Sunday, June 17, 2012

Song: You've really got a hold on me

I like this song, particularly since my friend has described sociopaths as "people you like but wish you didn't."



I don't like you but I love you
See that I'm always thinking of you
Oh, oh, oh, you treat me badly
I love you madly

You've really got a hold on me
You've really got a hold on me, baby

I don't want you but I need you
Don't want to kiss you but I need you
Oh, oh, oh, you do me wrong now
My love is strong now

You've really got a hold on me
You've really got a hold on me, baby

I love you and all I want you to do
Is just hold me, hold me, hold me, hold me

I want to leave you, don't want to stay here
Don't want to spend another day here
Oh, oh, oh, I want to split now
I just can quit now

You've really got a hold on me
You've really got a hold on me, baby

I love you and all I want you to do
Is just hold me, hold me, hold me, hold me

You've really got a hold on me
You've really got a hold on me

Saturday, June 16, 2012

Mentalizing

This was an interesting article about how people who have a harder time imaging what others are thinking are less likely to believe in God.  More interesting than this (at least to me) was the distinction that the article made between empathy and "mentalizing," which was the first time I had actually heard this term, at least used with this particular meaning:

The ability to infer the thoughts and feelings of other people is called "mentalizing" and it appears to play an important role in religious belief, according to researcher Ara Norenzayan.

Interestingly it was this mentalizing, or ability to imagine what others are thinking, that was more likely to lead to a belief in God and those without it showed less inclination to be religious:


"When adults form inferences about God's mind, they show the same mentalizing biases that are typically found when reasoning about other peoples' minds," the study authors wrote. Religious believers have an idea of God as an intentional being who responds to human beliefs and desires.

The researchers found that people who rate highest on the autistic spectrum — those with an inability to respond accurately to the mental states of other people — are least likely to believe in God.

Men typically are not as good as women at reasoning about other people's states of mind and are more likely than women to score high on the autism spectrum, which may help explain why men are less likely to believe in God than women.

Maybe I'm just late to the party about this distinction between mentalizing (apparently the psychological  version of philosophy's theory of mind).  Interestingly mentalization based treatment has been used with success for borderline personality disorder, although after reading the wikipedia article, I'm still not clear how and why.

How is mentalizing related to empathy?

"The empathy quotient measures the degree to which an individual thinks about and is concerned with the mental states of other people, their beliefs, wishes and emotions," Norenzayan wrote.

So it's still not clear to me.  I guess it's that there is a difference between mentalizing (imagining the internal world of others) and empathizing, this vicarious feeling of emotions that others are feeling. Sociopaths clearly do the former, but do not do the latter.  But I don't know.  Every time I explore the concept of empathy, I feel like I'm talking about something like Santa Claus.  I always half wonder if empathy is real, or maybe the product of fantasy or self-deception?

Friday, June 15, 2012

Selectively caring more

I thought this was a very interesting comment left on this post about empathy and becoming sensitized to certain things, among others:


I used be able to watch videos/view images of the goriest and most explicit nature: brain avulsions, total dismemberment, horrific murders. In fact, I craved viewing them. There was something in there that was fascinating to me. This was when I was much younger. As I got older, these pictures began to bother me. Not because I felt guilt or empathy, but because I had suffered accidents/injuries of my own, and they served to remind me of them. Now I avoid them, for the most part, because in each body I see the inevitability of my own mortality, and I always end up relating them to my own situation. 

The same holds true for emotional pain: just yesterday a girl related a story about a woman who's mother was killed by a distracted drive. I laughed when I heard the specifics; it sounded like such a glorious explosion of metal. Everyone else was horrified, and some were holding back tears, but I couldn't stop grinning--I had such fun recreating the scene in my mind. I couldn't empathize. But if another person's emotional pain reminds me of the few, and I mean 2-3, things left from childhood that are still painful to me, I am distracted and lost in my own pain. This gives the appearance of empathizing; it's not. I don't cry for the other person; I cry for myself. 

That erroneous conclusion ("They're crying while I'm crying; they must understand me!") is what, I think, leads empaths, especially those with emotional ties to the sociopath, to insist that they're "not that bad" or that "there's really deep feelings in there." Perhaps. But those deep feelings will always be self-centered. If a sociopath cries because you're breaking up with them, it's not because they've suddenly grown a heart to pine after you with. It's because they've lost control, because their plans have been ruined, and they're thinking about how the break-up will fuck things over. 

I realize they are interesting, and perhaps very fine distinctions to make, but I think that they are actually legitimate distinctions to make between a sensitivity (or lack of sensitivity to things) and the general skill of empathy.  A good example, perhaps, is the one of the typical empath who becomes desensitized to things like violence in times of war.  According to wikipedia, horses, who have a natural fear of unpredictable movement, become desensitized to accept the fluttering skirt of a lady's riding habit.  We sensitize guide dogs to certain human concerns like automobile traffic. 

Everyone can learn to care more or less about a particular thing. It's not that sociopaths are just constantly choosing not to care.  I believe that they are partly incapable of caring, and even more simply unaware of what and when they should be caring.  Once you direct their attention to it or something else happens to make them aware of the seriousness of something (e.g. growing older and having more a sense of one's own mortality), it gets easier to understand why everyone else is upset.  But this does not mean that the sociopath will ever vicariously feel what the other person is feeling.  

Thursday, June 14, 2012

The gendered sociopath

A reader writes about how sociopathic men understand women differently than normal men:


It seems to be common among a good majority of men that, men just "can't understand" women. Like they can't understand why women act certain ways about certain things, or why they feel certain ways of certain things that the men can't seem to understand.

Do you think this applies to sociopathic men? Me, I've always considered myself an abstract thinker, I don't see any big mystery behind women. I understand women are psychologically different and therefore emotionally value certain things in a different manner. Yet, somehow, 'normal' men do not understand this?

Are "normal" men just so involved in their own emotional impulses that it blinds them from understanding the emotional impulses of women? Perhaps sociopaths are not blinded because they are not heavily involved in their emotions, and as a result they can better understand the emotional impulses of others, namely, members of the opposite sex.


I thought it was an interesting theory, and probably accurate. I believe that sociopaths don't project their own mental states on people as often as empaths do (or even other non empaths because narcissists and autism spectrum types also project all the time, with autism spectrum people not having hardly any theory of mind at all).

For the sociopath, it's not any big mystery that men and women think differently and it's as easy to understand the one as the other. It could also have something to do with the fact that sociopaths don't identify as much with their gender, so do not have the same gender specific blindspots as most people do.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

Creativity = immorality

File this under "how to become more like a sociopath," this Scientific American article discusses how being creative (and even thinking more creatively) makes you more likely to cross moral boundaries:

In a recent paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers at Harvard and Duke Universities demonstrate that creativity can lead people to behave unethically. In five studies, the authors show that creative individuals are more likely to be dishonest, and that individuals induced to think creatively were more likely to be dishonest. Importantly, they showed that this effect is not explained by any tendency for creative people to be more intelligent, but rather that creativity leads people to more easily come up with justifications for their unscrupulous actions.
***
The authors hypothesized that it is creativity which causes unethical behavior by allowing people the means to justify their misdeeds, but it is hard to say for certain whether this is correct given the correlational nature of the study. It could just as easily be true, after all, that unethical behavior leads people to be more creative, or that there is something else which causes both creativity and dishonesty, such as intelligence. To explore this, the authors set up an experiment in which participants were induced into a creative mindset and then given the opportunity to cheat.  [It did.]
***
In addition, the researchers had guessed that creativity would lead to unethical behavior because it enabled people to more easily come up with justifications for their actions. Research has previously shown that whenever people do something which might be perceived as bad, they tend to reduce the ‘badness’ of this behavior by finding some justification for their corrupt behavior. As an example, if you find yourself being less than honest on your taxes, you may justify this by telling yourself that this is something everyone does, or that it doesn’t really hurt anyone.

The craziest part about this is the final experiment, that basically shows that one of the primary reasons why people don't cheat is that they can't come up with their own justifications for their behavior and that once you provide a readymade justification for them, they are much more likely to cheat:

So, if creativity leads to dishonesty primarily by assisting in coming up with justifications for dishonest behavior a creative mindset should not influence people’s likelihood of cheating if they already have some justification in mind. To test this idea, the researchers provided ‘justifications’ for some participants by allowing them to roll the die multiple times, but telling them that only the first roll counted. It turns out that one way of increasing the ease with which people can come up with justifications is by allowing them to observe something which almost happened, but didn’t. In this case, rolling a six on the second roll after rolling a lower number on the first, critical roll should give people a leg up on justifying their dishonest behavior.

It was found that when asked to roll the die once, people not primed with creativity were relatively honest. Individuals primed with creativity, on the other hand, behaved much more dishonestly, reporting much higher die rolls on average. Further, this effect disappeared when people rolled the die multiple times. That is, when people were provided with help to think up justifications, creativity had no effect on cheating. This pattern of results seems to confirm that creativity helps people to think up justifications for dishonest behavior.

These studies demonstrate that there is indeed a dark side to creativity. Perhaps, given this information, it should come as no surprise that the best and brightest in many fields are frequently caught in all manner of immoral transgressions.

Now empaths who want to acquire the skills of a sociopath have yet another avenue to pursue in cultivating an ability to be morally blind -- creativity.  According to the article, all sorts of activities can get you in that cheating frame of mind, even something as simple as arranging the words sky, is, why, blue, and the, into the sentence, “the sky is blue”.  This may also be why showbusiness is so cutthroat.
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