Sunday, January 9, 2011

Sociopath quote: choices

"What makes us most human is not whether we are or are not biologically driven and determined beings; but, rather, how we respond to this relative truth. The conscious choices we make in related to the dynamic, psychobiological forces of the daimonic define our humanity."

-Stephen A. Diamond

Friday, January 7, 2011

An explanation for tears

In a recent NY Times article, researchers discovered that men are sexually de-aroused from smelling a woman's emotional tears:
The researchers accidentally happened upon the evidence that women’s tears make men feel as if they have taken a cold shower.

They had assumed chemical signals from tears would trigger sadness or empathy in others. But initial experiments found that sniffing women’s tears did not affect men’s mood or empathy, but “had a pronounced influence on sexual arousal, a surprise,” Dr. Sobel said.
***
Why women’s tears would send a message of “not tonight, dear” is puzzling. Some experts suggested the tears could have evolved to reduce men’s aggression toward women who are weakened by emotional stress. The studies did not measure the effect on aggression, although future research might, Dr. Sobel said. Another thought, he said, is that the effect of tears evolved in part to coincide with menstrual cycles.
***
The research, published on Thursday in the journal Science, could begin to explain something that has baffled scientists for generations: Why do humans, unlike seemingly any other species, cry emotional tears?
It would be interesting to see what a sociopath's reaction to emotional tears is. I realize this is completely anecdotal, but whenever people cry around me I either basically ignore it, reflexively cry (the same way I would reflexively cough) or get angry at them if they are crying as some sort of remonstrance for my bad behavior. I'd like to see how that fits into the evolutionary theory of tears, or maybe the evolutionary theory of sociopaths.

Reading about these types of studies makes me realize how poorly we can explain even something so fundamental and basic as humans crying emotional tears. Perhaps because we know so little about how our world functions, it is tempting to take some new discovery and make logical leaps to explain myriad behaviors. This happens frequently with socio experiments, where each new discovery leads to a new theory of the origins and causes of sociopathy. It is a dangerous practice to draw unwarranted conclusions from limited evidence, an example of scientific hubris. As one tear scientist warned regarding the recent findings: it would be “premature to speculate about the evolutionary function” of chemo-signaling in tears, adding: “I have no doubt that it affected sexuality as they report, but I would be very surprised if it doesn’t turn out to affect other emotions in other contexts. Maybe it’s affecting some deeper, more fundamental psychological process that drives the effect that they’re reporting.”

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Sociopaths and anarchists

This is sort of an interesting blog post from an anarchist criticizing the comparison between sociopaths and anarchists that Robert Hare draws in his book "Without a Conscience". The anarchist is insulted to be compared to sociopaths and actually refers to sociopaths as an anarchist's "natural enemy", but only for the same reasons that sociopaths would be a natural enemy to anyone who considers themselves a potential victim.

The article is sort of interesting and sort of wrong, but has a certain charm to it because it is written from the point of view of one abnormal mentality regarding another abnormal mentality, in a way that Pakistan criticizing North Korea's nuclear policies might seem charming. The gist of the argument:
So once we realize that, we must examine legalism both from the aspect of outer rules and from the aspect of inner rules. The Anarchist rejects only part of the former, but the sociopath rejects both. Seen from that perspective, the sociopath is seen to correspond perfectly to the concept of atomistic individualism: an individual who lives as if he is in a vacuum, making decisions in complete disregard of society or any part of society.
It's an interesting distinction to make. I don't know anything about the anarchy movement so I can't comment on that part of it, but I think he is trying to say that anarchists still have internal moral beliefs and sociopaths don't. This assertion is not quite right unless you define "moral beliefs" quite narrowly, not just excluding little rules of thumb like "eat breakfast when you can," which sociopaths definitely can have, but also excluding certain value judgments, e.g. preferring strength over weakness, which sociopaths also seem to have to some extent. And I don't think you can have a principled definition of morality that excludes those types of value judgments unless you simply define morality as "everything that I innately believe and nothing else."

My favorite part of the article, though, is this mini review of Hare's book:
I wasn’t exactly bowled over by the book itself. Many conclusions were unsupported and obviously were only adopted by Hare because they are more conducive to him getting money. There are also some logical gaps. All in all, it’s a spotty piece of writing.
He makes that comment about money as if it were a bad thing. I myself don't mind being a cash cow for psychologists, in fact if Hare gave me kickbacks or otherwise paid me off, I would stop writing this blog today and/or jump on the Hare bandwagon. Hare, if you are reading this, I can be bought. For cheap. Cheaper than you might think. Unlike anarchists, I apparently don't have any inner rules or sense of morality to prevent me from doing so.

Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Craigslist killer

A reader asked what I thought about the Craigslist killer (apparently there was a "Lifetime" made for television movie about him this week). I really didn't know much about him or the movie, so I read this review of the movie and was charmed by these sections:
The film delivers the story as a conventional narrative. It might have been more compelling had it been told from inside the head of either the killer or his fiancĂ©e, but Mr. Markoff, at least, apparently didn’t leave much of an explanation for his behavior.

“I’m a straight-A medical student,” he tells the police during the initial interrogation after his arrest. “I’m getting married in a month. I mean, would you guys care to explain to me why I would go around and shoot prostitutes in hotel rooms?”

They don’t have an answer, and the filmmakers don’t either; cheesy sound effects are all they can come up with to signal his switch from perfect-man mode to psychopath.

The film’s most compelling moment comes courtesy of William Baldwin, who plays the lead detective on the case. “Used to be able to tell who the bad guys were, right?” his character says to a colleague. “Now it’s all texts and e-mails and Web sites. Creeps are hiding in our own houses, and we don’t even know who they are.”
I think it is hilarious that (at least in the movie) they are blaming this on the internet rather than trying to take a serious look at possible abnormal psychology reasons for his behavior. It reminds me of the time-honored tradition of blaming bad things on demons or evil spirits rather than admitting what Joseph Conrad understood, that "[t]he belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary: men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." We have already met the enemy, we just keep forgetting about it.
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