Socios: all in the family

This is one of my favorite songs. I love the lyrics: "One child grows up to be somebody that just loves to learn and another child grows up to be somebody you'd just love to burn. Mom loves the both of them, you see it's in the blood. Both kids are good to mom -- blood's thicker than mud." Of course when I first heard the song I thought I heard "Somebody that just loves to burn," which was obviously more applicable, but the rest is true -- my family loves me just as much as my empath siblings. But with the holidays upon us, I have been thinking about socio family members. Some think that as many as 1 in 25 people are sociopaths, and if that's the case you'd imagine that even more people have a sociopath in the family. Or maybe you turn out to be the sociopath in the family, like the man in this article:

Jim Fallon recently made a disquieting discovery: A member of his family has some of the biological traits of a psychopathic killer.
* * *
Three years ago, as part of a personal project to assess his family's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, Dr. Fallon collected brain scans and DNA samples from himself and seven relatives. At a barbecue soon thereafter, Dr. Fallon's mother casually mentioned something he had been unaware of: His late father's lineage was drenched in blood.

An early ancestor, Thomas Cornell, was hanged in 1673 for murdering his mother. That was one of the first recorded acts of matricide in the Colonies. Seven other possible killers later emerged in the family tree. The most notorious was distant cousin Lizzie Borden of Fall River, Mass. In 1892, she was accused and then controversially acquitted of killing her father and stepmother with an ax.

As a lark intended to enliven family get-togethers, Dr. Fallon decided to analyze the data from the Alzheimer's project to see whether anyone in his family matched the profiles of killers he had studied. His initial subjects included himself, his three brothers, his wife, and the couple's two daughters and son.
* * *
To his surprise, Dr. Fallon found that the analysis of his own brain showed he had inherited certain high-risk forms of MAOA and other various aggression-and violence-related genes.

"I'm the one who looks most like a serial killer," he says. "It's disturbing."
* * *
"I'm still in balance, but I seem to have low emotional engagement," says Dr. Fallon, noting that the brains of many cold-blooded murderers reveal a similar picture.

Dr. Fallon thinks that one vital factor may have prevented him from becoming a killer. "I had a charmed childhood," he says. "But if I'd been mistreated as a child, who knows what might have happened?"

The moral of this story to me is be careful how much you preach about genetic testing and forced imprisonment of sociopaths because you may turn out to be one of us.

James Fallon: The Psychopath Inside Q&A

Professor James Fallon has written an exciting new book combining his background in neuroscience with his personal experience having many characteristics (and the brain scan) of a psychopath. THE PSYCHOPATH INSIDE: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain (Kindle version here) is part memoir and part scientific review of both the recent genetic and neuroscience research that has been done on psychopaths.

As a special offer to this blog's audience, Dr. Fallon has graciously offered to answer some of your questions. If you have a question for Dr. Fallon, please post it in the comments addressed to "Dr. Fallon:". I will collect your questions (or a representative sample) and send them to him. When I receive his answers, I will post them in a future blog post.

Here is an except from his book:

I was thinking about putting something up about the book and then asking my readers and twitter followers if they had any questions in particular that they would like to ask him. I could select a representative sample, if he would be willing to give his thoughts? 

One October day in 2005, as the last vestiges of an Indian summer moved across Southern California, I was inputting some last-minute changes into a paper I was planning to submit to the Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law. I had titled it “Neuroanatomical Background to Understanding the Brain of a Young Psychopath” and based it on a long series of analyses I had performed, on and off for a decade, of individual brain scans of psychopathic murderers. These are some of the baddest dudes you can imagine—they’d done some heinous things over the years, things that would make you cringe if I didn’t have to adhere to confidentiality agreements and could tell you about them. 

But their pasts weren’t the only things that separated them from the rest of us. As a neuroscientist well into the fourth decade of my career, I’d looked at a lot of brain scans over the years, and these had been different. The brains belonging to these killers shared a rare and alarming pattern of low brain function in certain parts of the frontal and temporal lobes—areas commonly associated with self-control and empathy. This makes sense for those with a history of inhuman violence, since the reduction of activity in these regions suggests a lack of a normal sense of moral reasoning and of the ability to inhibit their impulses. I explained this pattern in my paper, submitted it for publication, and turned my attention to the next project. 

At the same time I’d been studying the murderers’ scans, my lab had been conducting a separate study exploring which genes, if any, are linked to Alzheimer’s disease. As part of our research, my colleagues and I had run genetic tests and taken brain scans of several Alzheimer’s patients as well as several members of my family, who were serving as the normal, control group. 

On this same October day, I sat down to analyze my family’s scans and noticed that the last scan in the pile was strikingly odd. In fact it looked exactly like the most abnormal of the scans I had just been writing about, suggesting that the poor individual it belonged to was a psychopath— or at least shared an uncomfortable amount of traits with one. Not suspicious of any of my family members, I naturally assumed that their scans had somehow been mixed with the other pile on the table. I generally have a lot of research going on at one time, and even though I try to keep my work organized it was entirely possible for things to get mixed up. Unfortunately, since we were trying to keep the scans anonymous, we’d coded them to hide the names of the individuals they belonged to. To be sure I hadn’t mixed anything up, I asked our lab technician to break the blind code. 

When I found out who the scan belonged to, I had to believe there was a mistake. In a fit of pique, I asked the technician to check the scanner and all the notes from the other imaging and database technicians. 

But there had been no mistake. 

The scan was mine.

Reprinted from THE PSYCHOPATH INSIDE: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain by James Fallon with permission of Current, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, A Penguin Random House Company. Copyright (c) James Fallon, 2013.

James Fallon's Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath

I've been meaning to do a post on the Atlantic's interview with James Fallon (Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath) about his new book, "The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain." Both the book and the article are worth reading in their entirety.

My favorite part in the article was Professor Fallon describing his relationship with his close associates, wife and sister:

I started with simple things of how I interact with my wife, my sister, and my mother. Even though they’ve always been close to me, I don't treat them all that well. I treat strangers pretty well—really well, and people tend to like me when they meet me—but I treat my family the same way, like they're just somebody at a bar. I treat them well, but I don't treat them in a special way. That’s the big problem.

I asked them this—it's not something a person will tell you spontaneously—but they said, "I give you everything. I give you all this love and you really don’t give it back." They all said it, and that sure bothered me. So I wanted to see if I could change. I don't believe it, but I'm going to try.

In order to do that, every time I started to do something, I had to think about it, look at it, and go: No. Don’t do the selfish thing or the self-serving thing. Step-by-step, that's what I’ve been doing for about a year and a half and they all like it. Their basic response is: We know you don’t really mean it, but we still like it.

I told them, "You’ve got to be kidding me. You accept this? It’s phony!" And they said, "No, it’s okay. If you treat people better it means you care enough to try." It blew me away then and still blows me away now. 

My second favorite part was on the possibility of change:

I think people can change if they devote their whole life to the one thing and stop all the other parts of their life, but that's what people can't do. You can have behavioral plasticity and maybe change behavior with parallel brain circuitry, but the number of times this happens is really rare.

Interestingly, I've felt like with my life being somewhat ruined by publishing the book, I have plenty of time now to do this very thing. I'm curious where it will take me.

Other topics include how sociopaths have a Zen Buddhist perspective, the difference between someone who becomes a violent sociopath and someone who does not, how and why treatment of infants and small children is critical to their development, and why sociopathic traits might not really "mature" until the adult brain has matured.

Dirty work

A reader sent me this video of James Fallon, science-famous for having killer ancestors and violent genes.  My favorite part is where he basically says that sociopaths exist to do the dirty work for everyone else.




Here are paraphrases of what I consider to be the most interesting parts:

6:48  There's a societal receptivity to psychopathology, in fact one may say that there's psychopathology in all of us because we ask the so-called successful sociopaths or psychopaths to do the dirty work for us. Ok.  And not just the dirty work but the good work.  You don't want your neurosurgeon to be empathetic and caring emotionally when they're working on you.  You want them to be cold machines that don't care.  Same thing with an investor. . . . A society almost demands that we have psychopaths.  It's a very stable feature throughout society in history that these people are there.  And they pop up in a very malignant way sometimes but these traits seem to be very useful to society so we almost ask for it, or our genes and our behavior ask for it.

8:10 Many of them . . . have excellent memories.  And there's a genetics to this.  The people who have very good memories usually have two forms of a gene that allow you to have very good memories but they also make you very anxious to depressed.

12:40  The fundamental way that a psychopath is put together is like a three legged stool.  One of the legs is a high vulnerability genetic alleles (aggression, violence, lack of bonding), brain loss, and abuse.

14:00 Two areas of the brain that are damages are orbital cortex and the ventromedial cortex

15:30 Cold cognition (logic) in balance with hot cognition (emotions, ethics, morality, etc.) in a normal brain.

Here's another video of James Fallon.

Thank you, sociopaths! (?)

I was having a conversation with a sociopath who is currently in the military about the relatively higher proportion of sociopaths in the military versus the general population.  The reader asked "What part do sociopaths play in the world? What's our niche?" and suggested: "In times of catastrophe, it's the socios that step up and lead until stability is restored, because at that point, we're the only ones who -can- do it, 9 times out of 10."

There are quite a few documented instances of sociopaths being exceptional in socially positive ways.  There is professor Jim Fallon his ideas about psychopaths doing the "dirty work" and the "good work" that others can't or won't do as well.   Joseph Newman believes that psychopaths are perhaps more inclined to be impulsively helpful than empaths. Also this post comparing heroes with sociopaths.

The reader continued about why sociopaths may be doing pro-social things, even when it doesn't involve the occasional "heroic" act:

In my experience, both personal and talking to others, sociopaths and psychopaths do seemingly random nice things for people more often than those seen as empathetic. If you walk the Path, you naturally want a leg up on those around you. You want to know what's going on, how to react, and you want people to defend you when someone tries to ruin your day. The best way to get that leverage is for people to like you and think you have their best interests at heart. Eventually, doing those small (but often meaningful) kindnesses becomes something the Path cares about, even if for no other reason than a flexible personality and unwillingness to change to suit others make it a routine.

Can we eliminate evil?

A reader suggested this Morgan Freeman narrated special "Through the Wormhole: Can We Eliminate Evil?" Not surprisingly, it features sociopaths and studies on the brain that give interesting insight to how we decide what to do and what constitutes evil.

The first clip is about empathy, and illustrates well the recent study that found that sociopaths feel empathy when directed to put themselves in the shoes of others.




If you have the genetics of a killer and the brain anatomy of a killer, are you destined to become a killer? James Fallon.




And finally this was an illustration of this experiment regarding the moral lives of babies.

Practicing Catholic

From a reader:

My name is Violet and I have recently been "Diagnosed" with ASPD, specifically Sociopathy. My psychologist of six years has recently told me (recently, as in almost three months ago) that he believes me to be a sociopath and for quite a while now. This was sort of a revelation; so many aspects of my life and mind became clear and made complete sense. I then realized why so many relationships failed and why I never could understand certain life lessons my mother or others would try to explain.

The reason I am writing to you is because I have a few questions and I am internally torn at the moment.  I am a practicing Catholic and have been since the "age of reason." I think that is probably one of the most difficult aspects of my life, that is, being myself and trying to live by what my Faith and Church teach even when I disagree or possess no love or interest in it. I am purely a Catholic because the fear of Hell was instilled within me from a very young age. I have always questioned the Church when others around me follow it blindly, or what appears to me to be blindly. Do you believe it is possible for a sociopath to fully accept a form of religion? My religion teaches that human nature is inherently sinful. There are degrees and variations of evil and good. The Church never mentions anything about the human brain and how certain disorders or personalities could make one more susceptible to sin. Sociopaths can lie, cheat, kill, steal, etc. without feeling remorse but this doesn't mean that we will, we are just more inclined to do those things and with ease. Would you say I am right? Psychology doesn't seem to apply with most Christian religions. People do not think psychologically. Most people do not seem to think, independently anyway. I am a philosophy major. I have also taken many logic courses. Thinking differently and more extensively has always been a part of me. I am sure you can relate.

I am having difficulty finding facts about Sociopathy online. Most of what I come across are the exaggerated and dramatic narratives from "Victims of Sociopathic/psychopathic relationships" who complain about their past romantic relationships and the "Sociopath or psychopath" who wronged them. I find it very humorous that they think that because one man/woman (normally a man though) cheated on them and ended the relationship that this therefore makes them a sociopath or psychopath. What a hasty generalization. There are so many disorders, why do people always label the "evil doer" as a sociopath or psychopath? Also, there doesn’t have to be something psychologically wrong with a person to perform hurtful or faulty acts.

Most people are terrified of sociopaths/psychopaths. I find this very interesting. I told my closest friend and she has absolutely no issue remaining my best friend. In fact, she finds it fascinating and she said it explains a lot of my behavior. She is also Catholic and an empath. I think she has a "Normal personality." She is the least dramatic and emotionally charged person I know, and because of this our friendship works very well.

I understand that most people are fixated on the "no remorse" aspect of the personality and that is why they are afraid and prefer to remain apart from us. I am tired of pretending though and I am tired of being an actress. Every now and then I am myself though, either with people I am just meeting or my mother's friends. I just do not see the sense in pretending for certain people; I gain nothing from them so I will stay away.  

I also have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Is this common? My research online only stated that the personality favors order and control. I am constantly internally examining myself for all of the traits I have read or the little "ticks" that I possess. Since discovering that I have the personality this has been a great personal study.


I have one more question. Is it normal that there would be an abusive instigator or crucial person who would illicit abnormal emotional behavior for a sociopath? From Childhood maybe? Research has suggested this. Sort of like the one person who helps form the person through abuse and could possibly only be the person to illicit any sort of emotional behavior? My psychiatrist thinks it is possible and told me that my mother is this person. She is the only one who can make me cry. Do you have that sort of person?

Your website is very helpful.

My response:

Thanks for this! Your thoughts on Catholicism reminded me of this and this post on contradictions.

I do think sociopaths can be religious, for various reasons, including maybe that they just want to. My religion seems to take into account psychological issues and relies more on mercy than justice, so maybe that's why I feel at home there.


I don't think that we don't have emotions, we just don't usually give them any sort of meaning or real role in our lives. You probably feel anger towards your mother? I used to feel angry at my father, now I just don't. I figure, what's the point?

Neuroscientist and diagnosed James Fallon has talked about having bouts of both obsessive compulsive behavior and anxiety issues. If you believe that sociopathy is largely a disorder of attention, which I do, then it makes sense that we would become fixated on things (OCD or anxiety) in addition to being completely oblivious to others (unemotional, unempathetic) -- hyper and hypo attention, if those are words.

Famous sociopaths: Benjamin Franklin?

So suggests a reader:

Of course, I read the book, and though I was, myself, a mental health professional, learned a great deal about sociopathy. In my day, before the functional MRI, there was no certainty that it was the functional structure of the brain that determined the behavior. Nor, that despite the 3-4% incidence in the general population, that many, if not most, are socialized, like "M. E." or Jimmy Fallon, and very likely, Benjamin Franklin, for that matter.

Not all sociopaths do evil things. I stated that Franklin might well be one, based on his risk-taking behavior, his disrupted familial relationships, his legendary charm, his promiscuity, and his need to go from one activity to another.

The risky behavior: the man signed the Declaration of Independence, an invitation to hanging. Also, he nearly electrocuted himself during the kite experiment. I'm sure that there were others examples that escape me for the moment.

• Disrupted family: Franklin had a hostile relationship with his son throughout their lives. He was also a very poor husband, and for all practical purposes, he acted as if he were a single man.
• The charm: Thank the lord for this and his genius. He got Louis XV to bankrupt France to support us against Britain during the Revolutionary War. It was the French fleet that bottled up Cornwallis at Yorktown, after all. AND: that bankruptsy was a proximal cause of the French Revolution that transpired just a few short years later.
• The hyperactivity: Again, thank the lord, and his genius, for his myriad inventions. Off the top of my head: a musical instrument that he called the Harmonium, the Franklin stove, bifocal lenses, the harnessing of electricity, etc.
• The promiscuity: His love life is one of legend, continuing well into his old age!

The error is to think that all sociopaths are alike. Sociopaths differ from one another based on the presence or absence of other pathologies such as paranoia (Stalin) or Schizophrenia (Hitler) or combinations thereof. Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are certainly sociopaths, yet their risky behavior was channeled into developments that have revolutionized our lives! Perhaps, we have advanced to where we are today because of  constructive sociopaths like these! Not every sociopath is a Jeffrey Dahmer or a Pol Pot!

I'm not entirely surprised at the suggestion that Benjamin Franklin could have been a sociopath, especially since studies have shown that entrepreneurs have several sociopathic traits ("The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship").

Cairns and Port Douglas in three efficient days

I'm a scuba diver and wanted to see the Great Barrier Reef while it's still there, it's been a childhood dream of mine to hold koalas, and I had like 4-5 days to kill between weekend appointments with people, so I headed up to the northeast to Port Douglas. I stayed at the Port Douglas Motel which was kitschy, cheap, centrally located, and great.

First, heads up. I feel like this is really not well publicized, but although this is a tropical part of Australia, you cannot really safely go swimming in the ocean, or even 100% safely hang out on the beach near bush or near the water particularly at dusk or dawn because (1) there are saltwater crocodiles and (2) all of the summer is "stinger season" in which you can get stung by all sorts of animals.

What are marine stingers?
Stingers are potentially lethal jellyfish that typically inhabit the waters off northern Australia. The most feared is the box jellyfish or Chironex fleckeri. Distinguished by its large box-like bell and trailing tentacles, the box jellyfish is responsible for about 80 confirmed fatalities in Australia since records began in 1883. The jellyfish's bell grows up to 30cm in diameter and extrudes about 60 tentacles, each measuring up to three metres in length. The Irukandji jellyfish, by comparison, is a pint-sized predator with a transparent bell measuring just 12 to 20mm and four small tentacles. There are numerous Irukandji species and two recorded deaths.

I literally only found out about any of this as I was take a shuttle from the airport in Cairns up to Port Douglas. By the way, I really recommend staying in Port Douglas, which is a charming tourist town, rather than Cairns which feels a little like not a place for tourists at all. My shuttle driver was talking to some locals about the two most recent crocodile deaths from the past 6 months -- an older woman who took a wrong turn while on a walk around her retirement home and a German young woman who was know to like to skinny dip.  For the elderly woman, apparently the family of the deceased pleaded with authorities to not kill the animal. Let's not make this a tragedy of two deaths instead of one!

Day one I checked in with my dive company for the next day then rented a bike and went to the Wildlife Habitat, which is a little small and a little kitschy, but also sketchy in all of the right ways like holding koalas and other animals and feeding various animals in a little bit of a free for all. I biked back to the motel via Four Mile Beach (pictured above). The sand is so packed, you can just bike on the beach itself, and probably safer with the crocodiles. At the Port Douglas end of Four Mile Beach, there's a little hill you can climb up to an ok lookout.

Day 2 I did a three dive tour to the outer reef using the ABC Dive Company, which seemed the most reputable and the smallest groups? The trip was nice, there was a shark apparently that I didn't see. I did see a lot of great coral, rays, an eel, a ton of little jellyfish. Basically it really did look like Finding Nemo, which I didn't expect for some reason. I think I had forgotten that Finding Nemo takes place at the Great Barrier Reef, so of course all of the same fish would be there.

Day 3 was not good. I had heard that the other great thing to see is the rainforest. Now this is like my third or fourth (fifth?) time doing tours of the rainforest, including the heart of the Amazon as well as other places in central and south America. I've done a ton of jungle tours and safaris and this one not only sort of sucked, it felt like I was trapped, which made me super grumpy. Daintree Discovery Tours. It was so bad that I was all set to post a bad review of it online, but then I started reading other one star reviews with my same complaints (basically just driving around in a car all day doing nothing of interest or no value added from the tour), and the response from the company was mainly to address the complaint that people had that they could have done the trip much cheaper themselves. The company responded by saying it would actually be around as expensive to do it yourself. But really, I just sort of wish I hadn't done it at all. My general impression was that either Daintree is not that cool of a rainforest to see, or no tour company has been able to highlight its charms well. It's sad, because apparently it is the oldest rainforest in the world? There were interesting things to see, I guess, but like 1-3 hours worth of interesting. Also, same notes as my post on Sydney about the service industry being a little lackluster in Australia. It felt like there was a lot of phoning it in going on.

Day 4 I did this Kurunda package that was pretty good, something like this in which you're basically just shuttled around on a bus from attraction to attraction. There seems to be no difference in the tour operators, so just choose the cheapest one that includes the little destinations you want to see, e.g. yes or no on the butterfly sanctuary. Rainforestation is worth seeing, so is the train and the skyrail. I had this terrible customer service encounter with a skyrail person who was yelling at people. I almost lost it for a second, and it reminded me that I'm for whatever reason most likely to lose my temper while traveling.

I did learn something interesting on the rainforest tour. Mangrove trees (pictured above) can grow in salt, but salt is still poison to them. They adapted a special root system that keeps most of the salt out, but salt still gets in. To keep the rest of the tree alive, the three designates a "sacrificial leaf". It puts all of the toxic salt in that leaf until it is full and then the leaf drops off. The leaf turns yellow.

I thought about how James Fallon has argued that sociopaths exist in society to essentially take care of the "dirty work" that is necessary and unavoidable in our society, work that give normal people PTSD if they had to deal it themselves. Kevin Dutton has made a similar argument about sociopaths being great soldiers, surgeons, and spies, I believe. Anyway, thanks to all of you sacrificial leaves out there taking one for the team!

Recent book media

Some recent media features on the book:

• NY Times Book Review by Jon Ronson
• NPR radio interview
• BBC World Tonight radio interview with Professor Kevin Dutton, author of Wisdom of Psychopaths
• Newsweek/Daily Beast (the comments are hilarious)
• Huffpost Live with Dr. James Fallon and Dr. John Edens (my diagnosing psychologist)
• Publisher's Weekly Review
• ABC Radio Australia
• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution
• Business Insider review
• Scientific American Review
• Slate's Patrick Bateman Review
• Bottom Up Radio interview
• Gluck Radio interview

Brains of killers

From a reader, here's a video of Professor Jim Fallon (previously discussed here) talking about some of the research he has done on the brains of killer.

Why we can't all be empaths

A lot of people think that the book and the blog argue that sociopaths are better than empaths. I make no such claim, I never have. But if people want me to justify my existence, I have some not-specious arguments about why we can be useful and an overall benefit to society. 

Even then, I acknowledge that the reason we work well are because there are so few of us, just like predators. If there were more sociopaths than there are already (maybe 25%), who knows, the world might be chaos. It would definitely throw our ecosystem off and certainly any competitive advantage that a sociopath has now would dwindle down to nothing.

So we can't all be sociopaths (or even have many more than we currently have), but we also can't all be empaths, at least not without throwing our ecosystem into a similar tailspin of chaos. Sociopaths within a society give that society an edge against other societies. And the very presence of sociopaths makes empaths behave in different, more robust and active ways that help propel a society forward instead of letting it stagnate or backslide. 

The NY Times provides an interesting economic analogy to this dynamic in "Why Can't America Be Sweden":

“We cannot all be like the Nordics,” Acemoglu declares, in a 2012 paper, “Choosing Your Own Capitalism in a Globalized World,” written with his colleagues James A. Robinson, a professor of government at Harvard, and Thierry Verdier, scientific director of the Paris School of Economics.

If the “cutthroat leader” – the United States — were to switch to “cuddly capitalism, this would reduce the growth rate of the entire world economy,” the authors argue, by slowing the pace of innovation.

***

These findings, if substantiated, will disappoint those who long for a Swedish-style mixed economy with universal health care, paid maternal leave, child allowances, guaranteed pensions and other desirable social benefits.

In a more detailed paper, “Can’t We All Be More Like Scandinavians?” Acemoglu, Robinson and Verdier expand on their argument that the world is dependent on American leadership in technology and innovation to sustain global growth. In order to maintain its position at the forefront of global innovation, the authors contend, the United States must maintain an economic system that provides great rewards to successful innovators, which “implies greater inequality and greater poverty (and a weaker safety net) for a society encouraging innovation.”

***

The three authors make the case that the interconnected world economy has reached what they call an “asymmetric equilibrium” in which the United States “adopts a ‘cutthroat’ reward structure, with high-powered incentives for success, while other countries free-ride on this frontier economy and choose a more egalitarian, ‘cuddly,’ reward structure.”

Directly challenging what they describe as the consensus view – that a country can substantially expand the welfare state without sacrificing its pioneering role in technological innovation – Acemoglu and his colleagues write that it is “the more ‘cutthroat’ American society that makes possible the more ‘cuddly’ Scandinavian societies based on a comprehensive social safety net, the welfare state and more limited inequality.”

In an e-mail, Acemoglu provided the following analogy: The U.S. is also the military leader of the world, and it cannot imitate Finland and reduce its military to a trivial size without taking into account the global repercussions of this (and I’m saying this as somebody who is strongly opposed to U.S. military interventions around the world).

Of course there are many criticisms to this argument (see the link to the original article), but it's not at all absurd to think that there is some element of truth to the idea that we can't all be the same and still see the sort of dynamic growth and prosperity we've become accustomed to. Similarly, the diversity that everyone (including sociopaths) provides has value to society as a whole.

Jim Fallon spoke similarly of sociopaths as being the members of society who do the "dirty work":

And not just the dirty work but the good work. You don't want your neurosurgeon to be empathetic and caring emotionally when they're working on you. You want them to be cold machines that don't care. Same thing with an investor. . . . A society almost demands that we have psychopaths. It's a very stable feature throughout society in history that these people are there. And they pop up in a very malignant way sometimes but these traits seem to be very useful to society so we almost ask for it, or our genes and our behavior ask for it. 

This is going to be especially useful in the zombie apocalypse. 

Baron-Cohan vs. Fallon

From a reader:

Hi M.E.,

If you haven't seen this, it's an interesting watch and I would be interested hear your take.  Simon Baron-Cohan (Ali G's cousin) is part of the panel and there is some interesting back and forth on Aspie's vs. Socio's and such with folks on the panel.

With all the debate on the forum of "who is what" and what the diagnosis mean and such, it might make fore some interesting fodder as well.

For me it was as much a confirmation of "whatever he is, I'm a lot like that."  Not exactly, but close - as an engineer, I can seen both elements in myself.

There is a funny quote around 45:00 about being the guy, in the case of trouble, "running down the street with two machetes in his underwear."  ...knives out and grinning!  8D~

And the "coming next time" bit on cultural alcoholism is a crack up!  I love the Ausies!

Cheers!

Presidential psychopathy

From a reader:

Interesting video of James Fallon speaking about how most beloved American Presidents score highest on the psychopathy checklist. 

Other interesting points he makes it that Hitler's not a sociopath, neither are any of the other Nazi leaders. Neither are mafiosos typically sociopathic. That's why Hannah Arend calls it the banality of evil, not the evil of psychopaths. 

Nurture trumping nature

I have posted before about James Fallon, neuroscientist, University of California, Irvine, professor, psychopath expert, and successful psychopath (?) before.  I thought this video was worth posting as well because it targets more the personal experience of what his family thinks about who he is and his childhood was instrumental in Jim not developing into a killer, despite his brain and genetic predispositions.




6:55: His mother tells him about how Lizzie Borden is a cousin of his.  On one line of his family there were at least 16 murderers.

7:54: He decides to check the brain scans and DNA of his family members for the brain signatures and genes linked to psychopathy.  He discovers everyone is normal except for him, who has the brain scan signature of a killer and all of the genetic markers predisposing to impulsivity, violence, etc.

10:05: Reaction from his family "I knew there was always something off.  It makes more sense now."  "Everything that you would want in a serial killer he has in a fundamental way."  "It was surprising but it wasn't surprising."  "He's always had a standoffish part to him."

11:00: Jim is honest with himself "I have characteristics or traits, some of which are . . . psychopathic." he gives the example of how he could blow off an aunt's funeral.  "I know something's wrong, but I still don't care."

11:40: Why wasn't he a killer?  "Whether genes are triggered or not will depend on what happens in your childhood."

12:28: "It turns out that I had a unbelievably wonderful childhood."

I think this is an interesting and accurate portrayal of what a high functioning psychopath might look like.  I think people expect to see very obvious differences, but frequently they're not obvious or they're not really visible.  It's like this response from Jennifer Kahn, author of that NY Times Magazine article on psychopathic children, when asked about whether the child's behavior was more or less extreme than she expected:

I think I expected Michael to be more immediately extreme. When I arrived, he was on his good behavior, but he did get extreme later in the night. Something that Waschbusch said he struggles with is that it is hard to define what is prepsychopathic behavior and what is behavior caused by a different kind of problem — it does tend to cross different diagnoses. It wasn’t the screaming or fits or slamming the toilet seat that struck me; it was the calculated coldness and the flip between emotional states. But I had expected it to be more obvious. When I entered the house, of course, I was thinking of adult psychopaths who have led criminal lives for decades, which is normally how they come to our attention. I was maybe expecting a child version of that, but of course that’s kind of ridiculous. Even among adult psychopaths, that would be a small minority.

Sociopathy doesn't exist

This was actually a good description of the difference between personality disorders versus other mental disorders and the problematic features of personality disorders, cognitive versus affective empathy, how and why the PCL-R emphasizes criminality, how sociopathy is a spectrum, and why brain scans cannot actually diagnose you with sociopathy (but rather just show that your brain is prone to the typical sociopathic traits), with Jim Fallon:

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder

The older I get, the more my obsession with efficiency and decisionmaking provokes me to behave in quirky ways, giving me every appearance of suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder (emphasis on compulsion).

Every month or two I make a small trek to a warehouse store. At the store I buy the same approximately 20 items in various quantities (small amounts of hummus, large amounts of palm hearts). I eat these items in a particular order, prioritizing the fresh fruits and vegetables in order of their spoilage, shifting then to baked goods that have a slightly longer shelf life, and finally to canned and frozen foods until I am able to make another trip to start the cycle over again.

My approach to shopping at the warehouse store is a ritualistic self-indulgence of the extremes of my desire to control. Because I am never sure what fresh fruits and vegetables will be available, I start there (what I am able to acquire in fresh fruits may alter slightly my choices in the frozen foods section, and finally in the dry and canned goods section). Even though I have a list and even though I buy nearly identical items at each trip, I still spend approximately 2-3 minutes with each item, even more for produce. I look at the quality, looking for flaws, looking at spoilage dates, comparing the item I selected with other identical items to determine slight variations. I do this carefully and methodically, trying to remain focused as my body suffers through the artificial chill of the produce section’s walk-in refrigerator. I then do the same for each other type of food, frozen foods, dry and canned goods, as well as any paper goods. I walk fastidiously through each aisle, paranoid that I will neglect some forgotten need and have to go without for another month or two.

As I stand in line to pay for my purchases, I sometimes smile at the odd picture the bizarre array of foods makes, each one of them a carefully chosen trade-off between convenience and nutrition, taste and perishability, versatility and diversity. Are people more likely to believe that I am throwing a theme party (assorted beverages and ethnic foods) or that I have Asperger’s (16 jars of palm hearts)?

But after years of this self-indulgence I can’t go to a normal grocer’s anymore; at least I can’t go and feel satisfied about the experience. My datamining mind chokes on the sheer amount of data involved for choosing each item: the unknowns (taste, quality, perishability, nutrition, price, etc.) multiplied by the number of options. People say “a whole aisle of bread,” like it is a good thing, but to me it is horror.

The last time I went to a grocery store was a whim—I needed to kill time waiting for an appointment so I thought I would buy rye bread because I love it and my warehouse store does not stock it. When I walked into the bread aisle, I was aghast. There were 8 different types of rye bread. I looked at each one, comparing the descriptions of taste, comparing the color and feel, comparing the nutritional information and the ingredients list. After 20 minutes and about to become paralyzed with indecision, I picked one loaf of each—all 8 different types of rye bread. (I am still eating rye bread from that trip, the loaves suffering serious freezer burn.)

And that is why I like to shop at the warehouse store. There are not 100 different types of bread, there are 5. There are not 20 different types of yogurt, there are three. There are only two types of bacon, regular and turkey, and only one type of egg whites in tetrapak. Going to the warehouse store is a satisfying experience in which I am quite certain that I can make the best possible choices given my options. Given my love/hate relationship with food and my particular dietary needs, I avoid going to a large grocery store for the same reasons I avoid going to a used car lot .

UPDATE: Interestingly, James Fallon said that he was at one point diagnosed with both an anxiety disorder and OCD. 

Almost a psychopath

From illustrious reader Daniel Birdick, regarding the book Almost a Psychopath: Do I (or does someone you know) have a problem with manipulation or lack of empathy?, in which people are apparently psychopathic without necessarily rising to the level of diagnosis:

I skimmed through the the Almost a Psychopath book. They adhere to the Hare definition of psychopathy and then label the "almost psychopath" as someone who behaves like a diagnosed psychopath, only less so. Very scientifically precise, no?~

This spectrum issue reminds me of the 2nd James Fallon video from one of your recent posts. Here this guy is, with the DNA and the brain of a serial killer, yet instead of becoming a murderer he instead becomes a neuroscientist. He is clueless about the impact of his own behavior on others up until the point when he sees the results of the brain scans, although his family is completely unsurprised by his discoveries. So, by virtue of his utter lack of caring and his genetic and neurological makeup, can we call him an almost psychopath? Or does the absence of antisocial or criminal behavior (relative to diagnosed psychopaths) indicate that he is not at psychopath at all, in any way that matters? Some, like good old Dr. Robert, base their notions of psychopathy entirely on what does or does not happen on the inside. The Hare checklist on the other hand is behaviorally based, with a few exceptions. I think the checklist assumes, to paraphrase the ultimate paragon of passivity, that you shall know a tree by its fruits. What you experience on the inside only matters when it expresses itself on the outside. I am inclined to agree. What you do matters more than what you don't feel. So what if you feel callous and unemotional on the inside. What matters is how you actually treat people. Right? Why then all the blather about empathy and emotional responses to social faux pas, like guilt and shame? Is it the whole authenticity thing? I find that to be another red herring. What self are we being authentic about? Where is this ghost in the machine and why won't it show up on a PET scan? Is it really "virtuous", whatever the hell that means, to be honest and admit that you don't give a flying fuck about whatever sob story some clueless twat wants to lay on you, or is it in fact more moral to pretend to care by aping the right facial expressions and body language?

Went on a bit of a rant there. Anyway...