Out of sync = red flag

Someone tweeted this TED article to me and I retweeted it, but also thought I would give my thoughts: "This is how our bodies betray us in a lie". The main idea is:

When we are being inauthentic — projecting a false emotion or covering a real one — our nonverbal and verbal behaviors begin to misalign. Our facial expressions don’t match the words we’re saying. Our postures are out of sync with our voices. They no longer move in harmony with each other; they disintegrate into cacophony.

The article is pretty interesting. It talks about how most people focus on the words when they're trying to determine who is a liar or not, but body language is a much better determinant. They did studies that found that people with brain hemisphere issues that make them less prone to focus on language do better at identifying liars than people with brain hemisphere issues that don't.

And this passage:

Presence manifests as resonant synchrony. Presence stems from believing our own stories. When we don’t believe our stories, we are inauthentic — we are deceiving, in a way, both ourselves and others. And this self-deception is, it turns out, observable to others as our confidence wanes and our verbal and nonverbal behaviors become dissonant. It’s not that people are thinking, “He’s a liar.” It’s that people are thinking, “Something feels off. I can’t completely invest my confidence in this person.” As Walt Whitman said, “We convince by our presence,” and to convince others we need to convince ourselves.

... makes me think of my own life experiences. There are so many weird things that happen to me, like my school nurse detaining me for suspicion of drug usage, or getting detained by security officers, getting interrogated by building maintenance personnel, or any number of weird situations. I have had two really weird situations like this in the past few months, being told that my "story doesn't add up" and basically be one or two steps away from having the cops called on me for nothing. I was talking to a family member about it who said that these people are all just picking up on a vibe from me that seems a little off, like I'm a person of interest or a sketchy character -- I'm triggering some evolutionary level warning system in their brains. I do think this is true, but I always wondered what their warning system is or what it is about me that triggers it. Now I wonder if it's not his asynchrony between my body movements and words that comes from being a naturally sort of inauthentic seeming person.

Also regarding all of this being hard work:

Simply put, lying — or being inauthentic — is hard work. We’re telling one story while suppressing another, and as if that’s not complicated enough, most of us are experiencing psychological guilt about doing this, which we’re also trying to suppress. We just don’t have the brainpower to manage it all without letting something go — without “leaking.”

A lot of people wonder how I could be basically an introvert while being sociopathic. The reason why is because it is so draining to have to project a particular image while constantly monitoring how that image is being received and making small adjustments accordingly. I've gotten a lot better about just being myself (had to have a better sense of self before that was even possible, so it's not like everyone can just choose to do that whenever they feel like it). Even that takes a little bit more effort, though, because I'm still not really used to it. And I don't love people in general. So introvert.

Not caring to act like caring (part 1)

From a non-English speaking reader:

For a long time I haven't known about I am different from others. For example, if a friend's close relative dies, I always try to act like feel sorry for him/her. But, I thought it was normal and what everybody doing. Well, honestly I never thought about what everybody doing. I didn't care about them. That was all normal to me at least. Because I born this way.

Last year summer I was in some city, visiting my friend. His father is a coroner (I am in med school btw). So, his father asked if I wanna attend one of the autopsies. I said yes. 

Long story short, the guy was shot to dead. Young guy. His sister came in before the autopsy. She was saying something like "Get up my little brother, let's go home." and she was crying. But you know I find it kinda funny because I thought that "He is dead you idiot, How do you expect him to get up?". Well, I know actually it is not funny but it was to me. I've almost laughed at it. I slightly smiled at it so, I turned around and closed my mouth with my hand like feeling sorry. After that I realized something wrong with me. Not wrong actually but different.

So I started thinking about it a lot. I remembered some memories while I was thinking. I looked at internet about it. I read a lot about antisocial personality disorder. Remorse, irresponsibility, impulsivity, lack of empathy, conduct disorder bla bla... It fits perfect. So, I found that I am a sociopath. I like being it but the thing is I cannot stand pretending like I care. My tactic was just being sympathetic but I am right opposite inside. It is too hard to pretend for real. After I noticed it was not what everybody doing, it get harder and harder, day by day. People started to noticed something wrong with me (you are selfish, you are bastard cause you only care yourself, stuffs like that), one by one because I started doing it sloppy. 

The thing is, I don't want to have problems with people. It is just unnecessary but I can't do it anymore. I just try to do not interact with people but I am being the weird boy then, so I get spotted. You know people feel afraid from unknown. Then, that cause anger to unknown. If you don't talk to them you are an unknown. So, they are being hostile to me. 

I read a lot about sociology, psycology, some Dostoyevski books just to find how not to be spotted by them with the least touch. Still didn't find any solution. For now, I have to act if I wanna get some comfort. But I don't wanna fucking act a role anymore. When I communicate I see stupid things about them and it is fucking hard to be kind and act like they're cool, good friends or something. Or listen to them while they talk about their girlfriends/boyfriends, they are being strong because they handle so many difficulties bla bla bla... 

How you people endure this? I really need advice.

M.E.:

Your predicament is the predicament of all sociopaths and is probably the worst thing about being a sociopath. Can I publish what you wrote? People think that we wear masks just to manipulate and get what we want, but a lot of the time (most of the time?) it's because we have to, otherwise people will persecute us.

Just recently I was flying somewhere foreign. The flight attendants handed out the customs, etc. forms for our destination. I was familiar with this country, and knew that I would have time in line to fill out this form, so I planned to fill them out then. About halfway through the flight a flight attendant saw the forms on the seat next to me and asked me (only me) if I had filled them out. Why does she care? I said no and smiled what I thought was a friendly smile. She got irritated with me and demanded that I fill them out. Again, why does she care? But I know there's something about me that rubs people the wrong way, particularly psuedo-authority figures. The week before I got stopped and detained by a private security guard for nothing. A couple weeks before that, I got stopped and detained by the manager of an apartment complex of an acquaintance of mine. This has happened to me my whole life and as overt as this persecution is, there are dozens of little, less noticeable incidents that happen to me weekly.

But I'm so curious, why do you read Dostoevsky to figure out how not to be spotted?

(cont.)

Psychopaths excel at deceptive facial expressions

A reader sent me a link to the article "Would I lie to you? ‘'leakage’' in deceptive facial expressions relates to psychopathy and emotional intelligence."  In the study, researchers tested the ability of psychopaths and those with high emotional intelligence ("EI") in emotional deception.  Here are some fascinating highlights (citations omitted):

• Emotional deception via the alteration of facial expressions can occur in three ways : simulating an expression involves adopting an expression in the absence of any real emotion; masking an emotion involves replacing a felt emotion with a different emotional expression; and neutralizing an expression involves concealing a felt emotion with a neutral face.
• Some psychopathic individuals are chameleon-like actors and appear to use their acting skills to effectively manipulate others in various interpersonal contexts. In corporate settings, white-collar criminals with psychopathic characteristics, such as Bernard Madoff, often find easy victims by appearing trustworthy, empathetic, and kind. Psychopathic offenders can readily feign remorse and a pro-social attitude to manipulate their way into lower sentences (i.e., manslaughter rather than murder), permissions to appeal their sentences, and undeserved conditional release. Despite their much longer criminal histories and poorer conditional release histories, psychopaths are 2.5 times more likely than non-psychopaths to be released when they apply for parole . Further, these decisions are faulty; psychopathic offenders in both studies spent fewer successful days on release compared to non-psychopaths released. In fact, extended interpersonal contact with a psychopath can lead to less accurate perceptions of psychopathic traits.  
• Despite evidence that psychopathic individuals are successful manipulators, the manner in which they deceive and manipulate others is open to question. Psychopathy arguably is associated with effective emotional deception. The psychopath’s distinctive lack of emotional experience may prevent emotional ‘‘interference’’ in feigning emotional displays. That is, because of the lack of real emotion, there may be less genuine emotion ‘‘leaking’’ onto the false face during a fabricated emotional display. In support of this prediction, Herpetz et al. (2001) found that psychopathic offenders exhibited fewer and less intense facial expressions in response to pleasant and unpleasant emotional images relative to controls. We predict that psychopathic individuals, particularly those with strong interpersonal-affective features of the disorder, will have an advantage when attempting to control their facial expressions during deception because of their lack of emotion; such individuals may express less ‘‘leakage’’ of genuine emotion during deception. However, due to emotional recognition deficits and a lack of understanding of what a sincere expression ‘‘looks like’’, these individuals will not necessarily be proficient at creating a facial expression consistent with the feigned emotion.
• As predicted, psychopathic traits – specifically, high levels of interpersonal manipulation – were related to shorter durations of unintended emotional ‘‘leakage’’ during deceptive expressions. In contrast, the erratic lifestyle element of psychopathy predicted greater emotional inconsistency during deceptive displays.  Individuals higher in EI – specifically, the ability to perceive and express emotion – feigned emotions more convincingly than others but were not more immune to emotional leakage.

In other words, psychopaths are the best at not letting other actual emotions interfere with the feigned emotion (presumably because the psychopath does not have strong feelings to suppress), but that people with high EI did a better job mimicking actual emotion (presumably because they know better what those emotions look/feel like).

Liar, liar

One thing I am always a little surprised by is how horrified people are of the idea of sociopath mask-wearing and lying. Doesn't everybody? The main difference seems to be what sorts of things people bother to lie about? Maybe not even that? From the New Yorker blog's "How to Tell When Someone is Lying":

People lie all the time. According to the psychologist Robert Feldman, who has spent more than four decades studying the phenomenon, we lie, on average, three times during a routine ten-minute conversation with a stranger or casual acquaintance. Hardly anyone refrains from lying altogether, and some people report lying up to twelve times within that time span. I might open a conversation, for instance, by saying how nice it is to meet someone—when I’m really not at all happy about it. I might go on to say that I grew up in Boston—a lie, technically, since I really grew up in a small town about forty minutes outside the city. I could say that the person’s work sounds fascinating, when it’s no such thing, or compliment him on his (drab) tie or his (awful) shirt. And if the person mentions loving a certain downtown restaurant where I’ve had a terrible experience? I’m likely to just smile and nod and say, Yes, great place. Trust me: we often lie without giving it so much as a second thought.

We lie in most any context—Feldman’s work has turned up frequent lies in relationships ranging from the most intimate (marriage) to the completely casual. Some lies are small (“You look like you’ve lost a bit of weight”) and some bigger (“I did not have sex with that woman”). Sometimes they are harmless, and sometimes they are not.

Interestingly, although it is very difficult to become a personal lie-detector, studies suggest that people are pretty ok at subconsciously detecting lying:

In a series of studies, out this month in the journal Psychological Science, the Berkeley team had students watch a video of a possible criminal who was being questioned about stealing a hundred dollars. As in an actual interrogation, the suspect responded to both baseline questions (“What are you wearing?” “What’s the weather like outside?”) and target questions (“Did you steal the money?” “Are you lying to me right now?”). Half of the potential criminals were lying; half were telling the truth. Each participant watched one truthful and one deceptive video.

Next, the students completed a simple assessment: Were the pleaders in the videos telling the truth? Just as in prior studies, ten Brinke’s subjects, when asked direct questions, did no better than chance at determining who was truthful and who wasn’t.

But then the students participated in one of two unconscious lie-detection tasks. In each, they saw still photos of the two pleaders alongside words that were associated with either truth, such as “honest” and “genuine,” or lies, such as “deceitful” and “dishonest.” Their goal was to categorize the words as indicative of either truth or lies, as quickly and accurately as possible, regardless of the face they saw along with it. If “genuine” flashed on the screen, they would press a button to classify it as a truth-category word as soon as possible.

When the researchers dug deeper, they saw that the participants’ unconscious instinct fared far better: in both studies, they were significantly faster at properly categorizing lie- and truth-related concepts when those concepts were presented with the lying or truthful face, respectively, from the video. Seeing a liar’s face made people faster at classifying lie-related words than truth-related words—and seeing a truth-teller had the opposite effect. “When you see a liar’s face, the concept of deception is activated in your mind even if you’re not consciously aware of it,” ten Brinke hypothesizes. “It’s still unclear just how high a percentage of lies our unconscious mind is able to sense accurately, but discrimination is definitely occurring.”

Unconscious discrimination seems to play out in more life-like scenarios, too. In a series of prior studies, conducted by an unrelated group at the University of Manheim, the psychologist Marc-André Reinhard and his colleagues found that the ability of student judges to detect deception improved drastically if they were given time to think—but only if, in that time frame, they thought about something other than the case they were judging. If they had to make an immediate judgment, they did no better than chance. The same was true if they were allowed to deliberate consciously. But when they were kept from consciously deliberating, by, for example, completing a demanding word-search puzzle, their accuracy improved significantly. Reinhard concluded that, in the unconscious-deliberation condition, the brain had had time to integrate the subtle cues that our conscious mind can’t quite perceive into a more complete judgment.

Why is it so hard for people to spot sociopaths then? Could it be that some people are willfully blind?

Song: She's Always a Woman

Even before I had ever heard the word sociopath applied to me, I always sort of identified with this song and it does seem to accurately portray the ups and downs with being with a female sociopath.

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Benefiting from sociopaths

I have gotten a lot of pushback from a statement that I make in the book: "I believe that most people who interact with sociopaths are better off than they otherwise would be." I don't necessarily mean it in the sense that the sociopath has directly benefited the person in a specific way, although I don't think that's an entirely outrageous statement either. When I think of the percentages of people I have harmed (even unintentionally) with the number of people that I have benefited in some small way, from things as small as holding a door open for them (people love good manners) to getting them a job (I love it when people owe me favors even more than I like them repaying those favors), the scale tips drastically in the direction of positive -- maybe 99.9% of people I interact with benefit in some small way?

Yes, true, those that are harmed tend to be harmed in larger ways than the corresponding benefit of having someone open a door for you. But even the people who get harmed benefit from their interactions with a sociopath in a way. They have the choice of either wallowing in the role of a victim or of taking the opportunity to learn from the experience (and who better to teach you about yourself than a sociopath). It's a little bit like how surviving cancer can give someone a healthier outlook on life. Life is filled with challenges and suffering. We will never eliminate it, and there are a lot of unintended negative consequences when we try (see Taleb's Antifragile). Even when we do successfully eliminate bad things from our lives, we invent new reasons to be upset -- so-called "first world problems". When we overcome challenges, even when they come in the form of a sociopath, we come out stronger. If there was never any opposition to your worldview or no one around to exploit the sloppiest of your mental shortcuts or delusions about the way the world works, then your mind (and our society, think Rome) would atrophy the same way your muscles do when they're not used. Hitting the gym is hard and can even be painful, but the result is a stronger you.

A reader said something similar:

I just finished reading your book... And wow.  I'm not a sociopath - I have very definite negative feelings.  

Several years ago, I was "ruined" by someone I believe is a sociopath.  A lot of what you described in the book fits her quite well, though she's never had (to my knowledge, at least) a professional diagnosis.  Her manipulation and seduction of my (at the time) fiance wound up destroying my relationship with him shortly before we were supposed to get married.  Now...well, if I still knew how to get in touch with her, I might thank her for what she did.  She didn't do it out of the kindness of her heart, obviously, but I'm now in a much better and happier relationship with a new man, and while I've had difficulty trusting some people after that incident, my life is better than it had been before I met this sociopath.

It's hard being an empath, honestly.  I'm a bit on the cold side of people without sociopathic tendencies; I can analyze cost/benefit and act on that.  It's my preferred method of engaging with the world.  But emotions can come into play, especially guilt and poor self-image.  I live with a young woman who lets her emotions so fully control her actions that she has no life direction, no job, no ability to stay focused on any one thing for more than a couple months at a time (in the past year she's decided she wants to be a vet, a pediatrician, a pathologist, and now a specialist in herpetology so that she could work at zoos).  Her ability to feel emotions is damaging to her ultimate well-being.

It's terrifying for us, to think about sociopaths who are good at manipulating and enjoy manipulating, because we lie to ourselves and pretend that we don't manipulate others and others aren't actively manipulating us.  But that's not true.  I know how to manipulate my husband into doing what I want. I don't always, but I have that power.  And he knows how to manipulate me into doing what he wants.  He doesn't always choose to do so.  The difference is that in our viewpoint, sociopaths don't feel obligated to buy into and perpetuate that lie.  

Reading your book was a very uncomfortable thing for me because you were so honest.  But I learned a long time ago that the discomfort I'm feeling is because I learned to view the world in a slightly different way.  I can't just sit back and pretend that sociopaths are nameless, faceless people out in the world.  By putting your own voice out there, I was able to engage with you, the author of the book, and understand your unique self at least a little bit.  I received a wealth of understanding from reading this book, and now I need to take the time to ponder.

Reading your book was a terrific, frightening, wonderful experience.  I cannot think about sociopaths in the same way anymore.  So thank you.

Passing

I just watched a film about a young Jewish woman who "passes" in occupied France during the Second World War. It reminded me of a time that I was helping two elderly Holocaust survivors fill out forms for restitution funds. I had been instructed that the Germans are great record keepers and very wary of fraud. I had been warned of people being denied their benefits because of very small inconsistencies in documentation, e.g. spring 1941 vs. March 1941. With that in mind, I tried to be as precise as I could with dates. The man's papers seemed to be more or less in order, and he had the identifying tattoo to match. The woman's papers were more confusing. She had dates from a previous claim, but they didn't really make sense with the story she told me. She was in and out of camps, according to her paperwork, and there were other documents that contradicted both what she told me and what her previous forms said. I didn't really know what to do, so I told her I would ask for help. She panicked, grabbed my arm, sat me back down. Pointing to the form with the dates, she said "this isn't me." She told me in her stilted English about how with her blonde hair and blue eyes, no one suspected her of being Jewish. She was able to "pass" for the duration of the war, working as a seamstress. The documents corroborating her time spent in camps she had gotten from another young woman who had died shortly after liberation.

Of course I felt no moral compunction about filling out the forms as necessary for her benefits (i.e. lying). I did wonder, though, was she lucky to have come to me rather than most any other member of the general populace? I'd like to think that anybody else would have done the same as me, but it's hard to know. Arguing in her favor, she must have suffered during the war, if not in the same ways, for the same reasons as those the restitution was meant to help. She probably lived in constant fear of being discovered. Who knows who she had to bribe or befriend to maintain her freedom -- being able to "pass" is not really a passive endeavor. Arguing against her, we don't want to help people who seem to be able to help themselves. We are disgusted with those who seem to game the system, accepting government help rather than seeking employment, being opportunistic about social safety nets, etc. We may even consider her less noble for taking her God given gifts of aryan beauty and making the most of them. But luckily for her, "we" only despise those things when we are unavoidably confronted with them, when we have our faces rubbed in the ugliness of reality, taking away with us the scent of our hypocrisy. As long as she continues to "pass," we may forget she and her kind ever existed, which is all anyone can ever really ask for from society.

Character (part 2)

The other reason for some sort of behavioral code is the idea of character. When I think of identity, I think of a mirror that reflects nothing back. When I think of personality, I think of the masks that I wear when I interact with people. Or maybe I think of the way my brain is wired, the things I think about when I'm not trying to think of anything in particular or anything at all. I have a limited degree of control over these things, if any at all.

The only self-descriptive word that I seem to identify with is the word character. To me, character is the sum of choices that I've made, about myself and what I choose to say and do from day to day. Maybe other sociopaths don't do that sort of math, but I do. Maybe it's because I have one friend who lives life beautifully, and I think, why not me too? I make a thousand choices every day, why not give them some sort of theme? Some sense of cohesion aesthetic appeal?

I thought this Atlantic article made some good points about the upside of living life with character:


It has been estimated that the average American tells 11 lies per week. Is this bad for us? Suppose we knew that a lie would never be detected, nor would we be punished. Suppose we had some means of ensuring that the lie would never cause us any physical or psychological harm through loss of sleep or the like. Suppose even that telling the lie would actually redound to our benefit, at least in the sense that it would secure us the pleasure, status, wealth, or power that those fudging the truth commonly seek. Under these circumstances, would it still make sense to tell the truth? Or would lying becoming the prudent course of action?

In his 2005 runaway philosophy best seller, On Bullshit, Princeton University's Harry Frankfurt distinguishes between lying and what he called "bullshit." Though liars do not tell the truth, they care about it, while the bullshitter does not even care about the truth and seeks merely to impress. Liars tell deliberate untruths, while bullshitters merely do not admit when they do not know something. This is a particularly pervasive form of untruth in my own orbits, medicine and academia, where people wish others to believe that we know more than we do. So instead of saying, "I don't know," we make things up, merely giving the appearance of knowledge while actually saying nothing.
***

Perhaps the most powerful moral argument for honesty has to do with what the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called "bad faith." Liars deceive others, but in a sense, liars also deceive themselves. When we lie we tend to distort our own view of reality, and the more often we lie, the more habitual this distortion becomes. Over time, the habit of lying divorces us further and further from reality, so we see less and less clearly the choices before us and what is at stake in them. Eventually, we may find ourselves unable to see what we are really doing and how it is affecting others and ourselves. We end up leading inauthentic and irresponsible lives.

To tell the truth is to live authentically and responsibly, to really live. At times we may make honest mistakes, misperceiving what is really happening, failing to see things in appropriate context, or even operating unknowingly on deliberate untruths. Whenever possible, however, we should be honest with others and ourselves. When we are honest, we ground ourselves most completely in the world we actually inhabit, being as real as we can with others, and reducing as much as possible the distance between the way things seem to be and the way they really are. In the final analysis, honesty means avoiding illusion and unreality, instead keeping life as real as we possibly can.



Maybe it's because I grew up with a narcissist father that living a life of delusion does not appeal.

Lance Armstrong and keeping secrets

People think he's a sociopath. I don't know, I just don't get the vibe from him. But I did relate to him in another way. I also have a secret that I keep from almost everybody, even people I genuinely like or even admire. For various reasons, I have been contemplating telling more people about me (not something I generally recommend, but they're probably going to find out from third parties and it seems like it's better if it comes from me).

I was reading an interview of Matthew McConaughey of all people, weighing in on the Lance Armstrong admissions and how it felt to be lied to:

"My first reaction was I was pissed off," he said, explaining that he wanted to be "delicate" in how he addressed the scandal. "I was mad. I then got kind of sad for him. First off, I had a part of me that took it kind of personally, which I think a lot of people have."

"For him, it was impersonal because he was living a lie," McConaughey added. "It was a whole unanimous facade he had to carry around."
***
"What I realized is that those of us that took that personally, like, 'Oh, he lied to me,' it's not true," said McConaughey. . . . "What I mean by this is, what was he supposed to do? Call me to the side and go, 'Hey man, I did it but don't tell anybody.' Then I would have really had a reason to be pissed off at him, going, 'You want me to walk around holding this?'"

First of all, unanimous facade? That makes no kind of sense. But it's a good attitude to have. The thing is, yes, I've done horrible things to people or good things to people with horrible motivations. I'm not a good person. I don't really deserve the benefit of the doubt. But it's also true what McConaughey said -- it's (almost) never personal.

Gullibility

I thought this was an interesting video from illusionist Derren Brown about gullibility, via Brain Pickings:



"Somewhat counterintuitively, it’s the more trusting people that actually emerge as less gullible. They obviously get fooled, as we all do… but they tend to be very good at learning from those experiences where they have been duped, they tend not to generalize it over everybody and then to start being cynical about everything, which then makes them more effective socially."

"You create a false logic. You create what appears to be an A, B, C. . . . That's not about gullibility, that's about a certain grammar that people will follow. . . . We can't function unless we form those patterns . . . . It's better to have that false positive than a false negative. . . . We are hardwired to fall for that . . . . it's pretty much inescapable and ultimately probably positive."

I found this relevant for two main reasons:

1. A lot of people either write me or come on here and feel like an idiot for having bought into the "lie" that their sociopath spun for them. I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of, I don't know that it is necessarily a lie, and also I don't believe these sociopath slayer types who say that they are so skeptical that say they always spot sociopaths and beat them at their own game (whatever that means).

2. I actually think sociopaths tend to be gullible in surprising ways. That's why I think that feeding them false information, particularly about areas that are their natural blind spots like the emotional worlds of others, is effective. I know others have disputed this point with me before, but it at least works on me.

Let's play doctor (part 2)

It's been a while since we've had an, "am I a sociopath?" post. I thought this one was interesting. There were several things that I really identified with and other things that I didn't as much (maybe you all can guess which is which), but who knows what that means.


Hey, I've just come across your blog and I relate to your thoughts. I'm a 16 year old sociopath girl. I've always known that I was different from everyone else, and about a year ago someone told me I was a sociopath. I didn't really know what that meant at the time and I spent a lot of time researching it. That person was dead on. I score a 29 on the Hare psychopathy checklist too. The post you had that has a representation of how a sociopath develops from child to adult is extremely accurate, however I only relate to the one about a male, not the one about a female. Let you know this, though: I am a very well-liked and somewhat popular person at my school. I'm sure people realize I'm not quite like them, but they are drawn to me for that reason exactly.

 I am not a violent sociopath, but I am indifferent to violence. I do not truly love anyone although I am attached to some people such as family friends but only for selfish reasons. I think if one of them were to die, i would get over it quickIy. I hate saying "i love you" to my family because I don't LOVE them.

I lie all the time, I enjoy manipulating people, I feel the need to be in control. I do not have empathy of any sort...

However, I've found that I do get angry. Do you get angry? People say that sociopaths don't have any emotions at all, but anger is an emotion.

Also, when you see violent movies or hear about shootings or murders do you feel anything towards the victims? I feel so aloof in my world of other teenagers  because I feel nothing at all. When I heard about the massacre of the children at Sandy Hook elementary school, I didn't care at all. Like at all. Today in my English class we are discussing slavery and before showing us this clip from a movie about the transportation of slaves in the Middle Passage, my teacher said "this is extremely graphic and hard to watch and it's very emotional..." Blah blah blah. When I watched it, the only thing I felt was interest in what would have gone on, I felt nothing for the slaves who were suffering incredibly. Everyone (including the teacher) was like crying and shit and i always find it fucking annoying when people show emotion. It's like this for everything, I only feel extreme interest about violence and crimes. I enjoy reading about all the different stories about all the serial killers and how they went about getting them alone and how they killed them. I would never or could ever do anything violent, but I love to read about it. Do you feel this way?

I am a very high functioning sociopath. I  am very intelligent (125 IQ) and I put on all sorts of masks and know how to behave in all the different social situations. I find it extremely exhausting though. It annoys me to no end and I find myself sometimes just not putting on a mask because its such a low risk situation. I need motivation to act like an empath and when I don't have motivation for something I would gain from acting, I just don't bother. Do you find yourself doing that?

I also am extremely impressionable. When I read a book or watch a movie/tv show where I really like the personality of a character, in the time period in which I like them a lot, I mix their personality with mine. It usually doesn't last long, and I'll find another that I like. People that I've known for a long time never know what I'm going to do or say because I am so impulsive.

Also, I'm attractive and I can have whatever guy I want. The whole game is getting them to like me and chasing them. When I win, and I always do, within a couple months ill get bored and dump them. Ordinary people are just so lame and boring and easy to manipulate.

I get bored so so easily and I have to live my life on the edge without explicitly breaking the rules. I get off on it.

It's a relief to be able to say this all to you because I can't say it to anyone else..

Thoughts?

How to spot a liar

A reader sent me this interesting and relatively short Ted video about how to spot a liar.



She mentions two "rules":
1.  Lying takes two -- person who lies and person who chooses to believe the lie. "Everyone is willing to give you something for whatever it is you're hungry for. If you don't want to be deceived, you have to know what it is that you are hungry for." Lying fills in the gap between our wishes and our fantasies.

2.  We're against lying, but we're covertly for it. It has evolutionary value to it. Babies will fake a cry. Trained lie spotters get to the truth 90% of the time, everyone else 54%.

There was an interesting discussion halfway through about how an honest person vs. a dishonest person would deal with being confronted. This one was interesting, if anything, in learning how to lie better. Falsely accused people are furious throughout the interview, not peppered here and there was a rational detailing of events.

Lying is an interesting thing to me. I don't really think about it that often. I don't think of people as liars or truth tellers. I don't even generally think of things I have said as lies or truth. I think it's probably because I have a deeply relativistic sense of the truth. I understand more than most people perhaps that everyone has their own different reality, including me. I don't think most of the "lies" we hear or say from day to day are intentional, but just reflect the "liars" distorted view of the world. I understand that for the most part, it is difficult if not impossible to determine an objective Reality in any given circumstance so I take everything with a grain of salt. Or I take it on faith perhaps, but always with a healthy dose of doubt that will trigger when new information becomes available to me, in a Bayesian updating sort of way. I assign a likelihood of accuracy in my mind, like whether my parents are actually my parents is 98% likely to be true, based on what I know about them and me. Or sometimes a long story someone has told me is 80% true, true in some parts and not true in others and it isn't exactly clear which is which. I am sometimes (often?) wrong in my assessments. And it is true that sometimes people are intentionally But when someone has gamed me, I'm often delightedly surprised that they have managed to do it. It makes life more interesting to think that anyone could be trying to trick you at any moment, but most of the time it's not true or the stakes are so low that it just seems like the sort of toll we have to pay to live in a world of collective delusion.

Which is not to say that we shouldn't learn people's tells, because we can learn so much about a person from the way they see the world, whether they are aware of their deceit or not.

Creativity = immorality

File this under "how to become more like a sociopath," this Scientific American article discusses how being creative (and even thinking more creatively) makes you more likely to cross moral boundaries:

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers at Harvard and Duke Universities demonstrate that creativity can lead people to behave unethically. In five studies, the authors show that creative individuals are more likely to be dishonest, and that individuals induced to think creatively were more likely to be dishonest. Importantly, they showed that this effect is not explained by any tendency for creative people to be more intelligent, but rather that creativity leads people to more easily come up with justifications for their unscrupulous actions.
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The authors hypothesized that it is creativity which causes unethical behavior by allowing people the means to justify their misdeeds, but it is hard to say for certain whether this is correct given the correlational nature of the study. It could just as easily be true, after all, that unethical behavior leads people to be more creative, or that there is something else which causes both creativity and dishonesty, such as intelligence. To explore this, the authors set up an experiment in which participants were induced into a creative mindset and then given the opportunity to cheat.  [It did.]
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In addition, the researchers had guessed that creativity would lead to unethical behavior because it enabled people to more easily come up with justifications for their actions. Research has previously shown that whenever people do something which might be perceived as bad, they tend to reduce the ‘badness’ of this behavior by finding some justification for their corrupt behavior. As an example, if you find yourself being less than honest on your taxes, you may justify this by telling yourself that this is something everyone does, or that it doesn’t really hurt anyone.

The craziest part about this is the final experiment, that basically shows that one of the primary reasons why people don't cheat is that they can't come up with their own justifications for their behavior and that once you provide a readymade justification for them, they are much more likely to cheat:

So, if creativity leads to dishonesty primarily by assisting in coming up with justifications for dishonest behavior a creative mindset should not influence people’s likelihood of cheating if they already have some justification in mind. To test this idea, the researchers provided ‘justifications’ for some participants by allowing them to roll the die multiple times, but telling them that only the first roll counted. It turns out that one way of increasing the ease with which people can come up with justifications is by allowing them to observe something which almost happened, but didn’t. In this case, rolling a six on the second roll after rolling a lower number on the first, critical roll should give people a leg up on justifying their dishonest behavior.

It was found that when asked to roll the die once, people not primed with creativity were relatively honest. Individuals primed with creativity, on the other hand, behaved much more dishonestly, reporting much higher die rolls on average. Further, this effect disappeared when people rolled the die multiple times. That is, when people were provided with help to think up justifications, creativity had no effect on cheating. This pattern of results seems to confirm that creativity helps people to think up justifications for dishonest behavior.

These studies demonstrate that there is indeed a dark side to creativity. Perhaps, given this information, it should come as no surprise that the best and brightest in many fields are frequently caught in all manner of immoral transgressions.

Now empaths who want to acquire the skills of a sociopath have yet another avenue to pursue in cultivating an ability to be morally blind -- creativity.  According to the article, all sorts of activities can get you in that cheating frame of mind, even something as simple as arranging the words sky, is, why, blue, and the, into the sentence, “the sky is blue”.  This may also be why showbusiness is so cutthroat.

Tips on lying effectively

In a New York Times article on lying, scientists suggest that excessive detail and meandering narratives help liars avoid detection:

The new work focuses on what people say, not how they act. It has already changed police work in other countries, and some new techniques are making their way into interrogations in the United States.

In part, the work grows out of a frustration with other methods. Liars do not avert their eyes in an interview on average any more than people telling the truth do, researchers report; they do not fidget, sweat or slump in a chair any more often. They may produce distinct, fleeting changes in expression, experts say, but it is not clear yet how useful it is to analyze those.
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Kevin Colwell, a psychologist at Southern Connecticut State University, has advised police departments, Pentagon officials and child protection workers, who need to check the veracity of conflicting accounts from parents and children. He says that people concocting a story prepare a script that is tight and lacking in detail.

“It’s like when your mom busted you as a kid, and you made really obvious mistakes,” Dr. Colwell said. “Well, now you’re working to avoid those.”

By contrast, people telling the truth have no script, and tend to recall more extraneous details and may even make mistakes. They are sloppier.
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In several studies, Dr. Colwell and Dr. Hiscock-Anisman have reported one consistent difference: People telling the truth tend to add 20 to 30 percent more external detail than do those who are lying. “This is how memory works, by association,” Dr. Hiscock-Anisman said. “If you’re telling the truth, this mental reinstatement of contexts triggers more and more external details.”

Not so if you’ve got a concocted story and you’re sticking to it. “It’s the difference between a tree in full flower in the summer and a barren stick in winter,” said Dr. Charles Morgan, a psychiatrist at the National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, who has tested it for trauma claims and among special-operations soldiers.

They are also training police to gradually introduce known facts during interrogations, however, which makes it tricky because if you are purposefully trying to embellish to hide a lie, you need to be extra careful that the embellishment is not about something easily ascertainable. Embellishments should be about things no one could possibly know about, like your feelings, the underwear you wore, how you slept the night before, etc. The worst would be for people to say random things like "it was a full moon" when there was no moon at all, etc. Check yourselves, fellow sociopaths.

Narcissists vs. Sociopaths (part 1)

A narcissist writes about the differences between sociopaths and narcissists, from a narcissist's perspective:

In "The Sociopath Next Door", Martha Stout describes several varieties of "sociopaths". They have the following traits - let's call the people with these traits sociopaths:

Sociopaths
almost no affect (very shallow emotions) - with compensatory faking of emotion to fit in
selfish & manipulative
don't bond with other humans
shameless
think they are awesome
treat life like a game (don't take their own lies too seriously)

Some sociopaths have ASPD traits too. So in addition to the "sociopath" traits listed above, they:
take offense easily
love retaliating
are impulsive
tell stupid lies
they don't fear punishment, so they tend to get in trouble repeatedly
don't take criticism from others personally
are glib and superficially charming

In one sense, sociopaths are like selfish, immoral robots (cool and rational). The sociopaths with ASPD traits are hotheads.

Some people assume that if someone behaves immorally and without concern for the welfare of others, he fits the above pattern. That's too simple. There are some very low empathy people with a different pattern. We'll call them narcissists.

Narcissists
have shallow emotions
are relatively unaware of their emotions and thoughts
are full of shame and controlled by it (but mostly unaware of it)
believe their own lies
are selfish and manipulative
fantasize of being rich, attractive and powerful (but may be relatively unaware of this)
love to hear positive things about themselves
deep down, dislike themselves tremendously
deceive themselves about their strengths and weaknesses
create a false "self" and spend a lot of effort getting people to admire it
are hypersensitive to criticism
don't make realistic plans
are glib and superficially charming

Some narcissists have ASPD traits too (take offense easily, love to retaliate, are impulsive and sadistic), making them "malignant narcissists".

Note: we're calling them "sociopaths" and "narcissists" - but other people might just call them "sociopaths" (because they are both very low empathy) or even "narcissists" (because they both treat others like objects). Even medical personnel who specialize in these people don't agree on terms.

Quote: War = deception

All warfare is based on deception.
When able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when far away, we must make him believe we are near.
Hold out baits to entice the enemy.
Feign disorder, and crush him.
To know your enemy, you must become your enemy.

-- Sun Tzu, the Art of War

How to detect when someone is lying

Everybody has some ability to detect whether people are lying or not, though some of us are better at it than others. Psychologist Paul Ekman has developed a tool that he believes will improve that ability for everyone. Ekman is a leading authority on reading microexpressions (unconscious facial expressions that in a split second can reveal the owner's true thoughts) to detect lies. His work has been dramatized by the American Television show Lie to Me. I haven't had the time to use the microexpression training tool, but apparently it takes only an hour. It's available at www.PaulEkman.com.

I think the ability to read microexpressions would be more useful against empaths than sociopaths. Why? Because sociopaths have a less rigid sense of self, they are able to actually believe their own lies much better than empaths are. For instance, I am able to compartmentalize quite well -- just like the protagonist in the movie Memento, I'm able to tell myself lies that I can actually believe. Once I believe a lie, any microexpressions seen on my face would seem to support the lie, not undercut it. Empaths, on the other hand, seem to need a stricter sense of identity. Although I'm sure they unconsciously lie to themselves all the time and microexpressions wouldn't be able to detect those lies, they seem much less able to consciously lie to themselves to the point of believing the truth. In those situations, the ability to read microexpressions would be a very useful tool against a lying empath.

Lies, lies, and manipulation

A reader asked: "Why is it that sociopaths are natural manipulators and expert liars? How can an everyday person acquire such skill?" My response:

Interesting. I posted a little about this a few weeks ago. I think the main skill in lying is to discover how people are able to determine what is truth and what is lie and always make your lies look more like truth and less like lies. I guess that sounds simplistic, but what I mean is that there are certain tells, certain aspects of a lie that alert the listener to be suspicious. If you could figure out what these things are and give the listener more what they are expecting to see when someone tells the truth, then you are a good liar, right? It's the same with any lie detection system -- find out how it works, then game the system. For a polygraph system you know that it establishes a baseline of stress levels and then looks for spikes. The game that most people try to play with a polygraph is to keep your stress levels high when telling the truth, thereby establishing a high baseline level of stress and making the lies more difficult to detect. I think sociopaths are particularly expert at lying because they are very used to being what is expected of them, particularly in wearing masks to become someone or something else in reaction to what people want to see.

Manipulation probably works the same way -- you read people, you really learn what makes them tick, and then you adapt in such a way that they are almost compelled to do what you want them to do. But everyone is a natural manipulator, not just sociopaths. We learn it when we are babies. As babies we fussed for the things we wanted, sometimes we were honestly upset, but sometimes we did it just to make people jump. Look at this site for a hilarious explanation of that.

I don't know whether sociopaths are necessarily better at manipulation than all of the other natural manipulators. If they are maybe it it just because they have had more practice. Sociopaths use manipulation because it is quick and easy and they can't see any reason why not -- they do not have the same respect for personal boundaries and individual autonomy that neurotypicals do.

I personally try to avoid it. I feel like particularly in interpersonal relationships, it is not worth the distrust and bitterness that are its byproducts. I guess in some ways that makes me like an industrialized nation version of a sociopath. When I was younger I was more like China, undeveloped and eager to get an edge anyway I could, even if it meant polluting my sky and water sources. Now I am more like Hong Kong -- at least willing to consider some of the negative externalities that my actions produce, partly because I have the luxury to do so (I have sufficient resources and stature to get what I want without getting my hands dirty all of the time), and partly because I at least half believe that polluting my relationships is probably not in my best interest.

Lie to me

I've finally gotten around to watching the television drama "Lie to Me," where they detect lies by reading microexpressions. It's sort of making me nervous. I realize that like all fictional depictions of science, the good guys are going to have a success rate of almost always, when in real life the accuracy of these methods is not nearly as high. Still, I'm worried. When I say I fake emotions well, I mean well enough to get by in a world where people assume that I am having normal emotions and/or don't care. My skills are not good enough to withstand this sort of close scrutiny.

The show also portrays the struggle that occurs when one person can intuit things about another person that that person doesn't want to be known. First, it's hard to be the one intuiting, to look the other way, to pretend you don't see what is happening, or to be presented with the temptation of using that information for your own gain and to not yield to that temptation. Second, it is hard for the person being read to not conceal their secrets, to not be able to control how the reader sees them, and to feel constantly vulnerable around another person because they can read you and you can't even fathom them. This is sort of an interesting dynamic that most people here are familiar with, but rarely gets represented in entertainment media.

And the show does make you more aware of different means of deception, which will always be relevant if you ever interact with anyone.

Imposter

The problem with that kid who faked his way into Harvard was that he took it one step too far. Adam Wheeler allegedly forged several documents to get admitted to Harvard, including straight-A transcripts from MIT and a prestigious prep school. While he was there, he collected tens of thousands of dollars in scholarships and grants. Adam was eventually caught when he applied for the prestigious Rhodes and Fulbright fellowships, using a fake transcript and plagiarized research. A professor he asked for a recommendation from noticed some similarities between Adam’s article and that of another Harvard professor, and that was it for Adam.

Many have noted that Adam would have gotten away with it if he had taken the degree and ran. Probably. Lying is very difficult to pull off flawlessly, particularly a continuing lie, such as pretending to be something or somebody that you aren't. Those lies are like being in the mafia. It can be great at the time, good experience, above average pay, but eventually you want to get out before you get caught or killed.

Some say that this Adam kid got greedy. They say that a lot about con men and habitual bank robbers too. I don't really think that is the issue for a lot of them, though. I think for a lot of people with a lifestyle outside of the law, it is the lifestyle itself that attracts them. Either they want the constant thrill, or there is no legitimate outlet for their particular skills and they'd hate to see their talents go to waste. Or they just don't know any different, or in my case, a little of all three. I have gone too far myself. Eventually you get tired or lazy or sloppy, you make a mistake, and depending who is around to see it, it could be a disaster. Luckily most of my slip ups have been relatively private. But it's sort of a but-for-the-grace-of-god type situation.