Weighing the pros and cons

I frequently get asked if I could choose to stop being a sociopath, would I? Or would I choose to remain the way I am? I tell people that I would change, because I've already lived half of my life this way and I'm a novelty seeker and it would be interesting to live life completely differently. I think what people are really asking, though, is whether I think it's better to be a sociopath or better to not. Although there are certain advantages to being a sociopath (e.g., ruthlessness or outside the box thinking), there are also disadvantages, like being unable to predict when a lynch mob will come after me or not being able to sustain relationships or employment positions. It can be frustrating and lonely sometimes. I feel like I often misunderstand and am misunderstood. So it's really a mixed bag.

I was thinking about this when I read this NY Times article about a high school long distance runner with multiple sclerosis. Before she was diagnosed she was completely unexceptional as a runner. After she was diagnosed, she became one of the fastest runners in the nation. During the race, she loses feeling in her legs. While other runners have to fight through the pain, she feels nothing. This allows her to keep up a remarkable pace, however when she gets to the finish line she always collapses into her coach's arms.

At the finish of every race, she staggers and crumples. Before momentum sends her flying to the ground, her coach braces to catch her, carrying her aside as her competitors finish and her parents swoop in to ice her legs. Minutes later, sensation returns and she rises, ready for another chance at forestalling a disease that one day may force her to trade the track for a wheelchair. M.S. has no cure.

Does this give her an unfair advantage?

Though examples of elite athletes with M.S. are scarce, some have speculated that Montgomery’s racing-induced numbness lends a competitive edge, especially given the improvement in her times since the diagnosis.
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“I think there’s a benefit to numbness,” he said. “I don’t know anyone in their right mind, though, who would trade this; who would say, ‘Give me M.S. so I have a little bit of numbness after Mile 2.’ But I think that’s when she gets her strength.”  

Of course besides the very real possibility of a wheelchair, there are other drawbacks to her condition:

“When you push to your limit, your body usually sends pain signals to warn you that you’re damaging tissues,” said Dr. Peter Calabresi, director of the Multiple Sclerosis Center at Johns Hopkins. He has not treated Montgomery.

“Pushing that limit is what endurance sports are all about. But if you can’t feel those signals and push from tingling to extreme or prolonged numbness, you could be doing damage that we won’t even know about until down the road. It’s a paradox.”

Sound familiar to any of the sociopaths out there? Ignoring normal fear, pain, and other emotional cues to do outrageous things, with both the advantages and disadvantages of doing so?

(On a related note to the previous post about people's perceptions being tainted by their previous experiences, those people who know nothing about her assume that her finish line collapses are seizures, fainting spells, or simply due to her being a wimp, as opposed to the less obvious but correct answer of multiple sclerosis).

(Also look here for thoughts on advantages and disadvantages to being ordinary vs. extraordinary).  

Morality changing according to context

I thought this article defending Twitter outrage was interesting, perhaps largely because I finally understood why people defend mob mentality (short answer, at its best it is one of the few purely democratic versions of social advocacy and activism). First, to his credit, I was heartened to see the author acknowledge how dangerous Twitter mobs can be for even "ordinary" people ("All the while aware that if we get it wrong, at some point Twitter may turn our way, set to destroy. No one is off-limits."). But he argues that this is (1) not unique to Twitter and (2) not a downside, but a feature of the Twitter/Internet mob:

If the ruthlessness on Twitter shocks you, well, it isn’t a ruthlessness only found there. This ruthlessness is everywhere—you may be projecting. Our economy and political system operate on a lack of forgiveness. We bring our children up now with zero-tolerance policies in the schools—can we really be surprised if we and they use them elsewhere? One bad credit report, one bad night at the hospital with a $30,000 bill and no insurance, one firing, one bad book, one bad tweet and you’re gone, consigned to a permanent underclass status forever. No way out. Our president had to make a deal with a few major companies to hire the long-term unemployed because not having a job became the quickest way to never get hired—we’ll see if the companies follow through. If there’s no forgiveness online it’s because there’s no examples of forgiveness anywhere in American life.

Meanwhile, underneath the prevalence of the public apology is a great public wrong. And so we, the public, we want someone to do something. We want the offending column fixed, the black woman comedian hired, the bill to pass, banks to lend safely, clean drinking water, health care, a job, even just a book recommendation we can count on. We want action on whatever it is, and we go to Twitter for it, feed fatigue and all, because there, unlike just about everywhere else, we still get what we’re after.  Twitter, for all the ridiculousness there, is one of the few places where there’s accountability at all for any of this. While it may feel dangerous that no one is above being taken down by Twitter, it also means that in its way, it is the one truly democratic institution left. It may be terrifying that it is the one place you have to be more careful than most, but that is also why, for now, it still matters.

So in the first paragraph he argues that Twitter social shaming is no different than any other ruthlessness we encounter in real life, e.g. become a felon and become politically disenfranchised. But then in the next paragraph he says that Twitter is there so we can actually right these wrongs. And the great thing about Twitter is that "we, the public" decide which wrongs deserve to be righted through social shaming and which we don't care as much about. (Interestingly, that's also how the ancient Romans determined which gladiators lived or died -- following the desires of the mob. Also interestingly, there was a far greater uproar about a racist tweet referencing the AIDS crisis in Africa then there ever were outraged tweets about the AIDS crisis in Africa. Also "we, the public" was also how we oppressed gay people, kept down black people, and hunted communists for decades.)

The problem with this line of thought is that Twitter isn't actually a democracy, primarily because Twitter and all other mobs = unconstrained lawlessness. Democracies abide by rules and procedures, and that goes double for justice systems within democracies. Twitter does not. No one is counting votes. No one is making sure that no one is voting twice or unduly influencing others to vote their conscience. In fact, there is every evidence that people fear the social shaming mob and consequently self-censor and sanitize themselves on Twitter and other social media so as not to become collateral damage (even the author of the original article admitted that he kept himself from tweeting certain things, afraid that "someone would get unreasonably angry at me for it" and argues at the end that he has to be more careful on Twitter than he is in other forums). And what are the rules or procedures for determining who deserves our collective ire? Is it the person without insurance with the large hospital bill? Any more or less so than the woman who tweets racist jokes? The child who has violated the zero tolerance policy at school? Should we forgive one and not the others? Does it depend on if the person without insurance couldn't obtain insurance or if they were just too lazy or cheap to get it themselves? Or if the child came from a disadvantaged background? Or if the racist joke was tongue in cheek? Or if it was made right before a transcontinental flight without Wifi? And how can we make these nuanced determinations in a way that ensures some degree of due process? And is there an Twitter Innocence Project out there exonerating those that have been socially shamed but are more innocent than we originally believed? Or are we pretty sure that mobs never make mistakes? If someone hits economic rockbottom, they could always declare bankruptcy, which disappears after a certain number of years. This and other legal safeguards blunt the ruthlessness of much of life. Are there similar safeguards for people who commit social or political gaffes? Or is that the lowest people can go in our eyes?

I guess I don't quite understand this aspect of the author's pro-Twitter activism position -- is he pro or anti ruthlessness in life/Twitter? And could it be that people are ruthless on Twitter not just because they are honestly attempting to right public wrongs but because they like it and because they can and because they don't have to face the same consequences for their actions that they might normally? And if so, maybe people can understand a little better why I enjoy ruining people (see also feature comment).



Ryan Holiday references the above video:

As Louis CK put it, in our cars we seem to have a different set of values, values that apparently make it OK to be absolutely horrible towards other people. But that’s not the only place. Think about all the angry, vitriolic comments you read on the internet. People do it because they can. Because it’s anonymous and they know they won’t face any real consequences saying awful things to other people. There’s countless situations like this, we change our values because we have tacit permission to be terrible, and because no one will hold us accountable.

We tell ourselves that this is cathartic but it’s really not. Has anyone ever really felt better after punching a pillow? Or does this actually make us more angry? Does yelling really express your frustration or manifest more of it? Do you criticize the person you’re in a relationship with because it’s necessary or because it’s possible? Do you take advantage of people simply because you know you have power over them?

When deprived of these options, what do we do instead? Usually nothing. We ignore the temptation of those impulses. In the best cases, we’re left with feelings that we must address instead of blasting them at other people.

It’s a lesson all of us should consider whenever we lash out, get short, or angry with other people. Are we doing it out of genuine necessity, or are we doing it because in that context, we can? If it’s the latter, let’s question in it. Let’s ask if it’s really something we want to have in our lives and if we’d feel better if the “permission” was magically rescinded.

From Louis CK "I'd like to think I'm a nice person, but I don't know man."

The ruthlessness of nature

Wired for risk

This was an interesting article sent to me courtesy of a reader, "Economic decision-making in psychopathy": A comparison with ventromedial prefrontal lesion patients," featuring our good friend Newman as one of the authors. The gist of the article is that "born" sociopaths share certain risking taking and economic decision-making patterns in common with people who have an impaired ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that is associated with risk, fear, and decision-making.

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?

Brutally effective

From Narcissistworld:


I recently watched a fascinating video on psychopaths, which describes psychopathy in terms of attention.

In a nutshell, psychopaths don’t pay attention to the same things that normal people pay attention to. E.g. take a cat: when it sees prey, it focuses its attention on catching the prey. It ignores pretty much everything else. Psychopaths are similar; when they are focused on getting something they ignore other information (the feelings of others).

Narcissists are hypercompetitive. When they compete, their attention focuses on what it will take to win; they marshal all the mental resources they can to that task. Notably unimportant: how others feel.

One fascinating exercise (see the video) asks subjects to focus on images, and ignore the words written on the images. The psychopaths do great at that task; they are able to focus their attention narrowly and keep working towards their goal. In some high-stakes circumstances the psychopaths will outperform normal people, who will break down and lose.

A bit how men can’t understand why women want to talk about feeling so much, psychopaths have a hard time understanding why normal people are so disinclined to be brutally effective. To a psychopath, things are crystal clear. One “benefit” of being analytical, low-empathy and morally utilitarian is that one can arrive at simple and brutal solutions and see them through.

It's funny how consistent this mentality is amongst sociopaths.  Everyone comes in different shells, different races, different genders, and sometimes even when I know someone is a sociopath I will just start seeing them as that shell, like I do with everyone else.  But they're not like everyone else.  They're singular.

Narcissists vs. Sociopaths (part 3)

(cont.)


I'm Low Empathy. Am I a Sociopath or a Narcissist?

If you know you are low empathy, and you just don't care about others finding out, you are a sociopath.
If you do bad things, but think your empathy is just fine, but you've got a nagging fear that maybe there is something wrong with your empathy, but you definitely don't want others to find out - you are a narcissist.

If you don't feel any shame when you get caught, you are a sociopath.
If you feel shame when getting caught, you are a narcissist.

If you do bad things because you are on a crusade, you are a narcissist, or a malignant narcissist. Decide between the two alternatives based on how cruel and impulsive you are.

If do bad things because it is good for you, and don't mind if others know it (except when it gets in the way of you winning) you are a sociopath.