Average and unique

I thought this was an interesting NPR interview regarding what it really means to be average (is anyone really?) or unique (is anyone not?). Most of it is with regards to education, but the points made about statistics would seem to apply to general categorizations we make of people (e.g. introvert/extrovert), but also -- to the extent that all psychological criterion take into account the culture of those they are being applied to (pedophilia is not going to mean the same in a culture in which the average marriage age is 13, sadness doesn't necessarily mean your depressed if you are just expressing a culturally appropriate amount of grieving, criminality in one culture is entrepreneurship in another, etc.)  -- to the world of psychology.

Rose talked with us about his new book: The End Of Average: How We Succeed in a World That Values Sameness.

The opening example you use in the book is that in the 1940s, when the Air Force designed cockpits based on the average measurements of the pilots, there were an unacceptable number of crashes. But when they went back and measured thousands of pilots, across 10 body dimensions, they found that zero of them even came close to the "average" on all 10. So they concluded that they had to redesign the seats and so forth to be adjustable to each person.

Body size is a very concrete example of what I call jaggedness. There is no average pilot. No medium-sized people. When you think of someone's size you think of large, medium, small. Our mass-produced approach to clothing reinforces that. But if that were true you wouldn't need dressing rooms.

So dimensions like height and weight and arm length and waist circumference ...

Yes, they're not nearly as correlated as you would think. Height is one-dimensional, but size isn't. People are jagged in size, in intelligence, everything we measure shows the same thing.

I'm going to quote a line from the book, said to psychologist Paul Molenaar, who is arguing for a greater focus on individual difference: "What you are proposing is anarchy!" How do you make decisions about people if you can't use statistics and cutoff scores and compare them to averages?

People feel like if you focus on individuality, everyone's a snowflake, and you can't build a science on snowflakes. But the opposite has been true.

It's not that you can't use statistics, it's just that you don't use group statistics. If I want to know something about my daily spending habits, one straightforward way would be to collect records of what I spend every day. To take an average for myself would be perfectly fine.

So you can generalize across time, but not across people?

We've got to let go of putting a group into a study and taking an average and thinking that's going to be close enough to universal insight.

Now we have something better. We have a natural science of individuality that gives us a surer foundation. We've gotten breakthrough insights in a whole range of research, from cancer to child development.

Unlabeled

From a reader:

I'm an 18 year old female and I just wanted to thank you for your book. I brought it when out with my boyfriend one day as it caught my eye, but as I started at the beginning of your story, I couldn't help but notice so many traits that I associate with my own personality. I'm not sure that I would 100% label myself as a sociopath, some of the emotions I experience feel too real and even from a young age I have been quite compassionate, or at least I have come across that way. I did however find myself relating to a lot of the manipulation and self interest and appreciation that you speak of, surprising since I can be so caring and thoughtful when I want to be. Since reading your book, I've come to acknowledge and accept parts of me that I was unsure or wary of previously, and it has helped me to understand that although I may not be a classic 'sociopath' that I do have a lot of the traits which are associated with the label. Your honesty has helped me address issues with friends and family, in particular with my boyfriend, that I previously had no idea how to go about. I'm not expecting a reply or for you to tell me your identity, I just wanted to let you know how you've helped me and probably many other people who are not as normal as they make out to be. Thank you.

My response: Thanks for this, I sometimes feel that people get hung up over the label and whether or not they fit exactly in the diagnosis of sociopath, when the label seems to hardly matter in terms of people understanding who they or other people are. I think labels and descriptions can be really helpful, but particularly since there is no real consensus on what makes a sociopath, are sociopath and psychopath the same thing, are they separate or related to antisocial personality disorder, are they a disorder at all or a personality type a la machiavellianism, etc., along with the tendency that people have to conform to what the believe to be the expectations of them, people might take care with how much they identify with or rely upon a label for their self-knowledge.

The usefulness of labels (gay, sociopathic, etc.)

From a not so recent comment:

Labels do not have to be limiting. I like to think of labels as being entries in a dictionary, you can get the general information from them and then turn to the etymology to find out the unique story behind it. In my part of the world, in talking with "queer" sociopaths, labels are invaluable. I get to spend much less time talking about the nouns of a person and much more time discussing verbs and adjectives (what makes them distinct). However, I also fully believe that a label must only be a 'first step'. Let the presence (or absence) of it light a fire that causes that introspection. Labels simply the big picture but the onus is on the one using the label to add the detail.

Rather than rehash what I've written many times to the queer sociopaths and sociopathic-leaning individuals that I communicate with, I'll just paste one such instance. It was in response to a homosexual sociopath that feared adding one more label to his list of many.

"Receiving a diagnosis of psychopathy did not change the person that I am. It merely gave a new vocabulary for the person that I always had been. I could then begin to learn about myself further. There was a word, a diagnosis, for the facets of my life that seemed so alien to others. This diagnosis had research associated with it, which would be a treasure-trove of valuable information for learning. No longer was I a seemingly unconnected mess of behaviors and thoughts. I was able to retain my individuality and complexities, but I now had an idea of what a large part of me was. Like early humans mastering the spoken word, I could now communicate with myself and with others a cherished and important of my being: my psychopathy.


Many argue that the use of labels reduces the individuality of those associated with such. I believe this can be true. I am much more than my gender or psychopathy. I am a complex individual with many nuances and quirks. I am unpredictable, wild, and not caged easily. Would not the diagnosis of psychopathy cage me or put me into a box that I could not escape? I don’t believe so. The individual’s use of the label means much here.

A label can be vital for understanding the conditions one lives with. The chronic pain sufferer the learns they have arthritis can take steps to change their activities as well as accept the potential lifelong pain. The psychopath can learn behaviors to rein in impulsivity and better understand the path they must walk to stay free, while also accepting (which is usually not a problem) that they will forever be psychopathic.

As importantly, this vocabulary allows for concise conversation with others. That said, no two psychopaths are exactly alike: we have our individual differences as well as strengths and weaknesses. However, with a proper explanation, the word ‘psychopath’ can turn volumes of explanation into a few sentences. With those that I correspond with, we can can get to the interesting qualities of the person without belaboring the condition. With myself, I can have a similar conversation, focusing on the quirks that make myself who I am and setting a good portion of the larger picture aside as a single word.

There is no shame in being a psychopath. The diagnosis was a gift for me in many ways. It allowed me to see a bigger picture, even if some details are murky, and allowed me to research the condition in order to live the most fulfilling life possible. It let me realize that there are others like me and it gave me the vocabulary to speak articulately with my confidants as well as my psychopathic brothers and sisters. I am a label? No. However, the label makes many things much easier."

Sociopath like me

I recently got my waterproof iPod replaced under the warranty. They must have given me one that had been returned, because it had all of this music from the band Skillet and its ilk, which I have not really listened to before. Rather than change the music to my own, I've been listening to this music, trying to imagine what life must have been like for this guy (I assume male, statistically), who happened to have gotten this iPod, perhaps for Christmas, then decided he'd rather have something else instead. When I swim laps to his music selected largely by tempo rather than artistry, I feel like a meathead, and it's a nice change of pace.

This happened to me once years ago when I had bought a used ipod from a friend of a friend (a Brooklyn hipster before anyone knew what that was). I would wander the streets of my city listening to Sufjan Stevens, Xiu Xiu, and Neko Case. It was so fascinating to me to make that the soundtrack of my life for those months. For one, my music taste was for once very of the moment. For two, it happens to be very easy to to get concert tickets for up and coming acts before they've made it national, which was fun to see these artists in very intimate settings. But I also just felt like I was peeking into the head of this particular guy. The songs he chose to exclude from albums told me as much about him as the ones chose to include. (Also, the experience made me wonder, does absolutely everyone have a Michael Jackson song tucked away on a laptop or MP3 player somewhere?_

You learn a lot from people by stepping into their shoes for a little bit. I know there is a mix of people who read this blog: some who identify as sociopaths, some with other diagnoses, some who love/hate a sociopath, and some who are just curious. This invitation is probably most directed to the curious.

People have often opined to me that sociopaths are hated because the particular individual does bad things, not because the diagnosis itself maligned and misunderstood. In my own personal experience, this doesn't ring true -- there seems to be quiet a bit of pejorative force to the label/diagnosis. (I had a long holiday conversation with a cousin whom I hadn't seen in a couple years. He told me how he spent a long weekend worrying about how I might try to kill him or his children, finally deciding that it was not too likely.)

So here's the invitation: pretend to be a sociopath. Do like the guy in Black Like Me. Act otherwise completely like yourself but with this additional label. I'm curious to see what people think about what it feels like to have people see you through the lens of that label.

And as a parting gift, this classic from Bobby Caldwell who was advised to disguise his whiteness.

Being told you're a sociopath (part 1)

A lot of people ask me, do sociopaths know that they are sociopaths? I have always said yes, or at least that they usually know that they're different even if they're not quite sure what to label that difference. But I also think that young sociopaths often underestimate exactly how different they are from most people. From their perspective, the main differences they notice are how people make irrational emotional choices or how people do not use their brains as efficiently and effectively as the young sociopath does. What they don't necessarily realize is that other people are making similar assessments about them and their behavior. Perhaps other people notice that the young sociopath makes hyper rational choices, or that the young sociopath seems emotionally detached. In other words, young sociopaths often spend much of their time watching and studying the behavior of others, but sometimes they themselves are being observed and classified, perhaps by people that actually know what a sociopath is and are able to identify the observed traits as being sociopathic. I thought this story from a reader was a great illustration of how a sociopath feels about being told they are a sociopath:

I am 18 and an undergraduate freshman, and my story begins when I took a Philosophy class titled EVIL. I took it because it struck me as an interesting way to go about taking care of a GE requirement. And indeed, it was interesting, just not for the reasons I thought it would be….

As we started really dissecting the nature of evil, morality, conscience, guilt and regret, I began to notice things I had previously not even bothered to acknowledge. I began to disagree with my professor's black and white view on many concepts. I began to receive strange looks from classmates who always left the lecture hall with teary eyes and heavy hearts. An older woman sitting next to me eventually confronted me and suggested that I stop commenting to the class as it seemed I was offending her and other people with my, as she put it, “complete soullessness.”

I didn't understand what the big deal was. I had never had any real problems with what I said to people. I could be fun and sarcastic and usually everyone just loved to be around me. And now, for the first time, I felt exactly like an alien failing at disguising herself as a human.

One day, my professor asked me to stay after class. He asked me about my views I had expressed in lecture, so I clarified the way I had always thought of the nature of evil. He went on to ask me about more personal questions, like my attitudes towards friends and family… so on and so forth. For the first time, I didn’t know what to say. No one had ever asked me about my thoughts on these things so I said what I thought was appropriate. Finally, he  asked me if I had any history of mental health or violence. I told him, honestly, that I didn’t as far as I knew.

Then he brought up one word. He asked me if I knew what the word ‘sociopath” meant. At the time, I thought the word only existed in movies and TV dramas. A romanticized adjective to describe the Hannibal Lecters and the Dexter Morgans. As far as I knew, it had no practical meaning in everyday life. I told him as much.   

He confessed that he had been talking about me with one of his psychiatrist friends. It turned out he had actually invited his friend to sit in on a few of the lectures. He said that his friend had confirmed what he had already suspected, that I exhibited some traits of Antisocial Personality Disorder. (He didn’t use sociopathy the second time, but I learned later through research that they mean basically the same thing.) He suggested that I go see the school therapist or immediately seek some other form of professional help.

Hearing that from someone was like having water thrown on my face. I didn’t know what to say, or how to respond, how to act. So I didn’t say anything. I just thanked him for his time, told him I’d consider it, and left. I started doing meticulous research after that I learned that APD or sociopathy was a very real thing… and that the criteria of diagnosis hit very close to home for me.

And that’s when I stumbled across your book.
  
Reading through it opened my eyes in ways I wouldn't have ever guessed were possible. It was exciting and…fascinating, to have this previously fictional world open up to me and suddenly become very real. I wasn’t afraid or that shocked even. I was curious. I had to know more. And your book offered me insight that I wouldn't have never gotten otherwise. I could relate to most of what you wrote. I saw your writing and through it saw myself in a new light.

Which is what brings me to here and now. I don’t know if I really am a sociopath or just messed up in the head. Part of me really doesn't care. I am what I am. Others may have had issue with me in the past but I have never had any problems with myself. However, part of me also can’t help but be suspicious. I can look back at my life and make all the excuses I want for things I barely remember doing but that doesn’t change who I am now. If sociopathy is genetic then I don’t know where I would get it from because no one in my immediate family (that I know of) is anything like me. Is it like a switch, a mutation, a genetic malfunction, that can just happen from time to time? I don’t know.

The only thing I ask myself is how I could have gone through my life without the thought ever even entering my mind. I mean, from your book and from what most research says about this, you should know in your childhood years. But I didn’t have a normal childhood where this would have become immediately apparent. I was off, certainly. I was weird and creepy, sure. But was I really that weird, and that off?

Overgeneralizing

I chose that title instead of demonizing or stereotyping or scapegoating, but they are all getting at the same basic human impulse. I really liked how this recent comment stated it, in response to this assertion: "People’s memory is the biggest resource towards learning and avoiding people that will hurt them again":

No two people are exactly alike, but we all share common traits. You've learned to identify and avoid the people who have hurt you, and that is good. However, that memory only relates to the specific people who have harmed you. Expanding that experience to cover large groups of mostly unrelated people will lead to racism, scapegoating, and stereotyping. That makes you the aggressor and them your victims, and you'll find that the people you harm will learn to avoid you as well. 

The rest of the comment is also interesting:

You didn't seem to catch this, but "The one thing I know is we are constantly being born" is a metaphor. My interpretation is that we are always facing new circumstances, and in facing them we enter a new world every day.

Animals are capable of learning, especially when the stimuli are rewards and pain. Animals live in the wild, hunting or foraging, searching for mates, bearing and caring for offspring. If their offspring survive to become self-sufficient, then they have lived full lives. The gift of intelligence merely allows people to be alive without living, doing none of the things they were born to do.

Practical empathy

This was an interesting video about the relevance (possibly revolutionizing effect?) of empathy in our society. The video discusses the difference between affective empathy where you feel what another person is feeling, and cognitive empathy, which is about perspective taking or "stepping into somebody else's world."

An interesting assertion was "We make assumptions about people. We have prejudices about people which block us from seeing their uniqueness, their individuality. We make we use labels and highly empathic people get beyond those labels by nurturing their curiosity about others." Do people make assumptions about sociopaths? Do empathic people choose to go beyond those labels by nurturing their curiosity about sociopaths? And if so, is this a net good or net bad?



The video tells the story of how George Orwell tried to nurture his curiosity about the under privileged classes by going on an "empathy adventure", "tramping" about London in disguise, to understand what it felt like to be in the lower classes -- literally putting himself in the shoes of another.

The narrator also discusses the possibility of having empathy not just on a personal level, but on a grander scale -- political, national, religious, etc. As an example, he tells the story of the English abolitionists who got former slaves to share their experiences as slaves, which movement eventually led to the illegalization of slavery.

The narrator talks about how traditionally people try to empathize with the downtrodden, but argues that we should be more adventurous in who we try to empathize with and to focus on more practical and strategic purposes of empathy, e.g. empathizing those in power because "only then are we going to be able to adopt effective strategies" for social transformation. Similarly, he thinks the gap between what we know about climate change and what we do about climate change is also due to a lack of empathy, particularly individuals failing to empathize with people on the other side of the world and people who have yet to be born.

The thing I found interesting about this video was that (1) it was very practically and not morally based analysis of empathy and (2) although the narrator only made the distinction once, he basically was only talking about the practical usefulness of cognitive empathy. I don't think that means that affective empathy is never useful, but it has its limitations in time and space. For instance, it's difficult to say that you are feeling the emotions of people you have never met and know nothing about. Similarly, it should be impossible to say that you are feeling the emotions of people who have yet to be even born. And yet we can feel cognitive empathy for these people by trying to imagine what it might be like to be them. If we exercise our cognitive empathy by putting ourselves in their shoes like George Orwell did, our perspective will broaden and we will get greater insight into not only the institutions of the world that we live in, but also perhaps some insight into our own selves. The good news is that anyone with theory of mind can practice cognitive empathy, including sociopaths, who actually do it perhaps better than most.

More on trying to gain more awareness of our own minds:

Labels = license to do ill?

I have been asked recently about whether I think that there is any danger that people will falsely self-identify as sociopaths and then use that label as an excuse to behave poorly. I think that labels definitely do affect the way people behave. David Dobbs wrote about how schizophrenics are treated in North America nations versus African nations, suggesting that because the disorder is considered more of a temporary aberration in some African cultures (as opposed to the sense that it is a full blown disability in western nations), African schizophrenics are more high-functioning. The theory is that western schizophrenics aren't expected to act normally so they don't, at least not as often as African schizophrenics. Of course I'm sure there's a lot more going on to explain the difference, but there is still a lot of power to a label.

So I think this is a legitimate concern, often acceptance of a label leads to better behavior through the process of reappropriaatinon. An academic article, "The Reappropriation of Stigmatizing Labels: Implications for Social Identity" describes the process:

Given that to appropriate means “to take possession of or make use of exclusively for oneself,” we consider reappropriate to mean to take possession for oneself that which was once possessed by another, and we use it to refer to the phenomenon whereby a stigmatized group revalues an externally imposed negative label by selfconsciously referring to itself in terms of that label. Instead of passively accepting the negative connotative meanings of the label, the speaker above rejected those damaging meanings and through reappropriation imbued the label with positive connotations. By reappropriating this negative label, he sought to renegotiate the meaning of the word, changing it from something hurtful to something empowering. His actions imply two assumptions that are critical to reappropriation. First, names are powerful, and second, the meanings of names are subject to change and can be negotiated and renegotiated.

It's probably obvious why reappropriation or a label is appealing to members of a stigmatized class of persons:

Stigma, according to Goffman, is an attribute that discredits and reduces the person “from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one” (Goffman, 1963, p. 3). Social stigma links a negatively valued attribute to a social identity or group membership. Stigma is said to exist when individuals “possess (or are believed to possess) some attribute, or characteristic, that conveys a social identity that is devalued in a particular social context”. 
***
Being stigmatized carries with it a number of burdens. First and foremost, stigmatized persons are disadvantaged in terms of opportunities they are afforded and the outcomes that they achieve. Overt and covert prejudice and discrimination can deny the stigmatized entry into elite stations in life, from education to jobs to housing.
***
Stigma, like categorization (Wittenbrink, Judd & Park, 2001) and stereotype threat (Steele & Aronson, 1995), is context-dependent (Crocker, Major & Steele, 1998). Thus, an individual may be stigmatized in one context but not in another context. In different cultures and in different times, groups such as the overweight or gays have not been burdened with stigma. Instead, these features are or were considered normal, or, in some cases, desirable (Archer, 1985). Intellectual ambition may be lauded in one context (e.g. classroom) but derided in another context (e.g. fraternity) or by another group (e.g. disadvantaged inner city youths). It is the variability of stigma that intrigues us. It suggests that what is considered stigmatizing is socially constructed and, in the end, malleable. In the case of stereotype threat, a social category label takes on negative connotations within a particular context. One approach to decreasing stereotype threat, and thereby to reduce the potentially performance-constraining effects of stigma, is to frame the task as non-diagnostic of underlying ability (Steele & Aronson, 1995). An alternative approach, which is the focus of this chapter, is to transform the connotative meaning of the traits that are linked to the social category, revaluing them positively. Reappropriation, typically in the form of self-labeling, is one strategy that attempts to revalue social identities. Reappropriation and other socially creative strategies are possible because of the situational, socially constructed, and thus malleable nature of stigma.

How and why reappropriation?

Where “queer” had connoted undesirable abnormality, by the fact that it is used by the group to refer to itself, it comes to connote pride in the groups’ unique characteristics. Where before it referred to despised distinctiveness, it now refers to celebrated distinctiveness. Reappropriation allows the label’s seemingly stable meaning to be open to negotiation. In addition, the defiant act of reappropriation may attack the negative evaluations of the denoted group. By refusing to perceive “queer” as demeaning, in-group members make it more difficult for out-group members to gain recognition for their own display of superiority, thereby undermining one of the functions of prejudice (Fein & Spencer, 1997). The ability of reappropriation to deprive outgroup members of a linguistic weapon is nicely exemplified in an episode of The Simpsons. In this episode, Homer becomes angry with a gay character for using the word queer to describe himself, yelling “And another thing. You can’t use the word queer... that is ourword for you.” This example emphasizes that implicit in the concept of reappropriation is the idea that language is an ongoing process of negotiation, a power struggle over the connotative meaning of symbolic referents. As such, self-labeling can serve to diffuse the negative connotations of the word. Further, by reclaiming names formerly soaked in derision, an individual exerts his or her agency and proclaims his or her rejection of the presumed moral order.

In successful reappropriation, an alternative vision is presented that does not necessarily change the underlying denotative meaning of a concept but transforms the connotative evaluative implications. In the case of “queer,” reappropriation implies that deviance or abnormality is itself not necessarily a bad thing, thereby promoting a celebration of diversity. Through reappropriation, the implication of distinctiveness in the term “queer” was not disputed or challenged, but rather the evaluative meaning that it connoted was transformed. Via reappropriation, the group asserts that it is still unique, or exceptional, but that exceptionality is positively valued. The distinctiveness of the group and the label is maintained, but it is simply the negativity that is challenged.

The rest of the article details a model of misappropriation. But yes, there is a very real danger to labels, both in people self-identifying strongly with a label and possibly the normalizing of certain behaviors via reappropriation of the label. Those are the natural consequences of labels. But, they are not necessarily bad consequences, particularly when the label has been overly stigmatized and the reappropriation of the term allows the label to reflect more truthful connotations as part of a larger cultural re-evaluation of the stigma, as well as allowing the stigmatized group to reintegrate themselves into a society that is seeking to exclude or subjugate them.

But don't sociopaths deserve their stigma? If you look at the core personality traits of a sociopath, they are not necessarily negative, but neutral or even positive -- charm, confidence, fearlessness, etc. As the article mentions:

Traits often take on different connotative meanings when placed in the context of the in-group versus the out-group. For example, intelligence when describing Jews (when they are an out-group) may be interpreted negatively as conniving. With regard to group-based evaluations (Brewer, 1979), loyal may be considered positively when describing the in-group, but take on negative connotations, such as clannish or exclusionary, when describing the out-group. Galinsky and Moskowitz (2000) presented traits in the context of the in-group and the outgroup and asked participants to rate the favorability of each trait (cf.Esses & Zanna, 1995). Traits were rated less favorably in the context of the out-group, even when the assignment of traits did not differ.