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.
Your understanding is incorrect. Serial killers do not typically have high IQs.[1] In fact they have normal IQs on average, and typically present themselves within a standard deviation of the norm.
The high IQ serial killer is a popular meme, but is ultimately unfounded.
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1.http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Serial%20Killer%20Information...
Real serial killers are average intelligence, chased by cops with average intelligence. They get caught for the same reasons that get other criminals collared. They get sloppy, and they fall into predictable patterns, or the cops get lucky. The only reason they can commit the same crime multiple times is that real investigative police work is difficult without CSI-style magical technology. Most people could formulate a simple set of rules that would keep their crimes separate from their public identity--until one of them hits a corner case and leaks critical information.
Don't burgle houses with dogs. Always burn the clothes you wore. Never look inside the package. Use encryption and dead drops. Put thermite on incriminating storage devices. Never work the same postal code twice. Don't work with a pimp. Always pay the boss exactly what you owe. Don't surface the submarine until you get within 50m of the floating dock. Wives and kids are off limits. Don't spend your share conspicuously. Don't sample the goods. Don't talk about Project Mayhem. &c. &c. &c.
It doesn't require mastermind-level plotting. The hardest part about crime is finding a person willing to do it. A lack of empathy goes a long way towards that, and an unwillingness to take responsibility for the consequences of one's actions gets even closer. The smart criminals don't murder people; instead they go into real-estate fraud, money laundering, and insider trading. The money is better and the prosecutions rarer.
The piece you link to lists the lowest IQ as Simon Pirela with an IQ of 57. I found the following two pieces about Pirela:
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-3rd-circuit/1874807.html
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2004-05-02/news/040502046...
He was apparently involved in four murders, but I am failing to find good details. From what I am reading of the one case where I can find a few details, you could conclude he was pressured into helping commit murder by other people and this occurred in part due to his low IQ. They commuted the death sentence due to his disability. So even the law doesn't hold him fully responsible.
The research you cite lists people as serial killers who killed at least two people. I don't think this is really what most people have in mind when talking about serial killers. Other research defines it differently, only including people who have killed at least three people.
Saying that someone typically has a high IQ doesn't mean they always have a high IQ. If you drop the very low figure of Simon Pirela's 57 IQ from the data, I imagine that would substantially change the means, medians, etc. cited.
My best understanding is that serial killers are typically bright. And the link you have provided is not really compelling evidence to the contrary.
I have spent part of my afternoon looking at this information because a. I did take Intro to Psych a long time ago, so perhaps what I know is outdated and b. I have a sincere interest in knowing what the truth is. That matters far more to me than winning internet arguments. I'm not here to argue with anyone anyway. That's not what motivates me.
But I'm really not finding your source compelling. So my mind has not been changed. I see no reason to believe the stated conclusion of this piece is better information than what I have previously been told. In fact, it looks pretty sketchy to me.
I can also give a personal citation of my own if that might help convince you. My Dad is a clinical psychologist who gives lectures on Conduct Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder, and does work for the courts evaluating the mental competency of defendants. He's the one who first told me there is no correlation between serial killers and intelligence.
Your understanding is incorrect. But I read How to Lie With Statistics too, so I'm happy to help you with more sources for your perusal. Keep in mind that merely invoking How to Lie With Statistics does not refute a statistical analysis, you actually have to identify the problem.
1. This document goes into much greater depth about the statistics you're criticizing: http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Serial%20Killer%20Information..., including a coverage of serial killers with 2 or more versus 3 or more victims.
2. The FBI's profile of serial killers, from their behavioral science unit, in which they explicitly call out the popular conception of high IQ serial killers as being a myth: https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/serial-murde...
3. This study conducts a meta analysis of published literature that finds no correlation between verbal intelligence and traits traditionally associated with psychopathy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28836093/ (also on bioRxiv if you'd like to read the non-paywalled version).
4. This study finds that, for a set of intelligence metrics and psychopathy checklist traits, psychopathy and intelligence are orthogonal: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0093854807309806
5. For good measure, since you like popular media like true crime TV, I'll throw in a Scientific American article for you: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/5-myths-about-ser...
> But I'm really not finding your source compelling. So my mind has not been changed.
I suppose I should be transparent with you: I don't debate with people online to persuade them, I debate with people online to persuade the audience. I don't particularly mind if you're convinced, but it is important to me that misinformation not be spread unchallenged. So now we're at a crossroads. I've provided empirical evidence from a variety of cited sources, and you've provided an anecdote from an undergraduate course you took years ago. My sources might be incorrect! The beauty of science is that you can challenge its findings. I welcome you to challenge the sources I've provided as well (though I'd remind you that you've continually abstained from providing any of your own). But if you don't, that's also totally fine, because I think I've sufficiently demonstrated my point either way. Considering your lukewarm dismissal of an academic dataset based on a disagreement with one particular data point out of 206, it appears true crime television and your recollection of an old psych class are better authorities than published research.
I can't find info on the other 204. I see 2 names listed, one a famous case I already had heard about. So I tried to find details on the only other data point where I was provided a name and came up short on the kind of info I would like to see.
Your comments are not written in a good faith fashion. I don't plan to engage you further.
And there are plenty of psychiatrists who treat sociopathy as such. It can cause the sort of impairment cognizable by the DSM, especially as children when the measure of impairment is different than as an adult (e.g. "unruly child", something that would be non-sense once they reach the age of majority). And in those cases while it might be formally treated under the rubric of Anti-Social Personality Disorder, clinicians understand that treatment (in as much as its treatable at all) requires understanding sociopaths as a distinct class with a very distinct pathology.
Sociopath in the vernacular does often connote a serial killer. Fair enough. But there's plenty of literature, for professionals and laymen, that discusses sociopathy in clinical, well-defined terms.
FWIW, AFAIU I don't think there's any real debate about whether sociopathy exists as a concrete human phenomenon. The debate is largely how big the umbrella--do we only include those who are "incurable" (i.e. neurobiologically lack the capacity for empathy, either at birth or from a combination of nature and nurture), or those which behave as-if they lack such capacity, but where the capacity is simply suppressed for other reasons. And of course, this begs the question of what, exactly, is empathy. Like sociopath, I think most agree that empathy is a thing (and much more concretely than, say, "love"). But is "cognitive empathy" a thing? And given these questions, how accurate can we ever hope to get in particular cases?
FWIW, here's a good, recent radio interview discussing a special clinic in Wisconsin that has seem good results treating sociopaths--not in making them stop being sociopaths who harm people, but at least in minimizing their harm to a level below that which is considered criminal.
https://www.npr.org/2017/05/24/529893128/scientists-develop-...
Of course, most sociopaths are already non-violent. Empathy seems to be but one evolutionary mechanism for checking violence and dampening violent tendencies. It's not the sole mechanism and might not even be the most important.
Sociopathy is not a clinical term, despite Robert Hare's research into the subject. I have spoken to psychologists and psychiatrists about this, as you're recommending - they only use terminology like "sociopathy" insofar as they use terminology like "insanity." It helps them quickly invoke a set of peripherally familiar traits when they're speaking to a lay audience, like clients or law enforcement.
The entire purpose of a clinical term is to label a disease or disorder. There's no such thing as a clinical term not being documented in clinical reference material, because that's implicitly definitional. Antisocial personality disorder is the clinical label for traits which are usually bundled together under the colloquial term "sociopathy" because "sociopathy" is just that - colloquial. For the same reason the legal insanity defense doesn't qualify it as a clinical term, psychologists do not actually use sociopathy because it's far too imprecise.
> Sociopath in the vernacular does often connote a serial killer. Fair enough. But there's plenty of literature, for professionals and laymen, that discusses sociopathy in clinical, well-defined terms.
Can you cite literature intended for a professional audience that actually uses sociopathy as a clinical term? Using sociopath in popular science books or books targeted to a lay audience doesn't count. That sociopathy occupies a zeitgeist among a lay audience is exactly why it's not used in a clinical setting. It has too many associations and inconsistencies that do not lend itself to a rigorous analysis, and is often abused to refer to whatever set of qualities someone wants to attribute to another party.
This might come across as pedantry, but I find it very frustrating when words like "sociopathy" or "psychopathy" or even "insanity" are all claimed to be clinical terminology. Claiming they are dilutes the clarity of actual diagnosable disorders in discussion, and somewhat legitimizes ad hominem attacks involving these terms. The terms are fun as a popular reference or for joking incredulity, but there is a serious lack of self awareness among all of the comments in this thread which keep trying to define and redefine terms which have no clinical definition.
My sense of the conversation was that the term evoked precisely the same concepts in both our minds (even if his had more nuance and depth), and nothing at all as a muddled as "insanity". I wanted to ask more questions but I figured, what was the point. All he could do would be to confirm what I've read and reiterate the open questions and debates.
"Clinical" is not defined by the degree of accuracy or precision relative to the objective truth of a phenomenon. Depending on the state of the science a clinical term could be extremely fuzzy or perhaps even an ontological misstep--i.e. a grouping of unrelated phenomena, or an overly restrictive grouping. But it can be still be a clinical term serving a clinical role.
Regarding the literature,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=sociopathy
I'll let those search results speak for themselves. If we're being pedantic I think many of them make my case. But in fairness those results taken as a whole probably augur in favor of the term "sociopathy" being, at best, borderline clinical.
Psychopath is a clinical term. Sociopath is not.
And I don't really want to discuss this any further with folks nitpicking my comments. The individual I was addressing has replied and explained the reason for their interest and I have replied to that. So I plan to step away from this discussion since I don't think it's at all constructive and I don't like how I am being addressed.
No, it isn't. "Antisocial personality disorder", "dissocial personality disorder", "unspecified personality disorder", etc - these are all clinical terms. Neither psychopathy nor sociopathy are clinical terms. They are colloquial terms used variously for many things, and unfortunately people tend to use them inconsistently.
> And I don't really want to discuss this any further with folks nitpicking my comments.
It's not nitpicking to point out actual inaccuracies. This isn't pedantry, and thus far you've defended your points by citing 1) "true crime" television, 2) an intro to psychology class you took "years ago", and 3) your experience as a parent.
So, I think you need to back up a step and figure out what your point is.
When I use the term sociopath, I generally am talking about people who:
1. Lack empathy
2. Are narcissistic
3. Are manipulative
4. Do not have some innate sense of morality
5. Are very intelligent.
This fits with traits listed in the article under discussion. It fits with what I learned in a college class, Intro to Psychology, about traits typical of serial killers. It fits with what I have heard in true crime shows profiling serial killers.
So you and I are not on the same page, which is okay because it isn't a clinically defined term. But you and you are also not on the same page, and that makes it really hard to meaningfully engage you in discussion.
Again, serial killers do not tend to have higher IQ than the general population. It is a popular misconception, but it is incorrect all the same.
I highly recommend not basing opinions on true crime shows.
EDIT: I sincerely apologize, it was not my intention to insult you. I included that last line as a way to knock down one of your supporting arguments, not as a personal attack, or to imply that true crime shows were the reason you have these opinions. I actually originally had that section also rebutting your citation of an intro to psych class (how I'm guessing you took that class a while ago, the field has changed a lot since then, and depending on the exact year you might have been taking classes while sociopathy was a clinically defined term, etc) but I cut it down for the sake of brevity. That's an explanation, mind you, not an excuse. The intention of my words are irrelevant, all the matters is how they are received. I really am sorry, and I don't mean to belittle you or your experiences.
That's why, whether the effect is desired, the final result is constraining. You cannot lower someone's credibility non-insultingly.
As already stated, I have taken college classes where this was touched upon. I have raised two children with a lot of personal challenges and I've read quite a lot of stuff.
It's fine for you to disagree with me. But you are being personally insulting for no real reason.
So I plan to step away from further discussion with you. If you take additional personal potshots at me, my lack of reply is not some sort of confirmation that these low blows are in any way accurate.
