How to maximize utility of socio relationship?

I thought this was a remarkably insightful comment, left July 7, 2013 at 7:56 AM

HOW TO BEAT A SOCIOPATH ... is the wrong question. If you're trying to beat, that means you're engaged in a competition, and non-socios tend to get revved up by their emotions during competition and thus will make it very difficult for themselves to "beat the socio", while the socio expends much less effort to pick at the non-socio's weaknesses.

Instead, the proper question for non-socios is "How do I maximize the utility to me of the socio relationship?"

In some cases, there may be no utility, so just terminate the relationship, or get out of it with at little damage as possible. In other words, you're in a hole, stop digging, don't try to beat or compete with the socio, just tend to your own needs. Do not feel sorry for the socio, or try to make the socio regret or repent, just leave. (If you can't control your own emotions, particularly to stop worrying about the socio, then you certainly aren't going to be able to control anyone else, including the socios, who are very good at control.)

If there is possible utility, then strictly enforce your boundaries, so the socio cannot damage you. Constantly assess whether you are getting enough from the relationship; do not worry that you are being selfish, trust that the socio is doing the same calculation for themselves, and will leave if they aren't getting what they want, so you can just worry about your own needs.

The tricky thing is to realize that socios imitate emotions to manipulate non-socios. If this satisfies your utility need, then great. Otherwise, realize that the socio has limits, and if you impose unrealistic expectations on the socio, you will just get burned.

It reminds me of this recent tweet:

"I am no more using them than they are using me."
— M.E. (@sociopathworld) January 24, 2014

Generosity

Maria Konnikova writes for Scientific American Blogs about the psychology behind gift giving. She cites research on how generosity is a winning game theory strategy, even seen from an self-maximizing economic perspective, because it is so difficult to tell whether you'll ever see that person again:

A group of psychologists from UC-Santa Barbara set out to test the long-standing conundrum that even in anonymous, one-shot games—in other words, in situations where you know that (1) you will never again encounter your partner and (2) no one has any idea what decision you’ve made—people more often than not choose to incur costs themselves in order to allocate benefits to others; an irrational behavior by traditional economic standards if ever there was one. In their model, the team managed to isolate an asymmetry that had previous been ignored: in an uncertain world, it is far more costly to incorrectly identify a situation as one-shot when it is in fact repeated than it is to mistake an actual one-shot encounter for a repeated one. Put differently, it is better to always assume that we will in fact encounter the same partners over and over. So costly is it to make a mistake in the opposite direction that, even absent any reputational or other mechanisms, it makes sense for us to behave generously to anyone we encounter. As the study authors conclude, “Generosity evolves because, at the ultimate level, it is a high-return cooperative strategy…even in the absence of any apparent potential for gain. Human generosity, far from being a thin veneer of cultural conditioning atop a Machiavellian core, may turn out to be a bedrock feature of human nature.”

That makes a lot of sense to me. Often people ask me, as a sociopath, whether I would leave a tip for a service professional whom I thought I would never see again, but I find that hard to imagine because one time I was accosted outside a restaurant by a service professional who felt that I undertipped him. Tipping generously not only had prevented that from happening since, it has also made a positive impression on my some of my dining companions that have had the chutzpah to actually check the tip that I've left, to ensure it was generous enough. So I find the hypo of never seeing a victim again difficult to imagine.

And if you're going to bother giving a gift, better make it count by getting something that they would particularly appreciate, or perhaps that could only come from you. Ariely describes these gifts:

Instead of picking a book from your sister's Amazon wish list, or giving her what you think she should read, go to a bookstore and try to think like her. It's a serious social investment.

The great challenge lies in making the leap into someone else's mind. Psychological research affirms that we are all partial prisoners of our own preferences and have a hard time seeing the world from a different perspective. But whether or not your sister likes the book, it may give her joy to think about you thinking of her.

I understand exactly what Ariely is talking about, having always made this type of tailor-made gift-giving myself. Konnikova suggests that people could do just as well with empathy (or maybe she is saying that this can only be done with empathy?):

Ariely singles out this type of gift as one that makes the mental leap from your own vantage point to that of someone else. It’s a leap that is incredibly difficult to take—exhibiting empathy, let alone perfect empathy to the point of complete confluence with the mind of another person, is a tough feat even in the most conducive of circumstances—but that may be worth taking all the same. For, even if you fail to make it as accurately as you may have wanted, the effort will be noted. The actual accuracy is somewhat beside the point. What matters is that you try to make the shift from your own mindset to someone else’s, that you make the effort to think about what present would be best suited to another person.

What if you don't use empathy to make the leap from your own vantage point to that of someone else? Is it still the thought that counts? 

Selfish + Pleasure - Pain = Happy

This was an interesting blurb that a reader sent me about one person's idea of success in life:

Be selfish + seek pleasure + avoid pain = success

At first glance, you may think this formula encourages you to be the most greedy and self-absorbed person imaginable. In reality, exactly the opposite will happen.

This formula virtually eliminates all the short-term bad decisions most of us make about diet, exercise, money, and relationships.

If you just want pleasure, you might cheat on your spouse. But if you want both pleasure and to avoid pain, you won't do it.

If you just want pleasure, you will eat rich desserts. But if you want both pleasure and to avoid pain, you will likely eat less dessert.

If you just want to avoid pain, you might lead a quiet, sheltered and safe life. But if you also want pleasure, you will find a healthy balance between safety and excitement.

To use a simple example, I'm a passionate skier with three "kids." During three different periods, I had to give up much of my free skiing time to teach them to ski. That was a little painful - especially in my lower back - but the subsequent pleasure of skiing with my now-expert offspring far outweighed the pain of a few missed powder days. Teaching them to ski was incredibly selfish of me.

Enlightened self-interest that looks like altruism

Add these three elements together, and you will start behaving in a manner that others interpret as altruism. You will exhibit a strong interest in your community, peers and colleagues, because doing so is how you make the formula work on your behalf.

Here's the critical part: you must adopt all three! If you adopt just one, your life won't go so well.

If you just focus on pleasure, you'll end up with a superficial and unsustainable life. If you simply avoid pain, you'll never accomplish anything worthwhile. If you obsess with your self-interest, you'll become the greedy and selfish person I promised to help you avoid becoming.

The reader commented that this is very similar to how I approach my own decisionmaking process. Does this seem familiar to anyone else?

Seeing what you want to see

I studied economics for a time. I was introduced to behavioral economics and how the heuristics that help us deal with day to day problems can also frequently lead us astray. I had understood for a long time that people often self-deceived, but even I was surprised by the depth and breadth of the way we misperceive the world (me included). I learned the lessons of decisionmaking and rationality and tried to become more rational myself. I have since noticed that many of my friends who did fine understanding the concepts but lacked the humility or insight to see an application in their own lives.

My friend I mentioned earlier is a good example. He is so afraid of making a bad decision that he avoids making them until they are made for him. That or he waits until his fear and panic of making the decision cause him to take action, any action at all, but all in a fog of willful ignorance -- pretending that certain facts don't exist or (intentionally?) misrepresenting probabilistic outcomes in his mind. All of this is done in an attempt to shield himself from self-hatred or acknowledging certain basic truths about the world that he would rather ignore. I see this sort of ex post self-justification happen in the comments section of this blog from people who are doomed to repeat past mistakes because they refuse a sense of responsibility about their own destiny.

It's a good example of seeing what you want to see and the harm that can come from it. I actually advise people to not even form a belief if they can -- the temptation to anchor their future assessments or see all new information through the distorted lens of whether or not it confirms that belief is just simply too high.

Even if people get the probability correctly, they often don't understand what that means. It's one thing to say there's a 1% of getting caught stealing a mobile phone, but many people have trouble understanding that means if you steal 100 phones you will statistically get caught once. Instead they act as if anything less than 5% means never going to happen no matter how repeatedly they engage in it. Which is why I liked this recent article in the NY Times about understanding low probability risks. It's worth reading in its entirety, here's a teaser story:


I first became aware of the New Guineans’ attitude toward risk on a trip into a forest when I proposed pitching our tents under a tall and beautiful tree. To my surprise, my New Guinea friends absolutely refused. They explained that the tree was dead and might fall on us.

Yes, I had to agree, it was indeed dead. But I objected that it was so solid that it would be standing for many years. The New Guineans were unswayed, opting instead to sleep in the open without a tent.

I thought that their fears were greatly exaggerated, verging on paranoia. In the following years, though, I came to realize that every night that I camped in a New Guinea forest, I heard a tree falling. And when I did a frequency/risk calculation, I understood their point of view.

Consider: If you’re a New Guinean living in the forest, and if you adopt the bad habit of sleeping under dead trees whose odds of falling on you that particular night are only 1 in 1,000, you’ll be dead within a few years. In fact, my wife was nearly killed by a falling tree last year, and I’ve survived numerous nearly fatal situations in New Guinea.

Violence in movies

There is something about violence in movies that I find so appealing.  I'm sure part of it is that it is dramatized in all the right ways to thrill rather than cause any anxiety or harm.  I was thinking about that today on the way to work.  I was driving.  I thought, if you take some people seriously about what they say about sociopaths and loving violence and senseless destruction and power over people, then why is it that I don't cross my lane line to collide head-on into the auto approaching me?  Wouldn't that scare people?  That would be some good fun, right?  I would get to scare the other person half to death, maybe there would be some carnage or death, definitely I would make people "jump."  It's odd that sociopaths can manage to get where they're going half the time without giving into that temptation, right?

But it's not a wonder.  Actually, I thought that was a ridiculous thing to believe.  Except perhaps when we're acting on impulse, sociopaths are generally making rational, cost/benefit decisions in which we determine that the cost, e.g. of damaging our car and risking our own life and health, does not exceed the benefit of "making someone jump" in most situations.  And aren't you glad?  Can you imagine a world in which there actually existed a class of people that were not constrained in any way at all?  But of course it makes sense -- how could an existence sans any restraint ever be evolutionary advantageous enough to outweigh the obvious negatives?  I don't know.  Sometimes I wonder how people can believe the odd things they believe about sociopaths.  There's no logic, just myth and fear mongering.  

But it is true I do like violence when it comes cheaply, like in movies.  And I like this supercut.  I wish that it included some clips from Watchmen and Public Enemies, maybe some others that aren't springing to mind.  Favorite violent scenes, anyone?

Narcissists = unpredictable

I thought this comment from UKan from a while ago was interesting, worth its own post:

I get in constant conflicts with narcisssists in real life. Around when I first came here I asked as a anonymous about a situation I had with someone and what kind of person they were. It was some guy who was pathologically lying to make himself look like some rockstar. This type of person is what my father is, and what almost every enemy I have ever had is. At the time I was ignorant of psychological terms. I knew the outline like I know many others, but I call them something else.

I don't like narcissists because they are costly in my business. They refuse to quit, because it's not about business for them. It's all about how they look and what their appearance is. They lie not to get out of trouble, con someone, or play games with people. They pathologically lie about who they are so that they add color to their drab life. So that they add worth to their pointless existence. Like my business partner with his fake rolex watch, or his car that 'looks like a bmw'. Or this guy who sat down next to me on my couch at the club and started giving me lip about how much of a big shot he was not knowing who I was. I can name them all day long. I despise their weakness. It disgusts me because even though nobody else can see it, I can. I can see the weakness and self loathing in every action they do. They constantly need validation and that's the main give away. They also for some reason always envy me while at the same time trying to be me which is even more ridiculous because to everyone else they spew nothing but hatred for me.

***

As far as victims are concerned, well they are easy. I'm drawn to them like a bee to honey. I'm always looking for a weakness. If that's all you display then the rest is a fucking cake walk.

One thing I hated about growing up with a narcissistic father is that he was very hard to predict because he didn't always act rationally (i.e., in his own best interest). Empaths can be this way too, if they get very emotional about things.

But I guess sociopaths would also seem unpredictable to a lot of people too. Maybe it's just because I'm used to my own mind that I find myself to be relatively straightforward. Plus, I like to think that I can be reasoned with, almost without exception. I have no problems setting hard feelings aside, for instance by allying with a former enemy, if I find it beneficial to do so in a particular situation. Or maybe I choose to destroy them completely in their hour of need because I'm tired of dealing with them? Either way, I like to think that most of my decisions are based on catering to my own self-interest, with a sprinkling of impulsive acts aimed at violence, swift retribution, or some other compulsion.

I don't know. I guess I don't think sociopaths are much better about this, but at least we seem more consistent than those ruled by their emotions.