Some anecdotes:
When the granddaughter injured her foot and was unable to do the balance beam at the gymnastics gym, her grandmother saw her work out on the pull up bar and do thirty pull-ups in a row.
The grandmother came downstairs one afternoon when the granddaughter and her brother and her parents were staying in their home. Right near, one of the outlets there was a fresh hole kicked in the drywall. The granddaughter said "Yes, I kicked the wall but I don't know where that hole came from".
The granddaughter was in the car with her parents and said something shocking that made everyone upset (it wasn't specified). She then got out of the car and started pummeling the hood.
The fit of rage at the end is not necessarily associated with sociopathy. That kind of lack of control is common with things like fetal alcohol syndrome and head injury syndromes.
I raised a sociopath. He's 30 now. We're close and get along well. My other son is not a sociopath, but has a violent temper. Neither has a criminal record and I find articles like the one under discussion rather unsophisticated and annoying.
My sons are okay in part because I never expected them to be born knowing things like "Lying is bad." One child went through a lying stage. The other did not. I successfully broke him of lying because I viewed it as "Wow, you dumb kid who has no idea how social stuff works" rather than "You evil badly behaved child doing bad things on purpose."
Surgeons typically lack empathy. It is what allows them to cut into people. I could never do that job.
The guy is probably an excellent scientist because he's a sociopath. The article doesn't address that fact.
It may do a great disservice to someone who is really suffering to get the label sociopath or psychopath undeservedly. But I also know there are people (I personally have dealt with) that just want to destroy you, and hate everyone...
That's an interesting theory. How long have you been working in the field, how many psychopaths have you met, and what is the strongest evidence for your theory?
The learned abusive-behavior, can also be how they relieve their frustration, and abusers themselves often started out as abuse victims. This is inheritable behavior; unrelated to genetics even.
None of them seem relevant to how the granddaughter sees other people. Perhaps the grandmother it's mis-labeling what are otherwise anger/coping-issues?
My diagnosis: The granddaughter is being subjected to emotional abuse by one or more of her 'care givers' and acting out in this manner as she lacks the emotional maturity and verbal skills to express herself.
But what on Earth does that have to do with sociopathy?
There's lots of good information, but you need some basic background information for context. It is hard to establish that because so much communication is rooted in weird attempts at signalling "I'm a good person who isn't guilty of what you are accusing me of!"
The reality is that sociopaths have very high IQs and serial killers are typically small business owners, in part because it allows them freedom and control over their schedule that a full time employee typically lacks.
But when I have tried to comment on that on HN in the past, it tends to not go over well because people feel I am saying "Businessmen are evil asshats inclined to be serial killers" which isn't what I am saying at all.
Serial killers tend to have certain traits. But that doesn't mean having certain traits is some one way non refundable ticket to serial killer land.
It's interesting to me how those traits predispose individuals towards certain paths, some positive and some not. But traits are not some Greek Tragedy style inescapable destiny. And that's a really hard thing to talk about.
You might find it helpful to look into brain research rather than psychological research. A lot of psychological research is really poorly done. But brain research has a lot of interesting tidbits based on some very solid experiments.
You might also look for historical case files about individuals, plus read biographies and fiction with an eye towards getting insight into individuals and how they experience the world.
Yes, people who are not neurotypical simply operate differently, so differently that a lot of what is written on the subject is biased to the point of uselessness.
You might find the writings of Temple Grandin of interest. You might find it useful to join online parent support groups and lurk. You might get good book recommendations out of that, plus useful anecdotal information.
Best.
But my understanding from an Intro to Psych class that I had years ago is that serial killers typically have six traits, including high IQ, plus other traits we would consider sociopathic, like lack of empathy.
Generally speaking, if someone has a low IQ, I just consider them to be mentally retarded and not pathological. I don't know why anyone would call someone sociopathic who lacks the mental faculty to comprehend the consequences of their actions.
I've never seen the claim that serial killers tend to be small business owners, do you have a source for that?
The clinical terms [1] are Dissocial Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Anti-Social Personality Disorder are most related, though many aspects of "psychopaths" can't be measured - for example how do accurately and repeatably measure "lack of empathy?"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_B_personality_disorder...
There are many mental disorders. Psychopathy is just one of them. Not every crazy person is a psychopath; not everyone who harms others is a psychopath. Psychopathy is a specific type of a disorder, not an umbrella term for "everything I dislike".
The best book I found on this topic is "The Psychopath Code" by Pieter Hintjens.
In real life, I met 2 people I would bet are psychopaths, in the clinical meaning of the word. I won't try to provide a short description, because short descriptions are not good enough to explain; if you didn't have the same kind of experience, you would probably just round the words to something else you are already familiar with.
A real psychopath is something like a spider in a human skin, with very good human-role-playing abilities. Your first experience is most likely going to be "this is a charming person". Only after longer interaction you will unconsciously start noticing patterns that feel somehow weird. But when you express doubt, there is always a good explanation and you will feel guilty for doubting afterwards. Only when they attack you, you will find yourself in a conflict with a non-human intelligence. And then you know that if you try to explain to someone who didn't have the same experience, they will never understand.
Psychopaths seem like masters of manipulation, so it makes sense to ask why this doesn't translate into a huge evolutionary advantage: why they don't already make 100% of the population. But it seems like an important part of their charm is being unknown. When you meet your first psychopath, they can manipulate you as they wish, because you have no idea what you are interacting with. Meet the second or the third one, however, and you have a chance to recognize the pattern. So when they exceed some fraction of the population, normies probably learn to recognize them and start killing them. But when they become rare again, they again get the advantage of being unknown.
A psychopath is simply a person who only has a certain subset of human emotions. That doesn't define what they will do; just like being a neurotypical humans does not define how one behaves. It just makes certain predatory behaviors more likely, because it removes some reasons not to do them (such as empathy) and adds some skills, such as being a better liar (humans are usually quite bad at lying, because they unconsciously display little signs of their emotions; but this does not happen when you simply do not have that kind of emotion).
This.
I think it's important to emphasize that those "good explanations" are usually lies, as lies are at the foundation of all the harm that psychopaths cause.
Normal people avoid lying if possible, psychopaths on the other hand are master liars and they make use of lies just whenever a lie serves them better than the truth.
The manipulation tactics that psychopaths use to reach their goals are also just based on lies. You can't be manipulated if you don't believe the lies. Of course psychopaths will primarily serve you lies that you want to believe but that doesn't make them more truthful.
Bottom line, if you want to stay safe from psychopaths, keep it like Reagan: "Trust but verify". And at the first sign of things not adding up, end the relationship and any contact.
It still throws me off, you have to basically vet or ignore any factual statement they make because it might either not have any correlation with reality at all or, if it is a statement about their intentions and feelings, they will not remember what they said in the future anyway and say they always had the new opinion.
This also happens with personality-disordered people (particularly, Narcissists, and especially the Borderline PD people I know . . . they SEEM manipulative, and they technically are, but they're manipulating for a reason that's usually ego-defensive).
Psychopaths, on the other hand, will lie for no damn reason at all that makes any sense to a sane person.
How about 'at the first proof of things not adding up'? Verification works both ways. If an isolated incident smells funny but checks out on investigation then maybe it was just a misinterpretation.
Psychopathy is neither an umbrella disorder nor a specific disorder. Psychopathy is, like "insanity," a term used by laypeople. The reason why we use antisocial personality disorder, or unspecified personality disorder, or other similar clinical terms to refer to some of the qualities on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist is exactly because of the (correct) point you're making here:
> It's frustrating how so many people redefine "psychopath" just to make a stronger statement about someone they don't like. When everyone is a "psychopath", no one is. If the word is supposed to mean something, it needs a narrower definition.
Unfortunately, you're right, this nonsense precluded Hare's term from ever being useful, much like the term "heart attack" is not actually a useful medical diagnosis because it's been co-opted by the public. Which brings me to my next points:
> In real life, I met 2 people I would bet are psychopaths, in the clinical meaning of the word.
There is no clinical meaning of the word, because it's not a clinical term. Further, this description, while occupying a place in the popular zeitgeist of psychopathy, is incorrect:
> A real psychopath is something like a spider in a human skin, with very good human-role-playing abilities. Your first experience is most likely going to be "this is a charming person". Only after longer interaction you will unconsciously start noticing patterns that feel somehow weird. But when you express doubt, there is always a good explanation and you will feel guilty for doubting afterwards. Only when they attack you, you will find yourself in a conflict with a non-human intelligence. And then you know that if you try to explain to someone who didn't have the same experience, they will never understand.
Let's suppose you're referring to someone with a diagnosable disorder, such as antisocial personality disorder. The literature does not show that any such disorder uniformly presents with exceptional charisma, nor any of the other exciting qualities usually lumped in with psychopathy, like high intelligence. Popular depiction in the media and outright confirmation bias have encouraged this description, but it doesn't match with how most people meeting the bar for the diagnosable disorders closest to Hare's "psychopathy" actually are.
> Psychopaths seem like masters of manipulation, so it makes sense to ask why this doesn't translate into a huge evolutionary advantage: why they don't already make 100% of the population. But it seems like an important part of their charm is being unknown. When you meet your first psychopath, they can manipulate you as they wish, because you have no idea what you are interacting with. Meet the second or the third one, however, and you have a chance to recognize the pattern. So when they exceed some fraction of the population, normies probably learn to recognize them and start killing them. But when they become rare again, they again get the advantage of being unknown.
Again, none of this has a basis in clinical literature. Sometimes they are exceptionally good at manipulation, but in many cases their criminal behavior enjoys prolonged success because of chance circumstances, like bureaucratic incompetence in local law enforcement (e.g. not following up on reports of unsettling behavior by several neighbors).
Here's the overarching point: trying to rigorously define sociopathy or psychopathy in the clinical context is doomed to failure. It's even more doomed if you use descriptions like "a spider in a human's skin." There are two problems here:
1. Trying to formalize colloquial terminology with clinical definitions when they have been so overloaded by popular representation has the side effect of allowing ad hominem attacks that arbitrarily use the word to be somewhat legitimized, and
2. It does a disservice to people with actual diagnosable disorders people associate with sociopathy, who do not universally present with the qualities you have listed here. It also demonizes them, especially if they are socially inept and nonviolent.
I guess I am fortunate that I only met one. Hope I never meet another one.
What makes you so sure? Given the history of these fields I would not be surprised either way.
Very strange. Hooray for Reader Mode.
On Mozilla, I recommend to use Reader Mode.
Am I a psychopath? Nah, but probably somewhere on the “spectrum” if you like. It could be undiagnosed ASD or adult ADD or any number of other things. But I don’t think that’s even necessarily the right question. All that matters is the reality of living with the mind you’ve got; being labelled with a “condition” just gives you some finer instruments like therapy and medication to help accomplish that.
Regardless, glad you're coping. If it's ADHD though, the meds can really make a huge difference in quality of life. But I understand if you'd rather not seek treatment when the alternative is being diagnosed with a personality disorder.
You’re right that I’m concerned about possible diagnoses. I’d like to know what’s “different” about me, but if it’s “bad” and would be used as justification to treat me with suspicion and remove my agency, then I’d rather nobody else know. :P
I wonder if anyone tried to tell him before he did the scan.
Some people howl and wail about a paper cut, others will continue through the day with a broken limb as if nothing happened. I am sure the same can be said for mental ailments; some people can't function with even the slightest sad thought, others can apparently become great scientists under the strongest psychopathy.
In this guy's case - he clearly does feel some dis-ease about his body. Whether or not the medical community agrees doesn't really matter, we have no ability to measure the mind, so we have to go off of what people tell us.
The biggest problem I see with this guy is that he's using the people around him as part of his therapy, whether or not they want to be a part of it.
That's not true. We have no tools to study the mind like we study ballistics, with strict mathematical formalities, but we certainly can study other people's minds, based on what they say and do. And regarless, we don't have to take their word for it.
He readily admits he's quite narcissistic.
I'm assuming you mean plastic.
This is what he says:
> My bias is that even though I work in growth factors, plasticity, memory, and learning, I think the whole idea of plasticity in adults—or really after puberty—is so overblown.
To conflate psychopath with hardcore -NTJ is to demonize hardcore -NTJ's, which can actually be a very valuable flavor of human for society. We should judge people by their impact crater, not by the perculiarities of their brain scans.
If you look at the psychopathy questionnaires, they have a heavy focus on the unrepentant predator side of things (e.g. https://openpsychometrics.org/tests/LSRP.php). The author does not sound like an unrepentant predator, so I think without the benefit of seeing his brain scan, few psychologists/psychiatrists would diagnose him as a psychopath.
Why are you sure of that?
The hunch is because stories like this https://www.quora.com/What-is-known-about-Elon-Musks-long-ti... about Elon Musk are not uncommon.
I worry that violence breeds violence, literally. What will happen to kids growing up in Syria today, where effectively mass abuse takes place (unless different kinds of abuse have different effects)? What will happen to kids growing up in the U.S. and Europe today, where they experience the constant bombardment of hate, either by observation, participation, or as victims of it?
EDIT: How many extra abusers are we creating in the next generation, who can pass it down to their kids, etc. ... On the hopeful side, violence has decreased in the world over time; we can make make progress if we want to.
Psychopaths can be easily diagnosed thorough a brain scan.
Or a more likely narrative: A person compared pictures and interpreted them wrong.
Unless the enemy infantry and fire-support are utterly incompetent or horribly outnumbered, the vast majority of such 18-year-olds will be killed in action. (And in the outnumbering case, the younger infantry are likely to be lower-rank and therefore could be easily selected for the more dangerous tasks.)
What consequences remain, then, of using 18-year-olds instead of 25-year-olds? Is the author actually implying that 18-year-olds' emotional deficiencies make them less competent as infantry?
