Saturday, October 9, 2010

Emotional contagion

This is an interesting, but old, audio news piece about how fear spreads among crowds and leads to stampedes, etc. "Human beings are hardwired to respond to fear of others." "Fearful body language primes humans to flee."

Interestingly, another article suggested that bad decisions may also be contagious.

As a side note, being in a crowded nightclub when a fire breaks out (story from the audio link), or any similar mob type situation is the reason why I experience anxiety in crowded spaces.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Being socio and black

I am very interested in a sociopath's sense of identity (or lack of identity, as is more frequently the case). I don't really identify with my own gender, race, ethnicity, place of origin, which is why I'm so interested in hearing from the male vs. female socio perspective, socios from different countries and backgrounds, etc. I asked one of our readers to talk about how he identifies with his own readily identifiable identity markers, and it's both interesting and banal at the same time, perhaps most interesting in its banality.
I thought I would write you something about what it feels like to be black and conscienceless. I thought it would be a longish email too. Funny thing is, there is nothing to tell really. Nothing that you don't already get. Sure, there is the black culture, of which I am part by virtue of the color of my skin. I did grow up in what is euphemistically referred to as an “urban center”. I saw a couple of dead people in front of my house growing up, drug deals gone down next door to me, etc. But I am as detached from my racial identity as I am from every other identity marker.

I have a penis and I know how to use it. But I don’t feel like a man per se. I am 35, but I don’t feel like a card carrying member of Generation X. I am a natural born American citizen, yet I do not feel any emotional investment in this country. I like the capitalism and I find the Founding Fathers interesting in their mix of pragmatism and idealism, but otherwise, I would no more die for this country than I would for anything else. I am detached from all of it.

That isn’t to say I don’t enjoy some things about black culture because I do. I grew up on soul food and when done well, it is delicious. Unhealthy, but delicious. I appreciate soulful singing. Not many other groups can pull that kind of singing off. That sort of thing. But had I grown up in the Civil Rights era, for instance, I would have been more interested in how I might use that movement to advance my own agenda rather than how I can help the race as a whole, know what I mean? Sure you do!

I will say this. I do have a deep aversion to police. I hate them. Kind of. But I don’t know if that stems from some kind of racial consciousness or from my own inborn anti-sociality. Or both.
We should get Hare to add to his PCL-R "intense hatred and distrust of the police and other pseudo-enforcement related individuals."

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Blood lust 2

An update from the same reader as this previous post on blood lust:
Thought I'd give you a small update on myself.

I was at a party, a thing I do every month so people don't think I'm a complete shut-in. During this party I commented on a guys shirt, he had a tag hanging out, so I tried a joke and asked if he put his shirt backside-out.
Apparently this was how the shirt was supposed to look. So, a couple of minutes later, this girl walks up to me. She's pissed cause she thought I was making fun of the guy, apparently she was his ex-girlfriend and still had feelings for him, and she was drunk, so she was angry at me.
I tried explaining to her that I wasn't making fun of her. And out of nowhere, she punches me in the cheek. The second I got my eyes on her I, kinda snapped. My arm just kinda wrapped around her throat without my brain telling it to do it. And me and her, and a bystander kinda froze for some seconds. My brain was saying "this is a bad idea. A lot of crap is gonna happen if you dont let go". But I did not let go. I felt my insides going into some kond of euphoria. I wanted to choke her.

But, I let go. Of course the other people on the party found out about this and I was asked to leave.

Two days later I thought about this. This was the closest to happiness(I guess?) that I've been.
Never have I felt my heart beat like that.

So, I went to Oslo (the capital of Norway). Went to some bars, looking for some drunk people.
I found one guy. This obnoxious lowlife. And I picked a fight. Wasn't hard to do.

We were standing in an alley, fighting, I had been drinking so it was a fair fight. In the end, I lost the fight. But, during the fight. I felt somewhat more alive than ever. I wanted to make him bleed, I wanted TO bleed. Every punch I gave and took, I got more and more sober. My mind was buzzing, my body was getting feeling more and more like they were a single person. I felt good, for the first time in a long time, I felt home.

No loneliness, no pit, no more was I an outsider. I felt good.
This was my first real fight. I doubt it will be the last.

The days after that, I've felt good. My spirit is lifted, it seems my burden is less to bear.
Maybe I'm the only one that will feel like that after a fight. (People get the wrong idea from watch the TV-show Dexter ..)

Now, what I'm trying to say is. I have bloodlust. I know there are alot of sociopaths out there, but not many of us have bloodlust.
But, if you have it. Don't let it go out on the wrong people. I'm going to do my best and take it out on the ones that deserve it.
-H
This idea of there being a "wrong person" to take your blood lust out on is interesting to me. I presume the main drive of blood lust is only physical violence towards another human being, i.e. inflicting some sort of physical harm. The fact that it might "hurt" the other human being, either psychically, financially, or emotionally, is merely an unintentional, and perhaps even an unfortunate consequence of acting upon the blood lust -- it's not necessarily the primary aim. Does this seem right, blood lusters?

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Sociopathic traits: lack of guilt

I thought that this was an interesting comment from a fairly recent post:
People that think they have traits they could use to label themselves as sociopaths. Most aren't, so sorry! Go get another label, that one is full. Having those traits, and having them in a pathological level are not the same cup of tea. Get over it! This is one of the things money won't get you.

When doing that trait test, reading "lack of remorse" - imagine your best at lacking remorse, the true best you can. And that's not it, is that point that you can no longer have imagination to take it to the next level. After, do the same to every other trait.

But there has to be something wrong with people that wish they were sociopaths. And here is the bullseye - maybe some people are ready to take themselves as socio's but not as anything else.

This is the kind of people I think hangs around here, in very general alineas, and they are only bringing more fuss to a matter that is allready hard to deal with or understand even from a MD's skills.
I wanted to address just one aspect of this comment -- the guiltlessness. The commentator suggests that to test whether you are a sociopath, think of your most remorseless moment, then imagine something that you can't even imagine because you're not a sociopath and that's still not even close to how sociopaths actually feel about guilt.

I wonder if this is really true. I know that a lot of people think that lack of guilt or remorse is a key identifying trait in a sociopath, but I think this is a trait that many (if not most) sociopaths would not self-identify with, but rather one that third party observers blithely claim to have observed in sociopaths with little to no evidence supporting it.

Here's how I think this myth got started. Take a typical situation you might encounter in a prison setting: convicted sociopath criminal justifies some reprehensible act he did by blaming his behavior on the victim: "she had it coming." The sociopath does not seem to feel guilt for something he should clearly be feeling remorse, does not even understand why he should feel guilt for that behavior. Ergo, sociopaths do not feel guilt.

Really? Why would a sociopath even bother to justify his behavior ("she had it coming") if he was incapable of feeling anything even resembling regret?

What is really happening? I think that sociopaths believe that they feel "guilt" or "remorse" over some things, just not for what people expect them to feel guilt or remorse. In the example above, I think the sociopath was simply expressing that the action was warranted ("she had it coming"), so there was nothing to feel guilty about. Sociopaths do not necessarily value (or are even aware of) society's rules or moral standards and they feel little to no cognitive dissonance for violating these standards. They may, however, feel cognitive dissonance, or regret, over violating one of their own beliefs about who they are, or what type of world they live in. Sociopaths may feel this cognitive dissonance less frequently than normal people because it is so easy for them to justify their own behavior ex post facto and most "successful" sociopaths would have enough control and foresight to typically avoid breaking their own rules. But feeling it at inappropriate times (and rarely), does not mean that they cannot "feel" it.

So do sociopaths feel guilt? I think a lot of sociopaths would say that they do, or at least have. Do they feel guilt every time society thinks they should? No, not necessarily. People need to understand that lack of "conscience" or "empathy" does not necessarily equate with an inability to feel remorse. But bonus points for anyone who identifies when "lack of guilt" was first used by the psychological community to demonize us further.

Sociopath quote: diversification

A prince being thus obliged to know well how to act as a beast must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from traps, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognize traps, and a lion to frighten wolves.

Niccolò Machiavelli
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