Traders > psychopaths

As a sometime dabbler in the stock market, I found amusing this Der Spiegel article about traders being not necessarily more ruthless than psychopaths, but definitely more pointlessly vindictive:

According to a new study at the University of St. Gallen seen by SPIEGEL, . . . stockbrokers' behavior is more reckless and manipulative than that of psychopaths. Researchers at the Swiss research university measured the readiness to cooperate and the egotism of 28 professional traders who took part in computer simulations and intelligence tests. The results, compared with the behavior of psychopaths, exceeded the expectations of the study's co-authors, forensic expert Pascal Scherrer, and Thomas Noll, a lead administrator at the Pöschwies prison north of Zürich.

Appetite for Destruction

"Naturally one can't characterize the traders as deranged," Noll told SPIEGEL. "But for example, they behaved more egotistically and were more willing to take risks than a group of psychopaths who took the same test."

Particularly shocking for Noll was the fact that the bankers weren't aiming for higher winnings than their comparison group. Instead they were more interested in achieving a competitive advantage. Instead of taking a sober and businesslike approach to reaching the highest profit, "it was most important to the traders to get more than their opponents," Noll explained. "And they spent a lot of energy trying to damage their opponents."

Using a metaphor to describe the behavior, Noll said the stockbrokers behaved as though their neighbor had the same car, "and they took after it with a baseball bat so they could look better themselves."

The researchers were unable to explain this penchant for destruction, they said.

As continued here:

Faced with a hypothetical choice between co-operating for everyone’s benefit and getting a predictable reward or cheating and possibly getting more for themselves, traders were more likely than psychopaths to cheat, said Noll.

As a result, psychopaths, who broke the rules occasionally, won the most, ordinary people, who almost always played by the rules and who co-operated, came in second, while traders, who didn’t care how their actions affected anyone else, cheated the most and won the least.

Sounds like a violation of the Diamond Rule to me.

Fan mail (part 2)

i like this a lot. can i publish it?

best,
m.e.

Reader:

I was hoping you wouldn't respond, that you'd prove me wrong. It would have been nice if your reaction would have been briefly thinking "What an asshole" before hitting the delete button. That would have been the non-sociopathic response. Almost everything I said was a lie, by the way, including my professed love of "stalking" sociopaths and the rosy nostalgia I painted such "victories" with. I was just engaging in a behavior that gets a specific behavioral response. I was wondering if your awareness of your sociopathy, and your openness about it gave you increased ability to act cognitively in ways that I have found sociopaths to be almost entirely behavioral.

I actually believe sociopathy makes some necessary contribution to humanity (though I don't know what it is), and the fact that it still exists in a fairly significant portion of the population is evolutionary evidence of that. The problem isn't genetic sociopathy, it's the intentional creation of imitation sociopaths through education and socialization that is destroying our species. Those bogus sociopaths engage in cruelty and stupidity because of social pressure while lacking the filter of self interest that true sociopaths possess, self-interest that will curb a sociopaths destructive appetites when they become aware that those appetites are self-destructive. Imitation sociopaths have no such awareness or ability to change their behavior. They don't engage in sociopathic behavior for the thrill of it, they do it because they are required to, and the joy they feel is fleeting.They usually hit the bottle or eat a bullet once their immersion in the occupation requiring that sociopathy, and hence their emotional defense against their past sociopathic behavior, ends. Once the social controls of occupational socialization no longer shield them, the remorse creeps in and can become completely overwhelming (PTSD is one common disorder that can arise from engaging in and witnessing extreme sociopathic violence as well as from personal trauma).

This-

"best,
m.e."

Is also a common behavior of sociopaths- the compulsion to indicate that they are not the person they are pretending to be. Providing some cryptic signature with a dual meaning known only to them, but which will skate by without attracting the attention of the reader makes the lie more enjoyable, for some reason. I have had occasion to notice this behavior and test my assumption in real life- jesus, what a piece of work that guy turned out to be. The paper trail of legal documents he left in his wake showed a Goddamn monster. Good thing you guys have that habit though, because he developed some sort of gay infatuation with me because of my writing, and then became openly sociopathic when I didn't respond (not gay). I had to blindside him with the fact that I knew everything about him, including his home address, and since he knew nothing about me, it would be in his best interests to just go away- so he did.

That's an example of what I meant when I said that your behavior is a lie but your words are true.

You can post my first email, along with this one to your site for visitors to freely read, but I don't give any permission to use it in any other manner, place, or for any commercial purpose.

Doctor Leroy Mclovin,

Fan mail (part 1)

From a reader:

Loved your sociopath blog. I bet you love all the emails from dipshits trying to "help" or relate to you. "It's a lonely life" waaaaah! waaaah!

I'm not a sociopath, I feel guilt, love, remorse, responsibility, etc. Deeply so, as a matter of fact. So deeply that I will hold to my nonsensical morality in the face of death. I consistently act against my own best interest to the benefit of others. but I can imitate you to perfection. I can also immediately spot sociopaths. You are plastic people. Walking blow up dolls.

I stalk sociopaths online from time to time, actually sent a couple of you to prison for sex offenses just from their behavior on messageboards- and they were typical sociopaths- well respected in the community, their disease hidden completely, and they attempted to use the weight of the entire community against me, failing miserably(direct, hostile confrontation with sociopaths to humiliate them publicly works wonders. Make you fuckers scared, use words like a cattle prod to force you to cross the line, since there's a bear trap there waiting for you on the other side). I've had contests that lasted years and watched sociopaths crumble, their spirit just snap, their sociopathy dragged out into the light and their actions become an object of open ridicule. God it's beautiful.

Here's your weakness (and I can tell you this because you have absolutely no control over it- no ability to act differently. I can tell you today and still lure you in under a different identity tomorrow), you are attracted to more "advanced" sociopaths (I'm sure you've noticed how other sociopaths will flock to you because of the blog). You idolize and despise them. Like moths to a flame, you want the power they seem to possess, and then you want to destroy them with it. . .and that power that you perceive them to possess, which you are so strongly drawn to, is the power that person has to SEE behavior in the words of others, the power to dissect and destroy the human heart like an insect.

It's great, if I "let slip" statements as simple as "morals are for the homeless", or "guilt isn't a leprechaun, there's a pot of shit at the end of that rainbow" the sociopaths come running like I'm their messiah, and always in the same manner. Always with the same demeanor. Always. Like roaches that will always scurry under the fridge when the light comes on. If I say "he who trades freedom for safety deserves neither", I. . .well, I won't tell you what doors that opens, since you are a sociopath. You should see the sociopaths I can yank out into the light by saying "Marx was a cat-herder". Doctors, lawyers, professors. . .makes no difference. you're truly all the same.

The truth is, your intelligence is seriously compromised by your disorder, just like "empaths" intelligence is seriously compromised by their lack of a disorder. You have a blind side big enough to taxi the spruce goose through. An "empath" that can see you as clearly as you can see them has an enormous advantage. You are behavioral, like rats that'll keep hitting the bar that dispenses food, no matter how many times it shocks them, but you only see that in "empaths". Language is lying, behavior tells the truth, but for you it's the opposite. Your behavior is a lie, but your words ARE true, if one knows how to interpret them.

By the way, don't flatter yourself- you do have the "evil eyes" just like every other sociopath. That thousand yard stare comes and goes though, depending upon your interest. You just never see yourself in the mirror when you are talking to someone that has nothing to offer you.

By the way, if people can be made into sociopaths, sociopaths can be made into a reasonable imitation of a person (the first step being when the sociopath informs those around them that they are sociopaths. Sociopaths deal with two problems- lack of human emotion and isolation from humanity. You can't alleviate the former, but you can the latter). The process of socializing humans to become sociopathic involves placing them in a situation where they have to choose between their morals and their desires, and reward them socially for choosing their desires. It's just like wiggling a fence post back and forth until you can pull it out of the mud. It can work the opposite way as well.

Doctor Leroy Mclovin

Antisocial evolution

A reader writes:

ME, this article made me think of you. It reminded me of some of the discussions I've had with your readers, regarding the perceived evolutionary advantage of being a sociopath. Here, we have a colony of traditionally cooperative, successful microbes, placed in an environment with unprecedented access to resources, resulting in the emergence of genetically-induced anti-social behavior. Obviously, the scales are different, but the parallels between this experiment and post-tribal human society, as it relates to the emergence of sociopaths, are certainly striking. Of note is the observation that anti-social behavior is only advantageous so long as socialization is still the norm, and once the majority of the population stops enforcing social behavior, the entire colony dies under stress. The implication that anti-social behavior only appears advantageous in the short term, being a complete evolutionary dead-end should the genes become dominant, is a topic I thought you might enjoy dissecting. Enjoy.

“It just makes you ask, ‘What on earth is that doing?’ ” said Gregory J. Velicer, a former student of Dr. Lenski’s who is now an associate professor at Indiana University. Dr. Velicer experienced this bafflement firsthand while watching the evolution of a predatory microbe called Myxococcus xanthus. Myxococcus swarms lash their tails together and hunt in a pack, releasing enzymes to kill their prey and feasting on the remains. If the bacteria starve, they come together to form a mound of spores. It is a cooperative effort. Only a few percent of the bacteria end up forming spores, while the rest face almost certain death.

This social behavior costs Myxococcus energy that it could otherwise use to grow, Dr. Velicer discovered. He and his colleagues allowed the bacteria to evolve for 1,000 generations in a rich broth. Most of the lines of bacteria lost the ability to swarm or form spores, or both.

Dr. Velicer discovered that some of the newly evolved bacteria were not just asocial — they were positively antisocial. These mutant cheaters could no longer make mounds of spores on their own. But if they were mixed with ordinary Myxococcus, they could make spores. In fact, they were 10 times as likely to form a spore as normal microbes.

Dr. Velicer set up a new experiment in which the bacteria alternated between a rich broth and a dish with no food. Over the generations, the cheaters became more common because of their advantage at making spores. But if the cheaters became too common, the entire population died out, because there were not enough ordinary Myxococcus left to make the spore mounds in the times of famine.

During this experiment, one of Dr. Velicer’s colleagues, Francesca Fiegna of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, discovered something strange. She had just transferred a population of cheaters to a dish, expecting them to die out. But the cheaters were making seven times as many spores as their normal ancestors. “It just made no sense,” Dr. Velicer said. “I asked her I don’t know how many times, ‘Are you sure you marked the plates correctly?’ ”

She had. It turned out that a single Myxococcus cheater had mutated into a cooperator. In fact, it had evolved into a cooperator far superior to its cooperative ancestors. Dr. Velicer and his colleagues sequenced the genome of the new cooperator and discovered a single mutation. The new mutation did not simply reverse the mutation that had originally turned the microbe’s ancestors into cheaters. Instead, it struck a new part of the genome.

Desensitized

Sometimes I hear people say that they were "born this way," whatever way that happens to be. To say you are born a sociopath or born gay is like saying you were born smart or born tall. Yes, you may have the genetic predisposition to be smart or tall, but the existence of feral children is an important reminder that no one is born any of those ways, that we rely on the most basic daily interactions, nutrition, culture, education, experiences, and myriad other influences in our development to become who we become. I realize that "born this way" is just shorthand and I've used it too, but I think it is sloppy and often masks some of these other important influences.

Was I born to charm? Born to harm? I wasn't necessarily even born to speak or wield a weapon. So how do we get there? What makes some of us different from others. Obviously it has a lot to do with genetics, but it also has so much to do not just with our our experiences, but in what particular order and when in life we experienced them. It's through our experiences that normal gened people can be desensitized to things like killing, and sociopathic gened people can be sensitized to things like being aware of the needs of others.

I intentionally sensitize myself to things all the time. When I studied music, I sensitized myself to minute changes in pitch because I played a fretless string instrument and needed to be keenly aware of pitch to play in tune. Now it drives me crazy to hear musicians playing out of tune. It's not just that I have a more discriminating taste than I used to, I actually have a very visceral reaction to pitch problems to the point that I can feel nauseated.

Things that used to shock me no longer do through repeat exposure, and vice versa. I know that my genes might predispose me to the way I think and interact with the world, but I also take full responsibility for the amount of control over the rest. Every day I am in motion, sensitizing myself or desensitizing myself, constantly reshaping my brain, making and breaking habits, making myself more less inclined to act or think a certain way.

I am careful what I do and say, what I allow myself to think and daydream about. It's not always because I am worried about external consequences (would I do these things if I were sure to not be caught?), but rather internal consequences. How would doing or thinking that thing change me and is that someone I want to become? I'm all too aware that we are what we eat.

On a related note, I don't expect to look or act exactly like other sociopaths because I haven't made the same trillion decisions in the same order that they have, even if we might share a particular gene sequence. Via my exposure to the myriad variety of sociopaths and other personality types that I've run into on the blog and in real life, I have eliminated many misconceptions I had about sociopathy (criminals are low-functioning, etc.). Keeping an open-mind is one of the habits I hope to keep by challenging my own beliefs as vigorously as I challenge those of others.