Man has much more to fear from the passions of his fellow creatures than from the convulsions of the elements.
--Edward Gibbon
--Edward Gibbon
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.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.
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
I'm a Karamazov... when I fall into the abyss, I go straight into it, head down and heels up, and I'm even pleased that I'm falling in such a humiliating position, and for me I find it beautiful. And so in that very shame I suddenly begin a hymn. Let me be cursed, let me be base and vile, but let me also kiss the hem of that garment in which my God is clothed; let me be following the devil at the same time, but still I am also your son, Lord, and I love you, and I feel a joy without which the world cannot stand and be.- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
"One of the saddest things about death is that the world does go on, and you feel like that devalues the person that they were. Eventually even we move on, we fill the void that was left with other people. We have to, it's human nature."However, she admits that void fillers won't ever be perfect. She remembers particularly her mother losing her parents, how painful that was, and how she was never able to find that type of relationship again, not like she expected to.
"People come in and out of our lives a lot. That's the nature of the beast. For some reason in our culture, only family sticks around, and even then certain family members will drift apart."Death has never made me sad, maybe I because I've never cared that much about anyone who has died. I have lost people in other ways and been sad, but am I really sad for their loss? Or am I upset that they have left me? Angry at myself for failing to keep them around?
I met [Will] Hall one night at the offices of the Icarus Project in Manhattan. He became a leader of the group--a "mad pride" collective--in 2005 as a way to promote the idea that mental-health diagnoses like bipolar disorder are "dangerous gifts" rather than illnesses. While we talked, members of the group--Icaristas, as they call themselves--scurried around in the purple-painted office, collating mad-pride fliers. Hall explained how the medical establishment has for too long relied heavily on medication and repression of behavior of those deemed "not normal." Icarus and groups like it are challenging the science that psychiatry says is on its side. Hall believes that psychiatrists are prone to making arbitrary distinctions between "crazy" and "healthy," and to using medication as tranquilizers. . . .Too true.
Just as some deaf activists prefer to embrace their inability to hear rather than "cure" it with cochlear implants, members of Icarus reject the notion that the things that are called mental illness are simply something to be rid of.
I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places. They are accidents and no one's fault, as used to be thought. Once they were considered the visible punishment for concealed sins.
And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born? The face and body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg can produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?
Monsters are variations from the accepted normal to a greater or a less degree. As a child may be born without an arm, so one may be born without kindness or the potential of conscience. A man who loses his arms in an accident has a great struggle to adjust himself to the lack, but one born without arms suffers only from people who find him strange. Having never had arms, he cannot miss them. Sometimes when we are little we imagine how it would be to have wings, but there is no reason to suppose it is the same feeling birds have. No, to a monster the norm must seem monstrous, since everyone is normal to himself. To the inner monster it must be even more obscure, since he has no visible thing to compare with others. To a man born without conscience, a soul-stricken man must seem ridiculous. To a criminal, honesty is foolish. You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous.
It is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighed, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never was from birth. And just as a cripple may learn to utilize his lack so that he becomes more effective in a limited field than the uncrippled, so did Cathy, using her difference, make a painful and bewildering stir in her world.
There was a time when a girl like Cathy would have been called possessed by the devil. She would have been exorcised to cast out the evil spirit, and if after many trials that did not work, she would have been burned as a witch for the good of the community. The one thing that may not be forgiven a witch is her ability to distress people, to make them restless and uneasy and even envious.
. . .
Even as a child she had some quality that made people look at her, then look away, then look back at her, troubled at something foreign. Something looked out of her eyes, and was never there when one looked again. She moved quietly and talked little, but she could enter no room without causing everyone to turn toward her.
She made people uneasy but not so that they wanted to go away from her. Men and women wanted to inspect her, to be close to her, to try and find what caused the disturbance she distributed so subtly. And since this had always been so, Cathy did not find it strange.
Cathy was different from other children in many ways, but one thing in particular set her apart. Most children abhor difference. They want to look, talk, dress, and act exactly like all of the others. If the style of dress is an absurdity, it is pain and sorrow to a child not to wear that absurdity. If necklaces of pork chops were accepted, it would be a sad child who could not wear pork chops. And this slavishness to the group normally extends into every game, every practice, social or otherwise. It is a protective coloration children utilize for their safety.
Cathy had none of this. She never conformed in dress or conduct. She wore whatever she wanted to. The result was that quite often other children imitated her.
As she grew older the group, the herd, which is any collection of children, began to sense what adults felt, that there was something foreign about Cathy. After a while only one person at a time associated with her. Groups of boys and girls avoided her as though she carried a nameless danger.
Cathy was a liar, but she did not lie the way most children do. Hers was no daydream lying, when the thing imagined is told and, to make it seem more real, told as real. That is just ordinary deviation from external reality. I think the difference between a lie and a story is that a story utilizes the trappings and appearance of truth for the interest of the listener as well as of the teller. A story has in it neither gain nor loss. But a lie is a device for profit or escape. I suppose if that definition is strictly held to, then a writer of stories is a liar -- if he is financially fortunate.
Cathy's lies were never innocent. Their purpose was to escape punishment, or work, or responsibility, and they were used for profit. Most liars are tripped up either because they forget what they have told or because the lie is suddenly faced with an incontrovertible truth. But Cathy did not forget her lies, and she developed the most effective method of lying. She stayed close enough to the truth so that one could never be sure. She knew two other methods also -- either to interlard her lies with truth or to tell a truth as though it were a lie. If one is accused of a lie and it turns out to be the truth, there is a backlog that will last a long time and protect a number of untruths.
. . .
Nearly everyone in the world has appetites and impulses, trigger emotions, islands of selfishness, lusts just beneath the surface. And most people either hold such things in check or indulge them secretly. Cathy knew not only these impulses in others but how to use them for her own gain.
It is quite possible that she did not believe in any other tendencies in humans, for while she was preternaturally alert in some directions she was completely blind in others.
Jonathan Haidt is hardly a road-rage kind of guy, but he does get irritated by self-righteous bumper stickers. The soft-spoken psychologist is acutely annoyed by certain smug slogans that adorn the cars of fellow liberals: "Support our troops: Bring them home" and "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."So are sociopaths weird because we have no moral compass while everyone else has some kind of different moral compasses? Or are we just weird because we do have a sense of "morality," but we would just never think to call it that, associate it with random emotions, and/or try to enforce it on everyone else...
"No conservative reads those bumper stickers and thinks, 'Hmm — so liberals are patriotic!'" he says, in a sarcastic tone of voice that jarringly contrasts with his usual subdued sincerity. "We liberals are universalists and humanists; it's not part of our morality to highly value nations. So to claim dissent is patriotic — or that we're supporting the troops, when in fact we're opposing the war — is disingenuous.
"It just pisses people off."
The University of Virginia scholar views such slogans as clumsy attempts to insist we all share the same values. In his view, these catch phrases are not only insincere — they're also fundamentally wrong. Liberals and conservatives, he insists, inhabit different moral universes. There is some overlap in belief systems, but huge differences in emphasis.
. . .
As part of . . . early research, Haidt and a colleague, Brazilian psychologist Silvia Koller, posed a series of provocative questions to people in both Brazil and the U.S. One of the most revealing was: How would you react if a family ate the body of its pet dog, which had been accidentally run over that morning?
"There were differences between nations, but the biggest differences were across social classes within each nation," Haidt recalls. "Students at a private school in Philadelphia thought it was just as gross, but it wasn't harming anyone; their attitude was rationalist and harm-based. But when you moved down in social class or into Brazil, morality is based not on just harm. It's also about loyalty and family and authority and respect and purity. That was an important early finding."
. . .
Haidt went to work for Richard Shweder, a cultural anthropologist at the University of Chicago who arranged for his postdoc fellow to spend three months in India. Haidt refers to his time in Bhubaneshwar — an ancient city full of Hindu temples that retains a traditional form of morality with rigid cast and gender roles — as transformative.
"I found there is not really a way to say 'thank you' or 'you're welcome' (in the local language)," he recalls. "There are ways of acknowledging appreciation, but saying 'thank you' and 'you're welcome' didn't make any emotional sense to them. Your stomach doesn't say 'thank you' to your esophagus for passing the food to it! What I finally came to understand was to stop acting as if everybody was equal. Rather, each person had a job to do, and that made the social system run smoothly."
Gradually getting past his reflexive Western attitudes, he realized that "the Confucian/Hindu traditional value structure is very good for maintaining order and continuity and stability, which is very important in the absence of good central governance. But if the goal is creativity, scientific insight and artistic achievement, these traditional societies pretty well squelch it. Modern liberalism, with its support for self-expression, is much more effective. I really saw the yin-yang."
. . .
[A] range of ethical systems have always coexisted and most likely always will.
. . .
Haidt . . . concluded that any full view of the origins of human morality would have to take into account not only culture (as analyzed by anthropologists) but also evolution. He reasoned it was highly unlikely humans would care so much about morality unless moral instincts and emotions had become a part of human nature. He began to suspect that morality evolved not just to help individuals as they competed and cooperated with other individuals, but also to help groups as they competed and cooperated with other groups.
"Morality is not just about how we treat each other, as most liberals think," he argues. "It is also about binding groups together and supporting essential institutions."
. . .
"I think this is terribly important," he says. "People are not going to converge on their judgments of what's good or bad, or right and wrong. Diversity is inherent in our species. And in a globalized world, we're going to be bumping into each other a lot."
Do most sociopaths know they are sociopaths, do narcissists know they are narcissists? Under what circumstances would a sociopath reveal himself? same question as to narcissists?My response:
Sociopaths know that they are different, though they may not necessarily be familiar that the label "sociopath" applies to them. Narcissists tend to be self-deceived, so they think that they are the same as everyone else, just better.There's another good response here:
When I was told by a friend that there was a label for people like me and it was called "sociopath," I actually willingly accepted the diagnosis. I knew I didn't have the same emotions as everyone else, I knew I had a weak sense of empathy, I knew I was different, and it wasn't something that I struggled with ever. I feel like narcissists deny deny deny when they are confronted with their identity. They are so self-deceived, though, that it is probable that they don't even recognize the signs of narcissism in themselves.
I don't think a narcissist would ever reveal himself, mainly because he probably doesn't think there is anything to reveal. For sociopaths I think revealing oneself is sort of like revealing a secret identity for a superhero -- generally not a good idea, but sometimes unavoidable. I have revealed myself to close friends (not all, only the ones who would be accepting), and on rare occasions to people whom I suspect to be sociopaths themselves. For instance, I have only once revealed myself to someone I had just met, but it was obvious from our conversational topics that if he weren't a sociopath, he was something akin to it. Even so it was a delicate dance of "how much do you think you empathize with others?" "Do you think manipulation is an appropriate tool for social encounters?" "Does anyone ever ask you if you are a sociopath?" Even from the people who are accepting of who I am, a lot of them can't believe that I am a sociopath, or they sort of pretend I'm not by imagining emotions or empathy where there are none. My parents are that way. I am high-functioning and take pleasure in being exceptionally considerate, so it is not too difficult to believe that I am normal. Bjust because most of me seems good doesn't mean I don't have any sociopath-flavoured bad in me.
I'm sure a sociopath realizes that they are "different" from normal people, in the sense that they do not comprehend normal emotional responses and connections. I would assume they don't understand why this is unless they recognize the signs through their own research or if someone tells them.
Also, I've found that aspies can be made to feel an emotional understanding through music or movies. They do so love their movies.Okay, yes, I think this applies at least in part to sociopaths too. We all know that music and movies with music are manipulative. Case in point, even though I am generally cold-hearted, I can frequently be moved by certain films, sometimes so much so that I have a crisis of identity and wonder, do I have the full spectrum of emotions after all? But it seems like not really, because only movies and music reliably trigger it. How do they do it? Tap into our primal psyches to produce some sort of behavioristic response? Like when our eyes water when we see other people's eyes tearing up? Or like how yawns are contagious? Do chimpanzees do the same? Does that mean sociopaths are closer evolutionarily to chimps than humans? Ha.
I suppose I just feel that trying to put us on the same page as aspie's is the namby-pamby way out when there's much more fun to be had simply remaining unidentified rather than accepted as defected.Too true, Jane. Particularly because if we, for whatever reason, needed to be "out" or part of an acknowledged acceptable neurodiversity "minority," we could just masquerade as aspies by toning down the charm, playing up the social awkwardness, and pretending to be obsessed with something bizarre like '80's action movie music scores. Right aspies?
His destruction was utterly senseless yet brilliantly thorough: He submerged his computer, stereo and iPod in water; threw puzzle pieces and Styrofoam cups into the toilet and flushed them, plugging the pipes literally dozens of times a week; and urinated on every square inch of his room: bed, walls, floor, closet, everything but the ceiling and that only because he had not (yet, I suspect) figured out how.I don't believe auties and aspie's are bad any more than I believe sociopaths are bad. I'm just saying that we have a lot more in common than anybody would like to admit, a fact that may be surprising given the choir-boy image auties and aspie's have in society compared to the soulless demon image that sociopaths have. If the neurodiversity movement embraces sometime-violent auties and aspies, it should include sociopaths as well.
When I asked him why he did these things he would say, eyes narrow like a night creature, "I don't like being caged."
. . .
[W]hen I showed up at the group home that morning, he was drinking coffee and pacing and still not dressed. I went into his room, took some clothes from the closet, handed them to him. And hinting at what he was about to do only with a small sigh, as if to say, "I've had enough," my son picked me up and threw me across the room.
. . .
Secretly, as if committing a sacrilege, I searched online using keywords such as "autism" and "violence" and "murder." What I found was confusing. There were roughly a dozen recent articles about heinous acts committed by people with autism and Asperger's syndrome, but each was followed by editorials and letters written by autism advocates vigorously denying a link. There were a few studies from the '80s and '90s, but the results -- when they showed a higher rate of violent crime among people with autism -- appeared to have been quieted or dismissed.
On the other hand there were, literally, thousands of heartwarming stories about autism. A couple of the most widely read were written by me. For years I had been telling my son's story, insisting that autism is beautiful, mysterious, perhaps even evolutionarily necessary. Denying that it can also be a wild, ravaging madness, a disease of the mind and soul. It was my trademark as an essayist, but also my profound belief.
. . .
Back when Andrew was in junior high school, my mother had a friend whose adult son had only recently been diagnosed with autism. He'd been dysfunctional since childhood, failing at school, unable to make a friend or keep a decent job. At 35 he was still living at home, collecting carts at the local grocery store, and taking anticonvulsants (Tegretol was the unofficial treatment of that era for outbursts) to control the violent urges he'd been having for 15 years.
"You think he's better now," my mother's friend once said as we watched a young, laughing Andrew out the window, playing tag with his brother and sister in my parents' backyard. "But wait 'til he's older. Then you'll understand. "
I hated her and was furious that she wished for our downfall -- also that her dumb, psychopathic son had been given the same label as my beloved child. Autism had become oddly fashionable; my mother's friend was wealthy. Clearly she'd gone "diagnosis shopping." My son, I vowed, would be nothing like hers.
. . .
The chairman of Trudy Steuernagel's department rose at her memorial service to proclaim, "Autism doesn't equal violence." And this probably is mathematically correct: Autism does not always equal violence. But I do believe there may be a tragic, blameless relationship. Neither Sky nor Andrew means to be murderous -- of this I am sure -- but their circumstances, neurology, size and age combine to create the perfect storm.
. . .
Mine, I decide, must be in part to break the silence about autism's darker side. We cannot solve this problem by hiding it, the way handicapped children themselves used to be tucked away in cellars. In order to help the young men who endure this rage, someone has to be willing to tell the truth.
I find myself attracted to "sociopaths" again and again, or at least people who have all of the defining traits of sociopaths. Often these people are drug abusers or alcohol abusers. I do not know what the allure is, except perhaps to live vicariously through people who seem to take what they want out of life. Many of them are incredibly good looking, which makes me wonder if the attention they are getting from their physical gifts helps cultivate this addiction to power that they have over others, since they get so much attention. I am a bit of an attention whore myself, so I understand it and always (foolishly?) admire it in people who are better at it than I am. I am not some hapless creature who is going to get pregnant by one of these creatures, but I thoroughly enjoy the energy they give off and like being around it. So many people I know are sad sack depressives, I get sick of their constant whining, but I am guilty of it myself sometimes but also more strongly identify with manic or hypomanic folk that are also hypersocial. I realize that I am often a pawn, and I play the part I am supposed to play, with the sociopath often not realizing I have any more depth than the part they have assigned to me. (which is generally sweet hapless thang whom they take advantage of sexually) I do not mind this, as I have a very masculine attitude towards sex and am happy with arrangements that are primarily sexual. I can socialize and go to the movies with my friends, and then have my sociopathic lover come over later that night. The domination is annoying, as it always has to be on their terms, that is my only beef with this kind of arrangement with this kind of person, but men are generally horny enough that i hear from them just as I begin having withdrawal symptoms. All of my friends are like "you'll never be able to have a normal relationship with a guy like that", but then I look at their boring arrangements, how they are often pining or having a crush on someone else, or going on antidepressants from lack of stimulation in their lackluster long term relationships, and I just have to ask myself- why are the kind of arrangements I enjoy so taboo? Why is everyone telling me all the time that I need to find someone 'normal' and be in a "healthy" relationship? Jealousy! I think people are jealous of this kind of excitement.. As long as one braces themself for the ride, and realize their part in the game, it can be deeply satisfying to be involved with such people. While they may technically be nutjobs, I so much prefer to be around an exciting person than a sweet dullard. I just find these type of men more masculine. I don't need a man who is as touchy feely, wishy washy and as insecure as myself. Yuck. I have a number of male friends who say to me "you deserve better" but their idea of better is themselves, like they would "treat me right". I'd rather be a pawn of an incredibly attractive bastard than worshiped by some tepid "nice guy". These nice guys wouldn't act any differently if they were much better looking or as fearless as the sociopathic types they despise and tsk-tsk.Good use of the phrase "tsk-tsk."
If a gene never expresses the proteins that could direct the body's functioning in a given way, then we may as well not possess that gene at all.If there were some triggering event or environmental force that triggered my sociopathy, I think it was just as likely something that happened to me as a baby than something within my conscious memory. For instance, when I was an infant I had a particularly bad case of colic, a poorly understood condition affecting infants whose main symptom is "frequent, inconsolable crying." According to my parents, I cried incessantly, and according to my medical records I had to go to the doctor for a ruptured navel due to excessive crying. I'm sure my parents did as well as they could, but it no doubt must have been difficult to tolerate such a child, much less nurture it.
[A]t least for mice, a vital way that parenting can change the very chemistry of a youngster's genes. [A] singular window in development [is] the first twelve hours after a rodent's birth--during which a crucial methyl process occurs. How much a mother rat licks and grooms her pups during this window actually determines how brain chemicals that respond to stress will be made in that pup's brain for the rest of its life.The book is not all that helpful for sociopaths, and has a low opinion of us generally, so I wouldn't recommend taking the time to read it. But maybe I'll post some other sociopath-specific information I find.
The more nurturing the mother, the more quick-witted, confident, and fearless the pup will become; the less nurturing she is, the slower to learn and more overwhelmed by threats the pup will be.
The human equivalents of licking and grooming seem to be empathy, attunement, and touch. If [this research] translates to humans . . . then how our parents treated us has left its genetic imprint over and above the set of DNA they passed down to us. And how we treat our children will, in turn, set levels of activity in their genes. (pp. 152-54)