Using babies to teach empathy

A friend sent me this older NY Times article about teaching at risk youth empathy by exposing them to and asking them to consider the well-being of babies.  Why this works, no one knows for sure, but it seems to trigger in them a natural inclination to help altruistically, also shared by primates:

We know that humans are hardwired to be aggressive and selfish. But a growing body of research is demonstrating that there is also a biological basis for human compassion. Brain scans reveal that when we contemplate violence done to others we activate the same regions in our brains that fire up when mothers gaze at their children, suggesting that caring for strangers may be instinctual. When we help others, areas of the brain associated with pleasure also light up. Research by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello indicates that toddlers as young as 18 months behave altruistically. (If you want to feel good, watch one of their 15-second video clips here.)

This was something that I didn't know, that we are programmed to help.  The clips are fascinating, for instance this first one, where the researcher drops a clothespin just out of his reach.  The 18 month old child crawls over to the clothespin, picks it up, works himself to a standing position so he'll be tall enough to give the researcher back his clothespin, which he does (to his own apparent delight).

I wouldn't necessarily call it altruism, though, at least not from my superficial understanding.  To me, the impulse seems rooted more in a drive for efficiency (am I projecting my own thoughts here?).  In each of these videos, the toddlers help out in a task that obviously requires cooperative effort for success -- a situation in which it is obvious that someone needs help with something, for instance opening a door when someone has their arms full.  Without the toddler's help, the door never gets opened and that person never gets to their location, or they do so with much greater cost in terms of time and effort.  By helping the researcher, even where there is no immediate promise of reward, the toddler is still engaging in value maximizing behavior that he can hope to benefit from in kind in the future.

This is clearly an evolutionarily advantageous trait, particularly to help out within a particular group or tribe of people.  It expands the our ability to consolidate resources in order to scale particular operations.  Just like the modern legal fiction of a corporation allows us to pool resources (via stock purchases) to create business entities that no one of us could finance independently, a natural inclination to participate in cooperative tasks promotes the overall well-being of society, which improves our own lives.

Maybe I'm reading too much into all of this, but I've always wondered where my compulsion for efficiency comes from, which will override almost any other impulse.  Could it be related to this?

It could also be that the toddler is just trying to pull his own weight, starting to realize that he is a suck on social resources, and wants to avoid getting left in the jungle to die.  Which is actually a risk for us all, in some ways.  So be good everyone!  Or else!

Wisdom of Psychopathy

Another book recommendation, this time with audio clip:


I was reading an article on Scientific American’s website today, when I noticed an advert for an upcoming book entitled The Wisdom of Psychopathy, Kevin Dutton author. This one isn't coming out till October.

I looked the book up on Amazon just because and I also came across another upcoming book called Almost a Psychopath. This one is being released at the end of the month. As always, I thought you might be interested. 

I Googled the title of the book and came across this audio program ("The Psychopath in Us All"). I believe it's about 25 or 30 minutes. The first part is standard fare, all the stuff you’ve read about before. The second part, which starts at about 10:20, features Dutton. I was gratified to hear him voice something I’ve said on your blog numerous times over the last few years: it makes sense to think of all personality traits as existing along a spectrum, from extreme to moderate to barely there. Psychopathic personality traits are no exception. Then there’s the little chestnut I used in the subject line. Very self-helpy. Unleashing the inner psychopath is a universal dream of mankind.

Living in the moment

I read this NY Times column and thought it was an interesting and hopefully relatable example of how (I believe) sociopaths think most of the time, in terms of compartmentalizing fear and living in the moment.  The author is describing how liberating it feels to ride a bike in busy, traffic-ridden New York because he is plagued by a vague sense of anxiety, but is rather focused and in the moment:


Natural selection has made us hypervigilant, obsessively replaying our mistakes and imagining worst-case scenarios. And the fact that we’ve eliminated almost all of the immediate threats from our environment, like leopards and Hittites, has only made us even more jittery, because we’re now constantly anticipating disasters that are never going to happen: the prowler/rapist/serial killer lurking in the closet, a pandemic of Ebola/Bird Flu/Hantavirus, the imminent fascist/socialist/zombie takeover. The disasters that do befall us are mostly slow, incremental ones that seem abstract and faraway until they suddenly blindside us, like heart disease and foreclosure. So we go about our days safer and more comfortable than human beings have been in five million years, constantly hunched and growling with a low level of fight-or-flight chemicals in our bloodstreams. My doctor assures me that this is the cause of most of our chronic back and neck problems; my dentist says nocturnal tooth-grinding became so endemic in New York after 9/11 it actually changed the shapes of people’s faces by enlarging their masseter muscles. He sells a lot of night guards.

Which is why it’s such a relief, an exhilarating joy, to break the clammy paralysis of worry and place yourself at last in real physical danger. Even though it’s the time when I am at most immediate risk, riding my bike in Manhattan traffic is also one of the only times when I am never anxious or afraid — not even when a cab door swings open right in front of me, some bluetoothed doofus strides into my path, or a dump truck’s fender drifts within an inch of my leg. At those moments fear is a low neurological priority that would only interfere with my reaction time, like a panicky manager shoved aside by competent, grim-faced engineers in a crisis. I doubt that the victims of sudden violent accidents die terrified; they’re probably extremely alert, brains gone pretty much blank while their galvanized bodies try to figure out what to do. I don’t think our minds are designed to accept that there’s no way out. Based on my own close calls, I suspect that if I am killed while biking, the state of mind in which I am likeliest to die is extreme annoyance. And at least it won’t be by drowning.
***
When I’m balanced on two thin wheels at 30 miles an hour, gauging distance, adjusting course, making hundreds of unconscious calculations every second, that idiot chatterbox in my head is kept too busy to get a word in. I’ve heard people say the same thing about rock-climbing: how it shrinks your universe to the half-inch of rock surface immediately in front of you, this crevice, that toehold. Biking is split-second fast and rock-climbing painstakingly slow, but both practices silence the noise of the mind and render self-consciousness blissfully impossible. You become the anonymous hero of that old story, Man versus the Universe. Your brain’s glad to finally have a real job to do, instead of all that trivial busywork. You are all action, no deliberation. You are forced, under pain of death, to quit all that silly ideation and pay attention. It’s meditation at gunpoint.

I’m convinced these are the conditions in which we evolved to thrive: under moderate threat of death at all times, brain and body fully integrated, senses on high alert, completely engaged with our environment. It is, if not how we’re happiest — we’re probably happiest in a hot tub with a martini and a very good naked friend — how we are most fully and electrically alive. Of course we can’t sustain this state of mind for too long. People who go through their whole lives operating on impulse tend to end up in jail. We are no longer purely animals, living only in the moment; we are the creatures who live in time, as salamanders live in fire, prisoners of memory and imagination, tortured with dread and regret. That other, extra-temporal perspective is not the whole reality of our condition. It’s more like the view from the top of the Empire State Building, of people as infinitesimal dots circulating ceaselessly through a grid. Eventually we have to descend back to street level, rejoin the milling mass and take up our lives; you lock up your bike and become hostage to the hours again. But it’s at those moments that I become briefly conscious of what I actually am — a fleeting entity stripped of ego and history in an evanescent present, like a man running in frames of celluloid, his consciousness flickering from one instant to the next.

How does the sociopath accomplish this in daily life?  I believe through extreme compartmentalizing, that actually allows him to quiet all of the mental buzz clogging up most people's neural pathways and hyperfocusing on the moment.

In-group altruism

I happened upon two articles about the emergence and explanation of altruism within groups.  There was this New Yorker article by Jonah Lehrer (sorry, not fully available to non-subcribers), which discussed the origin and development of the inclusive fitness theory.  Inclusive fitness basically holds that you are willing to be altruistic to another person in proportion to the advantage it will give your own genes in survival.  In other words, you share half of your genes with your siblings so you should be more willing to help them then, say, your cousin or even your nephew.  Here are some selections:


Charles Darwin regarded the problem of altruism—the act of helping someone else, even if it comes at a steep personal cost—as a potentially fatal challenge to his theory of natural selection. After all, if life was such a cruel “struggle for existence,” then how could a selfless individual ever live long enough to reproduce? Why would natural selection favor a behavior that made us less likely to survive? In “The Descent of Man,” Darwin wrote, “He who was ready to sacrifice his life, as many a savage has been, rather than betray his comrades, would often leave no offspring to inherit his noble nature.” And yet, as Darwin knew, altruism is everywhere, a stubborn anomaly of nature. Bats feed hungry brethren; honeybees defend the hive by committing suicide with a sting; birds raise offspring that aren’t their own; humans leap onto subway tracks to save strangers. The sheer ubiquity of such behavior suggests that kindness is not a losing life strategy.

For more than a century after Darwin, altruism remained a paradox. The first glimmers of a solution arrived in a Bloomsbury pub in the early nineteen-fifties. According to legend, the biologist J. B. S. Haldane was several pints into the afternoon when he was asked how far he would go to save the life of another person. Haldane thought for a moment, and then started scribbling numbers on the back of a napkin. “I would jump into a river to save two brothers, but not one,” Haldane said. “Or to save eight cousins but not seven.” His drunken answer summarized a powerful scientific idea. Because individuals share much of their genome with close relatives, a trait will also persist if it leads to the survival of their kin. According to Haldane’s moral arithmetic, sacrificing for a family member is just a different way of promoting our own DNA.

The idea of group altruism is interesting to me.  My father grew up in a large family and he has always prized a certain submission to the will of the group.  I quickly learned to speak in terms of "maximizing utility" for everyone concerned, in a very Bentham/Utilitarianism type of way, and my family would follow my plan over others.

Of course, as a sociopath I'm supposed to be a "cheater" -- someone who pretends to work for the good of the group while secretly not pulling my weight or siphoning off a disproportional amount of community output.

But I don't, or not always.  I guess it's because unlike bats or bees I'm not surrounded by idiots half the time.  Especially when I'm with my family or close friends who know better, it would be very difficult to defraud them consistently.  Maybe because I'm human and not a bat or a bee I can make higher cognitive determinations like it is better for me to be part of a group in which I support them and they support me in turn.

Could there be another reason why I engage in this sort of in-group altruism?  Is it because I don't just need specific things from the people in my group but actually need to associate with people in general?  From this Psychology Today post:

The idea that humans have a need to belong to social groups is so fundamental in psychology that one of the seminal papers on this topic has been cited 2572 times since its publication in 1995. Belonging doesn't just feel good — it's often essential for our very survival, even in modern times.

Do I also have an evolutionary drive to "belong"?  I actually think that I do, or at least I can feel in-group loyalty.  How about others?

Are sociopaths better than empaths?

I don't actually think that sociopaths are superior to empaths.  Unlike some (most?) people, I haven't formed a mental hierarchy of types of humans from sociopaths down to aspies, or empaths down to sociopaths, or any other sort of arrangement based on value to society or dominance or anything else.  We're different, yes, and some of those differences are strengths and some of them are weaknesses and some of them are strengths in one situation and weaknesses in another.

When I studied music seriously, I spent a lot of time practicing orchestral excerpts.  Excerpts are specific to a particular instrument, e.g. french horn or flute.  They are passages from the standard repertoire that either feature the instrument prominently or are particularly challenging to play.

In music there are basically two types of technical difficulty: (1) idiomatic but intricate passages and (2) deceptively simple passages that, due to the inherent weaknesses of the instrument, are still quite challenging.  The former are passages that play to the strengths or unique features of the instrument, for instance double or multiple stopping on a string instrument, glissandos on a harp, diatonic runs in the key of a woodwind instrument.  These passages showcase the instrument at its very best and can make even an average player look like a superstar.  The latter are passages that often were written by a composer without considering the particular difficulties of the instrument.  They may require awkward alternate fingering to be performed successfully.  They may be in a bad range of the instrument or require complicated breathing or sticking.  They are not a vehicle for showing off, rather they are an attempt to mask the awkwardness created by vulnerabilities of the instrument.

I have intentionally avoided using the word "flaw" to describe the instruments.  The truth is that no instrument is perfect.  Instrument designers have improved upon the originals and they continue to make small improvements, but inherent in the idea of there being a "better" range, there must be a worse range.  To make one passage easier to play, you must consequently make another hypothetical passage harder.  There's nothing to be sad about.  But when it comes to empaths talking about how sociopaths are an evolutionary mistake or sociopaths talking about how empaths are idiots it sometimes reminds me of how trombonists try to argue that their instrument is the best because they can tune to the exact pitch or string instruments arguing their instrument is the best because they can sustain a note for forever.  I find those sorts of arguments to be quaint and in a way that reflects a particularly small view of the world.

Original thinker

I was reading a New Yorker article (here is the abstract) about the Dutch artist/sculptor/engineer responsible for Strandbeests ("beach animals"), Theo Jansen.  He had an interesting quote that made me think about what a benefit it is to the individual and society to be able to think in an original way:

Mine is not a straight path like an engineer's, it's not A to B.  I make a very curly road just by the restrictions of goals and materials.  A real engineer would probably solve the problem differently, maybe make an aluminum robot with motor and electric sensors and all that.  But the solutions of engineers are often much alike.  Everything we think can in principle be thought by someone else.  The real ideas, as evolution shows, come about by chance.  Reality is very creative.  Maybe that is why the Strandbeests appear to be alive, and charm us.  The Strandbeests themselves have let me make them.

I don't know why I thought this was relevant.  I guess because sociopaths minds are so different than most people.  I think their minds, thoughts, and behavior can seem charming because of their uniqueness.  Sociopaths can have the innocence of an ingenue or the ruthless of the most determined predator.  There's something sort of refreshing about their brutal approach to the world.  And when we live in a world where "everything we think can in principle be thought by someone else," it might be nice to be around someone who is an entirely different "someone else" than you are.

Dirty work

A reader sent me this video of James Fallon, science-famous for having killer ancestors and violent genes.  My favorite part is where he basically says that sociopaths exist to do the dirty work for everyone else.




Here are paraphrases of what I consider to be the most interesting parts:

6:48  There's a societal receptivity to psychopathology, in fact one may say that there's psychopathology in all of us because we ask the so-called successful sociopaths or psychopaths to do the dirty work for us. Ok.  And not just the dirty work but the good work.  You don't want your neurosurgeon to be empathetic and caring emotionally when they're working on you.  You want them to be cold machines that don't care.  Same thing with an investor. . . . A society almost demands that we have psychopaths.  It's a very stable feature throughout society in history that these people are there.  And they pop up in a very malignant way sometimes but these traits seem to be very useful to society so we almost ask for it, or our genes and our behavior ask for it.

8:10 Many of them . . . have excellent memories.  And there's a genetics to this.  The people who have very good memories usually have two forms of a gene that allow you to have very good memories but they also make you very anxious to depressed.

12:40  The fundamental way that a psychopath is put together is like a three legged stool.  One of the legs is a high vulnerability genetic alleles (aggression, violence, lack of bonding), brain loss, and abuse.

14:00 Two areas of the brain that are damages are orbital cortex and the ventromedial cortex

15:30 Cold cognition (logic) in balance with hot cognition (emotions, ethics, morality, etc.) in a normal brain.

Here's another video of James Fallon.

Cat puppetmasters?

Thanks to @wordsmithatplay for giving me a heads up about the recent article in The Atlantic, "How Your Cat is Making You Crazy."  The gist is that a previously thought (relatively) benign cat parasite that infects as much as 50% of the population might change the infected personality to be either more introverted and risk seeking in male infectees, or more outgoing and social in female infectees.  There are fascinating implications for both free agency (cat puppetmasters? so argues a tongue in cheek "cat manifesto" from the NY Times), zombies, and (perhaps?) whether sociopaths can be made, at least in part?  The story is fascinating and alarming in a very exciting way.  Under the byline "Could tiny organisms carried by house cats be creeping into our brains, causing everything from car wrecks to schizophrenia?":

• Starting in the early 1990s, he began to suspect that a single-celled parasite in the protozoan family was subtly manipulating his personality, causing him to behave in strange, often self-destructive ways. And if it was messing with his mind, he reasoned, it was probably doing the same to others.
• The parasite, which is excreted by cats in their feces, is called Toxoplasma gondii (T. gondii or Toxo for short) and is the microbe that causes toxoplasmosis—the reason pregnant women are told to avoid cats’ litter boxes. Since the 1920s, doctors have recognized that a woman who becomes infected during pregnancy can transmit the disease to the fetus, in some cases resulting in severe brain damage or death. T. gondii is also a major threat to people with weakened immunity: in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, before good antiretroviral drugs were developed, it was to blame for the dementia that afflicted many patients at the disease’s end stage. Healthy children and adults, however, usually experience nothing worse than brief flu-like symptoms before quickly fighting off the protozoan, which thereafter lies dormant inside brain cells—or at least that’s the standard medical wisdom.
• “There is strong psychological resistance to the possibility that human behavior can be influenced by some stupid parasite,” he says. “Nobody likes to feel like a puppet. Reviewers [of my scientific papers] may have been offended.”
• What’s more, many experts think T. gondii may be far from the only microscopic puppeteer capable of pulling our strings. “My guess is that there are scads more examples of this going on in mammals, with parasites we’ve never even heard of,” says Sapolsky.
• [Regarding his changed behavior]: he thought nothing of crossing the street in the middle of dense traffic, “and if cars honked at me, I didn’t jump out of the way.” He also made no effort to hide his scorn for the Communists who ruled Czechoslovakia for most of his early adulthood. “It was very risky to openly speak your mind at that time,” he says. “I was lucky I wasn’t imprisoned.” And during a research stint in eastern Turkey, when the strife-torn region frequently erupted in gunfire, he recalls being “very calm.” In contrast, he says, “my colleagues were terrified. I wondered what was wrong with myself.”
• Flegr was especially surprised to learn, though, that the protozoan appeared to cause many sex-specific changes in personality. Compared with uninfected men, males who had the parasite were more introverted, suspicious, oblivious to other people’s opinions of them, and inclined to disregard rules. Infected women, on the other hand, presented in exactly the opposite way: they were more outgoing, trusting, image-conscious, and rule-abiding than uninfected wom

It's crazy how little we still know about human behavior and its roots.  But I guess some of our ignorance is intentional.  Who wants to admit that their identity is so ephemeral, vulnerable to a little cat parasite (just another reason that I am glad I have no fondness for animals).

Unfit for life

A reader sent me a link to this video.  Under the title "The Bermuda Triangle of the Pot Calling the Kettle Black," a very quirky gentleman criticizes a recent paper/presentation basically advocating again for eugenics with sociopaths as a target of those branches of humanity to force into extinction:


In October of 2009, at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas held at the Sydney Opera House in Australia, Dr. Julian Savulescu presented a paper entitled ‘Unfit for Life: Genetically Enhance Humanity or Face Extinction,’ which appears as a couple of videos on Vimeo (vimeo.com/7515623 and vimeo.com/7681585).

Dr. Savulescu is presently a philosophy professor at Oxford University and the Director of Oxford’s Centre for Neuroethics. In his paper Dr. Savulescu argues that we ought ‘to consider’ taking immediate steps to engineer better human beings, human beings who, in his words, are more “Fit,” that is, “wiser and less aggressive.” We ought to consider, he claims, genetically altering human beings in order to weed out those he categorizes as the Unfit, by which he means the psychopaths and terrorists among us, as well as the ‘freeriders, fanatics, criminals, sociopaths, and, finally, the anti-social types.’ He also argues that we humans ought to consider rethinking the idea of liberal democracy, as it facilitates the existence of the Unfit among us. 

Savulescu spends more time basing his conception of who should be considered ‘Fit’ by pointing out who should be considered Unfit—of which he provides countless examples. For instance, in his response to a question after his talk, he approvingly cites the infamous Marshmallow Experiment as an indicator of who should, and who should not be considered Fit. The Marshmallow Experiment was carried out in the US in 1972 by Walter Mischel at Stanford University. A group of four-year-olds were given a marshmallow and then promised another, only if they could wait 20 minutes before eating the first one. Approximately 30% of the children could wait, while the other 70% could not. Mischel’s research team then followed the personality development of each child into adolescence and claimed to demonstrate that those with the ability to wait were better adjusted, more dependable and smarter, that is, socially “fitter,” especially according to their parents.

Bystander effect

This is a follow up to the Yueyue video. I think that every culture is capable of horrible cruelties, in fact I think that the very institution of "culture" encourages it in ways (bystander effect) that make me sort of proud to be "anti-social."

 

And a lengthy explanation of why this is a result of some of our "pro-social" impulses:




Personally, I blame Burt Bacharach for all of this.  Instead of "walk on by" it should have been "stop to help."

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."

A prosthetic moral compass?

Like many sociopaths, I have my own way of organizing the world and coming up with shortcuts for good decisions. I like to use economics and the principles of efficiency. Most of the time my method tracks what the majority think is the moral thing to do. Why don't we kill? Because if it were really more efficient to take another person's life, the murderer should be able to pay enough money to the victim that he would consent to the murder. Along the same reasoning, murder of animals is fine because animals don't have the access to capital markets or earning potential to be able to buy their life, right? Wrong. Because otherwise that would also apply to slaves. See? It's complicated. Hard to keep track of things. But it's only a prosthetic moral compass, so what do you expect?

Here's an oft-asked question: If there were a cure for sociopathy, would I take it? Or do I really believe that sociopathy is just another way of navigating the world, an acceptable variance in human behavior? Would it be a betrayal to "my people" to accept a "solution" to a "problem" that they don't think needs solving? A significant portion of the deaf community feels that cochlear implants are an affront to legitimate deaf culture. What if there there were a cochlear implant for the heart? Wikianswers seems to think there's one coming:

In cases where brain damage is too severe to permit [normal therapy], new developments in technology in the next decades will bring implantable devices that may be able to be used in the brain, along with other means including synthetic replacement neurotransmitters, to carry nerve impulses along paths formerly silent and unused in the sociopath's brain.

I'm not one to get my information from wikianswers, and I haven't been able to find out what new technology this person was referring to, but it still is an interesting idea. Particularly if it stopped being evolutionarily advantageous to be a sociopath, I think I would seriously consider getting a mechanical device to "fix" my "broken" brain.

At the very least, I think it would be interesting to experience what others experience, even for a limited duration or in a limited capacity.  I was just reading in the NY Times about how John Elder Robison (Aspie and author of the memoir "Look Me in the Eye") underwent some experimental treatment that "had given him a temporary insight into other people he had not had previously".  If something like that were possible for people like me, I would almost certainly choose to do it.  I feel like that sort of insight can only be a good thing.

Senseless violence

Usually I don't share things like this, but I am in love with the senseless violence. And the staring.



One thing I noticed recently is that when I get stressed or annoyed, it actually helps to imagine small acts of violence, like sneaking up behind people and slitting their throat. I know everyone else must do this as well. Isn't that odd? That we can find violence so comforting? I wonder what in our evolutionary development prompted that little quirk.

Sociopaths and fearlessness

Sociopaths are generally more fearless than empaths. Is it because having no empathy/conscience leads to fearlessess? Or does fearlessness lead to lack of empathy/conscience? One psychologist thinks it's the latter:

Fearlessness is likely one of the inherited traits that predisposes to antisocial personality and addiction.

But does that seem right? Does fearlessness in a sociopath predispose someone to become a sociopath? Or is fearlessness another symptom of the underlying cause of sociopathy?

On the one hand we could argue that fearlessness leads to an inability for sociopaths to learn from experience: if sociopaths don't fear consequences, they are not going to modify their behavior as a result of bad experiences. On the other hand, it is difficult to argue that a trait such a fearlessness would lead to other sociopathic traits like an inability to empathize, failure to conform to social norms, being manipulative, etc.

Or maybe it's neither. Maybe sociopathic traits were evolutionarily selected to make sociopaths a specialty tool in the arsenal of humanity: a subset of human kind that evolved to take care of business while the rest of humanity pussyfoots around. Some sociopathic traits are probably evolutionary spandrels, but the rest might come as part of a package that compliment each other and make sociopaths particularly suitable for certain purposes, just like how a predator has complimentary skills and traits to make him a hunting machine.

Emotional appendixes

Here is an interesting podcast on happiness economics. Starting at the 40:30 mark, there is an even more interesting discussion of evolutionary psychology. Professor Epstein explains the Darwinian insight that emotions are not insulated from evolutionary pressures. Nature does not trust the really important human behaviors to reasoning, but rather reinforces them with emotions. The prime example of this is procreation and raising children. There is a physical incentive to have sex, but the incentive to stick around and make sure that the offspring actually survive to reach the age of reproduction is emotional. Parents feel a "natural love" for their children. This natural love leads them to enjoy benefits to their children as they would enjoy benefits to themselves. That's why providing for one's children is not just a chore that we do rationally to propagate the species, but also one that we get emotional rewards from.

What does this mean for the sociopath? Well, sociopaths are not as much subject to the whims of "nature" and genetic/emotional programming as the majority of the human population. This is good because sociopaths have more freedom of thought and action. But it's bad because genetic/emotional programming was put there for a reason. Part of this reason has to do with our hunter-gatherer past, and is less important now -- sort of an emotional appendix or tail. Think about how inappropriate and disruptive our fight/flight instincts are in everyday life. On the other hand, some emotional programming is essential for our society to continue functioning as usual.

Sociopaths may be ahead of the curve when it comes to outdated emotional responses (the appendixes of the emotional spectrum), but behind the curve when it comes to good, rational, self-benefiting decisions that are reinforced in neurotypical people with emotions. Wouldn't it be nice to have rational decisions reinforced by emotion? If for no other reason, for the increase in utility and pleasure that emotional reinforcement would provide. There are obvious examples of the body rewarding necessary behavior with physical pleasure or the absence of pain: sex, eating, drinking, urinating, etc. For the empaths they also get emotional pleasure from things like cooperating, providing, and altruism. I feel a lot of satisfaction from doing things well, so I usually like to cooperate and be a contributing member of society. But wouldn't it be great if you also got intense emotional pleasure from it? If you could add pleasure to that equation, why wouldn't you?

For those of you who are interested, here is a little bit more information about evolutionary psychology and emotions from one of the comments regarding the podcast. The author of the comment is discussing the Robert Wright's book, The Moral Animal.

He is using Darwins life to describe some of the findings around sexual selection, kin selection and individual "striving" if you will (that is my words not Wrights). In one chapter he is talking about How Darwin and his wife reacted to the loss of children. He had one die soon after birth or maybe stillborn and another when (s)he was 8-10 yrs old. Well they reacted quite differently to both situations and were much more distraught in the second case. Why? It could be explained by the changes in their own lives at the time, where Darwin was in his work, the age of his wife etc etc. When you look at it simply as return on investment into genetic material passing to the future it begins to make sense. Someone you had invested more money ,time and effort into and was closer to reproductive age would be harder to lose than one lost right out of the gate. Similarly its been found that ,generally, once they are past the age of reproduction there is a dropoff in the "grief factor" following a death. This does not make us cold hearted computers driven by a DNA chip it is what makes us human. This behavior is noted in other species of animals as well. Our primate relatives "favor" the child they have invested the most in as well, and the one that has the better chance of passing on the genes.

Trickster

A reader linked to these selections from “Trickster: Trickster Makes This World Mischief, Myth, and Art,” by Lewis Hyde. From the review, the book appears to be an interesting account of some of the mythology that predates evolutionary biology with regards to how predator/prey relationships shake up the status quo. Although the selections are definitely worth reading in their entirety, here’s a taste of what it covers:

The trickster myth derives creative intelligence from appetite. It begins with a being whose main concern is getting fed and it ends with the same being grown mentally swift, adept at creating and unmasking deceit, proficient at hiding his tracks and at seeing through the devices used by others to hide theirs. Trickster starts out hungry, but before long he is master of the kind of creative deception that, according to a long tradition, is a prerequisite of art.
***
In Evolution of the Brain and Intelligence, Harry Jerison presents a striking chart showing the relative intelligence of meat-eaters and the herbivores they prey on. Taking the ratio of brain to body size as a crude index, Jerison finds that if we compare herbivores and carnivores at any particular moment in history the predators are always slightly brainier than the prey. But the relationship is never stable; there is a slow step-by-step increase in intelligence on both sides. If we chart the brain-body ratio on a scale of 1 to 10, in the archaic age herbivores get a 2 and carnivores a 4; thirty million years later the herbivores are up to 4 but the carnivores have gone up to 6; another thirty million years and the herbivores are up to 6 but the carnivores are up to 8; finally, when the herbivores get up to 9, the carnivores are up to 10. The hunter is always slightly smarter, but the prey is always wising up. In evolutionary theory, the tension between predator and prey is one of the great engines that has driven the creation of intelligence itself, each side successively and ceaselessly responding to the other.

After many stories of how Trickster accomplishes his tricks and the effects that Trickster has on “society”, a few words on what it all means for Trickster:

In all these stories, trickster must do more than feed his belly; he must do so without himself getting eaten. Trickster's intelligence springs from appetite in two ways; it simultaneously seeks to satiate hunger and to subvert all hunger not its own. This last is an important theme. In the Okanagon creation story, the Great Spirit, having told Coyote that he must show the New People how to catch salmon, goes on to say: "I have important work for you to do ... There are many bad creatures on earth. You will have to kill them, otherwise they will eat the New People. When you do this, the New People will honor you ... They will honor you for killing the People-devouring monsters and for teaching ... all the ways of living." In North America, trickster stepped in to defeat the monsters who used to feed on humans.

The myth says, then, that there are large, devouring forces in this world, and that trickster's intelligence arose not just to feed himself but to outwit these other eaters. Typically, this meeting is oppositional--the prey outwitting the predator. The bait thief suggests a different, nonoppositional strategy. Here trickster feeds himself where predator and prey meet, but rather than entering the game on their terms he plays with its rules. Perhaps, then, another force behind trickster's cunning is the desire to remove himself from the eating game altogether, or at least see how far out he can get and still feed his belly (for if he were to stop eating entirely he would no longer be trickster).

Love-ish (part 3)

Reader:

Agreed that all love has both selfishness and selflessness involved. However, LASTING love eventually evolves from selfishness into selflessness, as it becomes essential to care more about the other person than you do about your own needs. I believe real love contains elements of sincere attachment and commitment that make people stay in the relationship "through the good times and the bad, through sickness and health" etc. Real love is truly defined by how strong it is when life gets hard. Anyone can love when things are easy. That being said, I do not think it is elitist, it just is hard to do. You say that relationships with sociopaths seem to work. Do they? I value your blog and your need to bring society into a better understanding of what a sociopath feels and deals with in a world full of "empaths", however I think we would be hard pressed to find a relationship involving a sociopath that is truly functional (unless maybe it is with another sociopath). The sociopath of course believes the relationship is fine. They are getting what they need from it. But you ask the empath on the other end of the relationship if they are really happy and feeling fulfilled and I doubt you would hear a positive response. In most cases I am sure eventually that relationship is going to come to an end, with the empath feeling like they wasted their time. I have read many of your posts. I remember you writing that you are able to feel love. You have love for your mother, but it is more of just an "outlet" of yourself as she is your mother so it makes sense that you love her. You also wrote that you feel love for people in your life, but it is love "at that time"...and also can turn to intense hate within the same day. Lasting love is more than acting on impulse in the moment. It would appear that "at that time" kind of love does not involve any commitment. No commitment is feeling no attachment. No attachment is at the core of a sociopaths disorder. And a feeling of non attachment is never going to make an empath feel like the relationship is a good one. I do not doubt that empaths, those of us who are not aware yet of who they are actually involved with, or are in denial, or just have low enough self esteems that they do not feel worthy of something better...these empaths might be willing to go through the hardships of a relationship with a sociopath but I am convinced that if you compared the contributions that the empath is giving: they are putting way more effort, concern and selflessness than the sociopath is capable of contributing.

thanks again for your insight. It is very interesting.

M.E.:

Yeah, I see your point. I guess to a certain extent we are just talking past each other. It's amazing how varied the human race is. I love raw oysters, while a lot of people think that is wrong on many levels. I'm not saying my love is better or worse than yours, I am just saying it is different, some people might prefer it, others might hate it. The fact that we are so varied could be an evolutionary accident as you seem to suggest, or there could be some more valid reason, as I believe. It would be very difficult to prove either way, and I'm fine with that.