The Roots of Psychopathy

The New Yorker has an interesting article by John Seabrook about researchers who study the brains of psychopaths: "Suffering Souls."

The scanner was housed in a tractor-trailer parked behind the prison’s I.D. center. We followed a correctional officer through an internal courtyard to the rehab wing, which consisted of a large common area surrounded by two-man cells. The prisoners were standing at attention outside their cells, some holding mops and brooms. I entered a vacant cell and saw the occupant’s brain, a grainy black-and-white image on a piece of a paper, its edges curling, tacked up over the desk.

Then we walked through the common room and out a door at the other end, passing under a large poster with lines that read, “I am here because there is no refuge, finally, from myself.” The officer led us along a corridor of offices in which students from the University of New Mexico, where [cognitive neuroscientist Dr. Kent] Kiehl is on the faculty, conduct psychopathy interviews and also counsel participants in the drug-treatment program. Carla Harenski, one of Kiehl’s postdocs, was interviewing a beefy guy with a tattoo on his neck. Her office, like those of all the researchers in the lab, is equipped with a button she can press to call for help if an interview gets out of hand.

In order to distinguish psychopaths from non-psychopaths among the Western volunteers, Kiehl and his students use the revised version of the Psychopathy Checklist, or PCL-R, a twenty-item diagnostic instrument created by Robert Hare, a Canadian psychologist, based on his long experience in working with psychopaths in prisons. Kiehl was taught to use the checklist by Hare himself, under whom he earned his doctorate, at the University of British Columbia. Researchers interview an inmate for up to three hours, and compare the inmate’s statements against what is known of his record and his personal history. The interviewer “scores” the subject on each of the twenty items–parasitic life style, pathological lying, conning, proneness to boredom, shallow emotions, lack of empathy, poor impulse control, promiscuity, irresponsibility, record of juvenile delinquency, and criminal versatility, among other tendencies–with zero, one, or two, depending on how pronounced that trait is. Most researchers agree that anyone who scores thirty or higher on the PCL-R is considered to be a psychopath. Kiehl says, “Someone who scores a thirty-five, a thirty-six, they are just different. You say to yourself, ‘Aha, here you are. You are why I do this.’ ”

Harenski recently interviewed a Western inmate who scored a 38.9. “He had killed his girlfriend because he thought she was cheating on him,” she told me. “He was so charming about telling it that I found it hard not to fall into laughing along in surprise, even when he was describing awful things.” Harenski, who is thirty, did not experience the involuntary skin-crawling sensation that, according to a survey conducted by the psychologists Reid and M. J. Meloy, one in three mental-health and criminal-justice professionals report feeling on interviewing a psychopath; in their paper on the subject, Meloy and Meloy speculate that this reaction may be an ancient intraspecies predator-response system. “I was just excited,” Harenski continued. “I was saying to myself, ‘Wow. I found a real one.’ ”

"Suffering Souls." (Image credit: John Ritter.)

• [Pipenta]

  #9

  The tests are pretty good, if you can get the accurate data. That is a problem your subjects are liars and con artists. And it is a reason that this sort of thing is studied more successfully in an institutional setting. In a jail, the inmates are observed, something is known of their histories, of their behaviors. Outside, in the world, these kinds of people are very difficult to study.

  I think the reason that many people are uncomfortable with this is because they imagine inmate/subjects who are possibly innocent. I think it is an open-hearted impulse, to give people the benefit of the doubt.

  And it seems like a terrible violation of privacy and personal space, the way the inmates are being observed. So folks who have no seen a psychopath in action up close and personal are going to be skittish. Because while they know that such people exist and do dreadful things, it is kind of an abstract. It is what you see on TV or at the movies. Monsters are the stuff of fantasy to them, like Hannibal Lector.

  But that can change

  (Psychopathy is an old term which was replaced by sociopathy and now by antisocial personality disorder. It is hard to give something an accurate name when the details of the cause are still not entirely known.)

  But when one has been on the receiving end of acts of violence and cruelty from a psychopath, one has a different perspective. One poster seemed astonished that the article seemed to imply that people like this are not entirely rare. Sadly, they are not. Just ask anyone who has worked in child protective services. Just talk to a rape crisis advocate, or someone who works at a shelter for battered women. You get someone who will take a kitchen knife and chop off a toddler’s arm and you start to understand this is real. And then you see the damaged people in the wake of an abuser and you know it is not rare, not rare at all.

  Of course no one likes to look at it. Much child abuse goes unreported, is denied, because the people who might step up, who have a vague sense that things are not right would rather turn away because it makes THEM UNCOMFORTABLE.

  Some people grown up raised by people like this and their childhoods are shaped by such cruelty. Some go on to behave as gruesomely themselves, some do not. All are scarred.

  But when victims try to understand why their abusers are the way they are, and start to read the literature and talk to the experts, they are astonished by how similar the behavior patterns of the abusers are. What their own personal monster had done to them, had been done countless times to over victims the same way.

  There are patterns of behavior that show up again and again in psychopaths. That’s what the tests are based on, nothing woo-woo or obscure. The patterns can be spotted because certain subsets of these people behave so alike that I’ve heard it joked, more than once, that “They must be pod people, because they’re all taking orders from the same mother ship.”

  And if some of you think the idea of locking them up and studying them is harsh or sinister, it is actually more humane than the initial impulse you’d have if you got nailed by one of these guys and lived to tell the tale. Something is very clearly wrong with them. Let loose they go about the business of destroying people. It seems they do not have a choice.

  You can pretend they do not exist and let them go about their merry way. You might think that this is a matter of sin, that with willpower and good intentions and prayer, these people can be reformed. Or you can study it and try to understand why these people are the way they are, and maybe, just maybe, figure out how to prevent it and cure it.

  That is not sinister. That is compassionate and noble.

  Oh, and #11? Last I looked the NYer was not a scientific journal, just a damn good magazine.

• [Pipenta]

  Damn. posted before I read the article and so did a slobbo job of repeating (pre-repeating, prepeating?) what was said in the article.

  Sorry, sorry. Long day. Won’t happen again.

  Just I got chewed up by one of these beasts and it all hits a nerve.

• [Maneki Nico]

  Jack @24 wrote:

  I would like to demand that Boing Boing post some cut [sic] cat videos …

  That’s an interesting Freudian slip in a discussion of psychopathy, no?

  That being said, Maru is a wonderful thing. Thanks Jack (and Susannah).

• [zikzak]

  “Some scientists think that psychopaths suffer from an extreme and far-reaching attention deficit, which causes them temporarily to forget the moral and social consequences of certain antisocial actions”

  A very interesting lens to look at us all through. To what degree are our “antisocial actions” caused by simply forgetting or failing to fully realize the moral and social consequences?

  How do we each exhibit psychopathic tendencies in our own lives?

• [TEKNA2007]

  Pipenta, I liked your comments. Relevant and heart-felt.

• [jackie31337]

  Pseudonym – Psychopaths are a different breed. Essential elements of humanity are missing/broken in them.

  This article mentioned that psychopathy tends to be correlated with childhood neglect. A few years ago a study at Harvard suggested that leaving infants to cry it out can actually cause changes in their brains (article from the Register summarizes it a bit over-dramatically here). I can’t help wondering if the mainstream American parenting style, with its emphasis on pushing babies into premature independence and fear of “spoiling” a child with too much emotional closeness, could be a contributing factor to people growing up without fully learning how to be a human being.

• [ArnoDick]

  #48, Tom, wins. Science as completely totally objective and completely non-subjective is a cartoon.

• [AGF]

  I agree. thanks Pipenta.

• [chgoliz]

  When I read “The Sociopath Next Door” my immediate reaction was that the psychologist who wrote it was living in woo-woo land. But as Pipenta said, the details were just too “right on” to be ignored. There are common impulses and behaviors that are now known and studied.

  An interesting point made in the book was that the intelligence level of sociopaths follows a Bell curve like any other subset of people. We think only Hannibal Lectors are sociopaths, but most of them aren’t that intelligent/cunning. They manipulate, abuse within the home, and run little cons in your workplace or in your neighborhood. The book ends with a scenario involving the pesky little old lady next door who makes everyone roll their eyes. When you’ve gotten that far in the book, you realize that she’s a sociopath. She gets off on meddling in other people’s business, proud that she’s got a small bit of control over others. No violence or arrestable criminal offences, but she’s still got that twist in her brain.

  Thanks for all you wrote, Pipenta. I’ve been there too.

• [Antinous]

  You might as well be arguing for Creationism.

  Did Godwin have a brother?

• [Anonymous]

  [quote]Free will is an interesting simulation or illusion but when it comes right down to it, science seems to showing that its little more than that.[/quote]

  The world is the “Theatre of the Absurd” and the internet is the playing ground of the Absurd. Genetic/biological fatalism is equally absurd, twin studies and regular psychology have proven this, there is infact a social/enviornmental/free will factor Mr. Biologically Absurd.

  [quote]Wow, did this article ever take a hard left turn down Woo-Woo Lane.[/quote]

  The real question is what the insinuation of that passage was? Does it suggest that she is a “psychopath” and thusly was not creeped out by her “fellow” psychopath? or was it something else.

  [quote]there’s something rather sinister about this article, [/quote]

  There’s something sinister about the delusional absurdists whether they be magical thinkers or biological fatalists.

  [quote]rather that the psychopaths had a particular way of looking you in the eyes, kind of the way a predator looks at prey.[/quote]

  I’ve the seen the so-called “pyschopathic” stare, there is nothing predatory about it, it’s actually more empty, like they’re pretending/acting, but they are supposed to be con’s after all so it’s not abnormal of them.

  [quote]It’s not really that weird — it’s essentially just intuition. Psychologists have it too. It’s like talking to someone and getting a sense that they’re lying, even though you have no proof — a combination of little tells that you can pick up subconsciously. [/quote]

  Sometimes your heart and instincts will lie to you and lead you down the wrong path.

  [quote]It’s like reading emotion from facial expressions and tone of voice.[/quote]

  But if you’re self-delusional (narcissistic, paranoid, schizotypal) you thusly suck at it anyway.

  [quote]It’s “woo” for biologists to apply to humans what they apply to every other species on earth? We are a part of the natural order, no excuses, no exceptions.[/quote]

  Yes we are, but we are social animals and thusly we are very complex. That and your own subjective opinions are not fact. Also take into note that the human being thusly being a 3D/4D entity bound by the laws of this world is thusly imperfect upon themselves and is therefore prone to error.

  [quote]Somewhat interesting story. But it really sets off my skeptic-meter.[/quote]

  Good, skepticism is always good, it shows true logic, rationality, and objectivity.

  [quote]It would also be easy to use such a test to condemn someone (otherwise innocent) to a life in living hell.[/quote]

  Correct, but the self-delusional absurdists cannot (or perhaps can, but simply refuse to) comprehend anything outside of their own little delusional fantasy world and thusly jump to hasty irrational assumptions. The term “pyschopath” immediatley labels one among many other things as a “boy who cries wolf” so to speak, and what if they are not crying wolf? Not many wish to find out the actual truth, they just wish to jump to simplistic “in-their comfort-zone” conclusions and move on quickly.

  [quote]Well, that and Internet forum trolls.
  [/quote]

  That and the common nuero-typical self-delusional.

  [quote]Psychopaths are a different breed.[/quote]

  Are they really? You sure about that, I’ve been told in the real world most people are just mind-game players and it seems to ring true with many of I’ve seen (not all of course), so that would mean that the pyschopath is a pyschopath as well as the man/woman who screams pyschopath. So if everyone is a pyschopath, then why are we all screaming about it? The “Theatre of the Absurd” once again is absurd.

  [quote]Essential elements of humanity are missing/broken in them.[/quote]

  I’ve read Eric Harris’ (Columbine Shooter/Probable “Pyschopath”) personal diary, he seemed to believe that is was other people who lacked humanity and that most people were nothing more than “pretenders”, he was very typically Macheveillian as well and thusly he seemed to adapt the traits of the “absurd” he hated for some reason. So who’s the pretender, the supposed pretender or the one who screams pretender? Both perhaps, which once again leads into the world of the absurd where nothing makes any sense.

  It’s hard to trust people about something with such a bad rap, they may be the same people they accuse others of, which in pyschology is called “projection”.

  [quote]Offenders who have been diagnosed as psychopaths usually get the book thrown at them regardless of the actual circumstances of the case. Forensic professionals need to be extremely cautious about using the p word in their testimony.[/quote]

  Indeed.

  [quote]In a jail, the inmates are observed, something is known of their histories, of their behaviors. [/quote]

  Looking through their personal diaries would actually be a good way to attain some sort of understanding for their “method of madness”. That’s why I read Harris’ personal diary, to demystify him which alot of so-called “Pyschopathy Pro’s” don’t do, they generally do the opposite, which leads to paranoia, depression and panic attacks amongst the irrational, delusional and absurd which most people tend to be.

  [quote]Monsters are the stuff of fantasy to them, like Hannibal Lector.[/quote]

  Except they aren’t quite actual monsters in a mystical demonic sense, they are monsters in a metaphoric social sense, again “mystification” is a bad idea.

  [quote]THEM UNCOMFORTABLE. [/quote]

  When the delusional, irrational, and absurd are thrown out of their “comfort zone” they tend to act like irrational buffoons, you have to be clear, concise, logical and coherent and very detailed with them, otherwise they panic and throw out strange absurd theories based on magical thinking and paranoid delusions. Making the absurd merely uncomfortable isn’t a good idea, my friend.

  [quote]When I read “The Sociopath Next Door” my immediate reaction was that the psychologist who wrote it was living in woo-woo land. [/quote]

  She was, she was describing a mere self-deluded narcissist who was a legend in their own mind. Pyschopathy/Sociopathy really needs a clear definition, because it’s always confused with mere pathological narcissism.

  [quote]Ignoring facts is unscientific. Studying, reporting, categorizing, analyzing, questioning and testing facts is the basis of science.[/quote]

  Focusing on one set of facts and ignoring another to soothe your own ego is unscientific as well. Like the focus on the biological aspect of pyschopathology (mental illness) and ignoring the enviornmental/social factors. Another thing that is unscientific is jumping to the wrong conclusions based on the facts like….

  Identical Twins show a 50-55% hereditary rate of anti-social features, and thusly ignoring that it’s only 50% biologically influenced jumping to the incorrect assumption that it’s 100% influence even though the facts state otherwise.

  [quote]I really can’t think of anything less scientific than ruling an entire category of facts out of order in scientific papers.[/quote]

  I can’t think of anything more illogical than jumping to the conclusion that 50 = 100.

  [quote]But what I also want to know is if there is a connection between autism and psychopathy. It seems that most people who are autistic can’t deal with the world, so the social manipulation factor is gone. [/quote]

  I smell absurdist agenda to demonize autistics.

  [quote]Fascinating and frightening.[/quote]

  Only to the absurd, to the logical it’s fascinating but the lack of mystification leads to a less frightening experience since it leads to something possibly explainable through rationality and better understanding.

  [quote]My experience with people with Asperger is that it’s not a personality determinant, but a way of thinking determinant. Faced with a diminished ability to understand subtextual clues, some cope by becoming controlling and angry and some cope by being really nice to everyone. I’d have a hard time relating it to psychopathy.[/quote]

  My experience with the nuero-typical is that they assume to much about others and think into their own behaviour and persona too little. See I can be an assinine person too?

  [quote]I don’t necessarily see that. I find it entirely plausible that mental health and criminal justice professionals could be capable of observing that they’ve experienced an unprecedented and involuntary reaction when interviewing psychopaths.[/quote]

  People get the creeps from non-pyschopaths, it means little, it’s just an irrationality based on primitive emotion and instinct telling them to “run” whenever their heart/instincts feel that they’re in danger, even if they are not in danger at all, such as a “normal/nuero-typical” person being creeped out by an autistic person, even though there was nothing to be afraid of.

  [quote]You’re saying they should discard observational data because it makes you uncomfortable?[/quote]

  It should be disregarded because it means nothing, see my above post, it explains why the “creeps” mean little.

  [quote]only it was people with schizophrenia and related disorders. [/quote]

  Schizophrenia is a pyschotic delusional pyschopathology. Pyschotic delusions typically consist of hearing “voices” and seeing things “hallucinations”.

  [quote]Then they’d get up to the head of the line, and next thing I knew they’d be telling me that they couldn’t fill out their Financial Aid Forms because Social Security numbers are the Mark of the Beast in Revelations.[/quote]

  That doesn’t sound like schizophrenia, it sounds like schizotypy that may be mixed with some paranoia, and those delusions are self-delusions not pyschotic delusions like common in schizophrenia.

  [quote]The measure we use to evaluate psychopathy is highly reliably…and fairly valid.[/quote]

  You know, I cannot see how Pyschopaths who are supposed to be pathological liars and deluded narcissists with a criminal spin can be judged by a self-report? A reliable self-report can only be done without self-delusion and honesty, otherwise it’s meaningless. How can you get an accurate report from someone who truly believes he’s “King Crap” and him to be honest about his pathological lying or other negative attributes? It’s a freaking paradox.

  [quote]Us ‘scientists’ are a little less flashy about the issues[/quote]

  The fact that you refer to yourself as a “scientist” on the internet, makes me suspicious.

  [quote]I’ll give the real scoop: [e-mail][/quote]

  No thanks.

  [quote]A minute later they’ll start yelling in Klingon or do something similar. [/quote]

  You do realize they may just be a trekkie having some fun right? Again when you assume stuff you make yourself look stupid.

  [quote]They’re clearly putting out some subliminal clues that are strong enough to notice just using peripheral vision.[/quote]

  Except you don’t have any idea of what you speak of, since you confuse self-delusions with psychosis and a trekkie with a schizophrenic.

  [quote]They don’t pick up social rules and cues on their own,[/quote]

  I can’t speak for other Aspies/Auties but I sure do know about “social rules”, rules that not only make no sense whatsoever, the so-called “norms/nuero-typicals” don’t even follow the silly things, it just goes to show you the so-called norms “talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk”.

  [quote]To a person with Proustian sensibilities, nearly everyone is a psychopath.[/quote]

  BINGO! You have won a thousand internets! You’ve seen through the “Theatre of the Absurd” and realized how absurd it is. The “Pyschopath” is just a buzzword the Absurd/self-deluded use for anyone who disagrees with their own absurdism/delusions.

  [quote]I, for one, would love to meet someone who isn’t a psychopath.[/quote]

  There’s plenty of non-pyschopaths, your run of the mill “pyschopath” is just a common d-bag, unfortunately they tend to be large in numbers, but there are plenty of cool, rational people. Heck, alot of self-delusionals can become cool people too when they decide to grow out of their delusional absurdism, in other words “GROW UP”.

  [quote]Perhaps the hoi polloi are attracted to the myth of the psychopath because it give them absolution?[/quote]

  Probably, it’s a possibility.

  [quote]Lastly, if we are to accept that psychopathy, if it does exist, springs from organic dysfunction, how then are we to regard the psychopath but with a certain amount of sympathy no matter how seemingly horrendous her deeds may be. It certainly calls in to question our current moral treatment.[/quote]

  That’s a good question, I have no answer but it also begs another question to be added to it. What makes a Pyschopath different than just a self-delusional narcissistic d-bag? Seriously, Pyschopathy needs a very clear definition, the definition is so unclear and vague it isn’t funny.

  [quote]In The Gift of Fear Gavin DeBecker talks about survival signals to spot potential violence, and how people talk themselves out of their feeling that something’s wrong and later have cause to regret it.[/quote]

  Then theres times when they talk themselves into their fear despite nothing being wrong, the door does swing both ways you know?

  [quote]It’s the most effective way of finding out if someone experiences something. [/quote]

  Except when the person in question is supposed to be a criminal pathologically narcissistic liar.

  [quote]Maybe some psychopaths stare too much, or have something about their body language. [/quote]

  Alot of people do that though, some are actually deemed “normal” if such a thing can even be considered to exist. It’s not a tell-tale sign when it’s not an absolute and it’s a sign exhibited by many non-psychopathic indivuals.

  [quote]Humans are finely tuned instruments to detect the moods of other humans [/quote]

  More like moderately tuned. The collective narcisstic ego of humanity shows with statement, and leads fools into believing “they know others better than they know themselves”.

  [quote]we have instincts for it and spend our entire lives learning how to do it well.[/quote]

  Instincts are not an absolute, they can be incorrect, I’ve stated this many times.

  [quote]Reporting it like that might be a little irresponsible.[/quote]

  It is irresponsible, a guess is a guess, just putting your heart and instinct into it isn’t going to give you any accuracy. This is what estimates are for, an educated guess based on logic, rationality and all the facts and evidence.

  [quote]No, you’re thinking about autism. Mirror neurons are crucil for understanding the motivations of others.[/quote]

  Then me and many other autistics must be failed auties, maybe I should hand in my Aspergers card for being a autistic failure. Oh well, never cared much for it anyway, I always saw myself as myself rather than “insert pyschological illness/syndrome/construct/ect”. I’m a human being not a social construct based on a writers/pyschologists personal interpretation of myself which may very well be lacking in many things.

  [quote]The distinction between “hard” and “soft” science is an artifact left over from a historical misunderstanding of the nature of logical inference. [/quote]

  Actually the distinction is that “soft” science is more abstract and subjective and can thusly be twisted for a delusional persons ego.

  [quote]No Bayesian would make such a distinction because we understand that the underlying logic [/quote]

  You can’t apply hard logic very well to the abstract, especially when the person in question has very little understanding of hard logic.

  [quote]Data are data, and one human’s response to another human are data.[/quote]

  Data that is not always useful or objective.

  [quote]The notion that our experiences are “subjective” and therefore “not real” or “not measurable” is unjustifiable Cartesian dualism:[/quote]

  Actually it’s justifiable by hard logic, the abstract and subjective are subject to personal opinion. Trying to make your delusional inner-reality (the abstract world of the mind) the outer reality is what makes one delusional. As a follower of hard logic, I reject your delusions on the basis 2+2=4 and always will equal exactly that in the real world. Trying to make it equal fish is ridiculous because just because it equals it in your own personal world. It creates “absurdism”.

  [quote]Humans are just another physical system, interacting in complex ways with their surroundings, not metaphysically separable into a different kind of stuff at all.[/quote]

  And thusly the needlessly convuluted absurdist philosophy was born and it’s innate desire to assert it’s subjective absurdity onto the real physical world was born, just because it couldn’t recognize that the subjective is personal opinion and the objective is hard fact.

  [quote]Science as completely totally objective and completely non-subjective is a cartoon.[/quote]

  Says the cartoon character to the real person.

  [quote]This is why practitioners of the harder sciences get told to shut their gob when discussing things they don’t know the first thing about. [/quote]

  And this is why hard logic followers see you as delusional imbeciles stuck in your own fantasy worlds, because you like to pretend your opinions are fact when they are nothing of the sort.

  [quote]You’re telling me that a field that is fundamentally the study of subjective experience should not admit subjective experience into its study?[/quote]

  So you’re saying that I shouldn’t take someones subjective opinion with skepticism?

  [quote]Have you ever been a room with a psychopath? They’re not making it up. I’ve felt it. [/quote]

  You say this, which to me, seems to be insinuating that only “psychos” can “creep” people out, then you say….

  [quote]It wasn’t some weird, specialized type of reaction triggered only by psychopaths. [/quote]

  You basically admit it’s not a specialized reaction to “Pyschos”, so which is it, you can’t have your cake and eat it too, so to speak.

  [quote]It’s a tool for self-protection, [/quote]

  Ugghhh, please be quiet, you’ve already proven that you’re irrational by saying one thing and then saying another (double-speak).

  [quote]In any case, when you hear warning bells: listen.[/quote]

  Why are the absurd so intent on pulling down the figurative fire-alarm while screaming “the pyschopaths are coming”?

  [quote]I felt like a remora fish swimming around a shark.[/quote]

  I feel like a Cro-Magnon inventor living amongst abunch of Neanderthals worshipping idols and talking about demons and ghosts.

  [quote]The smartest psychiatrist I’ve ever met once speculated to me that psychopathy is genetically inherited,[/quote]

  He clearly wasn’t that SMAERT then, since any intelligent psychiatrist would’ve told you it’s probably caused by a combination of genetic/biological and social/enviornmental factors.

  [quote]Well since the moderators are this topic are convinced they are psychic,[/quote]

  Ms Cleo: Call me NOW!

  Yeah, alot of people do like to pretend they’re “psychic” of sorts.

  [quote]I would like to invite them to join the ranks of the people who beat me up throughout my school career because I was “funny looking” “stuck up” and “weird”…[/quote]

  That’s people for you.

  [quote]I know this won’t be posted, but it was my face on the asphalt while everyone else pointed and laughed, and I’m kinda aspergoid but never mean to anyone — though I was smart and maybe teacher’s pet?[/quote]

  Clearly you’re an “Aspergoid”, your hyper-logic attests to that, but yeah, try not to get emotional over peoples idiocy over the internet, the internet is the playground of fools, here they can be as stupid as they want with no fear of the consequences.

  [quote]Psychology is about being a poor fit with one’s environment, nothing more or less.[/quote]

  Psychology can be helpful, but when it’s not helpful in the hands of the deranged delusional absurdist. Some Psychologists/Psychiatrists are intelligent, rational and reasonable and others are stuck in their fantasy world, just like all other human beings. Everyone is different, not all are the same.

  [quote]It isn’t mind reading, it’s having very good skills in the emotional range.[/quote]

  It depends on who it is, a delusional has no skills, he just thinks he does. A good Pyschologist isn’t delusional though.

  [quote]If someone doesn’t have good emotional skills, claims of such might occur as claims of “magic” or “psychic powers”, [/quote]

  Actually it does border into that when the psuedo-emotional skills range into the absurd. That’s why hard logicers don’t take the absurd seriously, because that’s what it boils down to, “magical thinking”.

  [quote]but it’s definitely in the realm of the real world, not paranormal. [/quote]

  He was making fun of delusional pretenders, he doesn’t think anyone has magical powers (nor do I), he’s speaking about the utter nutballery of believing you can read a person when you’re clearly a self-deluded fool with delusions of granduer.

  [quote]Just because I couldn’t detect whatever she was picking up, doesn’t mean somtehing isn’t there.[/quote]

  Theres a difference between actually “reading” a person and “projecting” your delusions upon them, just because one person does have good emotional IQ doesn’t mean everyone does, some people are deluded and just think they do when they have nothing. The one =/= the majority

  I dismiss statements like that only from people who are clearly deluded, I have emotional IQ too my friend, but I don’t believe I can read into people like a book, because people are not books.

  [quote]One is empathy, the other is hierarchy.[/quote]

  Primitive barbaric hierarchy is disgusting.

  [quote]A better way to put it would be that we don’t pick up social cues automatically: it takes conscious effort. [/quote]

  I don’t think all of us do it like that though, I picked up on stuff pretty quickly, I just disregard it because it’s absurd and the so-called “norms” disregard it too anyway, why do you think they play the “do what I say, not what I do” card? I don’t play the stupid mind-games “norms” like to play and I flat out tell them I won’t play the stupid games. I refuse to play by the absurd rules that mean nothing to the “norms” that created them. Flat out honesty is much better in my opinion, even if it means the “norms” get “butthurt” by my refusal to play “the game” which is nothing but nonsense, it’s strangely “pyschopathic” in itself, I wonder if the delusionals realize they act like the “pyschopaths” they claim to despise?

  [quote]I’m just being pointlessly pedantic.[/quote]

  Strangely enough “norms” see “pedanticy” as “evil”, I fail to see how there is “inappriopriate” hunger for knowledge and to learn. I think being a knowledge glutton is a good thing.

• [Tom]

  #11 Man On Pink Corner: Why don’t you think that objective reporting of facts has a place in scientific papers?

  Ignoring facts is unscientific. Studying, reporting, categorizing, analyzing, questioning and testing facts is the basis of science.

  I really can’t think of anything less scientific than ruling an entire category of facts out of order in scientific papers.

• [Jack]

  Anyone who has sat on a jury (in which the case is proven to be true) dealing with a violent crime can attest there are truly sick people out there.

  Sat on a jury in Brooklyn Criminal Court on on a pretty sick sexual assault case and walking home after giving the “guilty” jury truly freaked me out that night.

  But what I also want to know is if there is a connection between autism and psychopathy. It seems that most people who are autistic can’t deal with the world, so the social manipulation factor is gone. But there air traits that seem quite similar. And not saying people with autism are simply psychopaths, but perhaps they are two sides of the same coin.

  Also, it would be fascinating to see this kind of research done on psychopaths in cultures where honesty is the norm. Like Japanese society.

  Fascinating and frightening.

  PS: Also, what about the world of actors? Kind of odd how people whose whole profession is based on transforming themselves are not mentioned in this piece.

  • [Antinous]

    a connection between autism and psychopathy

    My experience with people with Asperger is that it’s not a personality determinant, but a way of thinking determinant. Faced with a diminished ability to understand subtextual clues, some cope by becoming controlling and angry and some cope by being really nice to everyone. I’d have a hard time relating it to psychopathy.

• [raya]

  Re: skin-crawling sensations

  Have you ever been a room with a psychopath? They’re not making it up. I’ve felt it. It wasn’t some weird, specialized type of reaction triggered only by psychopaths. It was a fairly normal panic response for a situation where you suddenly want to be far, far away and running is not a viable option.

  I think it’s important to note that no one is trying to say we should clinically detect psychopathy by means of skin-crawling sensations. It’s a tool for self-protection, not diagnostics. Psychiatrists and psychologists have jobs that put them in extended contact with a variety of disorders. They’re in a unique position to become vulnerable to manipulative clients.

• [Jack]

  Well, there goes my theory. I would like to demand that Boing Boing post some cut cat videos to counter he horror in my head—and maybe others—after reading this stuff;

  Here’s a fat cat running into a box:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHZUPJji6w8

  Same fat cat running into soda cases:
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPzNl6NKAG0

  Also this cat is a psychopath… For packing tape!
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv8TRbwyN3w

  So soothing. Bless you YouTube!

• [Anonymous]

  I basically have to discount any test that uses promiscuity as a determining factor of whether a person is a psychopath or not.

  Actually, I think the word is used here without the common religious connotation that has completely taken it over in the last years. In this context it simply means a person who frequently uses sex as an instrument for manipulating and harming others as well as compulsively performing sexual actions that are designed only to enhance the psychopath’s self image without any regard of other people’s well-being.

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  Cpt. Tim @2, science is showing us that the mind is affected by the body — not that I was in any doubt on that point — but it doesn’t prove that free will doesn’t exist. I’ve seen too much variability in the ways people approach the same neurological syndromes to not believe in it.

  Man On Pink Corner @4:
  

  Harenski, who is thirty, did not experience the involuntary skin-crawling sensation that, according to a survey conducted by the psychologists Reid and M. J. Meloy, one in three mental-health and criminal-justice professionals report feeling on interviewing a psychopath; in their paper on the subject, Meloy and Meloy speculate that this reaction may be an ancient intraspecies predator-response system.

  Wow, did this article ever take a hard left turn down Woo-Woo Lane.

  I don’t necessarily see that. I find it entirely plausible that mental health and criminal justice professionals could be capable of observing that they’ve experienced an unprecedented and involuntary reaction when interviewing psychopaths.

  I had something like that happen to me when I was working in the Financial Aid office at a large university, only it was people with schizophrenia and related disorders. It was a big, busy office, with students constantly coming and going, but when schizophrenics walked in, it was like someone tapped me on the shoulder and pointed them out to me. For a long time I refused to believe it was happening: give them a chance, they haven’t done anything weird yet et cetera. Then they’d get up to the head of the line, and next thing I knew they’d be telling me that they couldn’t fill out their Financial Aid Forms because Social Security numbers are the Mark of the Beast in Revelations. Eventually I had to admit that I could spot them. Any other conclusion would have been unscientific.

  Psychopaths don’t make my skin crawl. They inspire in me a pre-rational and almost overwhelming urge to be somewhere else, distant from them, in the company of other people, as soon as possible.

  Joe @6, I was relieved when people started writing about sociopaths in the workplace, because I’d noticed they were there, and was weirded out that no one had ever taken notice of it systematically.

  Man On Pink Corner again, @11:
  

  Sorry, but I’m afraid that “involuntary skin-crawling sensations” have no place in a scientific paper.

  You’re saying they should discard observational data because it makes you uncomfortable?

  Involuntary skin-crawlies show up in a lot of places. If that’s what the professionals who work with them experience, that’s what they experience. It’s primary data.

  Pipenta @16: Don’t apologize, it’s a great comment. Psychopaths do a hideously disproportionate amount of damage to the people around them, and they’re always moving on, looking for new pastures.

  Chgoliz @20: Complete agreement there. The pesky little old lady next door would be a monster if she had the resources.

• [Takuan]

  I personally have known several people who came into direct contact with some of the most notorious serial murderers of the past half century. They all describe “coldness”, horripilation and other distinct and tangible reactions to their presence. What disturbs me is those times when I myself have sensed “something” in a random meeting with a stranger never seen again.Who knows what they may have done or went on to do? Another point to consider is that in two of the cases I mention above, the witnesses had on-going and multiple contacts and did not report warning feelings every time. Either the killer could conceal it or the witnesses could switch off their premonition.

  In any case, when you hear warning bells: listen.

• [gfactor]

  Hi there,

  I’m actually a researcher in the lab that this article profiled.

  To give a very brief scoop:

  The measure we use to evaluate psychopathy is highly reliably…and fairly valid. It’s not perfect, but no diagnostic tool is. Just think of ADHD…what a mess of a disorder that is. In comparison, psychopathy is an extremely tightly construed abnormality.

  The psychopath and the serial killer are not synonymous terms. Nor is the psychopath always ‘sick’. In fact, he’s often not violent, and often comes across as quite normal, even charming. The verbal, manipulative facility, combined with a narcissistic, low-anxious personality, are the primary characteristics of the disorder.

  The psychopath is not always created through abuse, like pipenta suggests. Certainly abuse models of psychopathy exist, and are probably true in some cases. But the psychopath is equally often created through nature as much as nurture.

  Finally – the author of the article was not a scientist, but a scientific writer on staff at the New Yorker. Us ‘scientists’ are a little less flashy about the issues…if you have questions, feel free to ask – I’ll give the real scoop: [e-mail]

• [Antinous]

  when schizophrenics walked in, it was like someone tapped me on the shoulder and pointed them out to me.

  I have that exact same thing. I’ll be on a busy street and my head will just snap to one side to look at someone. A minute later they’ll start yelling in Klingon or do something similar. It’s happened dozens of times. They’re clearly putting out some subliminal clues that are strong enough to notice just using peripheral vision.

• [AGF]

  I really liked the whole article – and the skin crawly bits didn’t bother me. There did however, seem to be something a little unusual about the style that made me feel a little weird. A bit like it might be a ghost story or there was going to be a trick at the end. I’m not sure why – just a feeling I got.

• [Anonymous]

  “Successful psychopath” = CEO of a fortune 500 company. ;-P

• [raya]

  @#60 Jackie31337:

  This looks like a classic nature/nurture question to me. The smartest psychiatrist I’ve ever met once speculated to me that psychopathy is genetically inherited, and acts as if it is dominant rather than recessive. Which, taking the simplest view of genetics, would mean that psychopathic children who are raised by their birth parents will have at least one psychopathic parent. I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that psychopaths would be neglectful parents.

• [noen]

  gfactor – How is Lonnie Athens’ work regarded these days? Do his stages still hold? What about the traumatic brain injury theory? (Serial killers being created when daddy throws jr. into the wall.)

  What is most interesting about this subject is the potential conflict with legal and social values. What do we do if/when a psychopath puts forward the legal defense that he suffers from a defect and therefore did not intend to murder that family?

• [Anonymous]

  I basically have to discount any test that uses promiscuity as a determining factor of whether a person is a psychopath or not.

• [fltndboat]

  Proving again that humans are at risk of not growing up fast enough to take care of our planet. It is the Psychopath-in-Chief and the Psycho-Cluster he has empowered, that need this kind of study. Study the leaders, not the losers.

• [Cpt. Tim]

  I’m interested in how criminal justice will evolve as we learn more about the brain as a machine rather than a mystical thing.

  Like the man who became a pedophile and ended up in prison, and then they found a golf ball sized tumor in his head and when it was removed, the impulses vanished.

  Free will is an interesting simulation or illusion but when it comes right down to it, science seems to showing that its little more than that.

• [Takuan]

  is there a parallel species to Homo Sapiens Sapiens?
  Were branches of what we are please to call “early man” psychopathic?

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  Jack @22, I’ll back up Antinous on this one. I know lots of borderline Aspberger’s cases, and they no more lack a sense of moral judgement than any other random assortment of people with whom I’m acquainted.

  In fact, I’d argue that they’re a bit likelier to have a sense of morality. They don’t pick up social rules and cues on their own, so if they’ve assimilated enough of them to function in society, it’s because they’ve worked at it.

  Jack again @24, you asked for a unicorn chaser? Here’s Another Prairie Dog Bites the Dust. (Don’t be put off by the title. The rodent doesn’t actually bite the dust.)

  Antinous @27:
  

  when schizophrenics walked in, it was like someone tapped me on the shoulder and pointed them out to me.

  I have that exact same thing. I’ll be on a busy street and my head will just snap to one side to look at someone. A minute later they’ll start yelling in Klingon or do something similar. It’s happened dozens of times. They’re clearly putting out some subliminal clues that are strong enough to notice just using peripheral vision.

  Yes, that’s it exactly. We’re describing the same experience. I don’t know what it is they’re doing, but it reads loud and clear in my peripheral vision.

• [Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator]

  Takuan, aren’t there individual dogs that have no pack instincts?

• [Takuan]

  when a wolf litters,she watches her cubs. After any that never seem to master pack manners reveal themselves,she snaps their necks with one shake.

• [Man On Pink Corner]

  Teresa, Pipenta:
  

  You’re saying they should discard observational data because it makes you uncomfortable?

  How in the world do you measure an “involuntary skin-crawling sensation” that by definition is subjective to the researcher? How do you control for it? How do you repeat the test that yielded the sensation, or failing that, model the conditions?

  I hate to get all Heinlein on you two, but this is exactly why psychology doesn’t get much respect from practitioners of the “harder” sciences. If you can’t measure something, you can’t draw conclusions about it. You might as well be arguing for Creationism.

• [Takuan]

  double blind tests could be set up, but I’ve seen enough to know some people are just WRONG and I sensed it. I think anecdotal evidence from people who work with such is admissible.

  Further, as I understand it, Dr, Hare has always been concerned about misuse and abuse of his checklist.

  Perhaps the most important and useful thing we can do with this is teach our children how to navigate safely through dangerous reefs.

• [Anonymous]

  “I basically have to discount any test that uses promiscuity as a determining factor of whether a person is a psychopath or not.”

  If you actually read about the PCL-R assessment, you would know that promiscuity is not a “determining” factor in whether a person is psychopath. It is ONE of TWENTY factors that an individual is assessed on with this instrument. You would have to score high on several of those factors to be considered psychopathic.

• [Anonymous]

  try reading Snakes in Suits,When Psychopaths go to WORK

• [Pyros]

  I can’t help but think that the whole idea is dubious no matter what such scientists say. To a person with Proustian sensibilities, nearly everyone is a psychopath.

  People, in general, are preoccupied, if anything, with the thought of immolation where their fellow man is concerned. I, for one, would love to meet someone who isn’t a psychopath.

  Also, what about Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil? You know, the good people who drove entire train loads of people to their deaths.

  Perhaps the hoi polloi are attracted to the myth of the psychopath because it give them absolution?

  Lastly, if we are to accept that psychopathy, if it does exist, springs from organic dysfunction, how then are we to regard the psychopath but with a certain amount of sympathy no matter how seemingly horrendous her deeds may be. It certainly calls in to question our current moral treatment.

• [Man On Pink Corner]

  Harenski, who is thirty, did not experience the involuntary skin-crawling sensation that, according to a survey conducted by the psychologists Reid and M. J. Meloy, one in three mental-health and criminal-justice professionals report feeling on interviewing a psychopath; in their paper on the subject, Meloy and Meloy speculate that this reaction may be an ancient intraspecies predator-response system

  Wow, did this article ever take a hard left turn down Woo-Woo Lane.

• [Man On Pink Corner]

  Yeah, to be specific, I wasn’t objecting to the personality inventory checklist itself. I was objecting to the casual conflation of hinky feelings with actual data, in the same paragraph no less.

  Harenski, who is thirty, did not experience the involuntary skin-crawling sensation that, according to a survey conducted by the psychologists Reid and M. J. Meloy, one in three mental-health and criminal-justice professionals report feeling on interviewing a psychopath; in their paper on the subject, Meloy and Meloy speculate that this reaction may be an ancient intraspecies predator-response system.

  Would you get on an airplane, drive over a bridge, or take a prescription drug designed with this kind of reasoning? Leaping from “skin-crawling sensations” to “intraspecies predator-response systems” isn’t something I can respect as a reader of science lit, in the popular press or otherwise.

• [relain]

  there’s something rather sinister about this article, the implications that psychopathy is rife in society that anyone who’ll look you in the eyes is somehow a moral-void is a little disturbing.

• [Sparky005]

  I don’t care if it’s organic, or a matter of choice. If a person commits horrible acts, and there is no current way of “curing” this compulsion, they need to be separated from the rest of society. Try to complicate it with philosophy all you want. In the end, if someone is committed to harming others, they need to be stopped. Be it a pill, a jail cell, or a .45 caliber double-tap. I have no moral ambiguity with condemning someone who is violent due to an incurable mental problem to imprisonment or death. Is it absolutely tragic? Yes, but much less than the trail of human wreckage that will be left by that person.

  Of course, early detection and treatment brings up some interesting legal and ethical issues. In our society, it seems that having a predisposition to something is pretty much the same as actually doing it.

  What would happen to one of these serial rapist/murderer types if they were cured and could suddenly feel remorse? I mean, it’s like some mythological penance. A man who has half his body on fire at all times, but cannot feel any tactile sensation. He wants to feel the wind, silk, human touch etc. but in the end would only be consumed by the pain of his burning body. Giving these hard core criminals the capacity to emotionally comprehend their acts would be almost an act of cruelty.

• [Joe]

  Relain: I didn’t interpret the author as saying that “anyone who’ll look you in the eyes” is a psychopath, rather that the psychopaths had a particular way of looking you in the eyes, kind of the way a predator looks at prey.

  I’d like to see this guy scan and test white-collar criminals; I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of psychopaths in the board rooms.

• [Carl Rigney]

  In The Gift of Fear Gavin DeBecker talks about survival signals to spot potential violence, and how people talk themselves out of their feeling that something’s wrong and later have cause to regret it. It’s an excellent book, as is Protecting the Gift which is aimed at parents worried about their children.

  The ability to spot schizophrenics is very interesting; I wonder what cues TNH and Antinous are picking up on, and whether its linked to TNH’s noted ability as a troll whisperer.

• [HarshLanguage]

  #37 Man on Pink Corner – What I take from that quote is essentially: “a lot of professionals have reported feeling X in Y circumstance, we got some numbers to see if there was a trend.” It’s valid psychology, and it seems to be a valid application of scientific method, at least from what little I can glean from that paragraph. Physical reactions to subconcious stimuli aren’t woo-woo. I think you’re reading a lot more into it than is there. I’ll give you that there are a lot of bad studies done, sloppy research, and even woo-woo thinking, but you’re assuming too much in this case.

  #31 Teresa – Agreed on the morality question, and in fact, I believe that some background material referenced in that (lousy) Asperger’s “intention” study posted the other day had found exactly that – a relatively strong “moral sense” among those with Asperger’s. The rest of the study was annoying, though, so please excuse me for not going back for precise details.

• [stratosfyr]

  @#34 Man On Pink Corner:

  Subjective experiences are generally measured by asking — also known as “self-report” — in this case a survey. It’s the most effective way of finding out if someone experiences something. Rather like a doctor poking someone and asking if it hurts.

  The subjective experience of an observer is NOT used to make a diagnosis of psychopathy. It’s just an observation. If a chemist said “I haven’t run these samples through a spectrometer yet, but this one looks a little more green and this one looks more blue,” that’s a perfectly valid observation too, but it’s not “hard” science.

  The factors that trigger the “skin-crawling” response will probably be identified and measured eventually. Maybe some psychopaths stare too much, or have something about their body language. Humans are finely tuned instruments to detect the moods of other humans — we have instincts for it and spend our entire lives learning how to do it well. It may be worthwhile to find out the differences between people who experience it and people who don’t. Then again, it may be a waste of time. But counting the number of psychologists who experience something that is frequently reported isn’t a waste.

  Consider the amount of psychology work that still relies on intuition. You have two people in front of you. One says, “I’m feeling a little down.” The other says, “I want to kill myself.” Which one do you send to therapy and which one do you send to the hospital? What if the first is drastically understating things, and the second is just being dramatic?

  Meloy and Meloy speculate that this reaction may be an ancient intraspecies predator-response system.

  (Emphasis mine) – that’s just a fancy way of saying “maybe we evolved a way of guessing that some people are mean.” Obviously I haven’t read the paper itself, but psychologists often stick vague, unproven hypotheses in the conclusion for other people to gnaw on. That doesn’t mean they believe it’s true — just that it might be a direction for future research. Reporting it like that might be a little irresponsible.

• [cherry shiva]

  test the corporations. if they have the same rights as “people”, they should be held to the same mental health standards.

• [Anonymous]

  Well since the moderators are this topic are convinced they are psychic, I would like to invite them to join the ranks of the people who beat me up throughout my school career because I was “funny looking” “stuck up” and “weird”…

  … when I was just trying to get along and make friends (which I never ever managed to do since I was a ‘punching bag’ at every school I ever attended)

  I know this won’t be posted, but it was my face on the asphalt while everyone else pointed and laughed, and I’m kinda aspergoid but never mean to anyone — though I was smart and maybe teacher’s pet?

  Psychology is about being a poor fit with one’s environment, nothing more or less.

• [mdh]

  Pseudonym – Psychopaths are a different breed. Essential elements of humanity are missing/broken in them.

  As individuals, sure. But as a species? What do we lose? Might not be nothing.

• [Anonymous]

  Doesn’t anyone here think that these people are evil because maybe they choose to be so? I mean, I would love to see a vaccine for the prevention of jerks, but I don’t see that coming.

• [Anonymous]

  I hate to get all Heinlein on you two, but this is exactly why psychology doesn’t get much respect from practitioners of the “harder” sciences. If you can’t measure something, you can’t draw conclusions about it. You might as well be arguing for Creationism.

  This is why practitioners of the harder sciences get told to shut their gob when discussing things they don’t know the first thing about. You’re telling me that a field that is fundamentally the study of subjective experience should not admit subjective experience into its study?

  – ACS

• [stratosfyr]

  #4 posted by Man On Pink Corner:

  Wow, did this article ever take a hard left turn down Woo-Woo Lane.

  It’s not really that weird — it’s essentially just intuition. Psychologists have it too. It’s like talking to someone and getting a sense that they’re lying, even though you have no proof — a combination of little tells that you can pick up subconsciously. It’s like reading emotion from facial expressions and tone of voice.

  It takes more than that to make a diagnosis, which is why they make checklists like the PCL-R.

• [FoetusNail]

  Two words for consideration, mirror neurons. Does anyone know why a nine page article about people who lack empathy, does not mention mirror neurons?

• [Nelson.C]

  Sparky @56:
  

  Giving these hard core criminals the capacity to emotionally comprehend their acts would be almost an act of cruelty.

  That sounds like the perfect punishment. And possibly, with a conscience in place, punishment would be the only way for them to extirpate their guilt.

• [Razzle Bathbone]

  @43
  No, you’re thinking about autism. Mirror neurons are crucil for understanding the motivations of others. Failure in this area would cripple a psychopath’s ability to manipulate others.

• [noen]

  Wow, did this article ever take a hard left turn down Woo-Woo Lane.

  It’s “woo” for biologists to apply to humans what they apply to every other species on earth? We are a part of the natural order, no excuses, no exceptions.

• [noen]

  Bullies may get kick out of seeing others in pain

  In the aggressive teens, areas of the brain linked with feeling rewarded — the amygdala and ventral striatum — became very active when they observed pain being inflicted on others.

  But they showed little activity in an area of the brain involved in self-regulation — the medial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction — as was seen in the control group.

  “It is entirely possible their brains are lighting in the way they are because they experience seeing pain in others as exciting and fun and pleasurable,” Lahey said.

  “We need to test that hypothesis more, but that is what it looks like,” he said.

  Young Republicans.

• [Nix]

  TNH@#32,

  [Aspergers cases] don’t pick up social rules and cues on their own, so if they’ve assimilated enough of them to function in society, it’s because they’ve worked at it.

  I’m afraid I have to take issue with this. Aspies do pick up social rules and cues: one of the reasons the syndrome gets less noticeable we grow older is specifically that we’ve determined ways to act sort of semi-normal. A better way to put it would be that we don’t pick up social cues automatically: it takes conscious effort. An awful lot of conscious effort. (Some things, like that reading expressions from eye muscle patterns trick, never seems to improve: the information must be derived in other ways. Fortunately this is to some extent possible.)

  (So your overall point stands. I’m just being pointlessly pedantic.)

• [FoetusNail]

  Thanks, Razzle Bathbone, that tends to make some sense. But I can’t help thinking there must be something going on there, how can they then inflict so much suffering? Are they just trying to feel something by hurting others?

• [jphilby]

  Somewhat interesting story. But it really sets off my skeptic-meter.

  Is this ‘test’ REALLY any more effective than the once-vaunted IQ test, or the once-vaunted Lie Detector (sold complete with overtones suggesting scientific infallibility?)

  It’s easy to talk to a multiple-serial-killer and deduce that he’s a psychopath. It would also be easy to use such a test to condemn someone (otherwise innocent) to a life in living hell.

  Until there are alternative tests to confirm false positives, such a device is a potential weapon.

• [TEKNA2007]

  fltndboat@1:

  Proving again that humans are at risk of not growing up fast enough to take care of our planet. It is the Psychopath-in-Chief and the Psycho-Cluster he has empowered, that need this kind of study. Study the leaders, not the losers.

  I’ve always thought the ones in suits to be high-functioning psychopaths, the ones in orange jumpsuits low-functioning.

  Speaking in broad generalities.

• [Sekino]

  I have no problem believing that psychopaths are that common. I’ve met two already (bearing in mind that all of them aren’t violent criminals) and they fit the description perfectly. Charming, eloquent, entirely and remorselessly self-serving.

  One of them conned a good friend of mine out of over $6000 over three years. Crashed on his couch for free and pretty much took over his life. He acted like the best buddy who was down on his luck. But the stories out of that guy to justify his behaviour were priceless, so I guess we got a bit back in the form of sick entertainment.

  Once we discovered the crowds of women he’d used and dumped, buddies he’d tapped dry for cigarettes, booze and fancy suits, a teenage son he had all but abandonned (left him at the grandmother’s place for a couple of weeks that turned into 7 years) and thousands he owed the government for filing a fake insurance employment request, we understood this was a professional whose real full time job was using others. I was astonished how he felt he was entitled to it all when we confronted him. He actually told us straight faced that we were lousy people for putting money before friendship and judging him.

  My friend was truly believing he could change his buddy(and I did too, for a year or so), make him see the light, kill him with kindness. I was a fair and noble attempt, but that’s exactly what these people are after: giving, caring people to milk for all they are worth. They know how to pick people vulnerabilities (no matter how intelligent or astute, my friend being a 36 year-old with a degree in History) and use them to the max.

  It sounds like a ridiculous situation, but it was extremely painful and frustrating to watch a great friend being fooled and used. I still feel bad to imagine who’s the poor people he’s juicing right now.

  Now I understand there might eventually be a need to see these people as sick persons as opposed to walking, breathing malignant cancers; but it will take a long time (in my case). I try to be fair, but I’m only human.

• [Tom]

  The distinction between “hard” and “soft” science is an artifact left over from a historical misunderstanding of the nature of logical inference. No Bayesian would make such a distinction because we understand that the underlying logic of science is the same in all cases: building conceptual systems and finding evidence relative to them that increases (or decreases!) the posterior probability of propositions of interest.

  Data are data, and one human’s response to another human are data. The notion that our experiences are “subjective” and therefore “not real” or “not measurable” is unjustifiable Cartesian dualism: it assumes a subject/object dichotomy that we know is unprofitable. Humans are just another physical system, interacting in complex ways with their surroundings, not metaphysically separable into a different kind of stuff at all.

• [Man On Pink Corner]

  #7,#8: Sorry, but I’m afraid that “involuntary skin-crawling sensations” have no place in a scientific paper.

• [TEKNA2007]

  the ones in orange jumpsuits low-functioning.

  Well, that and Internet forum trolls.

• [jphilby]

  “I’ve always thought the ones in suits to be high-functioning psychopaths”

  I know what you’re saying.

• [spencerluck]

  Actually, after reading this, I’ve probably worked with 1 or 2 of this type.

  1 of the guys I met awhile ago was probably the Single Most Intelligent person I’ve met, ever. -Easily the most facile Liar I’ve ever seen. Casually improvised lying, forged documents, you name it.
  +A guy who had the vibe like you’d never ever want to piss him off. I felt like a remora fish swimming around a shark.

  Pretty sure I went to school with a few sociopaths, too.

• [GregLondon]

  Well since the moderators are this topic are convinced they are psychic,

  Psychic? It isn’t mind reading, it’s having very good skills in the emotional range. If someone doesn’t have good emotional skills, claims of such might occur as claims of “magic” or “psychic powers”, but it’s definitely in the realm of the real world, not paranormal.

  My wife and I will be at a party and she’ll quietly point me to someone across the room and whisper to me something like “I wonder what she’s so sad about” or whatever and half an hour later the person is running out of the room crying.

  I learned to stop dismissing statements like that from her. Just because I couldn’t detect whatever she was picking up, doesn’t mean somtehing isn’t there.

  I would like to invite them to join the ranks of the people who beat me

  Well, there is somewhat of a difference between my wife wondering from across the room why someone is so strange and someone getting beaten up about for being strange.

  One is empathy, the other is hierarchy.

• [soupisgoodfood]

  @Cpt. Tim

  Sorry, but science has not proven very much at all about free will except to shape the way we think about it. I’ve seen several tests that claim to prove something about free will and none of them do, as they make assumptions about what free will is, not to mention the experiments may be fundamentally flawed to begin with as all their test subjects are willing participants.

• [FoetusNail]

  Noen, thanks for the link. Your comment must have posted while I was deciding what to write. You are one of those here, whose comments always add to the discussion.

  Damn, Tom! Sometimes I wish I had gone to school for more than a few minutes.

• [pseudonym]

  I have worked in corrections for years, including psychiatric facilities, and can tell you this is valuable work. Psychopaths are a different breed. Essential elements of humanity are missing/broken in them.

• [mathilda]

  on #60:

  some days ago i came across For Your Own Good, a book of alice miller, a psychologist from switzerland who researches education and the mental development during childhood. she starts with giving a comprehension of educational values of the past, which our parents may have been and our grandparent for sure have been raised up with. examples are extended citations of literature of that time. it seems like common sense was preventing the child from developing vehemency, disobedience, craving, dishonesty and malignity and the common methods were lying, beating, humiliation, love deprivation and delayed/curtailed satisfaction of other elementary needs. when mothers showed too much empathy and mercy for their child’s desires their love was ‘ape-like’ and it sure resultet in the child’s inability to function in society.

  now if i imagine someone who had never learned to sufficiently regard his/her own feelings i see that person being insensitive towards factors which would make me cautious. in fact the more intelligent a person the higher the ability to create customized causal structures and thereby blank out signs of mischief.

  on#64:

  for some reason i’m not convinced by the sole genetic explanation. it sounds too much like an easy answer. abnormal behaviour can just as well be taught to the children. i mean they pick up their parent’s manners subconsciously. and i can see how a faulty rewarding system in the brain, as mentioned in #46, plays a big role and that can have lot more reasons than genetics.

  i’d like to know how someone can be so very empathetic and at the same time lack moral boundaries and solidarity. normally empathy does the opposite because you feel bad about treating others like you don’t wanna be treated.

• [nanuq]

  “Until there are alternative tests to confirm false positives, such a device is a potential weapon.”

  As it happens, that’s precisely the problem that diagnosed psychopaths face in courts. Offenders who have been diagnosed as psychopaths usually get the book thrown at them regardless of the actual circumstances of the case. Forensic professionals need to be extremely cautious about using the p word in their testimony.