his self-interest. It does not help him to harm you because you are willing to financially support him through college, or whatever else it is. It sounds like he is around 17. You might want to talk to him about how when he turns 18, you will still be his mother and will support him in anyway you can, but he will be considered an adult by society. Anything he does after that could have very long lasting effects for him. Give him some facts about the average life expectancy of someone his age. Perhaps you two could "volunteer" at a prison? He should be rational enough to be educated in these ways. And if you acknowledge how he is different without judging him, things should be able to get better between the two of you. Say things like, "you will always be my son." Give him a sense of permanence. Explain to him the meaning of the phrase "don't defecate where you eat." Have him read the book "Lord of the Flies" and see how he feels about it. If he's not a sociopath, I don't think these things will work.

Everyone on the autism spectrum

This NY Magazine article, "Is everyone on the autism spectrum?" has some pretty funny moments, but this is probably the most relevant. In regard to the difficulty of making psychiatric diagnoses, particularly amateur ones:

Men have caught on and, in a kind of inverted gaslighting, begun to describe themselves as having Asperger’s as a way of controlling their spouses. “Having Asperger’s-like syndrome does not give you Asperger’s,” says David Schnarch, a Colorado-based couples therapist. “Having a big belly does not make you pregnant. I’ve not seen a single case of what I would consider to be diagnosable Asperger’s. But I have seen any number of cases of wives accusing husbands of it, any number of cases of husbands claiming to have it.” It’s the new ADHD, he says. “The wife doesn’t want to accept that the husband knows what he’s doing when he’s doing something she doesn’t like.” Schnarch recalls a man who phoned him the day before a scheduled initial couples session and announced that he’d just been diagnosed with Asperger’s. “As soon as this happened,” Schnarch says, “I knew I had difficulty.” He contacted the referring therapist, who said he’d suspected the man had Asperger’s because he said things to his girlfriend that were so cruel he couldn’t possibly understand their impact. As far as Schnarch was concerned, it was an all-too-familiar instance of ­sadism masquerading as disability. “If you’re going to perp, the best place to perp from is the victim position.”

I like the part about big belly not making you pregnant -- PCL-R, anybody? And the flipside of the coin are the self diagnosers who need a diagnosis to give them a sense of ... antisocial belonging?

Monks, psychopaths, and shameless empaths

All walk into a bar...

This Forbes article, "What Vulnerability Looks Like to Psychopaths, Monks and the Rest of Us," makes an interesting comparison between sociopaths and Buddhist monks (apparently made in Kevin Dutton's book The Wisdom of Sociopaths), before veering off into stream of consciousness nonsense:


Ironically, both psychopaths and Tibetan monks detect deep emotions that are invisible to others.  Psychopaths are much better at recognizing “those telltale signs in the gait of traumatized assault victims” notes The Wisdom of Psychopaths author, Kevin Dutton.

Tibetan monks, steeped in meditative practice, are also especially adept at reading feelings that are hidden from the rest of us, Paul Ekman discovered. Ekman, is the preeminent expert on lying and on the six universally expressed emotions in the face — anger, sadness, happiness, fear, disgust and surprise. Scarily, psychopaths score especially high on the Hare Self-Report Scale of psychopathy in seeing those core expressions, especially the ones that make us most vulnerable, fear and sadness, according to Sabrina Demetrioff.

Not to get overly aspie anal about semantics, but I don't know how it is ironic that both psychopaths and Tibetan monks detect deep emotions invisible to others? I have made the connection before to a psychopath's detachment and a buddhist's detachment.



Unlike our common impression of psychopaths as dangerous serial killers, and some are, others use their high-performing capacity to remain calm in stressful times to conduct surgery, lead soldiers or become sought-after CEOs.  After all, as Dutton suggests, if you’re having brain surgery, wouldn’t you want someone who is not distracted by feelings and completely in control and concentrating on the operation? If your life were in danger on the battlefield, wouldn’t you want someone who could coolly survey the situation and deeply recognize others’ reactions, to determine the best way to rescue you?

Psychopaths adept detection of vulnerability is one of their most potent skills.

At which point the article contrasts Brene Brown's work on shame, and how one need only embrace their vulnerability and let go in order to be more courageous and connect better with others. Of course sociopaths are also shameless, but in a bad way that is different than when empaths acquire a lack of shame? It's not clear, but the article seems to suggest that lack of shame can lead to two very different result: extremely prosocial behavior and extremely antisocial behavior. I agree with that, particularly to the extent that feelings of shame seem to mitigate any extremes in behavior. But I disagree about the implicit distinction that it is psychopaths who would be doing all of the antisocial behavior and that shameless empaths are harmlessly prosocial. It's just odd to see an article come so close to drawing exact parallels between psychopaths and monks, and psychopaths and the empowered shameless empath, and then just sort of assume that monks, empaths, and psychopaths are not the same at all, for some undisclosed reason.

Moral codes, boundaries and food allergies

I think empaths' brains work differently than mine. There are certain things that they consider sacrosanct that I just think are normal, or even silly. Luckily I was brought up in a religious household, so I learned that some invisible things actually mean a lot to other people: love, patriotism, god, goodness, etc. I learned that the general rule to avoid unwanted conflict is to respect those beliefs in others, even though they do not mean anything to me. This is sort of a hallmark of a modern, civilized society. When we walk into holy buildings, we remove our shoes if that is the custom even though the god of that temple may not be our own.

That is what we are socialized to do, but there is some debate regarding how much respect we should give other people's beliefs. For instance, if you believe cows are sacred, I'm fine with your boycotting beef, but your beliefs won't stop me from eating a cheeseburger in front of you. If the average person is willing to take off his shoes in your temple but eat a cheeseburger in front of you, what will he do about your belief that abortion is murder or your beliefs that the female labia is dirty and needs to be cut off or the vagina stitched up to ensure the purity of the woman? What is legitimate?

To me it seems like random line drawing: sodomy between two consenting adults is legitimate, sodomy between an adult and a child not legitimate. Public nudity is wrong, but so is a woman covering up from head to foot. There are reasons, sure. I have heard reasons. But many empaths will criticize dolphin slaughter while eating animals raised in deplorable conditions. (By the way, stop eating octupus. They are very smart, precocious creatures.) How do they reconcile this? What makes them freak about one thing and be so permissive about another?

I am a very tolerant person. I attribute this to my sociopathy. Unlike empaths, who are so hard-wired to believe whatever their culture has programmed them to think, I can look at something from a blank slate point of view. I guess this is also why I'm a libertarian -- I don't believe that my ideas are so right that they should be imposed on others, even if those other people disagree. In other words, I am as skeptical about the beliefs I hold as I am about the beliefs of others. And I don't play favorites like empaths who say, "Imposing my beliefs on others is fine because mine are supported by (fill in the blank pet reasons: science, religion, logic, tradition, etc.), but you can't do the same because your beliefs are only supported by (fill in the blank hated reasons: science, religion, logic, tradition, etc.)." So I trend away from imposing my beliefs on others, and I don't necessarily think that one basis for beliefs is better than another. That doesn't mean I don't respect people's beliefs, though. To keep the peace and as a courtesy to others that I expect to be reciprocated, i will almost always take off my shoes when walking on someone's sacred ground.

Does that make me not a sociopath? Ha. Well, the process of how I do it sounds at least Aspergian. How do I know when to take off my shoes? It's like discovering a food allergy. Maybe you eat something at a restaurant and get sick. Other people from your party ate the same thing and did not get sick. Maybe you just caught a flu bug, you think. A few months later you eat something else and get similar symptoms. The symptoms seem the same, but you don't know what could be the common ingredient. You keep collecting info, eliminating this, eliminating that, keeping a mental log of what you could possibly be allergic to. It is clear to you by now that even though you cannot see what is making you sick, can't even identify it, there is certainly something wrong because you keep getting bad reactions. Maybe your boss periodically gets angry at you in the same way. Maybe your spouse can't stand to be around you when you are like _____. I am in those types of situations all the time -- people are mad at me and I have no idea why. chances are, though, I am encroaching on someone's moral code and/or sense of personal boundaries. I have learned that either I keep doing the same thing and getting the same adverse reaction, or I figure something else out. otherwise I'm in for a world of hurt, because it's like a moral/personal boundary minefield out there. Right aspies?

Anders Breivik, Aspergers and NPD

A reader writes:

Hello. I am a recent reader to Sociopath World. I came across a story fitting into one of your ongoing narratives that I don’t foresee getting much circulation in the English-speaking press: One of the psychiatrists observing Norwegian terrorist Anders Bering Breivik has diagnosed him with Asperger syndrome (and also Tourette’s and possibly narcissistic personality disorder, a combination I had never heard of before and raise an eyebrow at).

Here’s an original report in Norwegian (though Google’s translation is surprisingly readable). The CS Monitor buries the claim a few paragraphs down. Wrong Planet’s thread is maybe 60 percent denials and revisionism. Numerous commenters make the point that the diagnosis isn’t “official,” and this might actually be a fair point. Most professional therapists probably can recognize Asperger syndrome “on sight” in an unstructured interview, but for most clinical purposes, a diagnosis based on quantitative and qualitative testing is required. I know when I got tested, I underwent something like six or seven hour-long sessions, and my parents were also interviewed.

As an Aspie, I applaud your efforts to keep up a conversation about ASD and violence. Mainstream neurodiversity advocates’ ignoring or suppression of research on the topic ultimately does a disservice to those they’re trying to help, especially parents of ASD kids. So long as the very real possibility of autistic violence is suppressed, it can only come as a horrific surprise to parents totally unprepared to address it.

I’m also appreciative of your “big tent” conception of neurodiversity. If there are conversations to be had between ASD people and psycho/sociopaths, I wish we were having them.
Keep up the good blog.

I get emails all the time from people on the autism spectrum telling me that I'm absolutely wrong about any connection between autism and violence or sociopathy.  I mean, everyone is entitled to their opinions, but I think theirs are a little suspect than mine.

Neurodiversity = asset

A lot has been written about neurodiversity and how unfair it is to treat poorly people who fall out of the mental norms.  Despite the push of the neurodiversity movement, things are still labeled with pejorative terms like "disorder" and "syndrome" and the focus has been on "treatment" and integration as if being neurodiverse is equivalent to being handicapped.  In Wall Street Journal article titled "The Upside of Autism," Jonah Lehrer makes a contrary case:

Because of these obvious shortcomings—humans are supposed to be social animals, after all—most people regard autism as a disease, a straightforward example of an impaired mind. But there's compelling evidence that autism is not merely a list of deficits. Rather, it represents an alternate way of making sense of the world, a cognitive difference that, in many instances, comes with unexpected benefits.

That's the lesson, at least, of a new study from the lab of Nilli Lavie at University College London. A few dozen adults, both with and without autism, were given a difficult perceptual task, in which they had to keep track of letters quickly flashed on a computer screen. At the same time, they also had to watch out for a small gray shape that occasionally appeared on the edge of the monitor.

When only a few letters appeared on the screen, both autistic and normal subjects could handle the task. However, when the number of letters was increased, subjects without autism—so-called neurotypicals—could no longer keep up. They were overwhelmed by the surplus of information.

Those adults with autism didn't have this problem. Even when the task became maddeningly difficult, their performance never flagged.

What explains this result? According to the scientists, autism confers a perceptual edge, allowing people with the disorder to process more information in a short amount of time. While scientists have long assumed that autistics are more vulnerable to distraction—an errant sound or conversation can steal their attention—that's not the case. As Prof. Lavie notes, "Our research suggests autism does not involve a distractibility deficit but rather an information-processing advantage."

These perceptual perks have real-world benefits. The scientists argue, for instance, that the ability to process vast amounts of data helps to explain the prevalence of savant-like talents among autistic subjects. Some savants perform difficult mathematical calculations in their head, others draw exquisitely detailed pictures at a young age. These skills have long remained a mystery, but they appear to be rooted in a distinct cognitive style shared by all autistics. Because they can process details that elude the rest of us, they can perform tasks that seem impossible, at least for the normal mind.
***
The larger lesson is that, according to the latest research, these "deficits" are actually trade-offs. What seems, at first glance, like a straightforward liability turns out to be a complex mixture of blessings and burdens.

Of course you would never see an article in the Wall Street Journal titled "The Upside of Sociopathy" and for that it's a little hard for me to take the neurodiversity movement seriously.  But I like this idea of one sense being gone so your other senses fill the gap.  It reminds me of this classic tale of blindness and talent...  you're welcome!

Manipulation: movies and music

In a comment regarding aspies and auties, "jane" says:

Also, I've found that aspies can be made to feel an emotional understanding through music or movies. They do so love their movies.

Okay, yes, I think this applies at least in part to sociopaths too. We all know that music and movies with music are manipulative. Case in point, even though I am generally cold-hearted, I can frequently be moved by certain films, sometimes so much so that I have a crisis of identity and wonder, do I have the full spectrum of emotions after all? But it seems like not really, because only movies and music reliably trigger it. How do they do it? Tap into our primal psyches to produce some sort of behavioristic response? Like when our eyes water when we see other people's eyes tearing up? Or like how yawns are contagious? Do chimpanzees do the same? Does that mean sociopaths are closer evolutionarily to chimps than humans? Ha.

Also Jane says in response to my advocacy of neurodiversity rights for sociopaths:

I suppose I just feel that trying to put us on the same page as aspie's is the namby-pamby way out when there's much more fun to be had simply remaining unidentified rather than accepted as defected.

Too true, Jane. Particularly because if we, for whatever reason, needed to be "out" or part of an acknowledged acceptable neurodiversity "minority," we could just masquerade as aspies by toning down the charm, playing up the social awkwardness, and pretending to be obsessed with something bizarre like '80's action movie music scores. Right aspies?

Violence: sociopathy vs. autism

With the anniversary of the Columbine massacre comes renewed media interest in psychopathic killers on the rampage. Okay sure, some killers are psychopaths. But psychopaths are not the only sometime-violent members of the empathy-challenged club. Ann Bauer recounts her struggles with a particularly violent autistic son who had to be institutionalized. Under the sub-headline "For years I thought of his autism as beautiful and mysterious. But when he turned unspeakably violent, I had to question everything I knew."

His destruction was utterly senseless yet brilliantly thorough: He submerged his computer, stereo and iPod in water; threw puzzle pieces and Styrofoam cups into the toilet and flushed them, plugging the pipes literally dozens of times a week; and urinated on every square inch of his room: bed, walls, floor, closet, everything but the ceiling and that only because he had not (yet, I suspect) figured out how.

When I asked him why he did these things he would say, eyes narrow like a night creature, "I don't like being caged."
. . .
[W]hen I showed up at the group home that morning, he was drinking coffee and pacing and still not dressed. I went into his room, took some clothes from the closet, handed them to him. And hinting at what he was about to do only with a small sigh, as if to say, "I've had enough," my son picked me up and threw me across the room.
. . .
Secretly, as if committing a sacrilege, I searched online using keywords such as "autism" and "violence" and "murder." What I found was confusing. There were roughly a dozen recent articles about heinous acts committed by people with autism and Asperger's syndrome, but each was followed by editorials and letters written by autism advocates vigorously denying a link. There were a few studies from the '80s and '90s, but the results -- when they showed a higher rate of violent crime among people with autism -- appeared to have been quieted or dismissed.

On the other hand there were, literally, thousands of heartwarming stories about autism. A couple of the most widely read were written by me. For years I had been telling my son's story, insisting that autism is beautiful, mysterious, perhaps even evolutionarily necessary. Denying that it can also be a wild, ravaging madness, a disease of the mind and soul. It was my trademark as an essayist, but also my profound belief.
. . .
Back when Andrew was in junior high school, my mother had a friend whose adult son had only recently been diagnosed with autism. He'd been dysfunctional since childhood, failing at school, unable to make a friend or keep a decent job. At 35 he was still living at home, collecting carts at the local grocery store, and taking anticonvulsants (Tegretol was the unofficial treatment of that era for outbursts) to control the violent urges he'd been having for 15 years.

"You think he's better now," my mother's friend once said as we watched a young, laughing Andrew out the window, playing tag with his brother and sister in my parents' backyard. "But wait 'til he's older. Then you'll understand. "

I hated her and was furious that she wished for our downfall -- also that her dumb, psychopathic son had been given the same label as my beloved child. Autism had become oddly fashionable; my mother's friend was wealthy. Clearly she'd gone "diagnosis shopping." My son, I vowed, would be nothing like hers.
. . .
The chairman of Trudy Steuernagel's department rose at her memorial service to proclaim, "Autism doesn't equal violence." And this probably is mathematically correct: Autism does not always equal violence. But I do believe there may be a tragic, blameless relationship. Neither Sky nor Andrew means to be murderous -- of this I am sure -- but their circumstances, neurology, size and age combine to create the perfect storm.
. . .
Mine, I decide, must be in part to break the silence about autism's darker side. We cannot solve this problem by hiding it, the way handicapped children themselves used to be tucked away in cellars. In order to help the young men who endure this rage, someone has to be willing to tell the truth.

I don't believe auties and aspie's are bad any more than I believe sociopaths are bad. I'm just saying that we have a lot more in common than anybody would like to admit, a fact that may be surprising given the choir-boy image auties and aspie's have in society compared to the soulless demon image that sociopaths have. If the neurodiversity movement embraces sometime-violent auties and aspies, it should include sociopaths as well.

Subspecies

A posting at Rifters.com recently featured this blog saying things like: "As everyone agrees, the word for getting rid of a whole subspecies is not 'cure'. I’m not quite sure what the right word might be, but it’s probably somewhere between extermination and genocide."

But specifically about this site:

I do not know the name of the person behind “Sociopath World”; doubtless that’s by design.  He or she (actually, screw it; I’m gonna go with he) refers to himself merely as “The Sociopath” on his contact page, as “M.E.” on Twitter, and as me@sociopathworld.com when he hands out his address (which makes me doubt that the “M.E.” Twitter handle is an actual set of initials).  No matter.  This is either a subtle and very labor-intensive hoax, or it’s your one-stop-shopping center for the interested empath (they call us “Empaths”, apparently, which I find both more precise and less condescending than the “neurotypical” label the Autistic Spectrum types seem to prefer).  The most popular posts end up on the FAQ list: Do Sociopaths Love?  Are Sociopaths Self-Aware? Am I a Sociopath? Can Sociopaths be “Good”? There are helpful how-to pointers:  How to break up with a sociopath, for example (the illustration to the right was taken from that particular entry; at least we know that sociopaths have a sense of humor). 

There are pop-culture observations: whether the new Twenty-first-century Sherlock really is a sociopath in the world of fiction, whether Lady Gaga is in real life, the potential infiltration of sociopaths into Occupy Wall Street drum circles. There’s a forum, rife with trolls and assholes and deleted posts; but there’s also legitimate debate there.  And surprisingly, it also seems to function as a kind of support group for people in emotional distress. 

You can even, I shit you not, order a Sociopath World t-shirt. 

So. ME is out there, fighting the good fight. He’s getting noticed (at least, his blog gets shitloads more comments than mine, not that that’s a high bar to clear in the wide webby world). He’s showing up on the occasional psych blogroll. So now, I’m going to sit back and see if the neurodiversity community is willing to pick up the torch.  If he is trying to kickstart the Vampire Rights League, though, I think he’s fighting an uphill battle.

Reading the comment section, there is a remarkable absence of people arguing that Aspies and Auties should not be lumped in with filthy, no-good sociopaths.  Instead we get things like: "When I first ran into sociopathworld.com I thought that’s what it was, evil trying to represent itself as less than totally harmful or at least as something not to be so rightly feared. I’m less sure, now, and we should probably all spend some time reading there."

Sociopaths don't understand sarcasm

I think this conversation with a friend is interesting because it illustrates how completely oblivious I am to sarcasm. I frequently get accused of blaming every trait of mine on being a sociopath, but I think this one is actually true because aspies and other empathy-challenged individuals also supposedly struggle with understanding sarcasm. Although I don't understand how one's ability to feel for another would lead to being able to correctly interpret hidden meanings behind words. Uh... actually, after having just typed that out, it does seem to make some sense.

Friend: I just read on facebook that [a mutual friend] is a sociopath.
M.E.: What?! Really?!
Friend: Or actually, he replied this way to a question regarding his most embarrassing moment: "None, because I'm a sociopath."
M.E.: Whoa! That's crazy. I never would guessed.
Friend: Ok, sorry I thought you would realize that he was kidding and would laugh at it. I keep forgetting that you don't understand sarcasm.
M.E.: ? How do you know he was kidding?
Friend: Well, think about it this way: only neuro-typical people would say they are a sociopath. Sociopaths wouldn't want to out themselves and they wouldn't risk even joking about it for fear of accidentally outing themselves.
M.E.: Hmm, well, you got my hopes up for nothing then.

The morality of libertarians

This will be interesting and relevant to many of you. A reader sent me this article about recent research performed on the moral leanings of libertarians, "Understanding Libertarian Morality: The psychological roots of an individualist ideology." As described by Reason:

When it comes to morality, libertarians are often typecast as immoral calculating rationalists who also have a somewhat unseemly hedonistic bent. Now new social science research shows that libertarians are quite moral, just not in the same way that conservatives and liberals are.

***

[T]he study found that libertarians show (1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle and correspondingly weaker endorsement of other moral principles, (2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional intellectual style, and (3) lower interdependence and social relatedness.

In his earlier work, Haidt surveyed the attitudes of conservatives and liberals using what he calls the Moral Foundations Questionnaire which measures how much a person relies on each of five different moral foundations: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. Typically, conservatives scored lower than liberals on the Harm and Fairness scales and much higher on Ingroup, Authority, and Purity scales. In this case, libertarians scored low on all five surveyed moral dimensions. “Libertarians share with liberals a distaste for the morality of Ingroup, Authority, and Purity characteristic of social conservatives, particularly those on the religious right,” notes the study. Libertarians scored slightly below conservatives on Harm and slightly above on Fairness. This suggests that libertarians “are therefore likely to be less responsive than liberals to moral appeals from groups who claim to be victimized, oppressed, or treated unfairly.”

The Schwartz Value scale measures the degree to which participants regard 10 values as guiding principles for their lives. Libertarians put higher value on Hedonism, Self-Direction, and Stimulation than either liberals or conservatives and they put less value than either on Benevolence, Conformity, Security, and Tradition. Like liberals, libertarians put less value on Power, but like conservatives they value Universalism less. Universalism is defined as “understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection of the welfare of all people and nature.” All three put high value on Achievement. Taking these results into account, Haidt concludes that “libertarians appear to live in a world where traditional moral concerns (e.g., respect for authority, personal sanctity) are not assigned much importance.”

***

“Libertarians may fear that the moral concerns typically endorsed by liberals or conservatives are claims that can be used to trample upon individual rights—libertarians’ sacred value.

***

“Libertarians are high in Openness to Experience and seem to enjoy effortful and thoughtful cognitive tasks. In combination with low levels of emotional reactivity, the highly rational nature of libertarians may lead them to a logical, rather than emotional, system of morality.”

Probably the most interesting part of this article, though, was the discussion of the Empathizer-Systematizer scale:

The scale measures the tendency to empathize, defined as "the drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion," and to systemize, or "the drive to analyze the variables in a system, and to derive the underlying rules that govern the behavior of the system." Libertarians are the only group that scored higher on systemizing than on empathizing—and they scored a lot higher. The authors go on to suggest that systemizing is “characteristic of the male brain, with very extreme scores indicating autism.” They then add, “We might say that liberals have the most ‘feminine’ cognitive style, and libertarians the most ‘masculine.’”

Yes, tendency to systematize instead of empathize is something that libertarians, sociopaths, and autistics have in common.

The six fingered man

Society requires conformity. It enforces this conformity from early childhood. Anyone who falls outside the norm is snuffed out and beat down. Thus humans are trained to be able to sniff out weakness, imperfections, and harmful elements from society and eliminate them. But how do we distinguish between harmful imperfections and beneficial evolutionary mutations?

Society seems certain that particular differences are bad, e.g. autism and personality disorders. As the autistics and aspies argue effectively, wouldn't a world filled with auties function just as well if not better than a world of neurotypicals? People argue whether "special accomodations" are warranted for certain disabilities, but "special" is defined based on individual perspective. As one autie argued, if you were blind you might think that street lamps are an unnecessarily expensive "special accomodation" for the sighted.

When confronted with difference, the neurotypical automatically thinks flaw and/or threat. While double jointed, webbed flipper feet might be fine on Michael Phelps, as a general rule parents want "normal" children. But what is so good about "normal" anyway? Take for instance their precious empathy. As Adam Smith pointed out in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, humans can "feel for each other," but those feelings may be inaccurate or incomplete, and in any case emotions shouldn't be relied on to make decisions. As summarized by wikipedia:

If we sympathize with the feelings of another we judge that their feelings are just, and if we do not sympathize we judge that their feelings are unjust.

[Smith acknowledges that] it is not possible to sympathize with bodily states or "appetites which take their origin in the body."

Passions which "take their origins from a particular turn or habit of the imagination" are "little sympathized with". These include love.

In response to expressions of anger, hatred, or resentment, it is likely that the impartial spectator will not feel anger in sympathy with the offended but instead anger toward the offended for expressing such an aversive.

Of grief and joy, Smith notes that small joys and great grief are assured to be returned with sympathy from the impartial spectator, but not other degrees of these emotions. Great joy is likely to be met with envy, so modesty is prudent for someone who has come upon great fortune or else suffer the consequences of envy and disapprobation.

Smith makes clear that we should take very good care to not act on the passions of anger, hatred, resentment, for purely social reasons, and instead imagine what the impartial spectator would deem appropriate, and base our action solely on a cold calculation.

And Smith's observations regarding conformity:

Each "class" of things has a "peculiar conformation which is approved of" and the beauty of each member of a class is determined by the extent to which it has the most "usual" manifestation of that "conformation": "Thus, in the human form, the beauty of each feature lies in a certain middle, equally removed from a variety of other forms that are ugly."

If being social means to hate difference and to hate the different, then I am proud to be antisocial.

Asperger's in popular culture

Andy from the television show "Weeds" talking about the 5 abortions he helped his girlfriends to get: "It's no big deal. For me. The ladies tended to get a little weepy. Except for Deirdre. But I found out later she had Asperger's."

New blow to aspies: sociopathy under umbrella of neurodiversity

A reader provides even more info on the changing face of neurodiversity:

I have had the chance to interact with lots of researchers who aim to help autistic people deal with their affective problems (and the resulting social ones). I must say that many of them are now aware of the "neurodiversity" principle. I have even had the chance to discuss sociopathy as a potential condition to be placed under the umbrella of neurodiversity with a specialist, and the response I got was surprisingly encouraging. The discussion concluded, among other things, that sociopaths ought to be allowed to think however they wish, as long as they don't break laws and harm others, and that no one has the right to impose a particular method of thinking to anybody else. Of course, ideas that emerge in select institutions of higher education take decades to spread among the general public, so that will be something for the following generations to witness I guess.

Ah aspies, when it rains it pours. Don't worry, though. You can stand under my umbrella.

Asperger's = Autism?

Oh no, aspies! I just heard the bad news that "the man" is basically trying to kick your unique diagnosis to the curb and lump you amongst the (relatively more) unwashed masses (i.e., auties). I hope this doesn't jeopardize your social status amongst your neurodiversity cohorts! A reader flagged this New York Times op-ed for me:

Many people with milder symptoms of autism have, for the past 20 years or so, received a diagnosis of Asperger’s disorder. Some autistic adults call themselves “Aspies” to celebrate their talents and differences. And many parents have embraced the label because they have found it less stigmatizing, and so it has eased their sense of loss.

This may soon change, however. The American Psychiatric Association, with its release this week of proposed revisions to its authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is recommending that Asperger’s be dropped. If this revision is adopted, the condition will be folded into the category of “autism spectrum disorder,” which will no longer contain any categories for distinct subtypes of autism like Asperger’s and “pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified” (a category for children with some traits of autism but not enough to warrant a diagnosis).

Wow, there goes your social life, right? It's just like when your rich parents got divorced and you had to move to the wrong side of the tracks with your mom and shop at flea markets for your black leather jacket and army boots that were so ugly and ill-fitting, they distracted anyone from seeing the pain/shame inside. But don't worry, aspies, I am diagnosis blind when it comes to personality disorders. I accept all empathy-challenged types here. Small comfort, you say? Yeah, I know that you have traditionally considered yourself too good for sociopaths, but this may be as good of an offer as you are going to get now.

Raising a sociopath child (part 2)

My response:

This is a very interesting question and I'm glad you came to me because I sense disaster already. First the positive: having a sociopath child can be just as good, if not better than having a neurotypical child. There is nothing keeping your child from being a great, high achieving, functional member of society. I excel at many things, I have meaningful relationships with people, I have a very full life. I also suffered a lot to get where I am, and most sociopaths have similar stories. Luckily for me, my parents managed to do a lot of things right, and I love them for that. It could have gone very badly, I think, and I appreciate the fact that it didn't.

I think the biggest thing that parents of sociopaths need to learn is to realize when you are helping and when you are hurting. For instance, you should not tell other people (including school officials or anyone else) that your child may be a sociopath. I understand the impulse. I have a little relative who has had significant hearing loss, which is immediately obvious to anyone. Even if it wasn't, though, the parents are more than willing to make it known, particularly if it would affect the child's schooling. Nowadays we expect schools and teachers to be understanding of children's individual strengths and weaknesses. This "legitimately" includes autism and asperger's, but does not include sociopathy. People talk (even on this site) about the forced execution of sociopaths and how they would kill a sociopath baby if they could. Sociopathy (even if applicable) is a label that could forever inhibit your child's life and development. If everyone knows your child is a sociopath, they will treat him differently. He will not be given the benefit of the doubt like other children will be. Once he knows that every anonymous bad thing will be blamed on him, he will do only bad things because at least that way he will get the pleasure of the thing before he gets punished for it. Sociopath children are very very sensitive to perceived fairness and incentive structures (more on that later). If I were you, depending on what you have told the school official, I would play it off as much as possible. I don't know what you could do, but maybe tell the counselor you were just trying to warn him about the sociopath family member you mentioned, or even better trying to warn him of the evils of trying to diagnose someone before 18 (the "official" age for diagnosing a sociopath), e.g., don't make the mistake of doing that with my child, otherwise I will pursue legal action. You could suggest your family history includes asperger's, and you're concerned about your son. I would also do some research to try find a doctor who will readily diagnose your son as having asperger's. Unlike sociopathy, asperger's is an "acceptable" diagnosis that can be used to explain your sons other antisocial symptoms without fear of reprisal.