Smartest person in the room

Sorry for the particularly slow posting and comment moderation, I've been out of the country.

I stumbled upon this video, I have forgotten where. It's from personal financial guru Dave Ramsay, but it takes an interesting turn from the personal as the woman seeks what she believes is financial advice and instead he gives her marital advice.



Dave Ramsay says that they're at an impasse not because of the consumer debt that the couple has, but because their world views are colliding. He talks about there being a respect meltdown where "he is the king of everything and your opinion doesn't matter." He says it's debilitating. "How do we get your husband on board, uh, we don't, until he decides he's on board with being your husband." "He's just doing whatever the flip he wants to do and the rest of you just exist around him." "You're trying to work around this elephant that's in the middle of your living room . . .  and you can't work around it."

I feel like this must be the experience of a lot of people who are in a relationship with someone with certain types of mental health issues (including a lot of people with personality disorders) who have difficulty validating or acknowledging the personhood of others. I know in dealing with some lower functioning people with personality disorders, they will insist on absolute autonomy -- the right to do and say what they want, when they want and not to be accountable to other people for their choices. Often there is a double standard because they expect other people to consider them and their preferences in making choices. They can be hyper sensitive to anyone having an expectation of them, that they show up on time or do what they say they're going to do or fix the problems that they've created for other people. They'll whine about how people are trying to manipulate them or control them, trying to micromanage their life.

Unfortunately I think that Dave Ramsay is right -- when someone believes that he or she is the king of everything and the rest of people just exist around him/her, a healthy, functional relationship would be impossible. Trying to help a relationship that is already there is also impossible unless the other person is really willing to start acknowledging the personhood and role of others in his or her life. 

Just a dick?

In what has become an impromptu series of "Sociopath, or just _____?" (e.g., sociopath, or just puberty? Sociopath, or just smart? Sociopath, or just depression? Etc., a reader wonders:

I'm well aware you get hundreds of emails from people who are desperate to become sociopaths, so they tell you how unfeeling they are and how they don't care about anybody. And after reading your blog for over a year a question began to fester in the back of my brain and I crave an answer. Why would people, at the slightest lack of empathy, jump to the conclusion that they are a sociopath? And the reason i bring this up is, i used to feel like them. At some point in my life i just decided, i love to hurt people, so i must be a sociopath. I now realize that i'm just a douche. I still enjoy seeing people crumble before me when i attack all of their insecurities at once, but I'm not a sociopath or a psychopath. But what i'm confused by is, why is it so hard for people to come to the realization that they are just dicks?

M.E.:

I think you may be confusing lack of empathy with sadism. Some people don't care about other people, but they have perfectly intact empathy. Other people know that they don't connect with people, and it looks (internally) and feels a lot more like what I would imagine autism would feel like. Their brain is not capable of processing empathy the most people's brains (apparently) do. They can pretend that those empathy and emotional connections things are going on, in fact, they can pretend so well that no one else suspects what's really going on.

Although there's certainly bound to be overlap between empathy-impaired people and dicks, a diminished capacity for empathy is different and doesn't necessarily lead to enjoying exploiting people, or even just taking a special pleasure in your own agenda at others expense. So which are you? 

A sociopath's intimate

I liked this comment from a past post:

I had a friend who was a sociopath... learning about sociopathy in general was one of the most fascinating experiences. This person was incredibly perceptive, with a piercing intellect and spontaneous creativity, and seemed to excel at all he turned his hand to. However, life was ultimately unfulfilling for him because he felt so surrounded by idiots and imbeciles, and was himself so free of emotional inhibitions that he knew he could do more or less whatever he wanted. I always appreciated his complete and utter disdain for social norms, and the ways we would become each other's mutual psych experiment, even if it was difficult to learn that not one iota of his interest in me was emotional in nature. Sociopaths may be bereft of the empathic emotionality that constitutes the core of the neurotypical human experience, but I also feel there is much in the plight of the sociopath that is mirrored in 'normal' people, too; in essence, it is like gazing into a looking glass, seeing our basest, most ugly and unrestrained desires staring us back in our faces.

However, I feel so deeply sorry for people who had been in intimate relationships with these people. Honestly, I harbour no malice towards the sociopaths because they don't operate on the same emotional paradigm of most of humanity. Their actions are not 'evil' insofar as they are not malicious in intention, merely selfish, as they cannot be anything else. However, there is even an inherent selfishness to the most deeply emotional and sentimental of people - that we are not lied to, that we are never deceived or manipulated, that our feelings are viscerally understood and reciprocated. The sociopath, by nature of their very being, is unable to fulfil this requirement. I have no doubt that they do 'love' in their way, but never the twain shall meet. My heart goes out to everyone who has been unwittingly hurt by these people. Ultimately, I can't say that I hate them, as in many cases they are fascinating, beguiling and seductive existences, however I am quite content to watch that brilliant, chaotic maelström from a safe distance, never becoming swept up in its immediate vicinity. 

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? 

Song: She's Always a Woman

Even before I had ever heard the word sociopath applied to me, I always sort of identified with this song and it does seem to accurately portray the ups and downs with being with a female sociopath.

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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?

Boundaries: help or hindrance?

A reader asked about her sociopathic-seeming significant other, bringing up an interesting point about boundaries:

He knows he has thing's inside of him that work different from most people. I don't like to say, "normal" because to me, he is pretty normal or tries to go with the flow as much as he possibly can. I know to always be on my guard, and I have noticed that if I seem more like it does not bother me and if I am more stern with my remarks and answers, he seems to like that. Is that normal I suppose.

I don't know if I can speak for all sociopaths on this point, but I myself like well-defined boundaries, at least in personal relationships that I am interested in maintaining, and it sounds like he is the same. It is a little unusual for a sociopath to be in such a long relationship. By now he no longer derives most of his pleasure in the relationship from the constant acquisition of power, through playing games with you, seducing you, etc. You must provide something else to him that he values enough to try to keep the relationship working, whether stability, a front/beard/respectability, money, someone to take care of his kids, intimacy, or any other number of things. Basically you are still a profitable endeavour for him -- he may pay $100K a month to keep the thing running, but he gets at least $101K a month in return, so he'll keep that up forever. In other words, his brain is constantly running a cost benefit analysis of staying with you: all the time and effort it takes and possible negative consequences ($100K) compared to all of the benefit he receives ($101K). Just like a business, he might let things dip into the red here and there on a bad month, but ultimately will not continue seeing you if he sees it as a losing endeavor.

You being stern helps him keep the account in the black by reducing expenses. There is always going to be a certain amount of waste in a business, including breakage of merchandise, worker injuries, broken machinery, or hurt feelings. To fix that, businesses establish rules to promote optimum precautionary measures. For instance, instead of the business paying thousands of dollars to replace broken merchandise, they institute rules about putting breakable merchandise on the bottom shelf. Simple measures like properly training workers and forcing them to wear safety equipment (boundaries), can keep costs down and a business solvent. You are performing the same function with him when you establish boundaries. Instead of little things building up until you melt down emotionally (broken machinery), you are training him how to properly operate your machinery, so to speak.

Of course he will still do some things to hurt the business intentionally for his own gain, maybe the emotional equivalent of embezzling money, but when he does those things intentionally, he has no problem with them. Just because he kicks around the furniture one time does not mean that he wants to be accidentally stubbing his toe two weeks later. So some "stern" things you say will just make him angry and defensive, but if your sternness is just a matter of routine maintenance to prevent catastrophe, he will welcome any advice from you just as you would welcome the advice of a trusted mechanic.

Economics and sociopathy

I was talking to an economist friend recently. We were talking about how economics is not just a dismal science, but that economists have a pretty dismal view of human nature, possibly because economists themselves are not generally altruistic or prosocial? He told me that economists are different enough from the general population that economics researchers can't use economics undergraduate students for their experiments because they tend to give very different answers than the average person. Specifically he told me about a game where everyone chooses to either put in a black marble or a white marble in a bag. If you put in a white marble, you increase the overall size of the payout/pie, but you just have one piece of that pie. If you put in a black marble, you get two pieces of the pie, but of a smaller pie. The optimal result would be for everyone to put in white marbles, and a lot of people actually do put in white marbles either because of altruism or optimism or guilt or whatever else. Economists and economics students, however, almost always put in black marbles. My economist friend was using this as evidence that economists are not good people. And if this one scenario was the only thing you knew about economists, perhaps you could say that the results of the experiment are consistent with the economists-as-bad-people hypothesis too.

But I gave him another quick scenario to see how he would handle it: imagine that you are at war, just you and five other fellow soldiers, all standing around in a circle. A grenade gets launched into the middle of the circle. If someone jumps on the grenade, only one person dies. If no one jumps on the grenade, there's a 20% chance someone might die and everyone will suffer moderate to critical injuries. Everyone is equidistant from the grenade and has an equal opportunity to jump on the grenade. Before I tell you what he said, I want the sociopaths who are reading this to think what they would do.






So, I asked my economist friend what he would do and he immediately replied, "I would jump on the grenade." Of course he would. He's rational and cares about efficiency. He would be the type of person in the trolley problem to throw the switch and kill the one to save the five, and apparently that answer doesn't change even when he is the one who needs to die. I think his answer surprised even him, though I'm not sure why. Perhaps because he had convinced himself that economists are soulless or at the very least selfish (i.e., rationally self-interested). But there's nothing remotely selfish or even self-interested about jumping on the grenade.

The reason I knew that this example would "work" on him is that he and I think similarly and it's something that I think I might do too. I like efficiency, and it would be efficient to fall on the grenade. Also I like winning, and it would be "winning" to thwart the enemy. It would be powerful, to smother the force of such a powerful device with just my body. Also I'm impulsive and not particularly attached to life. I actually think that a lot of sociopaths would do the same for one or more of those reasons. In fact, and I wish there was some way to accurately test this, I predict that a higher percentage of sociopaths would jump on the grenade than non-sociopaths, if for nothing else than the indecision or paralyzing fear that a lot of non-sociopaths might experience -- by the time they got around to making the decision, it might be too late. These are just guesses, but I don't think it's crazy to think that sociopaths might be braver and more pro-social in certain situations than normal people, just like economists might be more selfless than the average person in certain situations.

Whether or not my prediction is correct, I think this example also illustrates how dangerous it is to perform a couple experiments in controlled situations and extrapolate the data far beyond those particular situations. Sloppy science writers (and even serious researchers) make this mistake all of the time, e.g. if sociopaths seem to not show empathy in one situation, it's easy to make the (apparently incorrect) presumption that they never feel empathy. The truth is context matters immensely and we only know a sliver of all there is to know about ourselves and others. 

Sharing is caring?

Are sociopaths happier for being selfish?  Probably:


Although we are taught the benefits of kindness and altruism, it seems we are happiest when simply told to pursue our own self-interest.

Researchers found the key to contentment is feeling we have no choice but to be selfish.

In contrast, the study, carried out by psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania, found that those who actively choose a selfish path usually have to battle with guilt.

They speculated that because we're taught as children that 'sharing means caring', if we make a decision out of self-interest, we often feel bad for prioritising ourselves over others.

But that frequently means we forego the things we know will make us happy.

That's odd, why would being unselfish not make us happy?