Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Sociopaths in the news: fratricide

Kids these days... tsk tsk.
An Indiana teen who has allegedly admitted strangling his little brother likened the murder to satisfying a craving for a hamburger and told authorities he was inspired by the television series "Dexter."

Anthony Conley, 17, is charged with murdering his 10-year-old brother Conner on Saturday night, allegedly strangling the boy and then stuffing his head in a plastic bag so that blood wouldn't "get everywhere," according to Dearborn-Ohio County Prosecutor Aaron Negangard.

"It's disturbing that a 17-year-old would want to kill under any circumstances, let alone his own brother," said Negangard. He described Conley as "emotionless" when he was interviewed by police.

Negangard said that when Conley was asked to explain his behavior by investigators the teen said he identified with Dexter Morgan, the main character in Showtime's "Dexter," which chronicles the life of an undercover Miami blood spatter expert who doubles as a serial killer.

"Conley said that he just 'felt like him,'" said Negangard.

In interviews with investigators, Conley also allegedly likened his desire to kill to a craving a person gets when they want a particular food.

"He analogized the murder to when someone wants a hamburger," said Negangard. "He said that when someone wants a hamburger they've just got to have it."

Monday, December 7, 2009

New Study Reveals Most Children Unrepentant Sociopaths

So reads the headline of a hilarious article from the Onion, sent by a reader. Selections are below, but read the entire article here.
A study published Monday in The Journal Of Child Psychology And Psychiatry has concluded that an estimated 98 percent of children under the age of 10 are remorseless sociopaths with little regard for anything other than their own egocentric interests and pleasures.

According to Dr. Leonard Mateo, a developmental psychologist at the University of Minnesota and lead author of the study, most adults are completely unaware that they could be living among callous monsters who would remorselessly exploit them to obtain something as insignificant as an ice cream cone or a new toy.

"The most disturbing facet of this ubiquitous childhood disorder is an utter lack of empathy," Mateo said. "These people—if you can even call them that—deliberately violate every social norm without ever pausing to consider how their selfish behavior might affect others. It's as if they have no concept of anyone but themselves."

"The depths of depravity that these tiny psychopaths are capable of reaching are really quite chilling," Mateo added.

According to the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, a clinical diagnostic tool, sociopaths often display superficial charm, pathological lying, manipulative behaviors, and a grandiose sense of self-importance. After observing 700 children engaged in everyday activities, Mateo and his colleagues found that 684 exhibited these behaviors at a severe or profound level.

The children studied also displayed many secondary hallmarks of antisocial personality disorder, most notably poor impulse control, an inability to plan ahead, and a proclivity for violence—often in the form of extended tantrums—when their needs were not immediately met.

"Children will use any tool at their disposal to secure gratification," Mateo said. "And as soon as the desire is fulfilled, be it some material want or simply an insatiable and narcissistic desire for validation, they quickly become bored and lose interest in their victims, all the while thinking only of satisfying whatever their next hedonistic craving might be."

Mateo added that even when subjects were directly confronted with the consequences of their inexplicable behavior, they had little or no capacity for expressing guilt, other than insincere utterances of "sorry" that were usually coerced.

Because children are so skilled at mimicking normal human emotions and will say anything without consideration for accuracy or truth, Mateo said that people often don't realize that they've been exploited until it is too late. Though he maintained that anyone can fall victim to a child's egocentric behavior, Mateo warned that grandmothers were especially susceptible to the self- serving machinations of tiny little sociopaths.
***
According to renowned child psychologist Dr. Pritha Singh, author of Born Without Souls, diagnosing preadolecents as sociopaths is primarily a theoretical interest, as the disorder is considered untreatable.

"We've tried behavior modification therapies, but children actually learn from our techniques and become even more adept at manipulating others while concealing their shameless misanthropy," Singh said. "Sadly, experience has taught us there is little hope for rehabilitation."

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Conversation with a friend

This is a very early, pre-blog conversation I had with a friend.
M.E.: The other night I met these strangers and within hours we had all outted ourselves as sociopaths and started collaborating on internet startup ideas. There was one non-socio there who was asking all these questions.

Friend: Do you really feel no guilt?

M.E.: No, I feel guilt

Friend: Well, that's not very sociopath of you.

M.E.: Well, I am not full sociopath then maybe. But I mean, it's a different kind of guilt.

Friend: Are those people full?

M.E.: I don't know. The other guy was funny, he was like "good sociopaths" do this. I think it is true that there are good sociopaths. I don't know if I feel guilt. I feel regret.

Friend: How many of the symptoms do you think you have? It seems like a lot, I guess.

M.E.: I dunno, like everyone has different symptoms because they deal with the lack of empathy in different ways. Some people see it as a lack and try to make up for it, others don't see it as a lack at all and sort of exploit it. So the symptoms are very varied.

Friend: It seems that there are plenty of consistent things.

M.E.: Ha, yeah, well everyone is manipulative, everyone is trying to avoid detection, everyone is a little reckless. Anyway, I told the empath that it is probably harder for socipaths to become an empath than for empaths to become a sociopath.

Friend: Hah, funny that you call him an empath.

M.E.: Because there is low road and high road mental processes going on. High road is conscious thought, low road is unconscious instinct type thought. So I tried to explain to him that sociopaths are essentially just shifting way more of their decisions into high road thought than the typical empath. Empaths can practice that and get good at making conscious decisions about everything (socio). But how can socios conscious force decisions into the unconscious? I think it could happen but it would have to be through the influences of someone else training you, something that you could remain unaware of.

Friend: It's not really like that

M.E.: Like what?

Friend: high/low

M.E.: Yeah, it is kind of

Friend: Well, we disagree

M.E.: Or I mean, pop science stuff I have read has said that the brain works that way. Are you saying that that isn't the distinction between socios and empaths? Or just that the mind doesn't work that way? Or not all high roaders are socios?

Friend: It's not that you're more conscious. It's that all your conscious thoughts are focused on the single-minded goal of achieving your interests. To the destruction of others. Everything is a war game to you and the fact that you are more conscious than most just means that there are lots of dumb people.

M.E.: Yeah, good point. You hate that I am a sociopath?

Friend: That's like saying I hate you because of your gender or ethnicity. Doesn't mean anything, really.

M.E.: You hate the sociopath in me, though? You hate the tendencies?

Friend: Well, obviously I don't like that you are manipulative and megalomaniacal and reckless abt your life and others. But I mean, that's just a given, isn't it?

M.E.: Given meaning that's just who I am and always have been?

Friend: And I mean, who knows what else arises from you believing you're a sociopath. That's just who you are. Alright sociopath, I'm going to maybe try to take a nap.

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

It's alarming how charming I feel (part II)

I could go either way on this letter (link here). It might have been written by a sociopath, or it may have not. But I always think it's an entertaining exercise to look at other people's communication in a critical way, trying to strip it of all your prejudices and preconceptions.

I think the letter is definitely manipulative. There is a certain lilt to it, a certain charm. There is a relatively good cadence, it is interesting to read. There's not really one point made, and though there is an apology, it's not for nothing specific. The apology, to the reader, could be interpreted as an apology for everything and anything that the reader believes the writer did wrong. This was clever, because the writer may truly be sorry for only one thing ("not behaving better") or may not even know what to be sorry for, so instead keeps things vague and lets the reader fill in the blanks. (Or perhaps doesn't feel any real guilt at all.)

I obviously don't know anything about the target of the letter, but I know it was effective because the reader has reunited with the writer. The letter seems clearly designed for one purpose, and that it accomplished that purpose leads me to believe that despite certain prejudices of mine about what I think people want or do not want to hear, this was obviously what the reader wanted to hear. The most interesting thing about it, though, is that although it is what the reader wanted to hear, the writer doesn't actually say much. Instead, the writer relies on the order, the structure, the format, the very cadence and rhythm of the words to lead to what were probably almost unavoidable logical inferences for the reader.

The writer hits hard with phrases like "I loved you" -- phrases that are sure to stand out in the reader's mind much more than the follow-up qualifiers of the love being selfish or narcissistic. The letter seems like an illusion, relying primarily on misdirection rather than outright deceit. The writer knows that he has to be honest, and has to come clean (so to speak) by actually including the various qualifiers and self-effacing statements he includes. That the reader wants to think he/she is reading honest responses is also apparent by the included phrase, "It's funny that after telling you virtually nothing, now I just want you to know the truth." We have talked before about how good lies typically contain a good deal of the truth, and the writer seems very careful about keeping the letter realistic (e.g., it sounds like these two did not know each other well enough for the reader to believe that the writer genuinely loved him/her, which is why the writer says "of course it was, I barely knew you"). The writer seems to be trying to reestablish a shared reality between the two of them, but a reality based primarily on rewritten history.

Going back to the phrase "I loved you," the past tense of the word loved is curious, but it seems purposeful, perhaps wanting to instill a sense of fear of loss or actual loss in the reader. Also it suggests that the writer is harmless, impotent -- because he/she no longer loves, he/she no longer has an incentive to "behave [poorly]". This seems designed to assuage any fears or misgivings the reader has about letting the writer back into his/her life, all while piquing the reader's interest --wanting the reader to not just think it is harmless to allow the writer back into his/her life, but actively wanting the writer back in his/her life.

The letter is also a Trojan horse, however. It promises love and eternal devotion, but those very promises are designed to guilt the reader into some sort of a response -- the writer's desired goal. The writer says, "It feels like you never really gave me a chance," followed by "I loved you." There are also the recriminations: "I feel like you have given me abandonment issues that I never really had before. I've gained a touch of paranoia. I second guess myself, even second guess the world." This is not only a plea for sympathy but a pointed finger of look-what-you-have-done-to-me-what-did-I-ever-do-to-deserve-this accusation. If the reader sees his or herself as a good, open-minded individual, he/she may have misgivings about his/her actions after reading this.

There is a suggestion that if they start over things will be different ("I guess I just wish that I had known it was coming"), but no direct promises or even a direct suggestion that it would have made any difference to the writer to know that the reader was leaving him/her. Finally, there is a plea to vanity: "I know I'll get over you, but I don't want to." I feel like that must work like a charm with empaths, if only because it sounds like a sappy movie line to me.

Our reader who sent this letter is right to be suspicious, I think. Even if the writer is not a sociopath, I am sure the friend has a very different understanding of the contours of their proposed renewed relationship than does the writer of this letter. Not only that, I believe that was the writer's exact intention.
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