Saturday, March 5, 2011

Twitter!

Are a sociopath's impulse musings as inane as everyone else's? Check it out @sociopathworld.

In other news, I'm still traveling, but at least now in country. Email me if you would like to guest post.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Empathy and self control

This is an interesting article about a study that suggests that the ability to empathize might actually decrease one's ability to exercise self control:
More and more research sug­gests that our brains have dif­fi­culty dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing between observ­ing an action and actu­ally par­tic­i­pat­ing in it. Empa­thy, for exam­ple, seems to hinge in part on our abil­ity to “take on” another’s emo­tions through vic­ar­i­ous expe­ri­ence. I always think of this when watch­ing a come­dian fall flat. I can feel the embar­rass­ment as if I’m stand­ing there on stage look­ing at a room full of blank stares.

A study in the jour­nal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Sci­ence inves­ti­gated this dynamic, but from a dif­fer­ent angle: researchers wanted to know if observ­ing some­one else exert self-control boosts or reduces one’s own self-control. Par­tic­i­pants were asked to either take on the per­spec­tive of some­one exert­ing self-control, or merely read about some­one exert­ing self-control. They were also asked to take on the per­spec­tive or read about some­one not exert­ing self-control.

The results: par­tic­i­pants who took on the per­spec­tive of some­one exert­ing self-control were unable to exer­cise as much self-control them­selves; those who merely read about some­one exert­ing self-control didn’t expe­ri­ence the energy drain. In other words, get­ting into the shoes of some­one mak­ing the effort wore par­tic­i­pants out as if they were doing it themselves.

On the flip side, par­tic­i­pants who read about some­one exert­ing self-control expe­ri­enced a boost in their own self-control, com­pared to those who read about some­one not exert­ing self-control. Read­ing resulted in a con­ta­gious effect rather than a vic­ar­i­ous one.

The dif­fer­ence between these results boils down to degrees of psy­cho­log­i­cal sep­a­ra­tion. Tak­ing on per­spec­tive reduces psy­cho­log­i­cal sep­a­ra­tion, and the more that gap closes the greater the vic­ar­i­ous effect. Read­ing about some­thing pro­vides more of an oppor­tu­nity to increase psy­cho­log­i­cal sep­a­ra­tion, which reduces the chances of vic­ar­i­ous effect.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Guest post: Turkeys

In his article, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” Robert Cialdini claims two major premises, first that the brain is a wondrously complex and powerful device but still woefully unprepared to assimilate and process all the available information in a timely manner. His second premise is that the way modern society works is the cause of this problem.

Cialdini starts his article with a perplexing question from a friend of his. The friend wondered why some jewelry she was trying to sell would not sell at a reasonable price but when the price was accidentally doubled, it flew off the shelves.

In order to explain this phenomenon he brings up research regarding the behavior of mother turkeys. He states that turkeys will only nourish their young if the child makes the typical baby turkey noise of “cheep cheep.” This correlation is so strong that if the child does not make this sound then the mother will completely ignore it or even kill it.

Given this information, scientists wondered if the turkey would try to mother another animal making that noise. They decided to stick a recording of the young turkeys in a stuffed bobcat and surprisingly enough, the turkey took it under her wing as if it were her own young. Then they shut off the recording and the turkey seemed to realize it was a bobcat and began to flap and peck at it furiously.

Why does the turkey have such a strong reaction to what is in actuality poor information? Cialdini states that the brain of a turkey is incapable of sifting through the entirety of the stimuli that it comes in contact with every day and so, has conditioned itself with a few routine behaviors to carry out given a specific trigger. The cheep cheep of the young turkeys triggers the mothering routine in the older turkeys and mostly works out well. The end result of these programs is that the healthy young who make the noise are nourished while the weak or sick ones are not. Cialdini claims that the human brain works much the same way and that humans respond to the same kinds of triggers that the turkeys do.

In the case of Cialdini’s friend, the customers knew little to nothing about the jewelry being sold but did have past experience purchasing other items which had taught them that higher price means better quality. Thus they operated on incomplete information like the turkeys and came out losing.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Bernie Madoff asks: "Am I a sociopath?"

From an interview with the New York magazine:
“How could I have done this?” he asks. “I was making a lot of money. I didn’t need the money. [Am I] a flawed character?”

In some ways, Madoff has not tried to evade blame. He has made a full confession, telling me again and again that nothing justifies what he did. And yet, for Madoff, that doesn’t settle the matter. He feels misunderstood. He can’t bear the thought that people think he’s evil. “I’m not the kind of person I’m being portrayed as,” he told me.

And so, sitting alone with his therapist, in the prison khakis he irons himself, he seeks reassurance. “Everybody on the outside kept claiming I was a sociopath,” Madoff told her one day. “I asked her, ‘Am I a sociopath?’ ” He waited expectantly, his eyelids squeezing open and shut, that famous tic. “She said, ‘You’re absolutely not a sociopath. You have morals. You have remorse.’ ” Madoff paused as he related this. His voice settled. He said to me, “I am a good person.”

There aren’t many who would agree. For most of the world, Bernie Madoff is a monster; he betrayed thousands of investors, bankrupted charities and hedge funds. On paper, his Ponzi scheme lost nearly $65 billion; the effects spread across five continents. And he brought down his own family with him, a more intimate kind of betrayal.

Madoff, 72, is in prison with a sentence of 150 years, which seems more than just, given the enormity of his crime. Though the financial damage continues, prison seemed to conclude Madoff’s part of the story. Then, on the second anniversary of Madoff’s arrest, his son Mark, age 46, slipped a vacuum-cleaner cord over a pipe on the living-room ceiling of his Soho loft and tried to hang himself. When it broke, he tried again with a dog’s leash, and succeeded. This was the kind of cosmic retribution that might have been exacted in the House of Atreus, the suicide an accusation of a vast betrayal. It seemed a death designed to hurt the living—even a monster’s conscience must be moved by such a demonstration. After all, before he was exposed as a fraud, Madoff had been a family man.

After Mark’s suicide, I became interested in this most tragic of families and the elemental forces that had torn them apart. And so I began calling everyone connected to the business and the family. Soon a picture began to emerge. Madoff’s youngest son, Andrew, harder-edged and less prone to self-doubt than his brother, had been protected by his anger at his father’s betrayal. Mark’s rage consumed and overran him. Neither would speak to their father, even if their lawyers had permitted it. Their mother, Ruth, had to choose between her husband and her sons. She had chosen her husband of five decades—though after Mark’s suicide, she too no longer speaks to Madoff. After the death, Ruth rushed from her apartment in Florida—but wasn’t at the memorial service at his widow’s house. Most of the family didn’t want her there. Mark’s widow still won’t let her visit Mark’s two young children. Andrew, who hasn’t spoken to his father since December 10, 2008, the day Madoff confessed, is still largely estranged from his mother and distant from his brother’s widow, Stephanie. As he tells friends, his rage at his father, far from dissipating, has metastasized. To friends, he’d described his father as a bully and a gifted manipulator. Madoff was a family man, yes, but to Andrew, that was yet another manifestation of his narcissism. The family served the needs of Bernard L. Madoff.
Whine, whine, whiner. I think the author of the article has it right, Madoff is much more likely to be a narcissist than a sociopath -- completely delusional. But when you're committing fraud on such a grand scale, does it really matter what label society wants to slap on you?
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