Thursday, May 1, 2014

Quote: Blame

“There is only one means of salvation, then take yourself and make yourself responsible for all men's sins, that is the truth, you know, friends, for as soon as you sincerely make yourself responsible for everything and for all men, you will see at once that it is really so, and that you are to blame for every one and for all things.”

 ― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov



Wednesday, April 30, 2014

Sociopaths: net gain or loss?

From a reader:

This is about a one minute clip of David Mitchell, british comedian, talking about atheism and religion in general. I don't know why, but it made me instantly think of your blog and book, and the way you talked about including mormon faith as a guidance in your life. I have had similar thoughts of catholicism and religion in general for quite a long time, and I think Mitchell brings up excellent point, where beliefs are not really there to be right or wrong, but to provide comfort in life. For me, one of the few emotions I experience is void feeling, grasping me from my stomach up my throat, when i think of death. When my consciousness ceases to exist, I am going to be no more. Unimaginable, yet so tempting to think about. I really would like there to be something after we die!


I related with his suggestion that people often mistakenly identify cause and effect relationships. Are religious people war mongering killers? Or do war mongering killers just find a helpful vehicle in religion. And if the former, if we took out religion, would there be fewer wars and deaths? Would something replace it? Is there some offsetting advantage to religion? Perhaps certain aspects of religion increase the likelihood for violence and hatred and other aspects decrease it so that there it's a wash? (Also it's funny that we as a society used to think that it was the godless atheists that were the cause of all the world's horrors, so it's still a little funny to see the opposite argument getting made all of the time).

The religion angle is interesting to me personally, but more interesting for purposes of this blog is the tendency for people to reduce complicated correlations into simple cause and effect relationships where they believe that if they only removed the cause, the effect would stop happening. For instance, if a sociopath wreaks a little bit of havoc and we remove sociopaths, there would be less havoc and the world would overall be better. But will something else take their place? At least in certain circumstances?

Imagine the example of someone who chronically speeds while driving. He gets pulled over by a police officer who cites him for speeding. In some ways the police officer could be seen as the cause of the ticket, but if that particular cop didn't pull him over, does that mean he would never have gotten a speeding ticket that day? Or worse, have gotten in a serious accident? The existence of police officers might seem terrible for speeders, but are speeders actually better off without a particular police officer? Or police officers in general?

The other argument is that even if sociopaths do bad things, could it be possible that they also do good things? Enough good things to make them overall beneficial to society? Isn't that true of most of us? We sometimes cheat on a spouse or don't pay our taxes or lie to our boss or fudge a CV or steal cable or exaggerate a claim for reimbursement, but we also volunteer for our church or coach our son's football team or plan parties for our co-workers' birthdays or mentor young sociopaths? :)

I'm just saying, I've met some people who have asserted that sociopaths cause billions of dollars of damage a year, and part of my does not doubt it, but the other part of me wonders if it's possible that their risk-taking in business and go-getting mentality doesn't earn even more for the people that back them.

I know I've said this before, but from a recent comment, if you dare take a sociopath's word for it:

I absolutely think sociopaths can be morally good people. In fact I would argue that sociopaths have the potential to be more effective citizens of society. Because I am not clouded by emotions as more empathetic people are, I make decisions based on logic, reason, and common sense. I'm charitable, kind, and compassionate because I know that will improve society.

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Liar, liar

One thing I am always a little surprised by is how horrified people are of the idea of sociopath mask-wearing and lying. Doesn't everybody? The main difference seems to be what sorts of things people bother to lie about? Maybe not even that? From the New Yorker blog's "How to Tell When Someone is Lying":

People lie all the time. According to the psychologist Robert Feldman, who has spent more than four decades studying the phenomenon, we lie, on average, three times during a routine ten-minute conversation with a stranger or casual acquaintance. Hardly anyone refrains from lying altogether, and some people report lying up to twelve times within that time span. I might open a conversation, for instance, by saying how nice it is to meet someone—when I’m really not at all happy about it. I might go on to say that I grew up in Boston—a lie, technically, since I really grew up in a small town about forty minutes outside the city. I could say that the person’s work sounds fascinating, when it’s no such thing, or compliment him on his (drab) tie or his (awful) shirt. And if the person mentions loving a certain downtown restaurant where I’ve had a terrible experience? I’m likely to just smile and nod and say, Yes, great place. Trust me: we often lie without giving it so much as a second thought.

We lie in most any context—Feldman’s work has turned up frequent lies in relationships ranging from the most intimate (marriage) to the completely casual. Some lies are small (“You look like you’ve lost a bit of weight”) and some bigger (“I did not have sex with that woman”). Sometimes they are harmless, and sometimes they are not.

Interestingly, although it is very difficult to become a personal lie-detector, studies suggest that people are pretty ok at subconsciously detecting lying:

In a series of studies, out this month in the journal Psychological Science, the Berkeley team had students watch a video of a possible criminal who was being questioned about stealing a hundred dollars. As in an actual interrogation, the suspect responded to both baseline questions (“What are you wearing?” “What’s the weather like outside?”) and target questions (“Did you steal the money?” “Are you lying to me right now?”). Half of the potential criminals were lying; half were telling the truth. Each participant watched one truthful and one deceptive video.

Next, the students completed a simple assessment: Were the pleaders in the videos telling the truth? Just as in prior studies, ten Brinke’s subjects, when asked direct questions, did no better than chance at determining who was truthful and who wasn’t.

But then the students participated in one of two unconscious lie-detection tasks. In each, they saw still photos of the two pleaders alongside words that were associated with either truth, such as “honest” and “genuine,” or lies, such as “deceitful” and “dishonest.” Their goal was to categorize the words as indicative of either truth or lies, as quickly and accurately as possible, regardless of the face they saw along with it. If “genuine” flashed on the screen, they would press a button to classify it as a truth-category word as soon as possible.

When the researchers dug deeper, they saw that the participants’ unconscious instinct fared far better: in both studies, they were significantly faster at properly categorizing lie- and truth-related concepts when those concepts were presented with the lying or truthful face, respectively, from the video. Seeing a liar’s face made people faster at classifying lie-related words than truth-related words—and seeing a truth-teller had the opposite effect. “When you see a liar’s face, the concept of deception is activated in your mind even if you’re not consciously aware of it,” ten Brinke hypothesizes. “It’s still unclear just how high a percentage of lies our unconscious mind is able to sense accurately, but discrimination is definitely occurring.”

Unconscious discrimination seems to play out in more life-like scenarios, too. In a series of prior studies, conducted by an unrelated group at the University of Manheim, the psychologist Marc-AndrĂ© Reinhard and his colleagues found that the ability of student judges to detect deception improved drastically if they were given time to think—but only if, in that time frame, they thought about something other than the case they were judging. If they had to make an immediate judgment, they did no better than chance. The same was true if they were allowed to deliberate consciously. But when they were kept from consciously deliberating, by, for example, completing a demanding word-search puzzle, their accuracy improved significantly. Reinhard concluded that, in the unconscious-deliberation condition, the brain had had time to integrate the subtle cues that our conscious mind can’t quite perceive into a more complete judgment.

Why is it so hard for people to spot sociopaths then? Could it be that some people are willfully blind?

Monday, April 28, 2014

Podcasts

A reader collected this list of podcasts related to the book (see also list of links below):  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/28/me-thomas-sociopath-diagnosis_n_3517982.html
        517837276.webm - video
        517837278.webm - video


http://audioboo.fm/boos/1579008-confessions-of-a-sociopath
        1579008-confessions-of-a-sociopath.mp3



http://programs.wypr.org/podcast/lawyer-sunday-school-teacher-sociopath-monday-july-22-1-2-pm
        Midday_07_22_13_HR_2_Sociopath.mp3



http://programs.wypr.org/podcast/confessions-sociopath-monday-sept-2-1-2-pm
        same as above



http://ttbook.org/book/beast-me
        tbk130811a1.mp3
        tbkthomasuncut.mp3
        tbk130811a.mp3



http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/2013/08/01/confessions-of-a-sociopath/
        Audio | Q with Jian Ghomeshi | CBC Radio.mp3



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQrcqO0Qu7k
        Confessions of a Sociopath....mp4 - video
        Confessions of a Sociopath....webm - video



http://rt.com/shows/big-picture/fossil-fuel-industry-egypt-542/
        bigpicture_0207.mp4 - video



http://audioboo.fm/boos/1475635-how-psychopaths-have-successful-careers
        1475635-how-psychopaths-have-successful-careers.mp3



http://www.npr.org/2013/06/19/193099258/inside-the-mind-of-a-sociopath?sc=tw&cc=share
        20130619_tmm_05.mp3



http://www.opednews.com/Podcast/Interview-with-a-Sociopath-by-Rob-Kall-130628-524.html
        confessions-of-a-sociopath-part--20130628-630.mp3



http://www.opednews.com/Podcast/Part-2-Interview-With-a-So-by-Rob-Kall-130708-879.html
        confessions-2-sociopath-part-2-1-20130708-542.mp3



http://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcasts/arts-culture/q-the-podcast/
        qpodcast_20130802_28534.mp3



http://glucksolutions.podomatic.com/
        glucksolutions_2013-06-20T07_30_59-07_00.mp3



Jefferson Public Radio: The Jefferson Exchange Podcast
        01 Meet a Sociopath.mp3



Life Matters - ABC national Radio
        lms_20130627_0930.mp3


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Sunday, April 27, 2014

Power and obsessions

A reader asked me, "I enjoy having power over people, and I think that this power will help me in life, however since it is important to me I worry about the possibility of losing it. What are some ways you have lost power or what are ways that I could end up losing power?"

I responded: Interesting question. Probably the most common way for me to objectively lose power is to suffer some sort of defeat or loss, like an accident or getting fired, but usually those don't bother me too much. The losses of power that bother me more are the personal ones.

The most unpleasant loss of power to me is being rejected by someone as a despicable human being. I hate that, it makes me very very angry to the point of a violent all consuming rage, which is its own form of loss of power.

Another form is having an obsession or an itch that can't be scratched. There are a few people that have somehow planted themselves in my mind. To them, I am nothing. I don't even know how they got there in my mind, except that to some extent I invited them there. I wonder about them, what they think about, what they do. They are my playthings in a different way than most -- they're fun and interesting to me because they are *not* mine, and the game is to acquire them. It's not unpleasant, this feeling of obsession. It actually gives me some insight into how to do that to other people -- burrow my way into their minds and take up residence there. There have been times when the obsession starts to get out of control, though. If it gets bad enough, I have learned to talk myself down from the obsession by remembering that they are not really the person that exists in my mind, that I am really obsessed with a figment of my imagination that I have populated with the image of that person. So there's both control and powerlessness in an obsession. Have you seen the movie Vertigo? A delicious depiction of obsession, my favorite movie for how unapologetic it and the characters are about indulging their respective obsessions (and for Bernard Herrman's exquisite score).

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