If not morals, why might a sociopath choose to do something "good" or help people? A reader recently wrote about how his sense of aesthetics keeps him from doing anything base, such as brute strength violence.
Similarly, from another sociopathic reader regarding the existence of the "gentleman sociopath":
I have read as many materials about sociopathy. It seems that the clinical model tend towards the violent and lack of self-awareness of the afflicted. I'm confused by that. I have over forty years and have done phenomenally well but there is a certain dichotomy to my nature that challenges what I read. Self-awareness is something I have in spades. It comes in waves but the overall tenets of my meticulous adaptation and mimicry have served me well. I am reasonably successful perhaps even quite successful. I am a charismatic individual that can engender such passionate responses but I don't quite get their ultimate utilitarian value. I am fully capable of expressing emotion though it typically is self-serving. I find people useful and fascinating and in my job I am an outgoing and rather likable chap. I know what to say to make the ends meet. But the act itself is mechanical. You are the first I have read that seems to be broadening the understanding of the bonds that bind us together and yet I wonder, what of the gentleman sociopath. The one who realizes that the flashes of violence and utter revulsion at humanity leaves the efforts to connect empty and like a well played out theatrical piece. One of which I am always the star; even if I sit back and do nothing of great significance I manage to impact other positively. But I fail to see the reward. Is this all there is? A chance encounter, fleeting, where love is extricated for my benefit and validation of my greatness. Psychotherapy and psychology seem only to capture the seen and make formulaic profiles of those who manage to fall into the system. I have absolutely no desire to be anything else. There is an elegance in the primal connection to my stripped bone need to see the tethers that bind us to this false sense of social propriety.
But these tethers that bind us all demand to be plucked so that I can rest assured my genius is not wasted. I am not adverse to violence and my sexual appetites are gruesome at best. But I have control of them despite a few slip ups. I appreciate greatly the time you took to read my letter. What Answer I receive from you will be welcome.
I have lived long enough to grow tired of the clinical definitions and confines of sociopathy. There are many of us who have formed quite mutually beneficial bonds with one another and find success in a tedious world a far better path than the wanton rebellion. I suppose, while I will be frank in admitting I haven't the foggiest idea of what drew me to your writings, you must have seemed to at least be less rigid in your understanding of this particular detachment. Except with those like me, I have never before felt an interest to express this. You also are likely aware that I would be remiss if I didn't say that any questions you have for me would be welcomed.
Thursday, June 13, 2013
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Targeted altruism
Or, a rose by any other name... from Superfreakonomics:Some of [Gary] Becker's most compelling early research concerned altruism. He argued, for instance, that the same person who might be purely selfish in business could be exceedingly altruistic among people he knew -- although, importantly (Becker is an economist, after all), he predicted that altruism even within a family would have a strategic element.
Summers empirically demonstrated Becker's point. Using data from a U.S. government longitudinal study, they showed that an elderly parent in a retirement home is more likely to be visited by his grown children if they are expecting a sizable inheritance.
But wait, you say: maybe the offspring of wealthy families are simply more caring toward their elderly parents?
A reasonable conjecture -- in which case you'd expect an only child of wealthy parents to be especially dutiful. But the data show no increase in retirement- home visits if a wealthy family has only one grown child; there need to be at least two. This suggests that the visits increase because of competition between siblings for the parent's estate.
This illustrates an interesting problem in defining altruism not just as good acts, but good acts done selflessly:
How can we know whether an act is altruistic or self- serving? If you help rebuild a neighbor's barn, is it because you're a moral person or because you know your own barn might burn down someday? When a donor gives millions to his alma mater, is it because he cares about the pursuit of knowledge or because he gets his name plastered on the football stadium?
Sorting out such things in the real world is extremely hard. While it is easy to observe actions, it is much harder to understand the intentions behind an action.
After an interesting discussion of several lab experiments, researchers conclude that true altruism (if it exists as all) is elusive as a unicorn or Nessie:
If John List's research proves anything, it's that a question like "Are people innately altruistic?" is the wrong kind of question to ask. People aren't "good" or "bad." People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated -- for good or ill -- if only you find the right levers.
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Edward Snowden and independent thinking
The reaction to Edward Snowden coming forward as the source for the NSA leaks has been interesting and varied, from clear signs of support to accusations of him being a traitor. I think the most interesting (and possibly the most prevalent reaction) is a little bit of fear mixed in with some what-is-he-thinking-could-he-really-be-that-naive and a lot of judgment guised as that's-not-how-I-would-have-done-it (this last one is the most hilarious to me -- you would never have done it, so any analysis of how you would have done it in a non-existent reality goes beyond mere speculation to pure fantasy). Like Monday morning quarterbacks, these people have questioned his decisions from things like his choice of an extradition-lite hideaway to his decision to come forward (as if him outting himself affects in anyway whether the U.S. government knows who he is and is trying to track him down) to whether he was able to save enough money to live on or if he is now completely unemployable for the rest of his life.
For as popular as Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" is, particularly during graduation speech season, there is a pretty clear social norm that favors steady job white picket fence 2 1/2 children and people that dare violate this norm can be very polarizing. On the one hand, most seem to acknowledge that there are great men and women that have bucked the trends and led to important advancements to us as a species. On the other hand, people who buck the trend present a lot of problems for society, at the very least because there is no comfortable pigeonhole to confine them to. This discomfort is often expressed in terms of these people being "unpredictable" or "untrustworthy". From Megan McArdle with the Daily Beast, "Whistleblowers Are Weird":
Human institutions, from the family to the government, are founded by trust. You need to be able to trust the people you work with, at least to the extent of being able to predict their future behavior. You may think you don't trust that rat down the hall, but in fact, you do trust him quite a lot: not to come into work with a machete and hack you to death in order to secure your superior office chair, not to start randomly swearing at clients, and so forth.
Some of that trust is enforced by fear of the consequences. But a lot of our ability to make a credible committment to be trustworthy comes from the fact that we are hard wired to be loyal. . . . You would feel bad about yourself if you [broke that trust].
That's why psychopaths are so dangerous: they don't have any of the internal brakes, the shame and guilt, that keep the rest of us from blatantly violating the trust of people around us. Oh, of course we do betray people from time to time--we break promises, forget to call our grandmothers, and engage in the guilty pleasure of gossiping about friends. But the hallmark of these betrayals is that they are impulsive and unjustified. Psychopaths feel no guilt about doing these things--or stealing your money, your wife, and your dog. They are fundamentally untrustworthy, though also, thankfully rare.
This reasoning seems flawed -- the reason why the rat down the hall doesn't machete you is because he is hardwired to be loyal? She's correct that if you're worried about someone harming you, the world of possibilities includes both intentional bad behavior (which she suggests that only sociopaths commit because they don't feel shame and guilt and these "brakes" on bad behavior are both apparently necessary to avoid bad behavior and also infallible?) and the unintentional bad behavior of everyone else (which she suggests is always impulsive). She says that we need to trust people to predict their future behavior (says no statistician, behavioral economist, or psychologist ever because currently the best predictor of future behavior is not trust or loyalty but past behavior). But of the two possibilities of bad behavior, which is more predictable? The sociopath's? (Who is almost the quintessential economic rational actor.) Or the "impulsive and unjustified" (i.e. no apparent or reasonable triggers or other identifiable causes) behavior of the non-sociopath?
Nor does someone's trust or the apparent level of predictability of a person constrain his behavior. You can trust the rat down the hall all you want, but that doesn't mean that your trust in him will keep him from someday putting a machete in your back. The best you could say about him is that his past behavior doesn't indicate an above average risk of being a murderer and/or that the chance is already so low and there are so many competing dangers vying for our attention that it's simply not worth the effort of thinking about who exactly could kill you. At this point, though, we are simply talking about probabilities of behavior and "impulsive and unjustified" are almost by definition random and unpredictable.
What is apparently happening here is that McArdle and many others intuit that there is something particularly unknowable about whistleblowers and sociopaths. Uncertainty like this does in fact increase both actual and perceived risk. But there's nothing terribly "unknowable" about them. In fact, in a lot of ways they are less complicated than most people -- the one hyper-rational ruled by self-interest and the other an ideologue that can't be bought off by even a $200,000 a year cushy government salary. Which makes me think this is the real crux of the issue. The scary thing about a whistleblower or any other independent thinker is that he is not as constrained by social norms. This is evidenced for the whistleblower by his rejection of the picket fence and golden retriever lifestyle. For most people, it's possible to constrain their behavior with so-called golden handcuffs -- all the materialistic trappings of a comfortable life in exchange for unquestioning loyalty, including submitting one's will to one's employer, one's government, the police, and even one's parent teacher association. The norm is enforced as heartily as it is because although the majority acknowledges that they can gain big from independent thinking, they can't have everyone constantly questioning the most basic of social rules as it would lead to chaos and a weakening of the social contract. And people are incredibly and irrationally loss averse, so given the choice they would rather keep what they have than chance it on someone who who already comes off as a bit of an outsider (how do we even know he has our best interests at heart? how can we "trust" him to make the right decisions? isn't this why we have a government heavily dominated by administrative agencies so we could sub-contract out important decisions like this and never have to consider them ourselves?).
Thus, the uncertainty lies not in the behavior of the independent thinker, which is actually quite predictably independent, but whether he is right or not. The problem is that although we say that everyone is free to act according to his own best judgment, the "right" thing to do with that freedom as far as the majority is concerned is to marry, own a house, be gainfully employed, and have at least two children. Only then are you considered sufficiently invested in society that you become "predictable" to us, in that we know you have too much to lose to take any major risks ("freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"). And if its one thing the financial crisis has taught us, it is that one person's actions can ripple through the entire global economy. Of course that applies for good things as well as bad, but how can we know ahead of time which is which? This is particularly a problem when (most?) people (inaccurately and unreliably) gauge the rightness or wrongness of decisions by imagining what they themselves would have done in that situation, and the thoughts and decisions of an independent thinker are difficult for many to fathom. (Of course, despite this inherent uncertainty, there are people who feel very comfortable assigning themselves the role of arbiter of good and bad. These people form the rank and file of the social norm police).
Still McArdle does make an interesting acknowledgment that the things that make people seem different and even unappealing to us are the very traits that make them socially beneficial:
We may well end up grateful to Edward Snowden, and also find that we don't like him very much. Of course, Edward Snowden probably doesn't care. After all, if he cared about people liking him as much as the rest of us do, he probably wouldn't have been able to do with he did.
For as popular as Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" is, particularly during graduation speech season, there is a pretty clear social norm that favors steady job white picket fence 2 1/2 children and people that dare violate this norm can be very polarizing. On the one hand, most seem to acknowledge that there are great men and women that have bucked the trends and led to important advancements to us as a species. On the other hand, people who buck the trend present a lot of problems for society, at the very least because there is no comfortable pigeonhole to confine them to. This discomfort is often expressed in terms of these people being "unpredictable" or "untrustworthy". From Megan McArdle with the Daily Beast, "Whistleblowers Are Weird":
Human institutions, from the family to the government, are founded by trust. You need to be able to trust the people you work with, at least to the extent of being able to predict their future behavior. You may think you don't trust that rat down the hall, but in fact, you do trust him quite a lot: not to come into work with a machete and hack you to death in order to secure your superior office chair, not to start randomly swearing at clients, and so forth.
Some of that trust is enforced by fear of the consequences. But a lot of our ability to make a credible committment to be trustworthy comes from the fact that we are hard wired to be loyal. . . . You would feel bad about yourself if you [broke that trust].
That's why psychopaths are so dangerous: they don't have any of the internal brakes, the shame and guilt, that keep the rest of us from blatantly violating the trust of people around us. Oh, of course we do betray people from time to time--we break promises, forget to call our grandmothers, and engage in the guilty pleasure of gossiping about friends. But the hallmark of these betrayals is that they are impulsive and unjustified. Psychopaths feel no guilt about doing these things--or stealing your money, your wife, and your dog. They are fundamentally untrustworthy, though also, thankfully rare.
This reasoning seems flawed -- the reason why the rat down the hall doesn't machete you is because he is hardwired to be loyal? She's correct that if you're worried about someone harming you, the world of possibilities includes both intentional bad behavior (which she suggests that only sociopaths commit because they don't feel shame and guilt and these "brakes" on bad behavior are both apparently necessary to avoid bad behavior and also infallible?) and the unintentional bad behavior of everyone else (which she suggests is always impulsive). She says that we need to trust people to predict their future behavior (says no statistician, behavioral economist, or psychologist ever because currently the best predictor of future behavior is not trust or loyalty but past behavior). But of the two possibilities of bad behavior, which is more predictable? The sociopath's? (Who is almost the quintessential economic rational actor.) Or the "impulsive and unjustified" (i.e. no apparent or reasonable triggers or other identifiable causes) behavior of the non-sociopath?
Nor does someone's trust or the apparent level of predictability of a person constrain his behavior. You can trust the rat down the hall all you want, but that doesn't mean that your trust in him will keep him from someday putting a machete in your back. The best you could say about him is that his past behavior doesn't indicate an above average risk of being a murderer and/or that the chance is already so low and there are so many competing dangers vying for our attention that it's simply not worth the effort of thinking about who exactly could kill you. At this point, though, we are simply talking about probabilities of behavior and "impulsive and unjustified" are almost by definition random and unpredictable.
What is apparently happening here is that McArdle and many others intuit that there is something particularly unknowable about whistleblowers and sociopaths. Uncertainty like this does in fact increase both actual and perceived risk. But there's nothing terribly "unknowable" about them. In fact, in a lot of ways they are less complicated than most people -- the one hyper-rational ruled by self-interest and the other an ideologue that can't be bought off by even a $200,000 a year cushy government salary. Which makes me think this is the real crux of the issue. The scary thing about a whistleblower or any other independent thinker is that he is not as constrained by social norms. This is evidenced for the whistleblower by his rejection of the picket fence and golden retriever lifestyle. For most people, it's possible to constrain their behavior with so-called golden handcuffs -- all the materialistic trappings of a comfortable life in exchange for unquestioning loyalty, including submitting one's will to one's employer, one's government, the police, and even one's parent teacher association. The norm is enforced as heartily as it is because although the majority acknowledges that they can gain big from independent thinking, they can't have everyone constantly questioning the most basic of social rules as it would lead to chaos and a weakening of the social contract. And people are incredibly and irrationally loss averse, so given the choice they would rather keep what they have than chance it on someone who who already comes off as a bit of an outsider (how do we even know he has our best interests at heart? how can we "trust" him to make the right decisions? isn't this why we have a government heavily dominated by administrative agencies so we could sub-contract out important decisions like this and never have to consider them ourselves?).
Thus, the uncertainty lies not in the behavior of the independent thinker, which is actually quite predictably independent, but whether he is right or not. The problem is that although we say that everyone is free to act according to his own best judgment, the "right" thing to do with that freedom as far as the majority is concerned is to marry, own a house, be gainfully employed, and have at least two children. Only then are you considered sufficiently invested in society that you become "predictable" to us, in that we know you have too much to lose to take any major risks ("freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"). And if its one thing the financial crisis has taught us, it is that one person's actions can ripple through the entire global economy. Of course that applies for good things as well as bad, but how can we know ahead of time which is which? This is particularly a problem when (most?) people (inaccurately and unreliably) gauge the rightness or wrongness of decisions by imagining what they themselves would have done in that situation, and the thoughts and decisions of an independent thinker are difficult for many to fathom. (Of course, despite this inherent uncertainty, there are people who feel very comfortable assigning themselves the role of arbiter of good and bad. These people form the rank and file of the social norm police).
Still McArdle does make an interesting acknowledgment that the things that make people seem different and even unappealing to us are the very traits that make them socially beneficial:
We may well end up grateful to Edward Snowden, and also find that we don't like him very much. Of course, Edward Snowden probably doesn't care. After all, if he cared about people liking him as much as the rest of us do, he probably wouldn't have been able to do with he did.
Monday, June 10, 2013
"Bridging the Gap Between Scientific Evidence and Public Policy"
To address some of the misconceptions I've been seeing recently about sociopaths, a peer-reviewed academic article on public policy implications of sociopaths. From the summary to: "Psychopathic Personality: Bridging the Gap Between Scientific Evidence and Public Policy" co-authored by Jennifer Skeem, among others:
Few psychological concepts evoke simultaneously as much fascination and misunderstanding as psychopathic personality, or psychopathy. Typically, individuals with psychopathy are misconceived as fundamentally different from the rest of humanity and as inalterably dangerous. Popular portrayals of “psychopaths” are diverse and conflicting, ranging from uncommonly impulsive and violent criminal offenders to corporate figures who callously and skillfully manuever their way to the highest rungs of the social ladder.
Despite this diversity of perspectives, a single well validated measure of psychopathy, the Psychopathy ChecklistRevised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991; 2003), has come to dominate clinical and legal practice over recent years. The items of the PCL-R cover two basic content domains—an interpersonalaffective domain that encompasses core traits such as callousness and manipulativeness and an antisocial domain that entails disinhibition and chronic antisocial behavior. In most Western countries, the PCL-R and its derivatives are routinely applied to inform legal decisions about criminal offenders that hinge upon issues of dangerousness and treatability. In fact, clinicians in many cases choose the PCL-R over other, purpose-built risk-assessment tools to inform their opinions about what sentence offenders should receive, whether they should be indefinitely incarcerated as a “dangerous offender” or “sexually violent predator,” or whether they should be transferred from juvenile to adult court.
***
Despite the predominance of the PCL-R measurement model in recent years, vigorous scientific debates have continued regarding what psychopathy is and what it is not. Should adaptive, positive-adjustment features (on one hand) and criminal and antisocial behaviors (on the other) be considered essential features of the construct? Are anxious and emotionally reactive people that are identified as psychopaths by the PCL-R and other measures truly psychopathic? More fundamentally, is psychopathy a unitary entity (i.e., a global syndrome with a discrete underlying cause), or is it rather a configuration of several distinguishable, but intersecting trait dimensions?
Although these and other controversies remain unresolved, theory and research on the PCL-R and alternative measures have begun to clarify the scope and boundaries of the psychopathy construct. In the current comprehensive review, we provide an integrative descriptive framework—the triarchic model—to help the reader make sense of differing conceptualizations. The essence of this model is that alternative perspectives on psychopathy emphasize, to varying degrees, three distinct observable (phenotypic) characteristics: boldness (or fearless dominance), meanness, and disinhibition. The triarchic framework is helpful for clarifying and reconciling seemingly disparate historical conceptions, modern operationalizations, and contemporary research programs on psychopathy.
In many cases, the findings we review converge to challenge common assumptions that underpin modern applications of psychopathy measures and to call for cautions in their use. For example, contemporary measures of psychopathy, including the PCL-R, appear to evidence no special powers in predicting violence or other crime. Instead, they are about as predictive as purpose-built violence-risk-assessment tools, perhaps because they assess many of the same risk factors as those broader-band tools. Specifically, the PCL-R and other psychopathy measures derive most of their predictive utility from their “Factor 2” assessment of antisocial and disinhibitory tendencies; the “Factor 1” component of such measures, reflecting interpersonal and affective features more specific to psychopathy, play at best a small predictive role. Similarly, current measures of psychopathy do not appear to moderate the effects of treatment on violent and other criminal behavior. That is, an increasing number of studies suggest that psychopathic individuals are not uniquely “hopeless” cases who should be disqualified from treatment, but instead are general “high-risk” cases who need to be targeted for intensive treatment to maximize public safety.
Misunderstandings about the criminal propensities and treatability of individuals achieving high scores on measures like the PCL-R have been perpetuated by professionals who interpret such high scores in a stereotypic manner, without considering nuances or issues of heterogeneity. A key message of our review is that classical psychopathy, whether measured by the PCL-R or other measures, is not monolithic; instead, it represents a constellation of multiple traits that may include, in varying degrees, the phenotypic domains of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition. Measures such as the PCL-R that do not directly assess features of low anxiety, fearlessness, or boldness more broadly tend to identify heterogeneous subgroups of individuals as psychopathic. As a consequence, efforts to apply one-size-fits-all public policies to psychopathic individuals may be doomed to failure. In aggregrate, these conclusions may help to shed light on what psychopathy is, and what it is not, and to guide policy interventions directed toward improved public health and public safety.
Few psychological concepts evoke simultaneously as much fascination and misunderstanding as psychopathic personality, or psychopathy. Typically, individuals with psychopathy are misconceived as fundamentally different from the rest of humanity and as inalterably dangerous. Popular portrayals of “psychopaths” are diverse and conflicting, ranging from uncommonly impulsive and violent criminal offenders to corporate figures who callously and skillfully manuever their way to the highest rungs of the social ladder.
Despite this diversity of perspectives, a single well validated measure of psychopathy, the Psychopathy ChecklistRevised (PCL-R; Hare, 1991; 2003), has come to dominate clinical and legal practice over recent years. The items of the PCL-R cover two basic content domains—an interpersonalaffective domain that encompasses core traits such as callousness and manipulativeness and an antisocial domain that entails disinhibition and chronic antisocial behavior. In most Western countries, the PCL-R and its derivatives are routinely applied to inform legal decisions about criminal offenders that hinge upon issues of dangerousness and treatability. In fact, clinicians in many cases choose the PCL-R over other, purpose-built risk-assessment tools to inform their opinions about what sentence offenders should receive, whether they should be indefinitely incarcerated as a “dangerous offender” or “sexually violent predator,” or whether they should be transferred from juvenile to adult court.
***
Despite the predominance of the PCL-R measurement model in recent years, vigorous scientific debates have continued regarding what psychopathy is and what it is not. Should adaptive, positive-adjustment features (on one hand) and criminal and antisocial behaviors (on the other) be considered essential features of the construct? Are anxious and emotionally reactive people that are identified as psychopaths by the PCL-R and other measures truly psychopathic? More fundamentally, is psychopathy a unitary entity (i.e., a global syndrome with a discrete underlying cause), or is it rather a configuration of several distinguishable, but intersecting trait dimensions?
Although these and other controversies remain unresolved, theory and research on the PCL-R and alternative measures have begun to clarify the scope and boundaries of the psychopathy construct. In the current comprehensive review, we provide an integrative descriptive framework—the triarchic model—to help the reader make sense of differing conceptualizations. The essence of this model is that alternative perspectives on psychopathy emphasize, to varying degrees, three distinct observable (phenotypic) characteristics: boldness (or fearless dominance), meanness, and disinhibition. The triarchic framework is helpful for clarifying and reconciling seemingly disparate historical conceptions, modern operationalizations, and contemporary research programs on psychopathy.
In many cases, the findings we review converge to challenge common assumptions that underpin modern applications of psychopathy measures and to call for cautions in their use. For example, contemporary measures of psychopathy, including the PCL-R, appear to evidence no special powers in predicting violence or other crime. Instead, they are about as predictive as purpose-built violence-risk-assessment tools, perhaps because they assess many of the same risk factors as those broader-band tools. Specifically, the PCL-R and other psychopathy measures derive most of their predictive utility from their “Factor 2” assessment of antisocial and disinhibitory tendencies; the “Factor 1” component of such measures, reflecting interpersonal and affective features more specific to psychopathy, play at best a small predictive role. Similarly, current measures of psychopathy do not appear to moderate the effects of treatment on violent and other criminal behavior. That is, an increasing number of studies suggest that psychopathic individuals are not uniquely “hopeless” cases who should be disqualified from treatment, but instead are general “high-risk” cases who need to be targeted for intensive treatment to maximize public safety.
Misunderstandings about the criminal propensities and treatability of individuals achieving high scores on measures like the PCL-R have been perpetuated by professionals who interpret such high scores in a stereotypic manner, without considering nuances or issues of heterogeneity. A key message of our review is that classical psychopathy, whether measured by the PCL-R or other measures, is not monolithic; instead, it represents a constellation of multiple traits that may include, in varying degrees, the phenotypic domains of boldness, meanness, and disinhibition. Measures such as the PCL-R that do not directly assess features of low anxiety, fearlessness, or boldness more broadly tend to identify heterogeneous subgroups of individuals as psychopathic. As a consequence, efforts to apply one-size-fits-all public policies to psychopathic individuals may be doomed to failure. In aggregrate, these conclusions may help to shed light on what psychopathy is, and what it is not, and to guide policy interventions directed toward improved public health and public safety.
Sunday, June 9, 2013
Pro-social sociopath (part 3)
Ok, a few more responses about the legitimate foundation of the stigma against sociopaths, and then we'll stop this series.
Yes, I understand, it would be scary if I had actually ever said that I "very likely could" kill someone or if a significant percentage of sociopaths are killers (I don't know what percentage of sociopaths are killers, and I don't think anyone does, but it can't be that high because there simply aren't that many murders committed). I think what I said was roughly (and even this was taken out of context): "is it possible that I would kill someone? I don't think I would, but it's possible." This is true. In my mind pretty much anything is possible -- I'm naturally very open-minded about what is and is not possible and my educational background has also led me to believe that it is foolish to not believe that it's within the realm of possibility that killing (either as a perpetrator or victim) could be part of my life -- or having a child with down syndrome, or becoming an amputee, or any number of unusual and unlikely but very possible events. I actually think it's weird that people assume that they're much more likely to be the victim of killing than the perpetrator, particularly because if most killers have only killed once, the odds of killer/killed happening to you are not so different. I wish more people would acknowledge that they too could be killers, given the right circumstances, then maybe they would take appropriate precautions to avoid things that might trigger any latent violent tendencies, like I do and have done since the DC metro worker incident from the book. If you have never experienced anything approaching a murderous rage, good for you but I fear you are in the minority of the population and there's no guarantee that you won't ever ("she always seemed so mild-mannered..."). But despite sometimes feeling like or wishing that I could "stick it to" someone, I have no real history of non-consensual violence and I don't really have the skills for killing someone even if I wanted to. My guess is that there is a greater chance of being struck by lightning than being killed by a sociopath and I am certain that there is a much greater chance of being the victim of violence perpetuated by a non-sociopath than by a sociopath. Do you know what kills much more frequently than sociopathy? Love kills. Emotions kill. It happens so often that we have a separate version of homicide for it, voluntary manslaughter. If you really want to decrease your likelihood of being murdered, you'd never get married, disown your family, never have kids. But of course this is stupid to do when the chance of getting murdered by anyone is so low and much lower than dying doing any number of other activities we still willingly engage in (driving automobiles, working, biking, etc.)
No, let me be very clear -- I am not repulsed. The fat woman does not bother me. Not only am I not repulsed, I don't understand why your feeling of repulsion and your mind-blindness are so strong that you can't imagine anyone not feeling repulsed to the point that you keep insisting that I am. I am not you. And your continued projection of your own failings unto me (along with a laundry list of failings that you imagine me to have) are telling as to how and why there is such a negative (and still unfounded, as far as this recent exercise is concerned) stigma against sociopaths. Why would her appearance offend me at all? I'd love to see someone even attempt to come up with a rational reason why, and yet you all conveniently write off this particularly ugly and antisocial empath trait as being "trivial" or necessary to the survival of humanity by ensuring that there be social conformity. Conformity as to what? Fit of clothing? Is it also ok to make everyone conform to the same religion? Same political beliefs? No? And yet, you all think there's an incredibly compelling reason to shame a fat person out of completely innocuous behavior. This is nonsense. It's irrational and hurtful and it's so common that you can't even imagine what humanity might look like without it. I don't think this example is trivial, rather I think this example and your reactions to it clearly illustrate how convinced empaths seem to be that their fecal matter doesn't stink.
This is a funny thing to say, especially when the actual marriage success rate is 50%. I guess empaths are all selfish and self-interested? I don't think I've met anyone who consistently acts outside their own self-interest, and I don't think we'd want them to, or at least rational self-interest is the basis of capitalistic economies.
It's not clear that sociopaths are actually deterred by heavier penalties. In fact, there has been substantial evidence suggesting that sociopath do not respond in the same way to punishment (but they do respond to incentives). If the idea is to actually prevent sociopaths from doing criminal acts, a one-size fits all method is not at all optimal. And I don't believe that sociopaths are incapable of reform. Sociopaths may not respond well to the current methods of prisoner reform, but we are far from having exhausted every possible option in terms of attempted reform of criminal sociopaths.
Sociopaths don't need to feel guilt/atone to choose to behave in socially beneficial ways. And your solution seems difficult to execute. Historically, what typically happens when you disenfranchise a group of people and treat them as less than? Does it work out well? No, because after they are no longer invested in your society (nothing to lose), they will have every incentive to tear it down (French Revolution, and really every other revolution, terrorism, etc.) And if we're imprisoning people based on their status (and an inborn genetic propensity at that), then we're opening the door to any number of atrocities committed against types of people that we might, in all our infinite and flawless wisdom, consider a net loss to society -- disabled people, mentally sick, even poor children who, just like sociopaths, are statistically more likely to grow up and become criminals. And if we're going to eliminate things that seem to cause problems, let's also get rid of religion because it makes people bigots and terrorists, and children in general because killers have to come from somewhere, and money because people don't like that other people have more of it and sometimes they commit crimes or murder for it, corporations, and a slew of other really great ideas for social reform. A certain degree of conformity is beneficial to society, but absolute conformity is absolute death.
My point is that everyone has antisocial behaviors. The sociopath's antisocial behaviors may seem uniquely distasteful to you, and it may be difficult for you to acknowledge your own failings, but it's not at all clear that sociopaths as a class of people are a net loss to society. You may have an intuition that this is true, but your intuitions appear to be tainted by your visceral negative reactions to the very idea of sociopaths. So I'm not just going to take your word for it on sociopaths being pure evil, and I don't think any reasonable person should. If your beliefs are really based in fact, they should hold up to even a modest degree of scrutiny. Otherwise, “that which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence." I'm not saying that people can't hate sociopaths -- they can and they do and I'm sure nothing will change that, particularly for some of you. But sociopaths are here, we're queer, and if you want to make our lives worse in some way, at least acknowledge that you are really just blindly enforcing your own personal and subjective set of aesthetic preferences of what humanity should look like onto sociopaths in the same way that you bully fat girls in a tube top. And it's not even effective -- as much as society shames fat girls in tube tops, they keep doing it.
One more outrageous claim to add to the pile of irrational outrage. But this has been incredibly enlightening to me. I am pretty sure I now know where the intense stigma and dislike for sociopaths comes from, but unfortunately it's not anything that any of you seem to be able to put into words. Correct me if I'm wrong.
- you said you salivate at the thought of ruining people (that's been stuck in my head for a while btw).
- and that you've never killed anyone but very likely could. how can you not think that would make people hate sociopaths?
Yes, I understand, it would be scary if I had actually ever said that I "very likely could" kill someone or if a significant percentage of sociopaths are killers (I don't know what percentage of sociopaths are killers, and I don't think anyone does, but it can't be that high because there simply aren't that many murders committed). I think what I said was roughly (and even this was taken out of context): "is it possible that I would kill someone? I don't think I would, but it's possible." This is true. In my mind pretty much anything is possible -- I'm naturally very open-minded about what is and is not possible and my educational background has also led me to believe that it is foolish to not believe that it's within the realm of possibility that killing (either as a perpetrator or victim) could be part of my life -- or having a child with down syndrome, or becoming an amputee, or any number of unusual and unlikely but very possible events. I actually think it's weird that people assume that they're much more likely to be the victim of killing than the perpetrator, particularly because if most killers have only killed once, the odds of killer/killed happening to you are not so different. I wish more people would acknowledge that they too could be killers, given the right circumstances, then maybe they would take appropriate precautions to avoid things that might trigger any latent violent tendencies, like I do and have done since the DC metro worker incident from the book. If you have never experienced anything approaching a murderous rage, good for you but I fear you are in the minority of the population and there's no guarantee that you won't ever ("she always seemed so mild-mannered..."). But despite sometimes feeling like or wishing that I could "stick it to" someone, I have no real history of non-consensual violence and I don't really have the skills for killing someone even if I wanted to. My guess is that there is a greater chance of being struck by lightning than being killed by a sociopath and I am certain that there is a much greater chance of being the victim of violence perpetuated by a non-sociopath than by a sociopath. Do you know what kills much more frequently than sociopathy? Love kills. Emotions kill. It happens so often that we have a separate version of homicide for it, voluntary manslaughter. If you really want to decrease your likelihood of being murdered, you'd never get married, disown your family, never have kids. But of course this is stupid to do when the chance of getting murdered by anyone is so low and much lower than dying doing any number of other activities we still willingly engage in (driving automobiles, working, biking, etc.)
- You are as repulsed by the fat girl as anyone else, but you see an opportunity to use her and have no qualms against taking it.
No, let me be very clear -- I am not repulsed. The fat woman does not bother me. Not only am I not repulsed, I don't understand why your feeling of repulsion and your mind-blindness are so strong that you can't imagine anyone not feeling repulsed to the point that you keep insisting that I am. I am not you. And your continued projection of your own failings unto me (along with a laundry list of failings that you imagine me to have) are telling as to how and why there is such a negative (and still unfounded, as far as this recent exercise is concerned) stigma against sociopaths. Why would her appearance offend me at all? I'd love to see someone even attempt to come up with a rational reason why, and yet you all conveniently write off this particularly ugly and antisocial empath trait as being "trivial" or necessary to the survival of humanity by ensuring that there be social conformity. Conformity as to what? Fit of clothing? Is it also ok to make everyone conform to the same religion? Same political beliefs? No? And yet, you all think there's an incredibly compelling reason to shame a fat person out of completely innocuous behavior. This is nonsense. It's irrational and hurtful and it's so common that you can't even imagine what humanity might look like without it. I don't think this example is trivial, rather I think this example and your reactions to it clearly illustrate how convinced empaths seem to be that their fecal matter doesn't stink.
- And when you've used her up, when her value is gone, there's no marriage contract, no division of property, just a social umbilical cord to cut which thrusts her back out into the world, cold, naked and alone.
This is a funny thing to say, especially when the actual marriage success rate is 50%. I guess empaths are all selfish and self-interested? I don't think I've met anyone who consistently acts outside their own self-interest, and I don't think we'd want them to, or at least rational self-interest is the basis of capitalistic economies.
- The person who commits a crime in a moment of temporary madness, or a blackout, is considered to be less dangerous than the one who knowingly and willingly commits an identical crime. The former is not held responsible, and in less need of reform. The latter is responsible for his actions, and heavier penalties are necessary to discourage future crimes.
It's not clear that sociopaths are actually deterred by heavier penalties. In fact, there has been substantial evidence suggesting that sociopath do not respond in the same way to punishment (but they do respond to incentives). If the idea is to actually prevent sociopaths from doing criminal acts, a one-size fits all method is not at all optimal. And I don't believe that sociopaths are incapable of reform. Sociopaths may not respond well to the current methods of prisoner reform, but we are far from having exhausted every possible option in terms of attempted reform of criminal sociopaths.
- Sociopaths do not feel guilt and will never atone, and thus commit social crimes in perpetuity without any legal or social recourse. The solution, then, is to identify people who are sociopaths and ostracize them, strip them of social privileges and cast them out.
Sociopaths don't need to feel guilt/atone to choose to behave in socially beneficial ways. And your solution seems difficult to execute. Historically, what typically happens when you disenfranchise a group of people and treat them as less than? Does it work out well? No, because after they are no longer invested in your society (nothing to lose), they will have every incentive to tear it down (French Revolution, and really every other revolution, terrorism, etc.) And if we're imprisoning people based on their status (and an inborn genetic propensity at that), then we're opening the door to any number of atrocities committed against types of people that we might, in all our infinite and flawless wisdom, consider a net loss to society -- disabled people, mentally sick, even poor children who, just like sociopaths, are statistically more likely to grow up and become criminals. And if we're going to eliminate things that seem to cause problems, let's also get rid of religion because it makes people bigots and terrorists, and children in general because killers have to come from somewhere, and money because people don't like that other people have more of it and sometimes they commit crimes or murder for it, corporations, and a slew of other really great ideas for social reform. A certain degree of conformity is beneficial to society, but absolute conformity is absolute death.
- I mean, sociopaths, almost all of them, have antisocial behaviors. And you are asking why humans, who life together, who organize in a society, stigmatize those who have antisocial behaviors?
My point is that everyone has antisocial behaviors. The sociopath's antisocial behaviors may seem uniquely distasteful to you, and it may be difficult for you to acknowledge your own failings, but it's not at all clear that sociopaths as a class of people are a net loss to society. You may have an intuition that this is true, but your intuitions appear to be tainted by your visceral negative reactions to the very idea of sociopaths. So I'm not just going to take your word for it on sociopaths being pure evil, and I don't think any reasonable person should. If your beliefs are really based in fact, they should hold up to even a modest degree of scrutiny. Otherwise, “that which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence." I'm not saying that people can't hate sociopaths -- they can and they do and I'm sure nothing will change that, particularly for some of you. But sociopaths are here, we're queer, and if you want to make our lives worse in some way, at least acknowledge that you are really just blindly enforcing your own personal and subjective set of aesthetic preferences of what humanity should look like onto sociopaths in the same way that you bully fat girls in a tube top. And it's not even effective -- as much as society shames fat girls in tube tops, they keep doing it.
- A clue - empaths, and people of this ilk, especially in a group, as you know, are a thousand times as intelligent as any sociopath.
One more outrageous claim to add to the pile of irrational outrage. But this has been incredibly enlightening to me. I am pretty sure I now know where the intense stigma and dislike for sociopaths comes from, but unfortunately it's not anything that any of you seem to be able to put into words. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
.
Comments are unmoderated. Blog owner is not responsible for third party content. By leaving comments on the blog, commenters give license to the blog owner to reprint attributed comments in any form.

