I liked this. It offers hope. Bleak hope, but hope. But I can't stop thinking .. yea but maybe she isn't. Still.. the lack of fear and addiction risk in opioids bears thinking about. It suggests some brain chemistry difference.
Definitely not a sociopath either. She cares enough not to want to cause pain even if she can't always read the symptoms of emotions. So.. if you have psychopathy but care enough to work around it, do you really have it?
You can not have empathy but not want your social structures crumbling around you.
There are pure sociological benefits to socialization and relationships, and it may be that the effort of going out of her way to foster those relationships is evaluated as being worth the effort in the benefit it brings.
But yes, that aspect of the interview was extremely interesting, and I wish the interviewer had asked about that directly (essential asked "what do you get out of your relationships"?).
Why does it offer bleak hope? I really don’t get this parallel, where not feeling for someone equals wanting them to be in pain.
Not caring doesn’t make you evil, it makes you indifferent. I think feeling less is an advantage if you do want to hurt others, but there is really no correlation between the two. You don’t automatically start wanting to hurt people, just because you don’t feel empathy.
Why does it offer bleak hope? I really don’t get this parallel, where not feeling for someone equals wanting them to be in pain.
Thats not what I meant. its bleak, because its emotionless. its unempathetic engagement. For me, its stepped over uncanny valley, into a dialogue with somebody who has no emotional engagement with you, only rational response. For some things, thats what you want. Personally, I don't think a relationship we normally couch as an emotional one, ie friend, or best-friend, or life partner, is one which is complete if its devoid of emotion. Preferably reasonably symmetrically, but there is room for variance. One sided? Thats pretty bleak, on the giving side: nothing comes back.
>Do you think it’s something that people suspect about you? Or do you think people’s perceptions are so off that they wouldn’t really know what psychopathy looks like?
>No. Psychopaths use what we call a ‘mask.’ It’s basically an entire affectation of being like everyone else. We learn at a really young age that if we respond to things the way that we naturally respond to things, people don’t like that. So you just learn how to affect the behavior and how to appear like everyone else, and that’s just what you have to do.
Psychopaths always believe this to be true, and to their “credit,” it does deceive many people. But it’s also symptomatic of their narcissistic delusions.
It’s been my experience that people who have had the misfortune of spending a lot of time around a psychopath can quite quickly identify others. It’s hard to describe exactly, but psychopaths are very deterministic in their behavior patterns. It’s as if the dulled emotions and fear response subtract some of the randomness that makes people without this pathology actually unpredictable. They can still be surprising in the moral thresholds and social boundaries they’ll cross without hesitation, but in terms of what they pursue (opportunities to deceive and manipulate, power over others), they’re dully predictable.
So, many do actually see completely through them, it’s just that this knowledge isn’t very useful. Social hierarchies and asymmetries of power do more to preserve their capacity to cause damage than anything else, so without the opportunity to fundamentally change the context you’re navigating, there’s not much you can do. Your boss will, in most cases, still be your boss, even if they’re transparently psychopathic. And their power to harm you is inherent to their title, not the specifics of their personality.
This is why if you ever read a book about dealing with psychopaths, the first thing they’ll almost all tell you is that nothing is gained by confronting them and your best recourse is to disengage as completely as possible. It’s a realpolitik approach to social dynamics, because only in rare and limited circumstances does a deep understanding of the psychopathic mind allow you to transcend them.
I think the thing most interesting in the interview was the S/O and friends.
What's the value in those relationships to a psychopath? I can't imagine there's the same desire for consensual validation, etc that drives so many normative relationships.
I really wish the interviewer dived a bit deeper into what her need fulfillment was in her interpersonal relationships.
It’s touched on obliquely, but psychopaths are impulsive and in constant need of stimulation, which, because of their diminished emotional responses, they largely derive from anti-social behavior. Its adrenaline inducing response is one of the few ways they can “feel.” High functioning psychopaths will often pursue long-term relationships because they provide a consistent source of this kind of stimulation, while also allowing them to modulate and practice the “masks” they use to deceive others.
The interviewee more or less admits this in speaking about how her “friend” would frequently ask if she was unwelcome around the interviewee, despite her not doing anything explicit to suggest this. It’s a typical psychopathic lapse into bragging about one’s ability to manipulate or inspire fear in others, albeit under the guise of the ability to “feel concern.” I guess it’s kind of a clever manipulation within the context of the interview itself, if again, it wasn’t so remarkably predictable. Few psychopaths can seem to go very long without slipping in examples of their inherent superiority or delighting in some prior act of sadism.
The authoritative tone of your comments bothers me. What are they based on? The claim that psychopaths pursue long-term relationships doesn't jive with the antisocial nature of this condition. I'm also troubled by your view that any engagement with a psychopath is wasted. Psychopathy does not exclude reason. A premise of your views is that you are able to unambiguously diagnose psychopathy in others, and that it is appropriate to treat those people radically differently based on your casual diagnosis.
To be frank, I feel like I'm reading paraphrases of Pieter Hintjens' self-help book "The Psychopath Code" which is quite popular with this website's users. The book is no longer open source, but I read a fair bit of it when it was. It struck me as a dangerous work that teaches how to perceive your foes as psychopaths, and then to cut them out of your life. I can see how the practice is empowering, but it irresponsibly elevates the armchair psychologist reader.
I think your comments should be be composed like the opinions they are, and not made to sound like objective truth.
The much more interesting version of this article was the neurology researcher who scanned his own brain and found it matched exactly the structure of criminal psychopaths who he was studying.
The guy otherwise had a wife, children and positive social environment, so it was something of a surprise discovery to him. It was much more introspective and informative on the possible nature of the condition - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscien...
He's mentioned in the submitted article, and there's some dispute about his findings. There's a bunch of stuff that affects brain function, and "psychopathy" is only one of them.
> Similarly, he takes issue with neuroscientist James Fallon’s calling himself a psychopath because his brain imaging profile matched that of psychopathic individuals.
> “Just because the amygdala shows hypoactivation does not make you a psychopath,” says Neumann. “This is a characteristic that’s associated with psychopathy, but biology is not destiny. We believe that the syndrome, the personality disorder, is a coming together of these four major domains.”
>The authoritative tone of your comments bothers me. What are they based on?
A moderately extensive reading of the popular and professional literature on psychopaths. I know this is an internet message board, so it’s best to doubt such claims, but that’s the answer.
>The claim that psychopaths pursue long-term relationships doesn't jive with the antisocial nature of this condition
You’ll notice that I prefaced that with “high functioning.” High functioning psychopaths often come from financially and emotionally stable families/backgrounds, which help inhibit what we’d think of as overtly anti-social behavior (e.g. violence). And as you say, psychopaths are not without reason. Given a set of sufficiently pro-social developmental circumstances, some can learn to delay their “gratifications” to obtain greater “rewards,” just like anyone else.
>I'm also troubled by your view that any engagement with a psychopath is wasted.
It’s not so much wasted, but about reducing your exposure to harm. And it’s not my view, you can find the same stated in the work of people like Hare, Stout, and Babiak.
>A premise of your views is that you are able to unambiguously diagnose psychopathy in others, and that it is appropriate to treat those people radically differently based on your casual diagnosis.
I claim no such ability. I’m speaking only to a fuzzy heuristic intended to reduce my own exposure to psychopaths after damaging experiences with people who quite consistently match their patterns of behavior.
>To be frank, I feel like I'm reading paraphrases of Pieter Hintjens' self-help book "The Psychopath Code" which is quite popular with this website's users.
I’ve never read this book, so I can’t speak to it. Again, you’re well warranted in your skepticism because it’s the internet.
His comments are reflections of all the extensive reading I've done, though he explains things better than I ever could. So I didn't have a problem with his authoritative tone - in general, I never have a problem with an "authoritative tone" when there is actual content and it matches up with what I know for myself, or it looks like it can be double checked (and is).
I guess for me I find it easy enough to ascertain the emotional drivers behind what someone is saying (or I think so). From that you can tell where they're coming from and what their motivations really are. A useful skill one gets in spades once you've dealt with an actual psychopath...
Just thinking out loud:
As for long term relationships, they provide easily accessable sex for instance, so no hassle in constantly looking for partners. Also having someone always around is consistent source of other forms of (anti)social stimuli.
But I generally very much agree with you, (m)any of the psychopathy traits listed in the article can be, or even are to a certain degree, present in everyone. So there is real danger in stigmatazing just about regular people.
And sure interaction with a psychopath doesn't need to be destructive for everyone, that'd have to be some kind hard working super villain to be able to hurt everyone around them.
And to emphasize, antisocial behaviour or just put plainly being a bad person is something everyone is guilty of.
So if this psychopath term is to be considered real it would just mean that psychos do a certain combination of (bad) things to a much higher degree than everyone else.
But if it all comes down to a degree, it makes me wonder if there really is no therapy for these people? Can they really not change? Can they really not learn to accentuate wider spectre of emotions?
Regular people can change their behaviour albeit it can be really hard, and they need to want it. Thus I'm not really buying the whole it's a fixed thing, it's brain chemistry-morphology whatever narrative.
This is pretty silly. But then the article is also really silly. Psychopaths are not superheroes. They don't have magical powers. And, believe it or not, they are absolutely not narcissists who need stimulation from other people.
In simplest terms psychopaths are people who do not "get" the particularity of human relationships. To a psychopath, relationships are always and everywhere abstract conceptual power relations. They don't get jealous (but they can fake jealousy), they don't fall in love (but they can fake love) and when people leave their lives it's more like losing money on a bad investment then, you know, losing one's best friend or lover. This is not magical or antisocial or deviant. Psychopaths are just everyday people who never really miss other people. They are just as stupid and irrational as everybody else but in different ways.
There is an argument here to be made here that just as society is welcoming of people who fall in love at the drop of a dime it should also be welcoming of people who can't fall in love. It's the sort of thing, like homosexuality, that people might think is a big deal but is really not and eventually will just be sort of normalized.
>In simplest terms psychopaths are people who do not "get" the particularity of human relationships.
Well now, I'm pretty sure you can't use this as a definition for psychopathy, as many other types of disorders fit this definition.
In my comment I was thinking of the definition given by this article, and the list of traits it provides.
So going by that definition I have to disagree with your argument: "...that people might think is a big deal but is really not and eventually will just be sort of normalized."
If someone checks all the boxes from the points raised in this article I would really hope that that sort of behavior never gets normalized because these traits are the exact opposite of what people should strive for in their lives.
> If someone checks all the boxes from the points raised in this article I would really hope that that sort of behavior never gets normalized because these traits are the exact opposite of what people should strive for in their lives.
I don't see any cause for concern. Putting aside Hollywood nonsense there doesn't seem to be any reason why psychopaths would inherently engage in destructive behavior. In reality psychopaths are quite probably among the most interesting and charming and entertaining people you will ever meet.
Psychopaths can be very manipulative but there's no inherent malicious intent behind this manipulation. They need to be manipulative because all human relations are based on manipulation and so to get anything done they have no choice but to "play the game."
Again, psychopaths are just people who don't get jealous. There are so many stories (really, all of them, from the Bible to virtually every pop song) about jealousy, where jealousy plays a central motivation for virtually all the characters, but to a psychopath, reading stories about characters motivated by jealousy is like reading stories about aliens. Abstractly it makes sense as a motivation but there's no actual 'there' there. Saying "I did X because I was jealous" is like saying "I did X because the voices told me to."
The problem for psychopaths is that virtually all human relations are motivated by jealousy. All of the politicking, the status games, the in-group/out-group and intrapersonal power dynamics that define so much human experience come down to this. And so psychopaths, out of pure necessity in order to participate in such relations, will quickly learn to fake jealousy, to deliberately inspire it in others or carefully suppress it in those they care about it. This is no different from everybody else does, really, they're just doing it for different reasons and are perhaps a bit more deliberate about it.
At this point it's also important to understand the difference between psychopaths and sociopaths. This comment [1] lays it out well. Note the end result here: both psychopaths and sociopaths end up being manipulative of those around them but while sociopaths are often consumed by jealousy and paranoia and will do anything to ensure they "win", psychopaths, more often than not, are seeking a generally optimal or neutral solution, they have little real interest in hurting or helping you in any given encounter.
> It’s touched on obliquely, but psychopaths are impulsive and in constant need of stimulation, which, because of their diminished emotional responses, they largely derive from anti-social behavior. Its adrenaline inducing response is one of the few ways they can “feel.”
Another way to look at this is that psychopaths seek and respond to different kinds of stimulation. They have little interest in gossip, hanging out or generalized bonding rituals. Instead they may be drawn to competitive, "results-oriented" games where individuals or groups have a clear objective. They may also, on the whole, be more drawn to "high-stakes" games because they perceive less downsides and more potential upsides to such games. Again, this doesn't suggest any real malicious intent. Psychopaths are just using different risk metrics. While some people may shy away from high-stakes status games because they are very sensitive to the potential loss of status, to a psychopath, "loss of status" isn't a thing and so such games can be perceived as pure upside.
> It’s a typical psychopathic lapse into bragging about one’s ability to manipulate or inspire fear in others, albeit under the guise of the ability to “feel concern.”
Again you seem to deliberately attributing some kind of malign intent without justification. This woman is trying to explain how she relates to others and why. There's no reason to think she is lying or that she cannot actually feel concern.
Got my upvote there... I had to deal with a actual psychopath who'd fooled the other people in this little charity sort of org for years. I got pulled in because a friend asked me to work on their website and I was supportive of the goals of the organization.
The guy was an obvious ass&*$% but had wormed his way into defining himself as the 'head' of the org and people went on with it because A) the dominant behaviors B) he'd turned himself into the public face of the org C) and I quote "yeah, but he's productive, he motivates other people, he gets things done"... But that was just the Stockholm syndrome talking - people like this are little more than parasites. I was the new guy so could see through the mask a lot quicker. I wish I'd asked questions about the backstory...
I concur with everything you say about social hierarchies and power. I'm American and my take on the English, based on my living here for over a decade and all the sociopathically inclined I've run into, is that there is a very good reason there seems to be so many adult bullies etc in the UK (versus my take on America). The rigid class structure and etc conceals a lot of fundamental psychological pathologies in English society - sure, they're present in every society, but the English seem to revel in them and even regard them as virtues.
I can recommend Athena Walker's (pseudonym of a psychopath) answers to Quora questions. [1] However, one must always be careful with the writings of a psychopath. These people are cunningly manipulative.
Me too for a moment, but ultimately I don't care. You could send her a PM on Quora. I've send her PMs with questions about her and psychopathy in general in the past and she's always been helpful and informative.
Attempts to humanize psychopaths disgust me. As do their clever attempts to derail the talk of their danger by bringing up serial killers. I don't care about serial killers. They're not a problem at all. Nobody should give a damn about serial killers. We're humans, not some pathetic herd animals who can feel placated knowing that there are no literal wolves around. It's the socially-adapted, nonviolent psychopaths like her that are the real problem.
One interesting yet rarely described trait of their kind is that, for all their glib talk, the transcript ends up vacuous and incoherent. There's nothing to be learned, because for them language is not a means of communication but a tool for manipulation and control; the effort to weigh the evidence and determine which parts correspond to physical reality is incommensurate with the yield.
>> When you meet new people, whether professionally or personally or whatever context, do you present them with the version of yourself that fits the situation?
> Absolutely. Why tell them anything that they don’t need to know? They just need to know what they can expect of me.
Well darling, what they need to know most is that you'll screw them over the instant it benefits you, so you're not convincing me here.
The same is true for any attempt of harnessing psychopathic behavior in some benign project. You have to ensure that at every moment, in every situation, they don't believe that they stand to gain a penny from backstabbing you or committing an atrocity; just as they always calculate the cost-benefit of doing so. There is no trust, no bond, not even any sort of a grace period; it's like pretending to have domesticated a crocodile. You run out of meat, you're it. Soldiers, surgeons, law professionals, CEOs, bankers. Everywhere psychopaths are a net loss and a liability, waiting for the rule enforcers to get distracted.
Worst of all, many of them are quite functional. Very much so, in fact. This is why there's no treatment; psychopathy is an alternative local optimum in human mental phenotype, rather than a disability. A parasitic one that probably evolved relatively recently with the transition from family groups and small tribes to big, partially anonymized societies, which allow for unnoticeable cheating.
Some say psychopathy is a scale. I claim it's just that psychometrics is not mature enough; "puerile", as Hannibal Lector would put it. There is a clear difference between a person who would not flush in a public toilet and a person who would, given reasonable guarantees of not being caught, momentarily borrow an careless "friend's" credit card and then burn through his savings. Who would cut costs diluting medication for one's patients and pocket the difference. Who would, as an attorney, conspire with the prosecution to put the client behind bars after swindling him of his money. A couples therapist who would facilitate a breakup to turn a client into a personal sex toy. All these are behaviors that stem directly from psychopathic traits. If you really, genuinely don't feel any concern at all for the well-being of other people, you'll be ready to commit crimes far greater than anyone who merely seeks to harm people for the thrill of it would. Though psychopaths like the thrill, as they get bored easily, and they do tend to amuse themselves with cruelty.
I pity her partner. Slavery for 19 years, and who knows how bad it'll get. The guy sure chose poorly.
Psychopathy, in my opinion, is the sole unobjectionable justification for negative eugenics, inasmuch at it's heritable. There's nothing else that's so purely devoid of excuses and detrimental for society.
That's almost as stupid as the joke about radical centrism. "If Nazis kill people and you kill Nazis, how are you better then them, huh? What's the difference?"
Further explanations are unnecessary. I wish you'll be able to afford this amiable gullibility for all your life. In fact, that's precisely what disappearance of psychopaths would make possible.
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This is of course only my conjecture, seeing as they are undetected unless caught red-handed on some officially recognized crime. However, consider this: violent psychopaths don't differ from this gal in lack of empathy, fearlessness or in deceitfulness. They only have poor impulse control, so they fail at maintaining long-term "masks". You can read basically as much right in the article. Would you like a proverbial serial killer to be your boss? Now, do you really believe that impulsive violence can deal more damage than cool-headed, planned immorality? And there's something like 1% of them in the general population, and they are over-represented in positions of influence that allow to harm people (not because they're exactly good at anything aside from manipulation). It'd be awfully convenient if the invisible hand of the market took care of it all and their natural tendencies became an innocuous tool for generating profit.
How often do we rely on other people just not being terrible for petty reasons? Not grossly abusing their position whenever they can get away with it? Surprisingly a lot of our society runs on trust. And wherever it doesn't, expenses and efforts are necessary to disincentivize transgressors. So even 1% is enough to drive up the costs. People in small, homogenous villages can leave the keys outside their homes, because it's harder to get away with burglary there and they trust neighbors. In cities people need better doors and better locks and security cameras and strong police and a fair bit of paranoia to keep up with rural areas. It's because it's easier to stay anonymous in the community of millions. But even under perfect guarantee of anonymity, I wouldn't break into people's homes and rob them. Most other people of regular upbringing wouldn't as well. A psychopath, by definition, would, irrespective of upbringing. Same goes for black hat activities. How much does IT security cost?
Also, there's a lot of articles dedicated to psychopaths like this one. I don't remember people like her "significant other", or her oblivious parents, or her colleagues ever being given voice. Somehow we are to take them on their word, even though they say (because there's no point denying already) that they see no utility in being honest or reciprocal.
People with other non-standard neurotypes tend to be quite open about their condition, as they prefer to get more understanding and have a better rapport. They are not as glorified by the media, they are not thought of as sexy and enigmatic, yet they come open. But this anonymous interviewee, as I already pointed out, "doesn't think people need to know" what she is to know what to expect from her. But this is obviously nonsensical, given that people (except maybe bankers) operate with some basic trust and information about her psychopathy would change a lot in possible relationships (even assuming that there's some use for their kind). Likewise, no surgeon or CEO has come out with "I'm a heartless bastard with no empathy or code or morals, see, I may be different but that makes me better in my field". Such inconsistencies illustrate that they don't really have any sort of ethical framework, it's all just vague noise to lull a pitiful myopic herbivore into sleep. That's really how they think of people.
All of this is unconvincing, I know. It's probably impossible for a neurotypical, well-meaning person to realize the magnitude of difference without being subjected to psychopathic treatment. Without seeing how the mask you've known for years crumbles in front of evidence and there's no distress behind, since it's cheaper to discard you along with the shards.
There have been many, many articles like this, and I think they have little value except the glorification of psychopaths. The term "psychopath" is fascinating to many, due to the cultural references linked to it. However psychopathy has never been clearly defined in the DSM. Maybe it's just a combination of other disorders (autism + NPD ?), maybe it's a separate disorder waiting to be discovered. Either way, nothing to be fascinated about.
I disagree, I think it’s interesting. But then, I’m interested in that sort of thing, I mean, I spent my entire Saturday trying to understand how the world would look if you were colourblind. So maybe I’m just weird.
What’s more interesting is the comments though, there sure seem to be a lot of tabu around this topic. I wonder why that is.
As far as I know psychopathy is most often connected to Antisocial Personality Disorder – up to the point of fusing these two terms – which has clear definition in DSM.
I think this is a bit more nuanced. Humans rationalize ways to absolve themselves of feeling empathy for the sufferings of others. This is not an innate human behavior. (At least ive seen no anecdotal or published evidence of such.) what I have seen is people being taught to dehumanize others, usually following percieved wrongs (see hatfields v mccoys). Look at the way homeless people are treated. They need to just pull themselves up by their bootstraps, stop being mentally ill physically disabled addicts and get one of those impossible to live on jobs pushing carts at whole foods for minimum wage so we can stop being inconvenienced by their poverty and suffering on our way to our overpaid jobs or when we go shopping or out on the town. It's fascinating to juxtapose how children perceive the homeless versus how the media portrays them:
Children: why is that person so dirty? Why do they ask for money and food? Why do they hurt? Why are they talking to the air?
Oxytocin fosters empathy towards people in the same in-group and reduces empathy for those outside the in-group. Oxytocin is the reason that a mob can be moved to avenge an injustice which requires both empathy and callousness towards another persons suffering at the same time.
Even feeling empathy for someone in pain doesn’t naturally lead to compassion. Empathy is just the ability to mirror someone else’s emotions and is a neurotypical response. If your happy, I’m happy. If you hurt, I hurt.
If I’m hurting because you hurt my natural response is to stop my pain. In some cases that mirrored pain can result in acts of compassion but can also result in lashing out, victim blaming or fleeing. These are all normal responses for someone feeling pain.
Empathy is a “normal” response but compassion is a choice. Few people have the emotional regulation skills and patience to see someone in pain, feel their pain and sit with them in their pain.
The bits of the transcript about having to wear a mask in order to function, having to internalize algorithms of human behavior that are totally unintuitive, and realizing that one’s deepest interpersonal instincts are out of sync with the rest of your kin remind me strongly of some individuals I’ve known with Aspergers/severe ADHD.
Additionally, her descriptions of not feeling fear, processing emotions at a lower intensity level than others, needing constant stimulation, and having a cognitive, but not truly emotional, understanding of romantic love and empathy ring true to my experience knowing these people.
I wonder if there is a legitimate grey zone at which these disorders overlap.
Or, alternatively, maybe my friend is just a psychopath.
In DSM-V (2013), asperger's is no longer being diagnosed. It is ASD ("autism") or not, and ASD is a spectrum. ADHD might very well be related to ASD (there's talks to merge the two, though I don't have an online source). People with such diagnosis are (neuro-)atypical. Someone with ASD likely has hyperfocus on certain subjects, and is oversensitive and undersensitive to certain stimulus (certain because it differs per autist). A psychopath can find common ground with an autist on the undersensitive aspects, insofar that they could be friends or that the psychopath only needs to wear the mask on (certain) oversensitive aspects. A psychopath might also very much enjoy the hyperfocus of an autist.
It's possible to be diagnosed with aspergers traits rather than aspergers, and I think I heard it was possible to have psychopathic traits without being a 'full' psychopath as well. So it definitely seems possible there could be an overlap in some cases.
You could also literally have both at once, since these conditions/states/differences/whatever aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
I have these problems. I've learned to "act normal" through decades of interactions with those around me. I have a wife and kids and a normal job. My oldest daughter acts just like me and I am actively teaching her how to "act normal". It isn't a big deal.
This linking of alexithymia to autism has caused harm by making it harder to get the diagnosis for people who can recognise emotion within themselves and others.
We need better constructs for this. Alexithymia is typically defined entirely in terms of whether someone can identify emotions, regardless of the underlying failure mode. In particular, some clinicians seem to think that everyone has the same baseline interoceptive experience and that any problem with identifying emotions is therefore purely a problem of attention or vocabulary.
Aspergers is not associated with “not feeling fear.”
If you’re just assuming this from your experiences with these individuals, you’re just assuming this, and might do well to expand your considerations of what different people find fearful.
I’m sure you would find many of them fear people who jump to conclusions before thinking through the various possibilities; or the outcomes of hasty judgements.
It’s a direct observation I made from being in a relationship with an individual diagnosed with severe ADHD for ~2 years. It’s not a superficial observation extrapolated from a few encounters. I’m not drawing the conclusion that individuals with ASD feel no fear, either.
I was constantly struck by how she didn’t seem to fear any sort of physical risk. It may well be the stimulus/risk seeking nature of ADHD, or just her personality - I’m honestly not sure.
Most people on the autism spectrum can experience the whole gamut of human emotion. There were some studies done just recently that concluded we feel compassion just like everybody else. (Certainly comports with my personal anecdata.) What we lack is the ability to express our feelings in a manner that registers as legitimate to neurotypicals. (Some of us lack the ability to quickly read emotions in others, others don't.) There is far more diversity among autistic brains than among neurotypical brains, which means from an autistic perspective all NTs are kinda the same. And this pattern or template, for how an NT behaves, if you deviate too far from that, the lizard brain "uncanny valley" instinct kicks in. The feeling of "this thing is imitating one of my kind, perhaps to eat me".
The bitter irony is, psychopaths are far more dangerous and yet they make better imitators, and can avoid triggering the uncanny valley instinct. That's why they can be so charismatic and attract followers.
Yeah, the uncanny valley effect is very damaging to people with invisible disabilities or psychological differences. If you look normal but don't 'act' in a way that's expected, it seems to creep out a lot of people.
And unfortunately, I believe this may be why to some degree, having the difference being physical/visible may make someone with a disability more sympathetic/liked. Disability itself has an uncanny valley setup ranging from 'can pass as completely normal' (certain high functioning psychopaths)to 'is visibly different and accepted'.
I also wonder if fiction may have had an effect here too. The average fictional psychopath/sociopath/whatever may look more like someone on the autistic spectrum than a genuine psychopath or sociopath.
People with asperger do have emotions including fear - one of symptoms is inability to control them (it somethimes manifests through blow ups and sort of temper tamtrum when things don't go the way autistic likes or needs, when routine is broken etc). In particular, people with asperger can be very fearful.
They do not express them the same way, they may lack awarness of them (another symptom), they don't understand them and they occure in different situations then the ones that would make neurotypical angry etc. But, they do feel and are not machines.
Maybe there is a good reason for psychopaths to exist. Maybe it keeps the community from becoming too trusting, and then later having one person completely take advantage over the whole community. Psychopaths could be a vaccine to keep humans wary of the negative possibilities. It also reminds me of the fact that having small amounts of disturbance (e.g. environmental) in a biological ecosystem keeps biodiversity high.
I understand that you’re just using analogies, but since psychopathy appears to biologically instantiated and heritable, I’m not sure they’re very useful.
More concretely, it’s a neurological variation that is “fit enough” to survive within human populations at a low threshold, so it persists. There’s no “guiding hand” beneath it all.
I have a similar hypothesis (which I don't believe, but still). Suppose there are no psychopaths. As is well known, people's choices of leaders are heavily influenced by biological biases such as height, social dominance and other "alpha male" traits. If there is no need to suspect malice, communities could suffer a runaway effect of increasingly biological selection of leadership, the same way it seems to happen in most herd/pack animals (where a smaller male basically can never become a leader, even though the correlation of size and intelligence is less than 1). But psychopaths can "supersignal" beyond even the most impressive neurotypicals. With some bad apples, we feel the need to check if signals correspond at all to the substance, and correct for personal behavior and long-term ability to deliver on promises.
Makes me wonder if a society of 100% psychopaths could function or would fall apart. In that society, there would be no reason to wear a mask and pretend. Everyone feels (or fails to feel) basically the same way. If you knew that anyone would take advantage of you given the opportunity, then how does society function?
Kind of like how the Dark Mirror Universe in Star Trek managed to get so far.
> If you knew that anyone would take advantage of you given the opportunity, then how does society function
That’s the opposite of what she was saying. From what I could gather, she does trust people, but simply by measuring their actions. I suspect such a society would work the same way: people who demonstrate they can be trusted would receive positive responses. Taking advantage of others would quickly lead to a form of ostracism.
Seems rather like interacting with corporations. I trust them insofar as I trust reputational and legal mechanisms to provide them the incentive to keep their part of the bargain.
Corporations often behave like psychopaths on a large scale. That's the problem with the bottom line being the only thing that really matters to a business.
So many people seem to be entirely blind to this dynamic.
You can look at a business person and point out "You know browser fingerprinting is a bit like a salesman walking into a User's house and taking a bunch of metrics to send back to base before making a sales pitch right?"
Then they look at you horrified by the mental image and say "But it decreases fraud!"
The cognitive dissonance is delicious, but our obsession with the Market mediating the worthiness of anything to the point where ethical and moral violations are encouraged as long as they can be hidden is a blight on our society at large.
On one hand you want some doves because they work together well and society is nice, but on the other hand if there’s too doves then hawks will thrive. But if everyone is hawks, then society as a whole doesn’t work as well together. So there’s push and pull of both and in the end the natural equilibrium is mostly doves with some hawks. I suspect this is how it works for psycopaths in society.
I’ve worked in teams comprised entirely of “hawks” that were entirely functional, and incredibly effective. As long as you all share a mission and respect each other then it can be great and involve almost no conflict.
Probably. But knowing human condition, that arrangement seems particularly unstable. If there's no emotional bonding, any stumble in competence can throw trust off, and then things may spiral down very fast.
I’m not convinced it requires empathy to recognise that the occasional stumble from someone with a solid track record doesn’t mean they’re not going to perform well again tomorrow.
No, but it erodes trust, and may start a quarrel. Then, without empathy it will be harder for people to deescalate tensions, or want to collaborate with someone they've had a confrontation with and are angry with.
This particular group of people pretty much never fought about anything. They practiced a very extreme version of candor which prevented tension from developing to begin with.
They’re just people who are aggressive and disagreeable. Those people are prone to conflict, but can actually get along very well in the right environment.
But would this work for an entire society? Because your teams are part of a larger society that has various rules and codes of conduct already in place. But a society of hawks would have to come up with their own rules, which aren't based on any sort of empathy or inherent morality (ie all people have rights).
This is the same thing Religious people say about Agnostic/Atheists, and the answer is the same.
Virtually every desire a human can have is better fulfilled if most people on earth are happy and productive. Whether you want to travel the world, waste away in VR, escape to Mars, or live forever, these pursuits are more achievable if human progress advances. In no future is it better for other people to be unhappy.
> In no future is it better for other people to be unhappy.
Then explain why some people are criminals or parasites on the system it it's better for everyone to be happy? Why take advantage of others if it's better overall not to do so? My guess is because some people don't care about others. Psychopaths generally fall into that category. Question is what they would do if they made up all of society, which means everyone is understood to be looking to take advantage.
Pretty sure we evolved the entire tribal cocktail of behaviors specifically to do better than isolated specimens. And the current culture, as in the sum of civilization's achievements, is very much a product of those behaviors and organization permeating the everyday life.
Moreover, afaik development of language is hypothesized to be interlinked with social behaviors (and empathy as a whole), so a species of antagonists would probably have trouble establishing civilisation in the first place.
I find the concept of not being able to feel fear quite interesting. I've always seen fear/anxiety as an emotion that is automatically bundled with the ability to imagine a possibly bad outcome for a given situation someone is in. If that is true, then not being able to feel fear would mean not being able to imagine this outcome, or not caring about the outcome - neither of which seem to be the case for psychopaths. The outcomes they want might be totally different than what might be considered normal, but they still desire them - why doesn't the thought of not being able to get what they want generate at least some degree of fear?
It could be that I'm totally mistaken about the origins of the emotion of fear, in which case it would be refreshing to view another take on it.
You're going too far generalizing from your experience. They can imagine just fine, as their cognition is unimpaired. But humans are learning and planning largely on emotional basis. Their amygdala is less functional, so their imagination is decoupled from negative emotion: when they imagine some bad outcome, they process it in the detached way most people process heat death of the Universe or hunger in Africa, i.e. something that is maybe significant but has little bearing on actual choices. It doesn't generate aversion. What does generate it, though, is deprivation of positive stimulus, so when "bad outcome" means "being put in a small concrete cage with no entertainment and bland food", they'll strategize rationally and do their best to avoid being caught. When it means merely being shunned, reviled, disowned, demoted, physically hurt, it doesn't affect the strategy very much. They don't want being hurt in the present moment, theoretically, but they can't feel enough to factor this into their planning.
It's kind of like how overeating people struggle to curb their craving now with thoughts of seeing their weight increase later. Some succeed, and some can't do it at all. They'll feel negative emotions when they look at the scales, not when they get the ice cream and imagine the numbers. Except psychopaths don't even want to fight this tendency of theirs.
To be fair, positive reinforcement works for them about as well as for others.
> I have no comprehenion of why people enjoy opioids. We also can’t get addicted to things because of the way our brain works. There are psychopaths that use drugs, but you can cut them off cold turkey and they will not have any withdrawal. They don’t have any cravings, and they can just go on with their day like it was nothing.
This is the first time I've seen it explained by someone else but it's how I feel all the time. Makes me wonder...
So even a person who only has very tuned down emotions, does not mirror other people’s emotions and mostly reacts very rational comes to prefer the same kind of relationships neurotypicals do.
That’s interesting.
I had a “commander Data” Moment while reading this.
Judging by how many people in this comment thread identify with the traits described in the article, it probably just shows that those traits are pretty ordinary, just a facet of the normal diversity of humanity, and have probably been with us forever.
The true problems of recent societies might in fact be overdiagnosis and Hollywood-style oversimplifications, not the traits themselves. Not everyone needs to be hyper emphatic (though we probably need a great number of such individual to keep our societies cohesive).
In other words, don't judge, do live and let live, defend yourself and people around you if attacked. Don't watch TV.
I think people imagine that mental pathologies are differences of kind, but they're actually differences of degree. Every mental pathology exists in a less intense form as a personality disorder, and even weaker as non-pathological personality traits. When we stop demonizing mental illness, it's easy to see those traits in ourselves, but the difference is in how intensely those traits negatively affect our lives.
Many people get anxious, and this causes them to look at people with anxiety disorders and think "That's like what I've got. Why don't you just pull yourself out of it?" but what they don't consider is that the difference is one of degree, not of kind.
>"When we stop demonizing mental illness, it's easy to see those traits in ourselves, but the difference is in how intensely those traits negatively affect our lives."
Are all mental traits that affect our lives negatively mental illness? I think it's quite a leap to say that just because you have negative effect in your life from a mental perspective/problem/limitation/etc... doesn't mean it's "illness" that requires a cure.
Sometimes it really is "just get over it", if not, then every person I know needs emergency therapy and drugs right now cause they are all ill.
If you want to say it's a matter of degree, sure, a valid a argument, but who lets who decide what the degree is? What if the person that says "pull yourself out of it" was affected many hundreds of times worse than the person hearing that advice? Now is degrees a purely personal and relative matter?
How many people have heard stories of spoiled rich brats scream bloody murder and acted like they were dying because they didn't get the exact color they wanted in their designer luggage? (replace in the nouns for different scenarios)
And conversely, the poor child with nothing, is happy and grateful just to have a little more food at mealtime? "Just get over it" _is_ the answer to the rich brat who wants to wallow when you put it in perspective of others. But from their own perspective, it's the end of the world. (lots of personal experience seeing both sides of this issue)
That's my point: the difference between a pathology and a personality trait is merely of degree. A trait in small concentration is beneficial, but if you concentrate it enough, it becomes toxic and we label that a pathology.
In between health and pathology is a vast grey area where things get complicated, and people are biased to think everyone else is just acting like a spoiled rich kid.
I agree with your premise but would nitpick against calling mental illnesses (in the psychiatric sense) pathologies.
>pathology: the science of the causes and effects of diseases, especially the branch of medicine that deals with the laboratory examination of samples of body tissue for diagnostic or forensic purposes.
In the words of Allen Frances: "psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests".
There are no known causes for psychiatric illnesses. Once a biological cause is discovered, it is no longer deemed a mental illness, but an actual biological pathology.
Is mild hypertension an illness? At some point the dividing line between normal and abnormal is blurry and arbitrary. But there are people with say severe anxiety that impairs their ability to carry out normal daily activities. That’s a mental illness, but is mild social anxiety? Maybe not, but it’s probably not optimal health either. There’s just the best possible life on one end and the worst possible life on the other.
My household has a similar debate around the usefulness of kindness and empathy for changing other people's behavior. My household has several empathetic and caring members, who frequently (and effectively) use those traits to guide other people into better behavior patterns, often just by existing in the same space.
On the other hand, sometimes there are dudes whose bad behavior is intractable, and the only halfway effective intervention is when I tell them forcefully to stop. Not viciously, but mercilessly direct, and little concession made for their comfort.
Although as I write that out, it looks like maybe the issue is that the framing is wrong - it's not empathy vs force, it's more like empathy and force. A question of choosing the right communication strategy for the person and situation.
I have no doubt when entitlement is the issue, getting (metaphorically?) punched in the face a couple of times is an important "teaching moment". It's probably not the case that all lessons are best taught like that.
I've come to similar conclusions from talking to people parked in the bike lane, of all things.
Some people do care once you tell them that blocking the bike lane is rude and a real safety problem for cyclists. Others don't care at all that a cyclist has a problem with this. Those people tend to respond best to me threatening to call the police to ticket their car. Once I recognize which category the driver is in, I know which approach to take.
I do not feel much empathy, except to my children and pets.
I am still attached to people but tend to rationalize a lot of things. My wife was diagnosed with MS, zero reaction. I help her to go through that but do not feel any emotion. Her neurologist mentioned that a lot of relationships break out when MS is diagnosed. I can understand this, but cannot comprehend which emotions push people to run away (I know them, just do not understand how one can feel them).
My mother was diagnosed with cancer, zero reactions from me. I love her very much, in some weird rational way.
I was diagnosed with an auto-immune illness, zero reactions. In that case it was really "zero fucks given" because I did not need to externalize anything.
At the same time I like very much to spend time with people and it bringd me joy.
“Judging by how many people in this comment thread identify with the traits described in the article, it probably just shows that those traits are pretty ordinary”
Or it could point to the fact that the traits that make an effective “hacker” (tendency to exploit systems to gain power and control) happen to be the same traits that make an effective sociopath.
Broadly speaking, psychopaths exploit social systems while hackers exploit technological systems. But there’s really not much of a barrier. What hackers call “social engineering” is what manipulators and sociopaths would refer to as manipulation.
To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that all hackers are sociopaths. Or even that most of them are. It is quite possible to be an extremely effective hacker with a solid moral foundation. “With great power comes great responsibility”, etc. I’m merely trying to encourage some self-awareness in the hacking community.
The book "The Psychopath Test" goes into how common some attributes are in society and being cautious giving out such labels with out thoroughly understanding the person. It gives a specific example about Tony being held in a mental hospital for years against his own will.
Yet another article with misleading information about “psychopathy” (“sociopathy”, “antisocial personality disorder”, etc).
The fundamental pattern these terms are all trying to address is the same: antisocial behavior, or a consistent pattern of behavior that harms others. Do we all have it in us to act selfishly sometimes? Yes. Just like we all have it in us to act altruistically. Psychopathy is a spectrum with Mother Theresa on one end and Hitler on the other. (I realize Mother Theresa may not have actually been all that saintly in real life, but bear with me for the sake of argument.)
The major flaw in the article is how it focuses on someone who was eventually diagnosed as a psychopath after seeking treatment. The issue here is that the people who are actually dangerous, i.e. very high on the Hare psychopathy checklist, i.e. true psychopaths, are never going to voluntarily be diagnosed. Real psychopaths don’t seek treatment to change their behavior. If they get caught, they try to destroy whoever exposed them, and if that doesn’t work, they move on to new targets and start over.
My point is that we need a consistent way to refer to people who are dangerous social predators. It doesn’t matter what the term is, sociopath, psychopath, ASPD, whatever. What matters is that the term doesn’t get watered down or confused with other so-called personality disorders which don’t share this aspect of harm to others. For example, aspergers/autism has absolutely nothing to do with psychopathy. If the term “psychopath” becomes meaningless, then it becomes harder to talk about and expose the real predators in our midst. In other words, the psychopaths win.
You may actually be confusing and conflating several different "disorders." Certainly it's not clear that psychopaths, sociopaths and ASPD are all just "dangerous social predators." Some would consider psychopaths and sociopaths to be polar opposites. This comment lays it out pretty well [1].
> 1. Psychopaths do not have a conscience (e.g., they do not feel guilt) and do not bond or love like most people. Sociopaths do have a conscience, albeit a weak one, so they are able to feel some degree of guilt in certain situations. However, they usually quickly deflect that guilt and place blame on others for causing to do whatever they feel guilty about. Sociopaths are capable of love but it is usually a very dysfunctional form of love/bonding.
> 2. Psychopaths tend to not take a lot things personally. They don't care if you don't like them. They are usually egotistical, though, so if you attack them personally, they will feel anger but not other forms of emotional hurt/wounding. Sociopaths will feel both and tend to take everything very personally, even stuff that isn't meant to be.
> 3. High-functioning psychopaths tend to think things through and plan their actions/steps in a logical manner without emotions coming into play. Their thinking is very organized and it is about reaching whatever goal they have. If they hurt you in the process, well, that is because you were most likely an obstacle and you got run over for being in the way, but not because it was personal. Psychopaths typically inflict pain because it's a means to an end, not because they enjoy it.
> 4. Sociopaths are basically the opposite: they tend to be very disorganized in their thinking and planning because they are much more subject to certain emotions such as vanity/narcissism, anger and jealously. If you get in their way, they will inflict pain to eliminate you, but will also likely enjoy it. Sociopaths will often seek to inflict pain because they enjoy inflicting it (psychopaths don't get that kind of rush) but will often feel mixed with their anger or violence a tinge of guilt, which their narcissism will require them to deflect as being caused by others (think of the killer who does something to their victims to show regret or respect, such as posing them in a certain manner. It doesn't mean they regret their actions, only that they regret that they were forced by someone or society to kill).
> 5. Most sociopaths end up in jail and have lower than average IQs. Most high functioning psychopaths don't and end up in jobs that require turning down one's emotional reactions, such as a trauma surgeon, butcher or CEO.
> Even people who are 16, 17, 18 on the PCL-R are nasty sons of bitches. Do they meet the diagnostic threshold of what we would call meeting a diagnosis of psychopathy? No.”
So apparently the PCL-R is a scale to measure how nasty a son of b one his.
I just don't get it. What happens at the 30 mark in the scale that makes it an illness versus you just being a terrible human being?
> they’re convinced their ex is a psychopath, when really their ex was just a toxic, awful person. There are millions of those, and they’re everywhere, and they come from every neurotype.
That's the most interesting quote I find. It poses a paradox. What makes a person awful and toxic? Are there common personality traits to this? Are there biological causes?
Do we need a new pathology for this? Toxipath?
She later mentions this:
> I think it’s important to hold people responsible for their actions, not brain formation. People make choices. Psychopathy is not an excuse, and it’s definitely not a reason why someone does bad things.
So what are those reasons then? And what are those bad things? And what mechanism governs one's choices?
It does seem to me like psychopaths, by definition, lack all natural controls which would allow them to know what the bad things are and that they shouldn't choose to do them.
Thus, they need social controls instead. Like, society has to make it easier to achieve her goals through good means, and make it very hard to do so through bad means. Otherwise she has no means of containment. She does not fear, she does not rejoice. She does not regret or feel guilt. She does not hope and dream.
That said, what are her goals? What drives a psychopath? Adrenaline rush alone? That's what she hints at.
Finally, I noticed the quoted doctor goes out of his way to mention a spectrum. And that he'd only classify of psychopath the more extreme cases, at the far end of it. For those, he says all four traits must be clearly demonstrated. And those by definition mention:
> take pleasure in hurting others
> are physically aggressive
Which are arguably at the top of the list for "bad things".
So purely from the quoted doctor, if she does not have those traits, she's probably not high enough on the spectrum to be labeled a psychopath. At least not based on the quoted doctor's diagnostic model.
I think an equal attention should be paid to the self defeating personality disorder spectrum which seems to be the opposite of psychopathy, if the goal is betterment of society.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadDefinitely not a sociopath either. She cares enough not to want to cause pain even if she can't always read the symptoms of emotions. So.. if you have psychopathy but care enough to work around it, do you really have it?
There are pure sociological benefits to socialization and relationships, and it may be that the effort of going out of her way to foster those relationships is evaluated as being worth the effort in the benefit it brings.
But yes, that aspect of the interview was extremely interesting, and I wish the interviewer had asked about that directly (essential asked "what do you get out of your relationships"?).
Not caring doesn’t make you evil, it makes you indifferent. I think feeling less is an advantage if you do want to hurt others, but there is really no correlation between the two. You don’t automatically start wanting to hurt people, just because you don’t feel empathy.
Thats not what I meant. its bleak, because its emotionless. its unempathetic engagement. For me, its stepped over uncanny valley, into a dialogue with somebody who has no emotional engagement with you, only rational response. For some things, thats what you want. Personally, I don't think a relationship we normally couch as an emotional one, ie friend, or best-friend, or life partner, is one which is complete if its devoid of emotion. Preferably reasonably symmetrically, but there is room for variance. One sided? Thats pretty bleak, on the giving side: nothing comes back.
>No. Psychopaths use what we call a ‘mask.’ It’s basically an entire affectation of being like everyone else. We learn at a really young age that if we respond to things the way that we naturally respond to things, people don’t like that. So you just learn how to affect the behavior and how to appear like everyone else, and that’s just what you have to do.
Psychopaths always believe this to be true, and to their “credit,” it does deceive many people. But it’s also symptomatic of their narcissistic delusions.
It’s been my experience that people who have had the misfortune of spending a lot of time around a psychopath can quite quickly identify others. It’s hard to describe exactly, but psychopaths are very deterministic in their behavior patterns. It’s as if the dulled emotions and fear response subtract some of the randomness that makes people without this pathology actually unpredictable. They can still be surprising in the moral thresholds and social boundaries they’ll cross without hesitation, but in terms of what they pursue (opportunities to deceive and manipulate, power over others), they’re dully predictable.
So, many do actually see completely through them, it’s just that this knowledge isn’t very useful. Social hierarchies and asymmetries of power do more to preserve their capacity to cause damage than anything else, so without the opportunity to fundamentally change the context you’re navigating, there’s not much you can do. Your boss will, in most cases, still be your boss, even if they’re transparently psychopathic. And their power to harm you is inherent to their title, not the specifics of their personality.
This is why if you ever read a book about dealing with psychopaths, the first thing they’ll almost all tell you is that nothing is gained by confronting them and your best recourse is to disengage as completely as possible. It’s a realpolitik approach to social dynamics, because only in rare and limited circumstances does a deep understanding of the psychopathic mind allow you to transcend them.
What's the value in those relationships to a psychopath? I can't imagine there's the same desire for consensual validation, etc that drives so many normative relationships.
I really wish the interviewer dived a bit deeper into what her need fulfillment was in her interpersonal relationships.
The interviewee more or less admits this in speaking about how her “friend” would frequently ask if she was unwelcome around the interviewee, despite her not doing anything explicit to suggest this. It’s a typical psychopathic lapse into bragging about one’s ability to manipulate or inspire fear in others, albeit under the guise of the ability to “feel concern.” I guess it’s kind of a clever manipulation within the context of the interview itself, if again, it wasn’t so remarkably predictable. Few psychopaths can seem to go very long without slipping in examples of their inherent superiority or delighting in some prior act of sadism.
To be frank, I feel like I'm reading paraphrases of Pieter Hintjens' self-help book "The Psychopath Code" which is quite popular with this website's users. The book is no longer open source, but I read a fair bit of it when it was. It struck me as a dangerous work that teaches how to perceive your foes as psychopaths, and then to cut them out of your life. I can see how the practice is empowering, but it irresponsibly elevates the armchair psychologist reader.
I think your comments should be be composed like the opinions they are, and not made to sound like objective truth.
The guy otherwise had a wife, children and positive social environment, so it was something of a surprise discovery to him. It was much more introspective and informative on the possible nature of the condition - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscien...
> Similarly, he takes issue with neuroscientist James Fallon’s calling himself a psychopath because his brain imaging profile matched that of psychopathic individuals.
> “Just because the amygdala shows hypoactivation does not make you a psychopath,” says Neumann. “This is a characteristic that’s associated with psychopathy, but biology is not destiny. We believe that the syndrome, the personality disorder, is a coming together of these four major domains.”
A moderately extensive reading of the popular and professional literature on psychopaths. I know this is an internet message board, so it’s best to doubt such claims, but that’s the answer.
>The claim that psychopaths pursue long-term relationships doesn't jive with the antisocial nature of this condition
You’ll notice that I prefaced that with “high functioning.” High functioning psychopaths often come from financially and emotionally stable families/backgrounds, which help inhibit what we’d think of as overtly anti-social behavior (e.g. violence). And as you say, psychopaths are not without reason. Given a set of sufficiently pro-social developmental circumstances, some can learn to delay their “gratifications” to obtain greater “rewards,” just like anyone else.
>I'm also troubled by your view that any engagement with a psychopath is wasted.
It’s not so much wasted, but about reducing your exposure to harm. And it’s not my view, you can find the same stated in the work of people like Hare, Stout, and Babiak.
>A premise of your views is that you are able to unambiguously diagnose psychopathy in others, and that it is appropriate to treat those people radically differently based on your casual diagnosis.
I claim no such ability. I’m speaking only to a fuzzy heuristic intended to reduce my own exposure to psychopaths after damaging experiences with people who quite consistently match their patterns of behavior.
>To be frank, I feel like I'm reading paraphrases of Pieter Hintjens' self-help book "The Psychopath Code" which is quite popular with this website's users.
I’ve never read this book, so I can’t speak to it. Again, you’re well warranted in your skepticism because it’s the internet.
I guess for me I find it easy enough to ascertain the emotional drivers behind what someone is saying (or I think so). From that you can tell where they're coming from and what their motivations really are. A useful skill one gets in spades once you've dealt with an actual psychopath...
But I generally very much agree with you, (m)any of the psychopathy traits listed in the article can be, or even are to a certain degree, present in everyone. So there is real danger in stigmatazing just about regular people.
And sure interaction with a psychopath doesn't need to be destructive for everyone, that'd have to be some kind hard working super villain to be able to hurt everyone around them.
And to emphasize, antisocial behaviour or just put plainly being a bad person is something everyone is guilty of.
So if this psychopath term is to be considered real it would just mean that psychos do a certain combination of (bad) things to a much higher degree than everyone else.
But if it all comes down to a degree, it makes me wonder if there really is no therapy for these people? Can they really not change? Can they really not learn to accentuate wider spectre of emotions?
Regular people can change their behaviour albeit it can be really hard, and they need to want it. Thus I'm not really buying the whole it's a fixed thing, it's brain chemistry-morphology whatever narrative.
In simplest terms psychopaths are people who do not "get" the particularity of human relationships. To a psychopath, relationships are always and everywhere abstract conceptual power relations. They don't get jealous (but they can fake jealousy), they don't fall in love (but they can fake love) and when people leave their lives it's more like losing money on a bad investment then, you know, losing one's best friend or lover. This is not magical or antisocial or deviant. Psychopaths are just everyday people who never really miss other people. They are just as stupid and irrational as everybody else but in different ways.
There is an argument here to be made here that just as society is welcoming of people who fall in love at the drop of a dime it should also be welcoming of people who can't fall in love. It's the sort of thing, like homosexuality, that people might think is a big deal but is really not and eventually will just be sort of normalized.
Well now, I'm pretty sure you can't use this as a definition for psychopathy, as many other types of disorders fit this definition.
In my comment I was thinking of the definition given by this article, and the list of traits it provides.
So going by that definition I have to disagree with your argument: "...that people might think is a big deal but is really not and eventually will just be sort of normalized."
If someone checks all the boxes from the points raised in this article I would really hope that that sort of behavior never gets normalized because these traits are the exact opposite of what people should strive for in their lives.
I don't see any cause for concern. Putting aside Hollywood nonsense there doesn't seem to be any reason why psychopaths would inherently engage in destructive behavior. In reality psychopaths are quite probably among the most interesting and charming and entertaining people you will ever meet.
Psychopaths can be very manipulative but there's no inherent malicious intent behind this manipulation. They need to be manipulative because all human relations are based on manipulation and so to get anything done they have no choice but to "play the game."
Again, psychopaths are just people who don't get jealous. There are so many stories (really, all of them, from the Bible to virtually every pop song) about jealousy, where jealousy plays a central motivation for virtually all the characters, but to a psychopath, reading stories about characters motivated by jealousy is like reading stories about aliens. Abstractly it makes sense as a motivation but there's no actual 'there' there. Saying "I did X because I was jealous" is like saying "I did X because the voices told me to."
The problem for psychopaths is that virtually all human relations are motivated by jealousy. All of the politicking, the status games, the in-group/out-group and intrapersonal power dynamics that define so much human experience come down to this. And so psychopaths, out of pure necessity in order to participate in such relations, will quickly learn to fake jealousy, to deliberately inspire it in others or carefully suppress it in those they care about it. This is no different from everybody else does, really, they're just doing it for different reasons and are perhaps a bit more deliberate about it.
At this point it's also important to understand the difference between psychopaths and sociopaths. This comment [1] lays it out well. Note the end result here: both psychopaths and sociopaths end up being manipulative of those around them but while sociopaths are often consumed by jealousy and paranoia and will do anything to ensure they "win", psychopaths, more often than not, are seeking a generally optimal or neutral solution, they have little real interest in hurting or helping you in any given encounter.
[1] http://www.thecut.com/_pages/cjkmuv88b00500xy6u0morj7n@publi...
Another way to look at this is that psychopaths seek and respond to different kinds of stimulation. They have little interest in gossip, hanging out or generalized bonding rituals. Instead they may be drawn to competitive, "results-oriented" games where individuals or groups have a clear objective. They may also, on the whole, be more drawn to "high-stakes" games because they perceive less downsides and more potential upsides to such games. Again, this doesn't suggest any real malicious intent. Psychopaths are just using different risk metrics. While some people may shy away from high-stakes status games because they are very sensitive to the potential loss of status, to a psychopath, "loss of status" isn't a thing and so such games can be perceived as pure upside.
> It’s a typical psychopathic lapse into bragging about one’s ability to manipulate or inspire fear in others, albeit under the guise of the ability to “feel concern.”
Again you seem to deliberately attributing some kind of malign intent without justification. This woman is trying to explain how she relates to others and why. There's no reason to think she is lying or that she cannot actually feel concern.
So is the rational decision to be together with a S/O less worthy than being bound together by the subconscious (chemical?) force of love?
The guy was an obvious ass&*$% but had wormed his way into defining himself as the 'head' of the org and people went on with it because A) the dominant behaviors B) he'd turned himself into the public face of the org C) and I quote "yeah, but he's productive, he motivates other people, he gets things done"... But that was just the Stockholm syndrome talking - people like this are little more than parasites. I was the new guy so could see through the mask a lot quicker. I wish I'd asked questions about the backstory...
I concur with everything you say about social hierarchies and power. I'm American and my take on the English, based on my living here for over a decade and all the sociopathically inclined I've run into, is that there is a very good reason there seems to be so many adult bullies etc in the UK (versus my take on America). The rigid class structure and etc conceals a lot of fundamental psychological pathologies in English society - sure, they're present in every society, but the English seem to revel in them and even regard them as virtues.
Reminds me of the “zombie problem”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
"Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath (2014)"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16584565 (122 comments)
[1] https://www.quora.com/profile/Athena-Walker
my current gf is also a psychopath, if she wasn't in jail we probably would have killed each other already.
One interesting yet rarely described trait of their kind is that, for all their glib talk, the transcript ends up vacuous and incoherent. There's nothing to be learned, because for them language is not a means of communication but a tool for manipulation and control; the effort to weigh the evidence and determine which parts correspond to physical reality is incommensurate with the yield.
>> When you meet new people, whether professionally or personally or whatever context, do you present them with the version of yourself that fits the situation?
> Absolutely. Why tell them anything that they don’t need to know? They just need to know what they can expect of me.
Well darling, what they need to know most is that you'll screw them over the instant it benefits you, so you're not convincing me here.
The same is true for any attempt of harnessing psychopathic behavior in some benign project. You have to ensure that at every moment, in every situation, they don't believe that they stand to gain a penny from backstabbing you or committing an atrocity; just as they always calculate the cost-benefit of doing so. There is no trust, no bond, not even any sort of a grace period; it's like pretending to have domesticated a crocodile. You run out of meat, you're it. Soldiers, surgeons, law professionals, CEOs, bankers. Everywhere psychopaths are a net loss and a liability, waiting for the rule enforcers to get distracted.
Worst of all, many of them are quite functional. Very much so, in fact. This is why there's no treatment; psychopathy is an alternative local optimum in human mental phenotype, rather than a disability. A parasitic one that probably evolved relatively recently with the transition from family groups and small tribes to big, partially anonymized societies, which allow for unnoticeable cheating.
Some say psychopathy is a scale. I claim it's just that psychometrics is not mature enough; "puerile", as Hannibal Lector would put it. There is a clear difference between a person who would not flush in a public toilet and a person who would, given reasonable guarantees of not being caught, momentarily borrow an careless "friend's" credit card and then burn through his savings. Who would cut costs diluting medication for one's patients and pocket the difference. Who would, as an attorney, conspire with the prosecution to put the client behind bars after swindling him of his money. A couples therapist who would facilitate a breakup to turn a client into a personal sex toy. All these are behaviors that stem directly from psychopathic traits. If you really, genuinely don't feel any concern at all for the well-being of other people, you'll be ready to commit crimes far greater than anyone who merely seeks to harm people for the thrill of it would. Though psychopaths like the thrill, as they get bored easily, and they do tend to amuse themselves with cruelty.
I pity her partner. Slavery for 19 years, and who knows how bad it'll get. The guy sure chose poorly.
Psychopathy, in my opinion, is the sole unobjectionable justification for negative eugenics, inasmuch at it's heritable. There's nothing else that's so purely devoid of excuses and detrimental for society.
Further explanations are unnecessary. I wish you'll be able to afford this amiable gullibility for all your life. In fact, that's precisely what disappearance of psychopaths would make possible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How often do we rely on other people just not being terrible for petty reasons? Not grossly abusing their position whenever they can get away with it? Surprisingly a lot of our society runs on trust. And wherever it doesn't, expenses and efforts are necessary to disincentivize transgressors. So even 1% is enough to drive up the costs. People in small, homogenous villages can leave the keys outside their homes, because it's harder to get away with burglary there and they trust neighbors. In cities people need better doors and better locks and security cameras and strong police and a fair bit of paranoia to keep up with rural areas. It's because it's easier to stay anonymous in the community of millions. But even under perfect guarantee of anonymity, I wouldn't break into people's homes and rob them. Most other people of regular upbringing wouldn't as well. A psychopath, by definition, would, irrespective of upbringing. Same goes for black hat activities. How much does IT security cost?
Also, there's a lot of articles dedicated to psychopaths like this one. I don't remember people like her "significant other", or her oblivious parents, or her colleagues ever being given voice. Somehow we are to take them on their word, even though they say (because there's no point denying already) that they see no utility in being honest or reciprocal.
People with other non-standard neurotypes tend to be quite open about their condition, as they prefer to get more understanding and have a better rapport. They are not as glorified by the media, they are not thought of as sexy and enigmatic, yet they come open. But this anonymous interviewee, as I already pointed out, "doesn't think people need to know" what she is to know what to expect from her. But this is obviously nonsensical, given that people (except maybe bankers) operate with some basic trust and information about her psychopathy would change a lot in possible relationships (even assuming that there's some use for their kind). Likewise, no surgeon or CEO has come out with "I'm a heartless bastard with no empathy or code or morals, see, I may be different but that makes me better in my field". Such inconsistencies illustrate that they don't really have any sort of ethical framework, it's all just vague noise to lull a pitiful myopic herbivore into sleep. That's really how they think of people.
All of this is unconvincing, I know. It's probably impossible for a neurotypical, well-meaning person to realize the magnitude of difference without being subjected to psychopathic treatment. Without seeing how the mask you've known for years crumbles in front of evidence and there's no distress behind, since it's cheaper to discard you along with the shards.
Given that (in popular culture, not necessarily in reality), it's also associated with cruelty and lack of empathy, this scares me a little.
What’s more interesting is the comments though, there sure seem to be a lot of tabu around this topic. I wonder why that is.
Children: why is that person so dirty? Why do they ask for money and food? Why do they hurt? Why are they talking to the air?
Media:
https://nypost.com/2018/08/18/state-senate-candidate-launche...
https://www.economist.com/britain/2018/08/18/no-end-in-sight...
(I cherry picked two articles from google news after searching "homeless")
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-love-hate-relat...
Even feeling empathy for someone in pain doesn’t naturally lead to compassion. Empathy is just the ability to mirror someone else’s emotions and is a neurotypical response. If your happy, I’m happy. If you hurt, I hurt.
If I’m hurting because you hurt my natural response is to stop my pain. In some cases that mirrored pain can result in acts of compassion but can also result in lashing out, victim blaming or fleeing. These are all normal responses for someone feeling pain.
Empathy is a “normal” response but compassion is a choice. Few people have the emotional regulation skills and patience to see someone in pain, feel their pain and sit with them in their pain.
Additionally, her descriptions of not feeling fear, processing emotions at a lower intensity level than others, needing constant stimulation, and having a cognitive, but not truly emotional, understanding of romantic love and empathy ring true to my experience knowing these people.
I wonder if there is a legitimate grey zone at which these disorders overlap.
Or, alternatively, maybe my friend is just a psychopath.
Disclosure: I have ASD diagnosis.
You could also literally have both at once, since these conditions/states/differences/whatever aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-with-autis...
This linking of alexithymia to autism has caused harm by making it harder to get the diagnosis for people who can recognise emotion within themselves and others.
Aspergers is not associated with “not feeling fear.”
If you’re just assuming this from your experiences with these individuals, you’re just assuming this, and might do well to expand your considerations of what different people find fearful.
I’m sure you would find many of them fear people who jump to conclusions before thinking through the various possibilities; or the outcomes of hasty judgements.
And, I recommend you read about it.
I was constantly struck by how she didn’t seem to fear any sort of physical risk. It may well be the stimulus/risk seeking nature of ADHD, or just her personality - I’m honestly not sure.
The bitter irony is, psychopaths are far more dangerous and yet they make better imitators, and can avoid triggering the uncanny valley instinct. That's why they can be so charismatic and attract followers.
And unfortunately, I believe this may be why to some degree, having the difference being physical/visible may make someone with a disability more sympathetic/liked. Disability itself has an uncanny valley setup ranging from 'can pass as completely normal' (certain high functioning psychopaths)to 'is visibly different and accepted'.
I also wonder if fiction may have had an effect here too. The average fictional psychopath/sociopath/whatever may look more like someone on the autistic spectrum than a genuine psychopath or sociopath.
They do not express them the same way, they may lack awarness of them (another symptom), they don't understand them and they occure in different situations then the ones that would make neurotypical angry etc. But, they do feel and are not machines.
More concretely, it’s a neurological variation that is “fit enough” to survive within human populations at a low threshold, so it persists. There’s no “guiding hand” beneath it all.
Kind of like how the Dark Mirror Universe in Star Trek managed to get so far.
That’s the opposite of what she was saying. From what I could gather, she does trust people, but simply by measuring their actions. I suspect such a society would work the same way: people who demonstrate they can be trusted would receive positive responses. Taking advantage of others would quickly lead to a form of ostracism.
But why would this be the case if everyone in society mostly felt it was okay to take advantage as long as you could get away with it?
So many people seem to be entirely blind to this dynamic.
You can look at a business person and point out "You know browser fingerprinting is a bit like a salesman walking into a User's house and taking a bunch of metrics to send back to base before making a sales pitch right?"
Then they look at you horrified by the mental image and say "But it decreases fraud!"
The cognitive dissonance is delicious, but our obsession with the Market mediating the worthiness of anything to the point where ethical and moral violations are encouraged as long as they can be hidden is a blight on our society at large.
On one hand you want some doves because they work together well and society is nice, but on the other hand if there’s too doves then hawks will thrive. But if everyone is hawks, then society as a whole doesn’t work as well together. So there’s push and pull of both and in the end the natural equilibrium is mostly doves with some hawks. I suspect this is how it works for psycopaths in society.
Like a warzone in Africa or the Middle East.
Like a maximum security prison in the US.
Virtually every desire a human can have is better fulfilled if most people on earth are happy and productive. Whether you want to travel the world, waste away in VR, escape to Mars, or live forever, these pursuits are more achievable if human progress advances. In no future is it better for other people to be unhappy.
Then explain why some people are criminals or parasites on the system it it's better for everyone to be happy? Why take advantage of others if it's better overall not to do so? My guess is because some people don't care about others. Psychopaths generally fall into that category. Question is what they would do if they made up all of society, which means everyone is understood to be looking to take advantage.
Moreover, afaik development of language is hypothesized to be interlinked with social behaviors (and empathy as a whole), so a species of antagonists would probably have trouble establishing civilisation in the first place.
It's kind of like how overeating people struggle to curb their craving now with thoughts of seeing their weight increase later. Some succeed, and some can't do it at all. They'll feel negative emotions when they look at the scales, not when they get the ice cream and imagine the numbers. Except psychopaths don't even want to fight this tendency of theirs.
To be fair, positive reinforcement works for them about as well as for others.
This is the first time I've seen it explained by someone else but it's how I feel all the time. Makes me wonder...
The true problems of recent societies might in fact be overdiagnosis and Hollywood-style oversimplifications, not the traits themselves. Not everyone needs to be hyper emphatic (though we probably need a great number of such individual to keep our societies cohesive).
In other words, don't judge, do live and let live, defend yourself and people around you if attacked. Don't watch TV.
Many people get anxious, and this causes them to look at people with anxiety disorders and think "That's like what I've got. Why don't you just pull yourself out of it?" but what they don't consider is that the difference is one of degree, not of kind.
Are all mental traits that affect our lives negatively mental illness? I think it's quite a leap to say that just because you have negative effect in your life from a mental perspective/problem/limitation/etc... doesn't mean it's "illness" that requires a cure.
Sometimes it really is "just get over it", if not, then every person I know needs emergency therapy and drugs right now cause they are all ill.
If you want to say it's a matter of degree, sure, a valid a argument, but who lets who decide what the degree is? What if the person that says "pull yourself out of it" was affected many hundreds of times worse than the person hearing that advice? Now is degrees a purely personal and relative matter?
How many people have heard stories of spoiled rich brats scream bloody murder and acted like they were dying because they didn't get the exact color they wanted in their designer luggage? (replace in the nouns for different scenarios)
And conversely, the poor child with nothing, is happy and grateful just to have a little more food at mealtime? "Just get over it" _is_ the answer to the rich brat who wants to wallow when you put it in perspective of others. But from their own perspective, it's the end of the world. (lots of personal experience seeing both sides of this issue)
In between health and pathology is a vast grey area where things get complicated, and people are biased to think everyone else is just acting like a spoiled rich kid.
>pathology: the science of the causes and effects of diseases, especially the branch of medicine that deals with the laboratory examination of samples of body tissue for diagnostic or forensic purposes.
In the words of Allen Frances: "psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances
There are no known causes for psychiatric illnesses. Once a biological cause is discovered, it is no longer deemed a mental illness, but an actual biological pathology.
On the other hand, sometimes there are dudes whose bad behavior is intractable, and the only halfway effective intervention is when I tell them forcefully to stop. Not viciously, but mercilessly direct, and little concession made for their comfort.
Although as I write that out, it looks like maybe the issue is that the framing is wrong - it's not empathy vs force, it's more like empathy and force. A question of choosing the right communication strategy for the person and situation.
I have no doubt when entitlement is the issue, getting (metaphorically?) punched in the face a couple of times is an important "teaching moment". It's probably not the case that all lessons are best taught like that.
Some people do care once you tell them that blocking the bike lane is rude and a real safety problem for cyclists. Others don't care at all that a cyclist has a problem with this. Those people tend to respond best to me threatening to call the police to ticket their car. Once I recognize which category the driver is in, I know which approach to take.
I do not feel much empathy, except to my children and pets.
I am still attached to people but tend to rationalize a lot of things. My wife was diagnosed with MS, zero reaction. I help her to go through that but do not feel any emotion. Her neurologist mentioned that a lot of relationships break out when MS is diagnosed. I can understand this, but cannot comprehend which emotions push people to run away (I know them, just do not understand how one can feel them).
My mother was diagnosed with cancer, zero reactions from me. I love her very much, in some weird rational way.
I was diagnosed with an auto-immune illness, zero reactions. In that case it was really "zero fucks given" because I did not need to externalize anything.
At the same time I like very much to spend time with people and it bringd me joy.
So yes, I think it is a matter of spectrum.
Or it could point to the fact that the traits that make an effective “hacker” (tendency to exploit systems to gain power and control) happen to be the same traits that make an effective sociopath.
Broadly speaking, psychopaths exploit social systems while hackers exploit technological systems. But there’s really not much of a barrier. What hackers call “social engineering” is what manipulators and sociopaths would refer to as manipulation.
To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that all hackers are sociopaths. Or even that most of them are. It is quite possible to be an extremely effective hacker with a solid moral foundation. “With great power comes great responsibility”, etc. I’m merely trying to encourage some self-awareness in the hacking community.
The fundamental pattern these terms are all trying to address is the same: antisocial behavior, or a consistent pattern of behavior that harms others. Do we all have it in us to act selfishly sometimes? Yes. Just like we all have it in us to act altruistically. Psychopathy is a spectrum with Mother Theresa on one end and Hitler on the other. (I realize Mother Theresa may not have actually been all that saintly in real life, but bear with me for the sake of argument.)
The major flaw in the article is how it focuses on someone who was eventually diagnosed as a psychopath after seeking treatment. The issue here is that the people who are actually dangerous, i.e. very high on the Hare psychopathy checklist, i.e. true psychopaths, are never going to voluntarily be diagnosed. Real psychopaths don’t seek treatment to change their behavior. If they get caught, they try to destroy whoever exposed them, and if that doesn’t work, they move on to new targets and start over.
My point is that we need a consistent way to refer to people who are dangerous social predators. It doesn’t matter what the term is, sociopath, psychopath, ASPD, whatever. What matters is that the term doesn’t get watered down or confused with other so-called personality disorders which don’t share this aspect of harm to others. For example, aspergers/autism has absolutely nothing to do with psychopathy. If the term “psychopath” becomes meaningless, then it becomes harder to talk about and expose the real predators in our midst. In other words, the psychopaths win.
> 1. Psychopaths do not have a conscience (e.g., they do not feel guilt) and do not bond or love like most people. Sociopaths do have a conscience, albeit a weak one, so they are able to feel some degree of guilt in certain situations. However, they usually quickly deflect that guilt and place blame on others for causing to do whatever they feel guilty about. Sociopaths are capable of love but it is usually a very dysfunctional form of love/bonding.
> 2. Psychopaths tend to not take a lot things personally. They don't care if you don't like them. They are usually egotistical, though, so if you attack them personally, they will feel anger but not other forms of emotional hurt/wounding. Sociopaths will feel both and tend to take everything very personally, even stuff that isn't meant to be.
> 3. High-functioning psychopaths tend to think things through and plan their actions/steps in a logical manner without emotions coming into play. Their thinking is very organized and it is about reaching whatever goal they have. If they hurt you in the process, well, that is because you were most likely an obstacle and you got run over for being in the way, but not because it was personal. Psychopaths typically inflict pain because it's a means to an end, not because they enjoy it.
> 4. Sociopaths are basically the opposite: they tend to be very disorganized in their thinking and planning because they are much more subject to certain emotions such as vanity/narcissism, anger and jealously. If you get in their way, they will inflict pain to eliminate you, but will also likely enjoy it. Sociopaths will often seek to inflict pain because they enjoy inflicting it (psychopaths don't get that kind of rush) but will often feel mixed with their anger or violence a tinge of guilt, which their narcissism will require them to deflect as being caused by others (think of the killer who does something to their victims to show regret or respect, such as posing them in a certain manner. It doesn't mean they regret their actions, only that they regret that they were forced by someone or society to kill).
> 5. Most sociopaths end up in jail and have lower than average IQs. Most high functioning psychopaths don't and end up in jobs that require turning down one's emotional reactions, such as a trauma surgeon, butcher or CEO.
[1] https://www.thecut.com/_pages/cjkmuv88b00500xy6u0morj7n@publ...
So apparently the PCL-R is a scale to measure how nasty a son of b one his.
I just don't get it. What happens at the 30 mark in the scale that makes it an illness versus you just being a terrible human being?
That's the most interesting quote I find. It poses a paradox. What makes a person awful and toxic? Are there common personality traits to this? Are there biological causes?
Do we need a new pathology for this? Toxipath?
She later mentions this:
> I think it’s important to hold people responsible for their actions, not brain formation. People make choices. Psychopathy is not an excuse, and it’s definitely not a reason why someone does bad things.
So what are those reasons then? And what are those bad things? And what mechanism governs one's choices?
It does seem to me like psychopaths, by definition, lack all natural controls which would allow them to know what the bad things are and that they shouldn't choose to do them.
Thus, they need social controls instead. Like, society has to make it easier to achieve her goals through good means, and make it very hard to do so through bad means. Otherwise she has no means of containment. She does not fear, she does not rejoice. She does not regret or feel guilt. She does not hope and dream.
That said, what are her goals? What drives a psychopath? Adrenaline rush alone? That's what she hints at.
Finally, I noticed the quoted doctor goes out of his way to mention a spectrum. And that he'd only classify of psychopath the more extreme cases, at the far end of it. For those, he says all four traits must be clearly demonstrated. And those by definition mention:
> take pleasure in hurting others
> are physically aggressive
Which are arguably at the top of the list for "bad things".
So purely from the quoted doctor, if she does not have those traits, she's probably not high enough on the spectrum to be labeled a psychopath. At least not based on the quoted doctor's diagnostic model.