Friday, September 13, 2013

Easy to love

Under the title "Bad Dog," a writer tells the story in the NY Times of her relationship with her dog -- a creature that did not get along well with others, was unpredictable, and overall poorly behaved. Her thoughts on what it means to love unconditionally:

It’s easy to love a well-behaved dog. It’s harder to love Chance, with his bristly personality and tendency toward violence. Yet in the end, I measure the success of my relationship with Chance by its challenges, because if I can’t love him at his most imperfect what use is love?

I had a work colleague who gushed about his new dog when we first met. He worked in a remote office, so we didn't see each other that frequently, but when we did, I would always be sure to ask him about his dog (I have found that dog owners love to talk about their dogs). One day I asked him  about his dog and he told me that he was thinking of giving the dog back to the pound. I was pretty shocked. The dog was hard to potty train and tore up the furniture, so had to be kept at doggy daycare almost every day. The dog was expensive and time-consuming, more than the owner had anticipated. Owning a dog was not as convenient and rewarding as planned, so he was going to return it like you might return a television set that had failed to live up to expectations.

Of course I don't care what people do with their pets, but I did think this was an odd turnaround. Man expects unconditional loyalty and devotion from his best friend but he does not return it? Not quite Old Yeller material. Then again, what did the dog do to deserve a good life? Should we feel obligated to be nice to things that are not nice to us -- to give to people or things that cannot or do not give back to us in commensurate ways?

Along those lines, I got a little bit of pushback from this recent tweet and subsequent exchange:


Ok, but does that mean people should have no problems being friends with someone who is a parasite, leech, or a sociopath? If there's such thing as unconditional love for all creatures, does that include sociopaths? And relatedly (but even more puzzlingly), some people act as if empathy is this great thing, but empathy doesn't seem that powerful or that special if it doesn't allow you to empathize with people who can't empathize back. Can you empathize with sociopaths? 

Thursday, September 12, 2013

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

As I wrote a like-minded friend, I have been recently thinking about the world of Oz. In Oz there are apparently witches, both good and bad. Anything remarkable that exists in that world is consequently attributed to witchcraft. When Dorothy shows up and kills the wicked witch, everyone is dying to know whether she is a good witch or a bad, as if her being any sort of witch is a foregone conclusion. The most interesting thing to me, though, is that their leader, the "wizard," is not a wizard/witch at all, but a charlatan who plays on their expectations of what their world looks like. He is a stranger in a strange land, someone from a different world, who doesn't think like they do. He uses misdirection and cheap tricks like gunpowder pyrotechnics and robotics to imitate the sort of witchcraft that the Ozians take for granted as an everyday occurrence. The wizard does all of this to hide in plain sight, but not just hide -- thrive. And not just thrive -- rule. My friend wrote:

Very interesting parallel there. If we wanted to play with the analogy a little, we could say that the Wizard is a literary example of how some sociopaths operate, including the whole “he isn’t as powerful as we thought he was” motif. He manipulated the people with the real magic. It was as if his deception was itself a kind of magic, potent enough to make himself the most powerful man in Oz. That is totally apropos. As you know, I believe that power is in one sense an illusion. I believe that people are always freer than they think they are. Because they believe in the social rules and roles and because their emotions almost compel them to even, they create power structures out of thin air, with most of them at the bottom of said structure. Awfully convenient for those at the top, don’t you think? ;)
This may all be true, but perhaps the strangest aspect to the story of the wizard is that he willingly gives up all the power and fame and return home to his native sepia-toned Kansas via the hot air balloon. This suggests a preference. Whether for loneliness or emptiness or meaninglessness, that for all of the wizard's success at assimilating into the world of Oz, he would rather live in a black-and-white world where everyone is just like him rather than all the color and glories of Oz.

And was he a good wizard or a bad one? Dorothy accuses him of being a bad man, to which the wizard responds, perhaps slyly, "Oh no, my dear, I'm a very good man; I'm just a very bad Wizard." Does he mean that he is not really a wizard at all, or that he realized that the wizard he was pretending to be was best categorized a "bad" wizard in the same way that Glinda is a "good" witch and the witch of the west was "bad"? Combined with the fact that he leaves Oz, maybe he thinks that it was "bad" to pretend to be a wizard in the first place, although he probably just fell into the role (literally), given his circumstances.

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Power corrupts

Organisms can be very adaptable to fit the needs of a particular situation. For instance, certain animals like clownfish will even change gender depending on the exigencies of procreation. Humans change too. Even neurotypicals can become monsters in the right circumstances. Interestingly, it's not just childhood abuse and abandonment that sets neurotypicals off but (wait for it) -- power and the sense of moral superiority, inter alia, to which it leads. From the Wall Street Journal:
Psychologists refer to this as the paradox of power. The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power. Instead of being polite, honest and outgoing, they become impulsive, reckless and rude. In some cases, these new habits can help a leader be more decisive and single-minded, or more likely to make choices that will be profitable regardless of their popularity. One recent study found that overconfident CEOs were more likely to pursue innovation and take their companies in new technological directions. Unchecked, however, these instincts can lead to a big fall.

But first, the good news.

A few years ago, Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, began interviewing freshmen at a large dorm on the Berkeley campus. He gave them free pizza and a survey, which asked them to provide their first impressions of every other student in the dorm. Mr. Keltner returned at the end of the school year with the same survey and more free pizza. According to the survey, the students at the top of the social hierarchy—they were the most "powerful" and respected—were also the most considerate and outgoing, and scored highest on measures of agreeableness and extroversion. In other words, the nice guys finished first.

This result isn't unique to Berkeley undergrads. Other studies have found similar results in the military, corporations and politics. "People give authority to people that they genuinely like," says Mr. Keltner.

Of course, these scientific findings contradict the cliché of power, which is that the only way to rise to the top is to engage in self-serving and morally dubious behavior. In "The Prince," a treatise on the art of politics, the 16th century Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli insisted that compassion got in the way of eminence. If a leader has to choose between being feared or being loved, Machiavelli insisted that the leader should always go with fear. Love is overrated.

That may not be the best advice. Another study conducted by Mr. Keltner and Cameron Anderson, a professor at the Haas School of Business, measured "Machiavellian" tendencies, such as the willingness to spread malicious gossip, in a group of sorority sisters. It turned out that the Machiavellian sorority members were quickly identified by the group and isolated. Nobody liked them, and so they never became powerful.
I feel like every high-functioning sociopath realizes this and either acts genuinely friendly, or is very stealthy about hiding any malicious intentions. It continues:
Now for the bad news, which concerns what happens when all those nice guys actually get in power. While a little compassion might help us climb the social ladder, once we're at the top we end up morphing into a very different kind of beast.

"It's an incredibly consistent effect," Mr. Keltner says. "When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools. They flirt inappropriately, tease in a hostile fashion, and become totally impulsive." Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that's crucial for empathy and decision-making. Even the most virtuous people can be undone by the corner office.

***

Although people almost always know the right thing to do—cheating is wrong—their sense of power makes it easier to rationalize away the ethical lapse. For instance, when the psychologists asked the subjects (in both low- and high-power conditions) how they would judge an individual who drove too fast when late for an appointment, people in the high-power group consistently said it was worse when others committed those crimes than when they did themselves. In other words, the feeling of eminence led people to conclude that they had a good reason for speeding—they're important people, with important things to do—but that everyone else should follow the posted signs.

[E]ven fleeting feelings of power can dramatically change the way people respond to information. Instead of analyzing the strength of the argument, those with authority focus on whether or not the argument confirms what they already believe. If it doesn't, then the facts are conveniently ignored.
***
[P]eople in power tend to reliably overestimate their moral virtue, which leads them to stifle oversight.
Hypothesis: neurotypicals are currently in power as a mob/group. They are easily corrupted by that power in ways that make them behave more like sociopaths, but unlike sociopaths they unquestioningly assume that they are always acting for the good of humanity because they are "good people," whereas sociopaths can never do "good" because they are "bad people".

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

The functional sociopath

I liked this recent comment from a reader about whether it makes sense to write sociopaths off as being hopeless cases:

I think it is ridiculous when people say that you (author of Confessions of a Sociopath) must be a fraud; presumably because you are successful and have a certain amount of respect for rules. Most experts agree that there are sociopaths in all walks of life and some say they are particularly attracted to law and business management. 

Maybe the people who don't believe you are hung up on the "impulsivity" issue. 'Sociopaths are supposed to be impulsive so how could one make such long-term plans?' they might ask. But everything is a matter of degree. Everyone is impulsive, non-empathetic, arrogant or manipulative sometimes in some contexts. In sociopaths, these traits are much stronger than in the general population, but human nature is such that many people learn to work their way around potentially limiting mental attributes and conditions. Some introverts can enjoy parties. Some sufferers from anxiety disorders can learn to relax. 

If at least some sociopaths can control themselves enough to work hard to get what they want (and we must admit that many do if we want to keep talking about sociopathic stock brokers and politicians), and many are able to stay within lawful behavior as well (just about any book on sociopathy will note that they are not all criminals or violent), it seems plausible that there could be some who develop attachments to others or a sense of values. These would not have to be based on empathy. A person might see that following rules increases their chances of getting what they want out of life. They might have an asthetic preference for order. The company of certain people might make them feel good. The idea of a functional sociopath is fascinating and I think the book and blog are great. 

I am not a sociopath myself, but have a high level of empathy and the very un-sociopathic traits of self doubt, worry and guilt (and have been in treatment for a variety of anxiety and depression-related problems for a long time). I have a hard time imagining life without empathy, but I kind of envy sociopaths for their boldness and it is fun to imagine what it would be like to be uninhibited like they are. 

I think I've talked about this before. I'm baffled by why people would insist that sociopaths are untreatable, unredeemable. If there's even a chance that they could be legitimate members of society, why wouldn't we want to explore that, at least consider the possibility?

Monday, September 9, 2013

Mind blame

Nobel Prize winning neuropsychiatrist writes an op-ed for the NY Times "The New Science of Mind" about the biology of mental disorders. He first uses the example of how psychotherapy and anti-depressant pharmaceuticals both change the structure and functioning of the brains of depressives, but one works better than the other depending on the neurological roots of the patients' depression. He also uses the genetic example of how an extra copy of genetic sequence means an increased risk of autism and its accompanying anti-social tendencies or a missing copy of the same sequence leads to Williams syndrome and its accompanying intense sociability.

Our understanding of the biology of mental disorders has been slow in coming, but recent advances like these have shown us that mental disorders are biological in nature, that people are not responsible for having schizophrenia or depression, and that individual biology and genetics make significant contributions.

The result of such work is a new, unified science of mind that uses the combined power of cognitive psychology and neuroscience to examine the great remaining mysteries of mind: how we think, feel and experience ourselves as conscious human beings.

This new science of mind is based on the principle that our mind and our brain are inseparable. The brain is a complex biological organ possessing immense computational capability: it constructs our sensory experience, regulates our thoughts and emotions, and controls our actions. It is responsible not only for relatively simple motor behaviors like running and eating, but also for complex acts that we consider quintessentially human, like thinking, speaking and creating works of art. Looked at from this perspective, our mind is a set of operations carried out by our brain. The same principle of unity applies to mental disorders.

In years to come, this increased understanding of the physical workings of our brain will provide us with important insight into brain disorders, whether psychiatric or neurological. But if we persevere, it will do even more: it will give us new insights into who we are as human beings.

Like most other mental disorders, sociopaths are characterized by both genetic and neurological differences that distinguish them from neurotypicals. I'm not saying that sociopaths aren't responsible for their actions, but they're certainly not responsible for being sociopaths. 
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