Practicing Catholic

From a reader:

My name is Violet and I have recently been "Diagnosed" with ASPD, specifically Sociopathy. My psychologist of six years has recently told me (recently, as in almost three months ago) that he believes me to be a sociopath and for quite a while now. This was sort of a revelation; so many aspects of my life and mind became clear and made complete sense. I then realized why so many relationships failed and why I never could understand certain life lessons my mother or others would try to explain.

The reason I am writing to you is because I have a few questions and I am internally torn at the moment.  I am a practicing Catholic and have been since the "age of reason." I think that is probably one of the most difficult aspects of my life, that is, being myself and trying to live by what my Faith and Church teach even when I disagree or possess no love or interest in it. I am purely a Catholic because the fear of Hell was instilled within me from a very young age. I have always questioned the Church when others around me follow it blindly, or what appears to me to be blindly. Do you believe it is possible for a sociopath to fully accept a form of religion? My religion teaches that human nature is inherently sinful. There are degrees and variations of evil and good. The Church never mentions anything about the human brain and how certain disorders or personalities could make one more susceptible to sin. Sociopaths can lie, cheat, kill, steal, etc. without feeling remorse but this doesn't mean that we will, we are just more inclined to do those things and with ease. Would you say I am right? Psychology doesn't seem to apply with most Christian religions. People do not think psychologically. Most people do not seem to think, independently anyway. I am a philosophy major. I have also taken many logic courses. Thinking differently and more extensively has always been a part of me. I am sure you can relate.

I am having difficulty finding facts about Sociopathy online. Most of what I come across are the exaggerated and dramatic narratives from "Victims of Sociopathic/psychopathic relationships" who complain about their past romantic relationships and the "Sociopath or psychopath" who wronged them. I find it very humorous that they think that because one man/woman (normally a man though) cheated on them and ended the relationship that this therefore makes them a sociopath or psychopath. What a hasty generalization. There are so many disorders, why do people always label the "evil doer" as a sociopath or psychopath? Also, there doesn’t have to be something psychologically wrong with a person to perform hurtful or faulty acts.

Most people are terrified of sociopaths/psychopaths. I find this very interesting. I told my closest friend and she has absolutely no issue remaining my best friend. In fact, she finds it fascinating and she said it explains a lot of my behavior. She is also Catholic and an empath. I think she has a "Normal personality." She is the least dramatic and emotionally charged person I know, and because of this our friendship works very well.

I understand that most people are fixated on the "no remorse" aspect of the personality and that is why they are afraid and prefer to remain apart from us. I am tired of pretending though and I am tired of being an actress. Every now and then I am myself though, either with people I am just meeting or my mother's friends. I just do not see the sense in pretending for certain people; I gain nothing from them so I will stay away.  

I also have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Is this common? My research online only stated that the personality favors order and control. I am constantly internally examining myself for all of the traits I have read or the little "ticks" that I possess. Since discovering that I have the personality this has been a great personal study.


I have one more question. Is it normal that there would be an abusive instigator or crucial person who would illicit abnormal emotional behavior for a sociopath? From Childhood maybe? Research has suggested this. Sort of like the one person who helps form the person through abuse and could possibly only be the person to illicit any sort of emotional behavior? My psychiatrist thinks it is possible and told me that my mother is this person. She is the only one who can make me cry. Do you have that sort of person?

Your website is very helpful.

My response:

Thanks for this! Your thoughts on Catholicism reminded me of this and this post on contradictions.

I do think sociopaths can be religious, for various reasons, including maybe that they just want to. My religion seems to take into account psychological issues and relies more on mercy than justice, so maybe that's why I feel at home there.


I don't think that we don't have emotions, we just don't usually give them any sort of meaning or real role in our lives. You probably feel anger towards your mother? I used to feel angry at my father, now I just don't. I figure, what's the point?

Neuroscientist and diagnosed James Fallon has talked about having bouts of both obsessive compulsive behavior and anxiety issues. If you believe that sociopathy is largely a disorder of attention, which I do, then it makes sense that we would become fixated on things (OCD or anxiety) in addition to being completely oblivious to others (unemotional, unempathetic) -- hyper and hypo attention, if those are words.

Fear of death?

This funny exchange with a reader:

Hey, it recently hit me that most people don't can't think about death without getting really bothered. 

E.g. you're going to die. If you have kids, they'll all die. Families, races, countries and species all die out. 

Nothing lasts forever.

I suspect a good test as to whether or not someone is sociopathic is can they take the facts - the incontrovertible facts of life - stoically.

Can you imagine going up to a mother with a little kid and saying, "what a nice kid! Too bad he'll probably be dead in 80 years or so. I sure wish he'd live forever - but you know how life is."

I can remember being a kid and black kids would taunt me by saying, "yo mamma." I'd say, matter-of-fact, "I don't have a mother. She's dead. She killed herself when I was 3." They often felt sad and apologized to me; it made no sense to me. One minute they were insulting me, the next minute feeling sorry for me.

Ha, hilarious. Did your mother really kill herself when you were 3? Can I publish this?

It is all true. Yes, you can publish the whole thing.

My experience of it was of misunderstanding. I didn't hate the black kids for being verbally aggressive, too personal and insulting. I thought they were a bit robotic with their insults - the black kids would reflexively say, "yo mama." Of course, it turns out I was the robot.

Psychopathy, autism, and pointing fingers (part 2)

Not surprisingly, some people found the call for greater understanding and more careful (and empathetic) use of the term and diagnosis of the disorder psychopath to be a bridge too far.

One person has suggested that the term is not ableist or any other -ist because it perfectly accurately describes people who are the bane of humanity and should be rightfully outed and oppressed lest everyone else should be oppressed. The evidence this person provides are google image searches.

The one for psychopath:

The one for autism:

See everyone! Psychopaths are all portrayed as old white males (never mind that autism is also portrayed as very white male)! They can't possibly be oppressed. The diagnosis can't possibly be misunderstood. But it is that very white/evil/male/oppressor portrayal that the original article criticizes:

"In radical communities working toward intersectional social justice, the figure of the psychopath is invoked all too often to characterize members of oppressive classes, especially when they are in a position of political power in addition to apolitical structural power."

Psychopaths, in other words, or merely those who share traits with psychopaths aren't these ubermensch who only oppress and are never themselves to oppressed because they are far too clever. Sometimes psychopaths are children. Sometimes they are people who were abused as children. Sometimes they are people from disenfranchised races (one study found that African-Americans were twice as likely as white Americans to be assigned this diagnosis) or low socioeconomic classes, circumstances that they had no control over. The unfortunate reality, as the original author argues, is that the actual use of the word psychopath to diagnose (typically people who are institutionalized) "is most often a tool for criminalizing poverty, blackness and brownness, and disability."

But some people think sociopaths deserve as much as we can throw at them and more. Proving the earlier point about people with a particular disorder disavowing any similarity or mistreatment of other disorders (e.g., arguments like "my diagnosis is misunderstood, not like these other people who really are monsters") :

When most people think of the word psychopath, they imagine Ted Bundy, Adolph Hitler, son of sam, Dexter, the zodiac killer, jack the ripper, brutal megalomaniac dictators.

For these people the label of psychopath fits perfectly. However we should actually be focusing more about the corporate psychopath, the CEO, the stockholders, the ruling class who show no empathy or remorse, who manipulate and ruin societies and economies.

Psychopaths are the people who oppress, they benefit from being psychopaths because they have no moral restraints whatsoever. That makes them oppressors, most of them are men, white and cis. Again, oppressors.

Erasing this label can only serve the psychopath, the oppressor and the ruling class.

We have to be able to tell people that the emperor has no clothes. To deal with these people we have to open our eyes to the evil they do, and label them for what they are, manipulative dangerous psychopaths. Only then can we hope to remove them from the places of high power, by shaking off our collective apathy and paying attention when someone calls someone out for acting psychopathic we take away their power to manipulate.

Your boss who takes credit for your work all while manipulating people to believe you are useless? Psychopath.

The person who abuses laws and rules to oppress people. Psychopath.

The person who uses bureaucratic excuses to deny needing people social services. Psychopath.

Your therapist who plays games with you, makes you jump through hoops and then still denies you real care. Psychopath.
***
Psychopaths benefit from being psychopaths, dont defend them. Call them out as the oppressors they are.

The thing that this proposal has going for it is its simplicity -- bad person = evil psychopath and deserves to be outted as such. I can't really criticize this proposal because the actual reasoning behind method of diagnosing and treating sociopaths is hardly any better.

The first author argues against the use of a label but rather just focusing on those who manifest certain behavior:

“My advice: Be precise in your language and say that oppressive structures are violent and manipulative. Say that those who abuse their structural positions of power act with reckless disregard for other human beings. Say that they are callous and unabashedly wielding the power that comes with their privilege.

But don’t call them psychopaths.”

The critic's response:

So, you don’t want us to use the word psychopath, but instead describe them as a psychopath instead? That wont change the reality that people will still use this in a racist and ableist way.

Yes, the only thing that can change the reality that people will still use "psychopath" in a racist and ableist way is if that term stops being a slur we hurl at our enemies or a scapegoat for all of the evil in the world and rather acknowledge what it as what it purports to be -- a mental disorder. 

Psychopathy, autism, and pointing fingers (part 1)

This was an interesting article from an autistic activist who is also anti-ableism in all its forms about why psychopath is a too often misused and maligned term/disorder:

I have become used to being told that I do not have feelings, that I am innately incapable of relating to other people as human beings or having any empathy at all, that this is a core component of what it means to be autistic. I have become used to hearing this said constantly by so-called professionals, dramatically by television personalities, clinically by journalists and academics, and casually by friends, acquaintances, family. But I have never become used to the feeling of absolute devastation weighing somewhere deep in my chest each time I find myself on the receiving end of this accusation.

Empathy is what makes us human.

It’s no wonder that the idea of psychopathy is terrifying. If psychopathy means the inability to experience empathy, and empathy is what makes us human, then psychopathy is literally the dehumanizing condition. Psychopaths populate crime dramas, horror films, murder mysteries, and thrillers. It’s the casual diagnosis for mass murderers, serial rapists, and child abusers.

But it is also deeply personal, profoundly ableist and sanist, and rooted in a complex, interlocking web of structural racism, ageism, and sexism.

She draws connections to autism and sociopathy and criticizes those with disorders who distance themselves from other disorders for the sake of seeming more normal to the ableist:

In response to frequent claims in the media and by policymakers that autistic people lack empathy (and are therefore violent psychopaths), many people in the autistic community, including autistic activists, begin the process of disavowal.

“No, autistic people are nothing like psychopaths. We are more likely to be the victims of crime while psychopaths are usually victimizers.”

“No, someone who would shoot dozens of innocent children wasn’t autistic. That’s not autism. That’s mental illness.”

“An autistic person wouldn’t commit such horribly violent crimes. Only a psychopath could do that.”

If empathy is what makes us human, and autistic people are as human as anyone else, then we must have empathy. It must be some other kind of person who doesn’t experience empathy. It must be someone who is truly psychopathic. This is the logic path that afflicts so many disability communities. Disavowal of one another has become a way of life. Many autistic people routinely decry the use of the slur retarded, yet assert in the same breath that they aren’t crazy or mentally ill. 

I love this tendency amongst people to distinguish their own failings as being somehow more excusable than other people's failings, e.g. "my limitations on empathy are not as serious as yours," or "my impulsivity or violence is due to excess of emotion, not lack of emotion," or "I'm only violent when I'm misunderstood, but you can be violent based solely on opportunism."

For more on the problems of stigmatizing mental illness, either coming from within or without the mental illness communities, see also United States President Barack Obama.  

An escort's unbiased perspective of the spectrums (part 2)

Thoughts from an escort (cont.):

The positives are that aspies and sociopaths are often less prone to xenophobia, prejudice, home-blind self-righteousness, hatemongering drives and such. For aspies, this is due to their inability to perform the first step of socially appropriate perceptive attention. For sociopaths, this is due to their inability to perform the second step of socially appropriate emotional attention.

And the borderline/bipolar/narcissists are like wild cards that can be extremely tolerant and compassionate in some issues, and extremely intolerant and hatemongering in other issues, depending on how their perceptive and emotional attention randomly work, or from how chaotic and interfering their wound-up emotions are with regard to both their perceptive and emotional attention.

Anyway, an input I have on your blog, based on my theory, is that your focus of inquiry, that of “empathy” could changed to “ability to intuitively trigger and experience socially appropriate emotions in oneself” (the “displaying” part is more relevant for aspies, I believe). Whereas “empathy” merely would be one emotion of many.

Because as I see it, the empathy issue is just what so called empaths kind of react on, from their subjective and practical view (which really is not very empathically done by these so called empaths). But the issue goes much deeper than that, and even though the empathy issue might be the manifested symptom that is most noticeable in human interaction, it is not the root to the problem, nor the cause of the problem, or even what the problem “is about” as such.

As said, I believe that aspies, borderline/bipolar/narcissists and sociopaths all have different causes to their problems, - and yet I find that they often seem to share the same kind of problems in their personal lives.

Their family, co-workers and friends often accuse them of being insensitive, egoistic, uncaring or even emotionally abusive. They often end up with being excluded or discarded by people that have been close to them. (And usually compensate with working hard in their professional lives, thus making money, and striving for power positions – the latter, I believe, not so much because of an actual hunger for power as such, but as a protective strategy for the kind of personal and relational exclusion they fear to experience again.)

As an escort (with certain aspie traits myself) I’ve learned good ways to communicate with these various types of persons. (Although, my selection methods as an escort narrow my clientele down to individuals that are both intellectual and apt at displaying a cooperative attitude to me, or I don’t accept them initially, nor do I accept to go through a full date with them if they aren’t trying to be cooperative).

But approached with the right communication, these persons are not so difficult in regard of being insensitive, egoistic, emotionally abusive and so on. – I just need to verbalize a lot of things and bluntly tell them about my experience of specific things said or done, and how they appear from my point of view, rather than expect them to just know it (as an objective fact) or know the relevance of it (as an emotional fact).

- Again, I would like to say that the distinction in the last sentence is important: Discerning between “objective state of facts” and “emotional facts”, as “knowing something” versus “knowing the relevance” of it.

An escort's unbiased perspective of the spectrums (part 1)

I thought this was an interesting, relatively unbiased perspective from a Swedish female escort comparing her sociopathic, narcissistic, borderline, and autistic clientele:

Plenty of my clients that become regulars, and/or have the tendency to become very personal and go for dates with social time, have 2 traits in common: They earn a lot of money (or else they couldn’t afford me as a steady date) and they have problems with establishing or keeping normal relationships, including sociopaths.

I have a nice little circle of nerdy guys, which could be pretty easily categorized as high functioning aspies (and I believe myself to have some autistic traits as well). But I have come to realize that borderline/bipolar/narcissistic and sociopaths share a lot of the same issues with the aspies, including the issue about cognitive attention in regard of experiencing empathy.
 and I think you have found an important key there, which intersects all of the three categories of people mentioned above.

From my observations, I have made following theory about how two types of attention affect the ability to perform socially appropriate emotional responses:

1) First, external and perceptive attention, which is the ability to a) perceive, b) interpret and c) assess objective “states of facts”, according the socially desired standards of normalcy. It’s about appropriately perceiving, interpreting and assessing the social reality of complex values and meanings in specific situations.

2) Second,internal and emotional attention, which is the ability to intuitively and immediately a) trigger, b) experience and c) display emotional responses, and do so in an appropriate correspondence to the state of facts we objectively perceive.
This is also about to within ourselves experience the “right”, or the socially desirable, emotional responses for the specific situation, in accordance to what is defined as normal by culture and society.

Aspies have trouble with the first, performing external perceptive attention (and to make socially appropriate interpretations and assessments of objective states of facts), which is what hampers their attentive ability to perceive complex social meanings and values in specific situations.
This leads to an incapacity to perform the second ability of emotional attention, regarding triggering, experiencing and displaying the appropriate emotional responses. In other words, since their first perception of “what is going on” often is insufficient or faulty, their emotional responses also goes astray from what is socially considered as appropriate.

While sociopaths manage the first ability of performing external perceptive attention (and make objectively appropriate interpretations and assessments) they have lapses and gaps in the second ability of internal emotional attention, regarding triggering, experiencing and displaying the socially appropriate emotional responses. (Otherwise, I really don't believe that so called sociopaths "lack" emotions, are incapable of love or such, I just think that they have a problem to trigger and experience these emotions in appropriate correspondence to the situations of when it is socially expected of them.) Which I think in turn interacts with how they actually perform the first ability of perceptive attention, as their emotional experiences get uniquely different, and so give them a different pre-understanding for how to continuously perceive, interpret and assess their social reality. This might not show immediately, since they still can make a “good enough” interpretation and assessment of complex social values and meaning, and so pretty much function anyway, if they just learn to act and fake a bit at displaying the “appropriate” emotions, which they did not manage to trigger or experience in themselves.

The borderline/bipolar/narcissistic, I believe, have problems both with having a good external perceptive attention in situations - because their cognitive focus on the outside world gets distracted by their inner emotional turmoil. And they have problems performing internal emotional attention - because their emotions are like a malfunctioning gas-pedal, so they easily under-react or over-react, and so have difficulty appropriately tuning and regulating their emotional responses according to social standards. That is why you find callous narcissists and self-sacrificing martyrs at the same time here, or people that appear pretty much as hypocritical enigmas, like fighting for human rights on one hand (and believing in it) while neglecting their own children on the other hand (and not noticing it). 

This is how I, as an escort, have theorized how these different types of persons seem to largely end up with about the same problems, regarding being alienated and (in the practical sense of social interaction) not being fully emotionally functional.

Because the problematic consequence of not being able to trigger and experience the appropriate emotional responses in accordance with social expectations, is that emotion is what motivates us to think and act intuitively. As I think a social researcher named Arlie Hochschild said “emotion is proto-state both to cognition and action” (although I’m not 100% sure that quite is exactly correct).

But what people most notice, is that empathy seem to be lacking in people with this kind of attentive disabilities. Even though the issue of empathy merely is one symptom (among many) of an underlying cause – which actually is about malfunctioning ability for external perceptive attention and internal emotional attention.

Power of empathy?

From researcher Brene Brown on the distinction between empathy and sympathy, among other characteristics of empathy:

It's interesting that Brown quotes another scholar, Theresa Wiseman, who studied professions in which empathy is (allegedly) important. Wiseman came up with four main qualities of empathy based on these studies:

1. Perspective taking (ability to take perspective of another person or recognize their perspective as their truth)
2. Staying out of judgment (not easy when you enjoy it as much as most of us do)
3. Recognizing emotion in other people 
4. Communicating that 

To me, I can say yes to all of those things. I can take people's perspective, as well as other people (maybe better?). I stay out of judgment (no bandwagon angry mob public shaming). I can recognize emotion in other people and communicate it back to them, it's why I am so good at reading and manipulating people. My main problem is recognizing emotion in myself. But Professor Brown then concludes that empathy is "feeling with other people." Ok, maybe that is what it is, or maybe that is what it feels like for most people (whether or not that's even possible or if people are just projecting their own emotions on the empathy target). But if the four main qualities don't include "feeling with other people," is that what is really valuable about empathy? If I can do the other four things, am I basically covering all of the important empathy bases?

A utilitarian view of justice? (part 3)

From the reader again:

I wonder if empathy is a refuge for people who don't believe in god but find utilitarianism too cold as a basis for morality. Or maybe people who have an excess of empathy find it abhorrent to be utilitarian, because it's somehow dehumanizing (ie, being utilitarian means you make an impersonal calculation about the greatest good for the greatest number, as opposed to treating everyone like as individuals)?

I'll share a story with you, which you're also welcome to publish on your blog: I was flying home from Africa a few years ago, and was seated beside a Moroccan woman and her son, on their way to visit family in Montreal. At one point, she asked me about my religion. I told her that I didn't believe in god, which immediately distressed her. I recall her almost frantically reassuring me that I was probably a good person anyway, and that I looked like I loved my family, and so on. I think she was, in her own way, trying to be nice to me and not make me feel bad about my atheism!

Her apprehension of me makes sense, I think.  Her morality derives from God. She doesn't kill, steal, or eat pork because Allah forbids it. Then she meets me, and not only don't I believe in Allah, I don't believe in any god at all. If I don't believe in god, then what stops me from killing and stealing? In her eyes, nothing! And yet I don't look like a monster. How is that possible? What prevents people from being monsters if not god? I think some empaths feel the same way about sociopaths and empathy.

I'm guessing that some empaths think about someone like you, who doesn't experience any emotional empathy, and freak out like the woman beside me on the plane did. Their morality is based on empathy/god. You have no empathy/don't believe in god. Therefore you have no morality. You now become completely unpredictable to them, hence the fear.  You eat pork and don't pray, so maybe you also murder?  You don't cry when others are in pain, so maybe you can kill someone and not feel badly about it?

This last part of the story reminds me a lot of this.

A utilitarian view of justice? (part 2)

From the reader, additional ideas about this post on utilitarian morality:

I sent this in because of a discussion I was having at that time with my husband.  He is an uber-empath who is extremely open minded, except when it comes to psychopathy.  He’s afraid of you and worries when I read your blog, which cracks me up (I think he worries that psychopathy is contagious …. would that it were, lol)!  We were talking about whether you could have a morality not based on empathy, and to my surprise, he disagreed that such a thing was possible.  “Disagree” is putting it mildly - he was deeply repulsed by such an idea, which surprised me because he’s normally very open.

To him, morality and empathy go hand in hand, in the same way that for religious people morality and god go hand in hand (both he and I are atheists).  Oddly, he sees how ridiculous (wrong) is it for religious people to impose their god-oriented morality on non-believing people, but he doesn’t think twice about imposing a morality based on empathy on the world. I am less convinced that empathy is necessarily a part of morality, and am more of a utilitarian, which is why I am interested in the utilitarianism of pre-modern cultures and decided to send this into you. 

Fyi, I very much share your instinctive fear of crazed mobs, most especially when they are fueled deeply felt sense of righteousness. I have seen groups of people in the clutches of religious fervour and other deeply felt emotions, and it is frightening beyond belief.

My response:

I think your analogy is spot on. Your husband's perspective is very interesting and hard for me to understand (but I lack empathy, so...). I can't even really reason out what the connection is between empathy and morality for most people. We don't do "bad" things because we feel the pain that our victims feel? What if there is no victim? Also, we sometimes do hurt people but for "good" reasons. For instance, we punish children, even though they are hurt when we do, for their own "good". Where does that assessment of "good" come from if not from a utilitarian point of view? This is especially true when you consider all the limitations of empathy. Might as well construct a view of morality that values the needs of your own loved ones and tribesmen over everyone else... 

The aspie's charm

I have written before about how people with asperger's seem to be, if not loved, tolerated--at least better than sociopaths or people from some of the other empathy challenged groups. I was thinking about this when I saw a youngster driving around with a "driver in training" sign on the car and a much older person in the passenger seat. The person was going much too slow for the conditions and later was causing a bit of a problematic traffic situation on an unprotected turn. For that sort of poor driving, people might usually honk or aggressively swerve around the slow driver, perhaps emitting a few profanities about getting off the road. But no one did that in this situation. Everyone waited patiently for them to finally find a gap big enough in oncoming traffic to make their turn safely. Why?

And does this same principle (whatever it is) have anything to do with why people don't find aspie's to be as morally offensive as sociopaths?

12 Years a Slave

I watched 12 Years a Slave recently and liked it, particularly for its portrayal of different types of people in different types of situations. You don't think (spoiler alert) that you'll be tricked by people pretending to be your friends, kidnapped, shipped thousands of miles away, and sold to someone who is "eccentric," possibly insane, but with the legal upperhand. But this ends up happening to someone and you see how he deals with these situations, as well as the reactions of countless others in related positions. People like to think that they would do the "right" thing in most situations, whether the morally right thing or the smartest choice in terms of survival and self-promotion. A dominant message of the film, at least for me, is to question this belief.

Instead, it seems that the popular reaction of viewers to the film is one of outrage or at least deep discomfort that almost seems to eclipse any other message. This is the theme (and criticism?) of this NY York Times review:

What had bothered me the first time is that the movie is basically an anthology of beatings and whippings, each one more severe than the last, culminating in a moment of deep horror when the hero-victim — Solomon Northup, a free black man shanghaied into slavery — takes the whip himself and administers skin-flaying lashes to a young girl (Patsey) whose only crime is wanting a bar of soap. It’s like the special-effects films that come out every other day where there is an escalation of mayhem: bodies and buildings blown up in ever more ingenious ways leading to a last scene in which everything in sight is blasted to kingdom come. In “12 Years a Slave,” the escalation is not technical — brutal realism, not video-game pyrotechnics, is the mode — but a ratcheting up of the level of pain for both the characters and the audience.

I felt no ratcheting up of pain. But sociopaths have a much different reaction to theodicy, or the problem of evil seen from a theological or existential point of view. In other words, we not only have different responses to the question "how could bad things happen?", we rarely ask the question, at least framed in that way. The truth is that bad things are happening this very moment, equally as brutal and hopeless as anything that happened in the film. I know that and accept it as reality. I think other people know that, but don't like to think about it. Instead they spend their moral outrage on things like people's choice of Halloween costumes or people's out-of-the-box solutions to climate change.  Some have suggested that not being aware of worldwide suffering is due to the downside to empathy, that we feel more strongly for victims that come wrapped in a package of pretty sick white girls whose photos are splashed on the covers of newspapers than babies dying of malnutrition out of sight.

The most interesting part of the film was seeing the different reactions people have to their situations. There is the mother who is so happy to see her lost son, that she lets her guard down and becomes kidnapped herself. There is the man who talks about uprising and is quickly dispatched when he makes the slightest move to protect a fellow prisoner. There is the very educated man who courageously talks almost Black Panther style until when he is freed by his master he clings to the sure slavemaster in blessed relief that he won't be sold to some unknown danger. There are also many characters whose actions and reactions may seem so foreign that it is tempting to write them off as being unfathomable -- those of a sociopath. Sarah Paulson discusses her "evil" character's motivations:

I think the only way to do it, for me, was to try and figure out the "why" of her behavior. The idea of playing someone who is just evil to be evil seemed really boring to me and not realistic. Because nobody does anything for no reason. It may not be one I agree with or one that makes sense to me, but there will be reason. What I really came up with was that she's a product of her time. She was probably raised by ignorant and racist people, and I don't think she's of a complicated enough nature -- or self-aware enough nature -- to challenge what she's been taught. I think she just decided what she was taught is the right and true way, which many people in this country, and this world, sort of live by. Then, you add into that the reality that she's deeply, deeply, deeply jealous, because her husband is in love with another woman right under her nose, in her own home. It's humiliating. So when you're dealing with a person who's not very self-aware, who was raised by racists, who is not a deep woman, and who deals with surface feelings and emotions and appearances, then you might behave the way she behaves. That's how I could get into it.

Interestingly, despite people's strong reactions to the film, I haven't really seen this perspective a lot -- "I could have done these things in a similar situation". But that is the awful reality. There is no way that in all of history, horrible things were always done by sociopaths or the deranged. Normal people did these things. Normal people who lacked a bit of self-awareness and didn't bother to question the dominant moral teachings of their time.

Another reaction that I have not seen is people -- nobody seems to have been moved to go out and dedicate time, money, or effort to prevent the various forms of modern slavery that are popping up in their own backyards. Instead, one of the more common reactions has been to criticize the previous Hollywood portrayals of slavery as being impossibly rosy: "the paternalistic gentry with their pretty plantations, their genteel manners and all the fiddle-dee-dee rest." It's an odd criticism to make when so much of most peoples' daily lives are spent in deep denial of the horrors around them.

Or as a reader recently wrote to me:

People often think sociopaths are creepy for compartmentalizing and being able to hurt other people.

But  how great is empathy, if it allows normal people to go along with slavery? How can they take the moral high ground?

Sure, I'd be the sort to be a bounty hunter and track down slaves, happy to bring them back to the plantation and get paid. Or I'd be happy to punish a bad slave.

But what happened to normal people, that they went along with slavery? Maybe they aren't that different from sociopaths after all. Maybe they beat up on sociopaths because we remind them of their character traits that they hate the most.

How a psychopath is made

As a follow-up to its stories on Colonel Russell Williams, The Globe and Mail investigates "How a Psychopath is Made." There are the usual suspects trotted out to give their two cents, and these interesting insights into how sociopaths grow from child to adult.

The theory is that neglect, abuse and early trauma somehow desensitize children to the feelings of others, says Dr. Kiehl, but it still has not been proven. Not all psychopaths had horrible childhoods. Some come from stable families. Millions of children are abused he says, but don't become psychopaths.

In one of her studies, Dr. Gao found that children who lived apart from their parents in the first three years of life were more likely to have psychopathic personalities. This suggests that failure to bond may play a role, she says. She also found that adults who reported they were neglected by their mothers when they were children were also more likely to have difficulty with empathy, and other psychopathic traits.

But every child showing signs of callousness and fearlessness isn't a psychopath in the making – although it certainly increases the odds. It is rare for people to become callous and unfeeling as adults if they began life as caring, empathetic children, says Paul Frick, a psychologist at the University of New Orleans, who studies anti-social behaviour and develops therapies for anti-social children. These troubled kids learn to conform quickly, often even fooling researchers by posing as model citizens until the end of the day, when, denied a reward, they become nasty intimidators even with adults.

But one study that followed 12-year-olds with these traits into adulthood found that only about 20 per cent met the measurement for psychopathy. Genes may lay the foundation, but environment builds upon it. A fearless child with callous traits who lives in a stable, supportive home with a parents that can afford to send him skiing as an outlet for his risk-taking has better outcomes than one raised in a poor family where the parents have few resources.

In the past, it was argued that psychopaths could not be treated – therapy sessions appeared to have no impact on their recidivism rates, and they often emerged having learned new skills about human nature that made them better manipulators. Some new research, however, has shown progress in teaching empathy to young children, as well as the benefits of very intense therapy for adult criminals.

It's interesting thinking what might trigger sociopath genes in an otherwise relatively normal child. Yes, abuse or severe neglect, but they are neither necessary nor sufficient. I've already talked about some of the banal details of my childhood that may have triggered a predisposition to sociopathic traits, including possibly a particularly serious case of colic. Perhaps the colic interfered with normal maternal bonding, perhaps I sensed a more urgent need to compete for resources than normal people, but I understand how these explanations might fail to be convincing.

People always think there are going to be graphic, horror stories from my childhood, but there just aren't. I can imagine how frustrating that might be to those looking for an easy explanation, but disturbed or disordered people often have surprisingly normal backgrounds. For instance, when asked to discuss his own past, Col. Williams, perhaps anticipating the disappointment that his answers might elicit, responded almost apologetically, “it will be very boring.”

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Oxytocin debunked?

I've written on oxytocin before -- the connection some researchers have made between oxytocin and empathy, calling it the "moral molecule" or the "kindness hormone", and the odd coincidence that about 5% of the population do not release oxytocin at the usual stimulants and 1-4% of the population is psychopathic, etc. It seems like a wonder hormone and a justification for empathy and social bonding all at once. Or is it? This was an interesting summary of some recent findings that shed more light on oxytocin, suggesting that its affects are much more complicated than some believe, to be filed in the ever-expanding "empathy not all its cracked up to be" file:

It’s been called the cuddle hormone, the holiday hormone, the moral molecule, and more—but new research suggests that oxytocin needs some new nicknames. Like maybe the conformity hormone, or perhaps the America-Number-One! molecule.
***
In the past few years, however, new research is finding that oxytocin doesn’t just bond us to mothers, lovers, and friends—it also seems to play a role in excluding others from that bond. (And perhaps, as one scientist has argued, wanting what other people have.) This just makes oxytocin more interesting—and it points to a fundamental, constantly recurring fact about human beings: Many of the same biological and psychological mechanisms that bond us together can also tear us apart. It all depends on the social and emotional context.

The article breaks the recent research findings into five main categories:

1. It keeps you loyal to your love—and leery of the rest.

2. It makes us poor winners and sore losers.

3. It makes you cooperative with your group—sometimes a little too cooperative.

4. It makes you see your group as better than other groups (to a point).

5. It does make us trusting—but not gullible.

Some of the interesting quotes include:

• [O]xytocin plays a critical role in helping us become more relaxed, extroverted, generous, and cooperative in our groups. Sounds utopian, doesn’t it? Perhaps a little too utopian. . . . The oxytocin-influenced participants tended to go with the flow of their group, while the placebo-dosed participants hewed to their own individualistic path. Oxytocin is great when you’re out with friends or solving a problem with coworkers. It might not be so great when you need to pick a leader or make some other big decision that requires independence, not conformity.
• If a group of researchers in the Netherlands dosed you with oxytocin, you might find yourself developing a sudden affection for windmills, tulips, totally legal soft drugs and prostitution, and tall, blonde, multilingual bankers. You might also decide that the life of a Dutch person is more valuable than that of, say, a Canadian. That’s exactly what Carsten De Dreu found in 2011. His study was sternly criticized for overstating its effects—and yet it’s not the only one to find that oxytocin seems to make us really, really, really like our own groups, even at the expense of other groups.
• The drug “soma” from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World probably contained some oxytocin. The two-minutes hate in Orwell’s 1984 probably got the oxytocin pumping as well.
• We may like being part of a group so much that we’re willing to hurt others just to stay in it. The desire to belong can compromise our ethical and empathic instincts. That’s when the conscious mind needs to come online and put the brakes on the pleasures of social affiliation.

I particularly liked this conclusion that along the lines of every-virtue-is-also-vice:

“We do have to be in the right environment to be virtuous.” That might be the bottom line with oxytocin—and, indeed, any neural system that bonds us to other people: The impulse to join and conform in a group is always very strong in human primates, and so the key lies in choosing the right group—and then not getting carried away. 

The drama/static of our minds

From a reader:

I just finished reading your memoir and I wanted to take a moment to thank you.  I am a clinical psychologist and am continually interested in expanding my mind and understanding of the human experience.  Your book helped me think differently about sociopathy, empathy, logic and choice.  Many people (especially clinicians) would like to think that there is a firm line between those who are "personality disordered" and the rest of them.  This presupposes that they are perfectly ordered in their own personalities.  Why is it that we allow ourselves to be 'a little depressed' or 'have some problems with anxiety' but the notion that we may all be on a spectrum of orderliness to disorderliness in regard to personality is so challenging?  While I do not identify with any one personality disorder per se (other than general traits of cluster B), your worldview and approach to life resonated with me at times.  I believe that working within one's system of thought and affect instead of against the grain will yield greater results.  This is especially true when I apply this to the clients I see in my private practice.  There is a difference between the drama that unfolds in our minds and the behavior we choose to enact in the world.  I teach my clients to remove (emotional) judgment from choices and evaluate different paths according to the cost benefit ratio.

I asked what she meant about the "drama that unfolds in our minds and the behavior we choose to enact" and whether her patients push back when she tries to get them to be less emotional in their decision-making:

As far as my comment goes, everyone has dark thoughts; some are more willing to admit them.  I believe that having the freedom to fantasize and think about whatever you want is freeing and allows you to work out other issues.  I actively promote this with my clients and generally find that even the most violent of fantasizing does not lead to action for those that I see.  In fact, it usually has deeper, symbolic meaning.  I don't believe in judging anyone if I can help it - natural consequences shape behavior.  If one is generally an asshole to others, that person will find he or she has few friends.  If that works for that person, then great.  Otherwise, it's time to review one's strategies and weigh the pros and cons.  Personally, I draw the line at not encroaching on the rights of others (even though I would often like to and most of the time don't really care about the rights of people I don't know or who wouldn't affect me).  I do this because of the natural consequences of not doing so (i.e. having to deal with pissed off people, losing friends, legal issues) but also because I believe this sort of discipline keeps me mentally fit and in control.  

As far as taking emotion out of decision making, I usually give clients a logical reason for examining issues in a particular way. Emotion tends to act as static for our cognitive minds.  I look at it like two data streams - one leans towards facts and the other towards instinct.  Both hold good information but since emotion is processed by an older part of our brain and doesn't work with information in the same way, we can't rely solely on it as a source of decision making and is better used as an adjunct.  Clients tend to see what I mean so it's not a hard sell.

Knowing you better than you know yourself

I saw this in a recent comment: "How could someone who feels no empathy for others possibly understand how to treat a child?"

It reminded me of something that one of my professors said once in the mid 2000s. He said that sometimes he would be in a bookstore, see a book he wanted to buy, but would put off buying it until he got home and could order it on Amazon. Why? Not because he wanted to get it for cheaper, but because he wanted Amazon to know about the purchase so it would be better at recommending books to him in the future. When I watch Netflix, I look at their recommendations for me, and their "star" ratings guess for how much I would like a particular film/television show. They're pretty accurate. And it doesn't take that many data points to pick you out from an otherwise anonymized list of a half million other Netflix subscribers. It's crazy. It turns out that we really all are special little snowflakes.

Has this never happened to you? That someone knew better than you what you would like? Is it empathy that helps them do it? Probably not, right? Because isn't empathy allegedly the ability to feel what another person is feeling? Does Netflix feel what I feel? Not likely, right? But Netflix still does a great job predicting what people want to watch. If I collect a bunch of data points on you, or a child, or your dog, or anything else, will I also understand how you would like to be treated? Will I know perhaps even better than you know yourself? My loved ones feel this way about me.

Maybe you're not the type of person who would go home to order a book on Amazon rather than buy it in the store (or one of the people making up the statistic that 75% of Netflix streaming selections come from recommendations from the site), but there are plenty of people who would value that unique service quite highly. This is particularly true of children who often have their true feelings and wants/needs superseded and/or ignored by the adults in their lives. And by the way, can empaths really understand what/how children think/feel? Unless they have a lot of time recently around people in that age, I have found that most adults are pretty bad at understanding or even caring about how kids feel.

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? 

The paternalistic pull of conscience

I asked a reader why it is a relief to know that his ex was a sociopath. His response:

Woah, Never thought about that one, I guess it makes me feel better because of two reasons.

First reason would be that it means that I can just let go, As I've read sociopaths can't change, I'm not saying "Can't get better" on purpose because I don't think you're that much different to people who can't see certain colors or can't hear certain tones. If it she can't change that means I have the complete right to let her go and not try to help her and still feel good about myself.

Second reason is that it gives me the right to actually blame everything on her, keep my hands clean as some people say. I guess I sound about low on the empathy when saying that but truthfully that's how I feel.

My response:

That reminds me of a comment one of the socio readers once wrote: "Empaths are the idiots who will help anything that's in pain or distress for no other reason than its state." A couple of weeks ago, I witnessed a wild animal intrude on civilization. The animal was in no danger, the area wasn't that urban, but people were so surprised to see it that they began discussing what they should do about it, how they should protect him. To me it seemed bizarrely paternalistic and presumptuous for these people to assume that they knew better than this animal how best to survive, or to see any potential action on their part as anything but unwanted interference. Anyway, I guess you can't help it, but what you said reminded me of seeing people react to that wild animal.

Normal people are always trying to do the right thing, God love them, which makes it even more tragic when things like this scene from a television series happen, as described by the New Yorker:

When the three [friends] head out of the city for a day hike, in the first episode, Joe hits a possum in the road and is torn about what to do. He can’t tell whether it’s dead or alive, and he decides that the only humane solution is to make sure it’s dead, so he backs up over it, then pulls ahead again. It becomes clear that the possum is definitely not dead, as they look back and see it walking across the road. Of the three guys in the car, Joe is the most upset by this mess; at first, he thought he might have killed the animal, then he tried to kill the animal, and now he’s left wondering whether it will die because of him. It’s to the show’s credit that this isn’t (only) a metaphor for the uncertainty and the inevitable mistakes of adult life; the scene is viscerally disturbing, and you watch it closely, as if some magical method for undoing irreversible damage will reveal itself, not just to Joe but to you, too.

I always say that one of my biggest fears is well-intentioned people, from the Crusades, to the Inquisition, to the colonization of the New World, to everyone who has ever done something "for my own good."

The downside of empathy

The author of the "Moral Life of Babies," Paul Bloom, writes for the New Yorker, "The Baby in the Well: The Case Against Empathy." He first talks briefly about the origins of the word empathy and the science behind it. He then lists several recent books about how great empathy is and how lack of empathy is essentially responsible for the world's evil, concluding

This enthusiasm may be misplaced, however. Empathy has some unfortunate features—it is parochial, narrow-minded, and innumerate. We’re often at our best when we’re smart enough not to rely on it.

Why? First, it causes us to over-focus on problems with names and faces and ignore problems that are represented only by faceless statistics:

The key to engaging empathy is what has been called “the identifiable victim effect.” As the economist Thomas Schelling, writing forty-five years ago, mordantly observed, “Let a six-year-old girl with brown hair need thousands of dollars for an operation that will prolong her life until Christmas, and the post office will be swamped with nickels and dimes to save her. But let it be reported that without a sales tax the hospital facilities of Massachusetts will deteriorate and cause a barely perceptible increase in preventable deaths—not many will drop a tear or reach for their checkbooks.”

Because it is such a powerful emotion, it can be abused by bad people seeking to prey on your empathy:

[A]s critics like Linda Polman have pointed out, the empathetic reflex can lead us astray. When the perpetrators of violence profit from aid—as in the “taxes” that warlords often demand from international relief agencies—they are actually given an incentive to commit further atrocities. It is similar to the practice of some parents in India who mutilate their children at birth in order to make them more effective beggars. The children’s debilities tug at our hearts, but a more dispassionate analysis of the situation is necessary if we are going to do anything meaningful to prevent them.

And it is impossible to empathize with absolutely everyone, because it turns out that even if we loved each other as much as ourselves, we still live in a world of scarce resources and conflicting preferences where trade-offs and compromises must be made, and empathy doesn't really help us there either:

A “politics of empathy” doesn’t provide much clarity in the public sphere, either. Typically, political disputes involve a disagreement over whom we should empathize with. Liberals argue for gun control, for example, by focussing on the victims of gun violence; conservatives point to the unarmed victims of crime, defenseless against the savagery of others. Liberals in favor of tightening federally enforced safety regulations invoke the employee struggling with work-related injuries; their conservative counterparts talk about the small businessman bankrupted by onerous requirements. So don’t suppose that if your ideological opponents could only ramp up their empathy they would think just like you.

One of my favorite paragraphs discusses how empathy wrongly and selfishly focuses people on retributive justice, largely because people want their feelings of outrage satiated by bloodthirsty justice:

On many issues, empathy can pull us in the wrong direction. The outrage that comes from adopting the perspective of a victim can drive an appetite for retribution. (Think of those statutes named for dead children: Megan’s Law, Jessica’s Law, Caylee’s Law.) But the appetite for retribution is typically indifferent to long-term consequences. In one study, conducted by Jonathan Baron and Ilana Ritov, people were asked how best to punish a company for producing a vaccine that caused the death of a child. Some were told that a higher fine would make the company work harder to manufacture a safer product; others were told that a higher fine would discourage the company from making the vaccine, and since there were no acceptable alternatives on the market the punishment would lead to more deaths. Most people didn’t care; they wanted the company fined heavily, whatever the consequence.

Although Bloom also argues that empathy can often be the pull to act at all that a lot of people need, the truth is:

“The decline of violence may owe something to an expansion of empathy,” the psychologist Steven Pinker has written, “but it also owes much to harder-boiled faculties like prudence, reason, fairness, self-control, norms and taboos, and conceptions of human rights.” A reasoned, even counter-empathetic analysis of moral obligation and likely consequences is a better guide to planning for the future than the gut wrench of empathy.

Sociopaths feel emotion

I have been surprised by how often I hear or read someone saying that sociopaths don't have emotions or can't form emotional bonds with other people. Most often it's people talking about how sociopaths are soulless monsters or must live lives completely devoid of any real meaningful relationships, but sometimes it's someone saying that he couldn't possibly be a sociopath because he feels emotions and love, etc. This is all fallacy. The three main diagnostic criterions actually have relatively little to say about emotions: Cleckley only mentions "general poverty in major affective reactions" and a poorly integrated sex life, Hare's PCL-R also lists shallow affect, and the DSM-V's ASPD only says that sociopaths tend to experience irritability and don't feel remorse. Nowhere does it say that sociopaths don't love. Nowhere does it say that sociopaths can't form emotional bonds. There is not a single historical example of a sociopath who is a completely emotionless, robot loner, so I don't know from where people are getting this image of the emotionless sociopath.

I thought about this popular misconception when I read this recent comment:

"How does a sociopath know when the missing emotions that make him supposedly so different, since he does not feel them, are feigned? In other words how does he learn to differentiate between feigned and real emotions?"

I am sociopathic, but have some emotion. These emotions are egocentric and only arise with events I am directly involved with, but they are still there. I feel joy and happiness at doing my favorite activities and I can (but may not always) feel anger or sadness when things do not go my way. Nonetheless, these are 'feelings' because they provide information that goes beyond the intellectual analysis of the situation at hand.

Because I have those feelings I can easily contrast those with situations where I do not or am faking them. If I am 'acting' in such a way to not betray myself, and my only contribution to that acting is my intellectual state, then I know that there is an absence of feeling there. If one tells me about how their friend died and they are in tears, I know that I must contribute with an appropriate response so that they 1) do not realize my status and 2) are not feeling any worse. Going through the motions because of this intellectual realization is far different than the automatic response given by most non-sociopaths. I think, by and large, we realize that we are not giving the same response as non-sociopaths because we realize that we have to craft the *entire* interaction with another person, not just the words.

But I don't think even this idea of faking emotions is so different than most people. Do you always mean it when you say "oh, I'm so sorry to hear that"?

Of course who knows whether sociopaths are feeling the same emotions that everyone else is, but I don't think anyone's emotional palette is completely identical to anyone else. Rather people's emotions are going to depend on their culture, their belief system, their education, the societal expectations placed on them, along with the vast natural and physical differences between people's brain and brain chemistry. This applies particularly to a complex emotion like love. I was actually just talking to a friend about how the only reason he can tell his wife loves him is that she very actively ensures that he is sexually satisfied (she's not a sociopath, but this "complaint" could very well be said about many sociopathic spouses). But whatever, right? Who is to say that this is a lesser or less desirable love than someone who would love to hold your hand in a hot air balloon?

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.