This TED talk is from a reader. It discusses some research about psychopaths and loss aversion (they don't experience it) and suggests some ways that non-psychopaths could learn to be a little more risk seeking themselves.
It also mentions (and this is the first I've heard about this, but does not seem wrong) about how psychopaths have naturally high mindfulness because they are laser focused on whatever task is in front of them.
A third point was regarding how to influence people by doing favors for a person. I'll let you watch the explanation for that one.
I thought this recent comment was an interesting explanation of why people fear the unknown, particularly sociopaths:
You are upfront, but to what degree? You are telling us that you are manipulative for various reasons, and then asking us to take what you say at face value. You are different, you lack something, and we don't know what the effect of that is just as we don't know what could set off a dangerous predator. Do you trust a wolf, or a tiger? Maybe you would, if you were a wolf or a tiger. But you're not, so you break those creatures down to the impulses and instincts that make them dangerous - predators, cunning, violent. Nevermind that they are also caring, sweet animals that can show affection and mercy. In essence as a society, it's difficult to accept that there are people like you walking around as a member of the human family; just as individually it would be hard to accept the knowledge that we lacked the ability to control harmful impulses.
This comment reminded me of a time I visited a different continent for a wildlife tour. There were several dangerous animals and we were warned several times about avoiding them. However, we would also have impromptu picnics in the middle of the wildlife preserves. At one of these open-air picnics, I was chatting with a friend until she gasped, grabbing my shoulder in a vice grip, "Oh my God, we're going to die." I looked around us and we were surrounded by a 30 or so large rodent looking things. It was the first time we had seen this particular animal and our guide was not around to tell us what they were. Maybe my friend was overreacting, but maybe she wasn't, I thought, trying to remember whether the list of dangerous animals might possibly have included these. Even small animals can be dangerous, I rationalized -- think of those honey badger videos!
Or rabies? And it's not like we were close to any hospitals, should anything happen. The most unnerving thing about these animals, though, was the way they started closing in on us. It was like a Twilight Zone episode -- when we were looking directly at them, they would remain perfectly still, but every time we looked away, they would advance closer to us until they were within pouncing distance.
Without knowing anything about these animals, I had no clue how to react but my friend insisted that we abandon our food and try to wend our way through the fast approaching crowd. Unfortunately, a second, much larger species had appeared (or a more menacing adult-sized version of the first?). There were 60 or more animals between us and our tour vehicle and as we inched our way forward, my friend clutched my arm as if she expected impending death. We finally were able to climb onto the hood of the vehicle and waited there until our guide returned thoroughly amused at our reaction to what turned out to be perfectly harmless (in his mind), cuddly creatures.
Since returning home, I often think of this experience when I see commonplace wildlife native to where I live. How is it that I never noticed how ubiquitous squirrels are? Can they be rabid? Can raccoons hurt me? Was I wrong for worrying that the foreign animals were dangerous? Or am I wrong for not thinking more about the more familiar dangers that I encounter on a daily basis?
So although I can relate to the fear of unknown/sociopaths, it's also important to consider how concerned you want to be. Would you want to kill, lock up, or otherwise persecute a group of people because you don't understand them (and have made no real effort to try to understand or peacefully accommodate them)? Do they warrant that? Or not? Maybe you figure you've already been living a life with sociopaths without realizing it, like I had been living surrounded by squirrels without really noticing them, so how concerned should you be? Of course sociopaths are not like squirrels, more like bears or sharks or lions, but does the existence of those animals keep you from going camping? Or swimming? Or from copulating in Africa? Maybe. It's true that people have different tolerances for risk. Some are too afraid to even leave their apartment.
The reaction to Edward Snowden coming forward as the source for the NSA leaks has been interesting and varied, from clear signs of support to accusations of him being a traitor. I think the most interesting (and possibly the most prevalent reaction) is a little bit of fear mixed in with some what-is-he-thinking-could-he-really-be-that-naive and a lot of judgment guised as that's-not-how-I-would-have-done-it (this last one is the most hilarious to me -- you would never have done it, so any analysis of how you would have done it in a non-existent reality goes beyond mere speculation to pure fantasy). Like Monday morning quarterbacks, these people have questioned his decisions from things like his choice of an extradition-lite hideaway to his decision to come forward (as if him outting himself affects in anyway whether the U.S. government knows who he is and is trying to track him down) to whether he was able to save enough money to live on or if he is now completely unemployable for the rest of his life.
For as popular as Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" is, particularly during graduation speech season, there is a pretty clear social norm that favors steady job white picket fence 2 1/2 children and people that dare violate this norm can be very polarizing. On the one hand, most seem to acknowledge that there are great men and women that have bucked the trends and led to important advancements to us as a species. On the other hand, people who buck the trend present a lot of problems for society, at the very least because there is no comfortable pigeonhole to confine them to. This discomfort is often expressed in terms of these people being "unpredictable" or "untrustworthy". From Megan McArdle with the Daily Beast, "Whistleblowers Are Weird":
Human institutions, from the family to the government, are founded by trust. You need to be able to trust the people you work with, at least to the extent of being able to predict their future behavior. You may think you don't trust that rat down the hall, but in fact, you do trust him quite a lot: not to come into work with a machete and hack you to death in order to secure your superior office chair, not to start randomly swearing at clients, and so forth. Some of that trust is enforced by fear of the consequences. But a lot of our ability to make a credible committment to be trustworthy comes from the fact that we are hard wired to be loyal. . . . You would feel bad about yourself if you [broke that trust]. That's why psychopaths are so dangerous: they don't have any of the internal brakes, the shame and guilt, that keep the rest of us from blatantly violating the trust of people around us. Oh, of course we do betray people from time to time--we break promises, forget to call our grandmothers, and engage in the guilty pleasure of gossiping about friends. But the hallmark of these betrayals is that they are impulsive and unjustified. Psychopaths feel no guilt about doing these things--or stealing your money, your wife, and your dog. They are fundamentally untrustworthy, though also, thankfully rare.
This reasoning seems flawed -- the reason why the rat down the hall doesn't machete you is because he is hardwired to be loyal? She's correct that if you're worried about someone harming you, the world of possibilities includes both intentional bad behavior (which she suggests that only sociopaths commit because they don't feel shame and guilt and these "brakes" on bad behavior are both apparently necessary to avoid bad behavior and also infallible?) and the unintentional bad behavior of everyone else (which she suggests is always impulsive). She says that we need to trust people to predict their future behavior (says no statistician, behavioral economist, or psychologist ever because currently the best predictor of future behavior is not trust or loyalty but past behavior). But of the two possibilities of bad behavior, which is more predictable? The sociopath's? (Who is almost the quintessential economic rational actor.) Or the "impulsive and unjustified" (i.e. no apparent or reasonable triggers or other identifiable causes) behavior of the non-sociopath?
Nor does someone's trust or the apparent level of predictability of a person constrain his behavior. You can trust the rat down the hall all you want, but that doesn't mean that your trust in him will keep him from someday putting a machete in your back. The best you could say about him is that his past behavior doesn't indicate an above average risk of being a murderer and/or that the chance is already so low and there are so many competing dangers vying for our attention that it's simply not worth the effort of thinking about who exactly could kill you. At this point, though, we are simply talking about probabilities of behavior and "impulsive and unjustified" are almost by definition random and unpredictable.
What is apparently happening here is that McArdle and many others intuit that there is something particularly unknowable about whistleblowers and sociopaths. Uncertainty like this does in fact increase both actual and perceived risk. But there's nothing terribly "unknowable" about them. In fact, in a lot of ways they are less complicated than most people -- the one hyper-rational ruled by self-interest and the other an ideologue that can't be bought off by even a $200,000 a year cushy government salary. Which makes me think this is the real crux of the issue. The scary thing about a whistleblower or any other independent thinker is that he is not as constrained by social norms. This is evidenced for the whistleblower by his rejection of the picket fence and golden retriever lifestyle. For most people, it's possible to constrain their behavior with so-called golden handcuffs -- all the materialistic trappings of a comfortable life in exchange for unquestioning loyalty, including submitting one's will to one's employer, one's government, the police, and even one's parent teacher association. The norm is enforced as heartily as it is because although the majority acknowledges that they can gain big from independent thinking, they can't have everyone constantly questioning the most basic of social rules as it would lead to chaos and a weakening of the social contract. And people are incredibly and irrationally loss averse, so given the choice they would rather keep what they have than chance it on someone who who already comes off as a bit of an outsider (how do we even know he has our best interests at heart? how can we "trust" him to make the right decisions? isn't this why we have a government heavily dominated by administrative agencies so we could sub-contract out important decisions like this and never have to consider them ourselves?).
Thus, the uncertainty lies not in the behavior of the independent thinker, which is actually quite predictably independent, but whether he is right or not. The problem is that although we say that everyone is free to act according to his own best judgment, the "right" thing to do with that freedom as far as the majority is concerned is to marry, own a house, be gainfully employed, and have at least two children. Only then are you considered sufficiently invested in society that you become "predictable" to us, in that we know you have too much to lose to take any major risks ("freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"). And if its one thing the financial crisis has taught us, it is that one person's actions can ripple through the entire global economy. Of course that applies for good things as well as bad, but how can we know ahead of time which is which? This is particularly a problem when (most?) people (inaccurately and unreliably) gauge the rightness or wrongness of decisions by imagining what they themselves would have done in that situation, and the thoughts and decisions of an independent thinker are difficult for many to fathom. (Of course, despite this inherent uncertainty, there are people who feel very comfortable assigning themselves the role of arbiter of good and bad. These people form the rank and file of the social norm police).
Still McArdle does make an interesting acknowledgment that the things that make people seem different and even unappealing to us are the very traits that make them socially beneficial:
We may well end up grateful to Edward Snowden, and also find that we don't like him very much. Of course, Edward Snowden probably doesn't care. After all, if he cared about people liking him as much as the rest of us do, he probably wouldn't have been able to do with he did.
I did these Q&As for book promotion and thought I'd share them here as well:
Were you always aware that you were different?
Yes, though when I was young, I thought maybe it was just because I was smarter than everyone else. I saw things that other children did not see, was aware of the adult world in a way that even my smart siblings were not—awkward interactions from the end of an affair, why my grandpa treated my Dad differently from his other children (he was adopted), and so on. I knew other people did not see these things because I would reference them and get blank stares in return. I learned to keep things to myself, even to pretend I didn’t see them. Those were probably some of my first attempts to wear a mask of normalcy.
What are the common characteristics/behaviors shared by most sociopaths? Do they describe you, too?
Lack of remorse or concern for hurting or stealing; being deceitful, manipulative, impulsive, irritable, aggressive, and consistently irresponsible; failure to conform to social norms; and being unconcerned about people’s safety, including their own. You need to have at least three of these to be sociopath. I have them all, to varying degrees.
Why did you write CONFESSIONS OF A SOCIOPATH under a pen name?
I understood that being completely anonymous would hurt the authenticity of the book, yet I have no desire to be famous for being a sociopath. I also have relatives and friends who asked me to respect their privacy. But I still wanted people to know that I am a real person, and these things really did happen.
The book’s publication will likely out you as a sociopath. Why were you willing to take that risk?
I’m a risk-seeker and writing the book is probably one of the riskiest things I have done. I’m also a novelty seeker. I say “yes” to more things than I say no to. Writing the book gave me something interesting and exciting to divert my energies in a productive manner, rather than indulging any urges to stir up trouble in destructive ways.
I tell people I don't get nervous. They ask why my voice sometimes shakes or I have other physical symptoms of nerves and anxiety. Ok, it's a bit of an exagerration to say I don't get nervous. Yes, my body gets nervous. Or it gets ready for whatever risky situation I am planning on subjecting it to. But my mind doesn't interpret that emotionally and think -- wow, I'm nervous.
To get an inkling of how this physiology works, consider the following scenario, in which a trader grapples with a rumor that the Fed may raise rates later that afternoon:
As 2:15 — the time of the announcement — approaches, trading on the screens dwindles. The floor goes quiet. The trader feels intellectually prepared. But the challenge he faces requires more than cognitive skill. He needs fast reactions, and energy for the hours ahead.
Consequently, his metabolism speeds up, ready to break down energy stores in liver, muscle and fat cells. Breathing accelerates, drawing in more oxygen, and his heart rate speeds up. Cells of the immune system take up position at vulnerable points of the body, ready to deal with injury and infection. And his nervous system, extending from the brain down into the abdomen, redistributes blood — constricting flow to the gut, giving him butterflies, and to the reproductive organs, since this is no time for sex — shunting it to major muscle groups in the arms and thighs as well as to the lungs, heart and brain.
The announcement will bring volatility, and a chance to make money. The trader feels a surge of energy as steroid hormones are synthesized by their respective glands and injected into his bloodstream. Steroids are powerful, dangerous chemicals — they change almost every detail of body and brain: his growth rate, lean-muscle mass, mood, even the memories he recalls — and for that reason their use is tightly regulated by the International Olympic Committee and the hypothalamus, the brain’s drug enforcement agency.
These past hours, the trader’s testosterone levels have been climbing. This steroid hormone, produced by men (and, in lesser quantities, by women) primes the trader for the challenge ahead, just as it does athletes preparing to compete and male animals to fight. Rising levels increase confidence and, crucially, appetite for risk. For the trader this is a moment of transformation, what the French since the Middle Ages have called “the hour between dog and wolf.”
The stress hormones adrenaline and cortisol surge out of the adrenal glands, and the cortisol travels to the brain, where it stimulates the release of dopamine, a chemical operating along neural circuits known as the pleasure pathways. At high levels, cortisol provides a nasty, stressful experience. But in small amounts, in combination with dopamine — one of the most addictive drugs known to the human brain — it delivers a narcotic hit, a rush that convinces traders that there is no other job in the world.
Finally, at 2:14, the trader leans into his screen, pupils dilated, breathing rhythmic, muscles coiled, body and brain fused for impending action. An expectant hush descends on global markets.
This scenario illustrates just how sensitive the body is to information. We do not regard prices on a screen as a computer would, dispassionately; we react physically. Our body and brain rev up and down together, and this natural fusion makes us better risk-takers.
So yes, my body does respond to risk. And it can't just keep taking a beating. So even though my mind can handle things, sometimes my body can't, and vice versa.
First, the researchers make a distinction between classes of sociopaths:
“primary” (low-anxious) psychopathy is viewed as a direct consequence of some core intrinsic deficit, whereas “secondary” (high-anxious) psychopathy is viewed as an indirect consequence of environmental factors or other psychopathology.
Next, the sociopaths were given two classic decision-making tasks, the Ultimatum Game and the Dictator Game. Regarding the Ultimatum Game:
In the Ultimatum Game, two players are given an opportunity to split a sum of money. One player (the proposer) offers a portion of the money to the second player (the responder), and keeps the remainder for himself. The responder can either accept the offer (in which case both players split the money as proposed) or reject the offer (in which case both players get nothing). “Rational actor” models predict that the responder would accept any offer, no matter how low. However, relatively small offers (less than 20–30% of the total) are rejected about half the time (Bolton and Zwick, 1995; Guth et al., 1982). The “irrational” rejection of unfair offers has been correlated with feelings of anger (Pillutla and Murnighan, 1996), suggesting that the responder’s ability to regulate anger and frustration plays a critical role in task performance. Patients with vmPFC lesions, who are known to exhibit irritability and poor frustration tolerance despite an otherwise generally blunted affect (Anderson et al., 2006; Barrash et al., 2000), reject an abnormally high proportion of unfair offers (Koenigs and Tranel, 2007). Thus the first aim of this study is to determine whether either of the psychopathic subtypes (primary or secondary) also rejects an abnormally high proportion of unfair offers.
And the Dictator Game:
In the Dictator Game, there are again two players with an opportunity to split a sum of money. However, in this case the responder has no choice but to accept whatever split the proposer offers. Thus, the amount offered by the proposer in the Dictator Game is presumed to reflect a prosocial sentiment, such as empathy or guilt. Patients with vmPFC lesions, who are known to exhibit deficits in empathy and guilt (Anderson et al., 2006; Barrash et al., 2000), offer abnormally low amounts in the Dictator Game (Krajbich et al., 2009). Thus the second aim of this study is whether either of the psychopathic subtypes (primary or secondary) also offers abnormally low amounts in the Dictator Game.
I'm not surprised at all by the results. The only thing I find somewhat puzzling is that the primary and secondary sociopaths differ. I would think that both types would try to shortsell their partners in the games. Unless the secondary sociopaths are a little bit more aware or paranoid that this may be a situation that would leave them vulnerable to the unpredictable social judgment of others?
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