How Psychopaths See the World

One thing that's been really interesting about meeting other sociopaths is seeing different iterations of essentially myself. I see people who have very different lives from me, very different professions, but their choices also make a lot of sense to me. I can't help thinking that I would have made those same choices they had made perhaps in a parallel universe, or if I had their early life experiences. I can also see much better that the traits represent themselves in spectrums. For instance, I think all sociopaths are impulsive, but some are more conscientious in general than others. I'm about middle of the road in terms of conscientiousness. Some sociopaths I have met have a much longer future outlook than I do, like up to 7 years. Mine of course is still around 3 years. Then there are also people who have a much shorter outlook, more like 6 months to 1 year. Not many sociopaths I have met (just one!) are as into seduction as I am as a form of power game. I was also a little surprised to hear that at least among the successful sociopaths I have met, my fearlessness levels are among the highest. This is not to say that the other sociopaths are fearful, just that they experience a small degree of fear in their lives more than I do (which I experience as almost nothing).

It's super fascinating to talk to these people. It's one of my favorite things in the world to do now, there's such a unique pleasure to it. The way we talk and skip from subject to subject, so fast and so nonstop with interesting things to say, has been common to all of the sociopaths I've met, although of course everyone's conversational content has varied. One new friend I met in Europe actually commented on this -- "You know that no one else talks like this, right?" She described it as having a "chaotic brain". She said that she is careful not to talk like this particularly in the professional realm in which establishing trust is very important for her. Because, as she explains, you have to be likeable and you can't be likeable if you sound like you're on a separate planet. I likewise assume that our unique conversational style reflects the non-linear way that appears to characterize our thinking, as well as the unusual way that our attention works. The imagery I've used to describe it to other people is that it's like in a Loony Toons cartoon where the characters are sneaking around at dark but when a spotlight falls on them they freeze, as if doing so would allow them to escape detection. Our attention is like that spotlight. Whatever it falls upon, we are super focused. Everything else is in a murky haze.

My friend sent me this Atlantic Article about a study done on male prison psychopathic prisoners and their theory of mind, or ability to place themselves in another's shoes. What they found is that sociopaths can do that sort of perspective taking, and can do it very well, they just don't appear to do it automatically. They only engage in that mental exercise if something draws their attention to doing so:

They saw a picture of a human avatar in prison khakis, standing in a room, and facing either right or left. There were either two red dots on the wall in front of the avatar, or one dot in front of them and one dot behind them. Their job was to verify how many dots either they or the avatar could see.

Normally, people can accurately say how many dots the avatar sees, but they’re slower if there are dots behind the avatar. That’s because what they see (two dots) interferes with their ability to see through the avatar’s eyes (one dot). This is called egocentric interference. But they’re also slower to say how many dots they can see if that number differs from the avatar’s count. This shows how readily humans take other perspectives: Volunteers are automatically affected by the avatar’s perspective, even when it hurts their own performance. This is called altercentric interference.

Baskin-Sommers found that the psychopathic inmates showed the usual level of egocentric interference—that is, their own perspective was muscling in on the avatar’s. But they showed much less altercentric interference than the other inmates—the avatar’s perspective wasn’t messing with their own, as it would for most other people.

Of course, not all psychopaths are the same, and they vary considerably in their behavior. But Baskin-Sommers also found that the higher their score on the psychopathy assessment test, the less they were affected by what the avatar saw. And the less affected they were, the more assault charges they had on their record.
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To her, the results show that psychopaths (or male ones, at least) do not automatically take the perspective of other people. What is involuntary to most people is a deliberate choice to them, something they can actively switch on if it helps them to achieve their goals, and ignore in other situations. That helps to explain why they behave so callously, cruelly, and even violently.

But Uta Frith, a psychologist at University College London, notes that there’s some controversy about the avatar task, which has been used in other studies. “What does it actually measure?” she says. It’s possible that the avatar is acting less as a person and more as an arrow—a visual cue that directs attention. Perhaps instead of perspective-taking, the task simply measures how spontaneously people shift their attention.


Baskin-Sommers argues that the task is about both attention and perspective-taking, and “for research on psychopathy, that is a good thing.” That’s because, as she and others have shown, psychopaths pay unusually close attention to things that are relevant to their goal, but largely ignore peripheral information. “It’s like they’re the worst multitaskers,” Baskin-Sommers says. “Everyone’s bad at multitasking but they’re really bad.” So, it’s possible that their lack of automatic perspective-taking is just another manifestation of this attentional difference. The two things are related.

When I think back on some of the sketch that I've gotten up to or some of the sociopaths I've met have gotten into, there's a similar thing going on. It's almost like I'm in a trance, so focused on accomplishing the one thing dominating my attention, like tracking that DC Metro worker to choke the life out of him or kicking my best friend out of my car in the middle of a strange city during an argument. It's only when she yelled at me "what is wrong with you?!" that I snapped out of it and started taking a broader, different perspective on the situation. Several of the sociopaths I have met have either been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD or have used the meds on the sly to improve their linear thought or better control their focus. To help mediate this unusual focus, I sleep inordinate amounts and when I need to concentrate on one thing for long periods and do not find myself naturally doing so, I force my brain to think linearly with baroque, minimalistic music, or impressionistic music, which share a common feature of constantly moving forward musically at whatever pace without much focus on cadence or structure.

So I find this study and its results to have a great deal of explanatory power and I would love to see this connection explored more.

Hilariously, the study was criticized by an autism researcher, not because the science behind it is poor, but because it seems to suggest a closer link to autism than the autism researcher was comfortable with:

“It is a bit worrying if [Baskin-Sommers and her colleagues] are proposing the very same underlying mechanism to explain callousness in psychopathy that we used previously to explain communication problems in autism, albeit based on a different test,” Frith says. “These are very different conditions, after all.”

But the distinction here, as pointed out by the researcher and as is apparent probably to all sociopaths who have had extensive interactions with people on the autism spectrum, is that autistic people are really bad at perspective taking, even with their attention directed at it full force. And with the sociopath... it's not as if he can't be bothered to do so, it's just that he doesn't always think to do so.

But what do sociopaths or those acquainted with think about the linear thought (chaos brain) or the multitasking? By the way, I can't have a television on in the background and still be able to focus on a conversation. I think I may have mentioned this before, but I also feel like I understand movies and television better with the subtitles on. I used to think it was bad hearing from years of drumming, but I've had my ears tested many times and they're always fine. There's more something about the ability to understand speech in the context of seeing it spoken on a screen that leaves my brain scrambling.

Sesame Street on Empathy

I saw this interesting Sesame Street clip defining empathy. Curiously, they never define it as feeling what another person is feeling -- only understanding or imagining what another person is feeling. I guess we would call that cognitive empathy, perhaps even just perspective taking. If that is all that is needed, then I think each sociopath here passes the Sesame Street standard? If anything, it's the autism spectrum that struggles to perspective take?

Perspective

I was half watching Olympic curling recently. I tried to figure out what the announcers were talking about, i.e. what the rules/scoring are. It usually seemed good when you managed the other team's stones, but also not always? And I know people say this all of the time about curling, but there's something a little ridiculous about it, especially the broom people, and particularly in comparison to events like slalom skiing and skeleton (which are dangerous, but again not that serious in the big scheme of things). So I was watching these curlers who look like soccer moms and there's all of this weird vocalizing and references to weird pieces of nomenclature that when the announcers started flipping out about something being a huge mistake I just laughed. How could anything that has to do with curling be labeled a "huge mistake"?

This was not like my friend who, while driving, failed to properly look both directions at a stop sign, pulled out, got hit by a huge truck and killed his friend who was a passenger. Or my other friend who killed his wife in a hiking accident by causing a rockslide. I once saw an interview with a girl who was jumping from rock to rock on the top of a cliff. Due to an optical illusion, she thought that the mountains on the horizon were rocks that were just a meter in front of her. and jumped off a cliff. She's now paralyzed. Those things seem closer to being labeled "huge mistakes". Maybe not even those? Economists have argued (and empirics support) that people have a set baseline of happiness -- that despite major positive and negative changes in their lives, they will eventually (6 mos?) coast back down or up to their previous level of happiness. I know my friends who have killed people don't feel like their lives have been ruined (although the families of the deceased might think differently). And the girl from the interview said she was also very happy. Things just don't seem to matter as much as people fear they will, particularly since with few exceptions all of us will be forgotten in as little as a hundred years (Along these same lines, Downton Abbey juxtaposes the perceived domestic "tragedies" of a missing footman with true tragedies like war to great effect).

I always tell my anxiety prone friend to not think about the future in terms of the next few decades. Otherwise she tends to over-estimate how terrible it will be to live without her ex that she just broke up with because he takes her current sadness levels and multiplies it out 365 days a year, for however many decades. And when you think that way, even the smallest setback can seem terribly overwhelming. And it's interesting. In the aftermath of the book release, I've fallen way behind in answering emails from this site (maybe 5-6 months delay?). Often people who write to me very upset about something. I write them back 5 months later and get no answer. There are a lot of ways to read this, but mostly I think that it's because the issue is no longer relevant. And maybe it's no longer relevant because the horrible thing they were fearing happened and there's nothing that can be done to fix it, but I tend to think that it's because the problems that so bothered the person turned out to not be as serious/destructive/long-lasting as they thought it was or would be. Most of the people who break up with sociopaths don't really care much about them after some time. They move on. (There are some notable exceptions). Most people who are hurt by sociopaths move on. Stuff sorts itself out and more pressing matters take one's attention from the past, which I don't think is a bad thing. Sometimes it really can be helpful to imagine your future in terms of where will you be a few decades from now. Things that seem like mistakes or tragedies now may be so insignificant as to be forgotten by then.

And that's what I thought about as I heard the announcers lament such a terrible mistake in curling, a mistake that I wasn't even able to recognize, much less understand. I guess that's another thing that rubs me the wrong way about the social shaming -- I think that a large part of the urge to social shame or otherwise morally judge people as "guilty" and deserving of punishment is a secret fear of the but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I type.

People that seem most inclined to make moral condemnations also seem most self-assured that everyone has free will and a large amount of control over their lives. These moral condemners tend to think that people get what they deserve (for good or ill) because it supports the idea that they have earned the good things in their life solely through their own ingenuity and hard work. And if they have earned the goods things in life, that means they have succeeded in a way, particularly if you measure success in terms of home size, discretionary income, and how well one's children do in school. (Interestingly, to most of these people it's no longer considered a moral "failure"to have one's marriage fail, although to be laid off from one's job often still is.) And all of those things are important because not everyone has them, so that makes you better.

See, that's the tricky thing -- if you have a long term perspective about the negative things, that means you also will have a long term perspective about the positive things. If you feel like a mistake in the Olympics won't make or break your life, maybe you also won't believe that a score on a standardized test should be able to make or break your life, which might take away some of your self-justification for feeling better than other people. So they are faced with a conundrum: they can admit to themselves that most mistakes (theirs or others) are not really important when seen in perspective, but that would mean also acknowledging that most of their successes (theirs or others) are not important either.  I feel like for some of these people who love to harp on the mistakes of others, this moralistic urge comes from a fear that if they acknowledge that a gross mistake today will not seem like anything in a decade, they will also have to give up their joy at what seems a great success today. And that belief just leads to nihilism, because what is the point if you can't even feel that you're much (any?) better at life than your average homeless person.

If there were no Olympics, what would be the point of skiing down mountains fast or directing a stone true to its target? How would we know who is better and who is not?

(Cue the defensive comments and/or personal attacks from people whose world views do not permit such perspectives?)

Power of empathy?

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

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

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

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

Sociopaths feel empathy (sort of)

Recent research suggests that sociopaths can feel empathy (or at least their mirror neurons light up as if they are feeling empathy) when directed to put themselves in the shoes of someone else. From the BBC News:

Psychopaths do not lack empathy, rather they can switch it on at will, according to new research. Placed in a brain scanner, psychopathic criminals watched videos of one person hurting another and were asked to empathise with the individual in pain. Only when asked to imagine how the pain receiver felt did the area of the brain related to pain light up. Scientists, reporting in Brain, say their research explains how psychopaths can be both callous and charming. The team proposes that with the right training, it could be possible to help psychopaths activate their 'empathy switch', which could bring them a step closer to rehabilitation. Criminals with psychopathy characteristically show a reduced ability to empathise with others, including their victims. Evidence suggests they are also more likely to reoffend upon release than criminals without the psychiatric condition.

I always wonder at this logical jump -- that a lack of empathy is the primary reason why sociopaths reoffend as opposed to, say, fearlessness, overoptimism, etc.? Maybe, but I haven't seen actual research on the issue, only idle speculation. The LA Times reporter, Geoffrey Mohan, takes this flawed line of reasoning one step further and suggests that only automatic empathy will do the trick:

But there is a substantial gulf between automatic empathic responses and those that result from cognitive control. Because a psychopath likely cannot be "trained" to summon up empathy to counterbalance manipulative and violent behavior, therapies would have to focus on embedding the process where it belongs: in the largely unconscious emotional regulating centers of the brain.

I disagree. I think sociopaths can be trained. I think that is the biggest implication of this recent research. And I think other research has shown that conscientiousness is the trait most strongly correlated with successful sociopaths vs. unsuccessful sociopaths. And what is conscientiousness but the acquisition of good habits, i.e. training. Plus, my own experience suggests that sociopaths can be trained. Readers of the book will recognize Ann as my trainer. So, it's an odd assertion to make, that sociopaths can't be trained. But luckily the researchers seem to share my view:

"From a therapeutical point of view, the big implication of our study is it does not seem to be the case that they have broken empathy per se,” Keysers said. “That would suggest that what therapies need to do is not so much try to create empathy in them, but try to make empathy more automatic and potentially do so by making the social cues of others more salient, so they will always be drawn into this empathy mode that they can activate when they want to.”

Especially given what we know of cognitive empathy being something we can practice.

So do I think that this is major news and will change the way we view sociopaths? Maybe it will change the common (mis)conceptions regarding sociopathy, but it is completely in line with recent trends in sociopathy research. For instance, Joseph Newman has a similar theory that sociopathy is largely an attentional issue, and that when you direct their attention to emotions (apparently even to the emotions of others), they experience them in relatively "normal" ways. The researchers of this current study agree:

Theories of psychopathy’s origins center around deficits in instrumental learning and attention. Keyser’s conclusions merge with those hypotheses. Of particular note were scans that showed abnormal activation in the amygdala, an area of the paralimbic system associated with emotional learning. Psychopaths may lack clues to the salience of social stimuli, an attribute shared to a certain degree with autism spectrum disorder. 

[I have often wondered if sociopathy is an autism spectrum disorder]

Psychopaths therefore may not be able to develop more complex structures of rules and morals, said Keysers.

“They don’t have this tendency that we normally have to be drawn into what the other person is feeling, and you can rephrase that as an attentional deficit,” Keysers said. “They simply don’t attend to what is going on with other people, automatically.”

So no, I don't think this is so different from what has been the recent trend in how researchers have viewed sociopathic empathy, particularly when you consider that sociopaths have always been acknowledged to have cognitive empathy, just not emotive empathy. Research suggests that cognitive empathy can be enhanced by attention directing exercises such as perspective taking. I have consistently said that sociopaths are able to put themselves into the shoes of another and imagine what it might be like to be that person, which possibly explains why we're so good at manipulation. Also, I have even experienced this type of focused empathy accidentally.

Things I would like to see explored further:

• Is this sort of empathy different from mentalizing?
• Can anyone empathize with things they haven't yet experienced or the experiences of others that are dissimilar to them (e.g. white people don't empathize with Trayvon Martin as much as African Americans do)?
• What is the relationship between this attentional empathy and being moved (manipulated into feeling your own feelings in response to stimulus?)

So this is good news for sociopaths and our fight against the stigma, but knowing how much some people blindly hate sociopaths, my guess is that this is eventually going to be used to argue that sociopaths are just being lazy or opportunistic when they choose not to empathize.

As a side note,  apparently in the Netherlands psychopaths have access to the insanity defense? "Keysers and his team were given access to offenders who committed violent crimes, such as rape and murder, but who were found not responsible due to a psychopathy diagnosis." Sort of not surprising for the Dutch.