Psychopaths among us
hare.org
hare.org
Nice, reverse psychopathy.
Game theory can derive this result. John Maynard Smith introduced the idea of a evolutionarily stable strategy. The idea is to use the classic game theory payoff matrix successively to determine a stable mix of strategies used by the population. Some payoff matrix aren't stable since one of the strategies can dominate the others and causing the dominated strategy to be extinct in the population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy
The types of strategy typically discussed are:
* Doves (always peaceful)
* Hawks (always attack)
* Bully (feign attack)
* Retaliator (peaceful until attacked)http://www.amazon.com/Sociopath-Next-Door-Martha-Stout/dp/07...
Indeed, this book changed my perception of human nature -- some people are un-reformable. Most of them aren't serial killers, they're just dicks who get their rocks off by controlling other people. Think your asshole boss, or a jerk you knew who was always using people.
It's ridiculous to suggest that 1 in 25 people could be a sociopath. Sociopathy is a disorder, a mental illness, a way in which someone can differ from the norm. If it would affect 4% of the population, it would be an essential part of the norm. Instead of labeling these people as 'sociopaths', why not accept that not everyone has the empathic abilities we'd hope for? Why not accept that, in spite the lack of empathic ability, such people can still lead meaningful lives and can care for others? Calling them 'sociopaths' is just another way of dehumanizing those we don't like, so we don't have to face to darker sides of our own humanity.
You don't know that sociopathy is a mental illness or disorder. That was also explained in the article. For all you know someone who achieves universal enlightenment might become a sociopath because he/she realizes that we all eventually die and nothing that happens in this world matters, or something like that.
In fact I'd say it's simply an effect of a different world view, and the ones getting caught are the dumber/impulsive ones while the smarter ones are the ones we label as "assholes."
You don't know that sociopathy is a mental illness or disorder.
Neither sociopathy nor psychopathy is listed as a diagnosis in the DSM IV or IDC 10 (the current canonical lists of diagnoses for mental health). Both are listed as descriptors to "Dissocial Personality Disorder" in the ICD 10.
You can't have 1 in 25 people being a sociopath. You can have 1 in 25 people being an antisocial asshole.
What I found truly frightening in that book was the section pointing out the downfalls of the results of the Milgram experiment (most of us will do what we are told by an authority figure, even to the point of torturing/killing) with sociopathic behavior by a minority.
Is it just me, or would anyone else not follow a person who matched this description?
Psychopath != narcissistic asshole
Philanthropy is hardly unknown to the Silicon Valley; there's Bill Gates giving away scores of billions, or the Google guys, or Steve Wozniak's past decades of work. So Jobs is certainly aware that his peers consider charity a good use of their billions.
And Jobs is rich - WP tells me 5.5 billion & increasing, and any plausible financial management plan has him having sold off a fair bit of stock (just to reduce risk if nothing else).
And Jobs has the personal motivation: he is, I am surprised to learn, a Buddhist. Is there any global religion which in general puts as much emphasis on good works & not possessing billions as Buddhism?
Yet, Jobs apparently does not significantly give to charity: http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070620152256AA... Keep in mind that even your basic tithe of 10%* would mean dozens or hundreds of millions a year being given away to someone.
A narcissistic asshole, one might well expect, would give money away like a drunken sailor to show how awesome and munificent and successful he is, and immortalize his name on foundations and buildings and scholarships etc.
A psycho/sociopath... not so much.
* I realize that I can't simply take 5.5 billion and divide by 10 years, but with numbers as big as these, whether we go by net worth or income doesn't matter so much.
Isn't that an argument he should sell now, while he is sure he is alive? How does Jobs benefit from holding onto $5b of stock while he's alive until he dies at which point his estate sells it off for $1b or whatever? Jobs's risk of dying is not insignificant; besides the fact that it intrinsically goes up each and every year, he has had health issues, shall we say?
I won't run the numbers, but he plausibly doesn't have too much longer (he's 55) and the drop in value would be significant (by half or more?); combine that with the usual discounting of future expenditures (2-8%), and if we believed he was holding onto his wealth solely to grow it for future charitable spending, then we must also believe that Jobs expects massive growth in the future.
This is quite frankly the kind of witchhunt discussion that's worth avoiding at all costs.
And there may be a teapot in orbit around Mercury. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. If our priors say psychopaths are less likely to give to charity - and it's a tough row to hoe if you want to say they give as much or more as the average - and we observe even weak evidence that a person doesn't, then our likelihood of the person being a psychopath must go up.
> I don't see why a psychopath wouldn't give money to charity anyway.
You don't? I was reading the blog linked elsewhere about raising a RAD kid, and lack of empathy & altruism & charity is one of the diagnostic criteria for sociopathy. I can see why a psychopath wouldn't...
> This is quite frankly the kind of witchhunt discussion that's worth avoiding at all costs.
Death to all extremists, eh... If we accept the basic statistics in the article, then there's a 1% likelihood of Jobs being a psychopath in general, and the likelihood rises the more evidence we adduce, like all the anecdotes of Jobs cheating people or brazenly lying (the Knuth story I mentioned is a good case). That's enough for it to be worth discussing, and it brings out interesting distinctions between narcissism and psychopathy - like the charity criterion I've used here. And being interesting is the chief and only virtue of discussions like these.
In that case, I think you're a psychopath, since you've given me absolutely no evidence that you donate to charity. ;) (Don't try telling me that you donate to charity without evidence, either! That's exactly what a psychopath would do, assuming he didn't want to be exposed as a psychopath!)
"Death to all extremists, eh...That's enough for it to be worth discussing, and it brings out interesting distinctions between narcissism and psychopathy - like the charity criterion I've used here. And being interesting is the chief and only virtue of discussions like these."
Interesting. You have absolutely no emotional distaste to discussing (without sufficient evidence) whether or not some of our particular fellow human beings are psychopaths, as long as you can continue to amuse yourself. That demonstrates a serious lack of empathy. Very concerning.
Seriously though, I don't think a psychopath would have as much interest in changing the world as a young Steve Jobs did, nor would a psychopath name something after his daughter or adopt her into his family. I'm not saying there's no similarity between what we've all read about Jobs and the psychopath archetype, but there's enough differences that it doesn't quite fit.
No you don't; you think the likelihood of me being a psychopath has gone up slightly from its initially very low <1% likelihood. That's nowhere close to 50%, much less a confident 'I think [for sure]'. I don't know whether you are deliberately misunderstanding me here, despite my careful phrasing before, or just statistically innumerate.
> Don't try telling me that you donate to charity without evidence, either
Actually, I could prove it with my donations to Wikimedia, GNU, Debian, and the Internet Archive; but that's irrelevant to your point, I think.
> You have absolutely no emotional distaste to discussing (without sufficient evidence) whether or not some of our particular fellow human beings are psychopaths, as long as you can continue to amuse yourself.
Why would I feel any distaste about the discussion? Who is being hurt? What negative effects may even improbably occur?
Is amusement _per se_ wrong? Or is it just wrong when it is about something that is less than prefect & moral? Then since most entertainment is about non-utopias (such as wartime or criminals), we must condemn billions of peoples for producing said entertainment or consuming it.
> That demonstrates a serious lack of empathy.
What exactly should I be empathizing about? Should I feel what the psychopaths (don't) feel? Should I sympathize with their victims? (But I don't see how pondering whether Jobs is a psychopath is bad; in fact, victims of all people should be most interested in spotting psychopaths from afar.) I know what it means to empathize with tsunami or earthquake victims, but I'm really mystified as to what you mean that word to mean. To me, your comment looks like a rhetorical tissue of exaggerations and applause lights (http://lesswrong.com/lw/jb/applause_lights/).
> Seriously though, I don't think a psychopath would have as much interest in changing the world as a young Steve Jobs did, nor would a psychopath name something after his daughter or adopt her into his family.
These are much better points. But there are counterpoints; if we go into family relationships, we might learn from Wikipedia:
> She [Chrisann Brennan] briefly raised their daughter on welfare when Jobs denied paternity, claiming that he was sterile; he later acknowledged paternity.
No, you missed the possibility that I'm just being facetious with you to make some other point, a point which has seemed to evade you. I do understand and appreciate Bayesian reasoning, of course, but that's not really the point here.
EDIT: Also, how are we to know whether Steve Jobs has any empathy? The whole thing with sociopaths is that they're good at faking it.
He returned to his previous job at Atari and was given the task of creating a circuit board for the game Breakout. According to Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, Atari had offered US$100 for each chip that was reduced in the machine. Jobs had little interest or knowledge in circuit board design and made a deal with Wozniak to split the bonus evenly between them if Wozniak could minimize the number of chips. Much to the amazement of Atari, Wozniak reduced the number of chips by 50, a design so tight that it was impossible to reproduce on an assembly line.
At the time, Jobs told Wozniak that Atari had only given them $600 (instead of the actual $5000) and that Wozniak's share was thus $300.
Perhaps many people who end up being leaders can be described this way, but I've always considered an ideal leader to be one who makes decisions based on the big picture and doesn't let self-interest cloud his/her judgment.
The original research group decided to focus on "everyday" manipulative, lying, power-hungry behavior. Looking for test subjects, they found plenty of instances, but ended up picking a category of people to study - their own PhD advisors.
The point is, mild versions of psycho/socio-pathic behavior are unfortunately commonplace. Changed my perception of people's behaviors in very fundamental ways.
What question springs to my mind is, given that these people have something like their 'appreciate other people's emotions' bits of their brains not working properly, why don't we see many female psychopaths?
Off the top of my brain, I can come up with a few likely answers: 1: Female 'psychopaths' don't exhibit the same sorts of criminal behavior that male psychopaths do. 2: Females are less susceptible to being a 'psychopath'
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a5xvv/iama_diagnosed_s...
I only found the okcupid one (and I'm definitely not taking it from there :) )
No, I don't think I'm a psychopath (an introvert sure, aspergers or autism-related stuff maybe - I did score very high there - but probably not psychopath).
While I suspect that normal human behavior has significant adaptive advantages in promoting the success of the species, I frequently wonder about a society of people who are all autistic-spectrum, or who all exhibit schizoaffective disorder, or are all manic-depressive. Would their psychologists form diagnostic handbooks for the clearly maladaptive trait of aggressive interpersonal contact, or trusting another person to watch their children?
Bonus question: if you're religiously inclined, do the deities of your choice love and respect these societies? Is there something morally superior about normal human behavior? What spiritual beliefs might they form for themselves?
There is no physical thing known as Psychopathy, it is an arbitrary descriptive label known as a category used to group similar behavior together. It is not a scientific discovery but a classification.
This psychology professor is just asserting the classification he's devoted his life's work to is now bigger and applies to more people. He is simply coming up with an excuse to inflate his self-worth and sell more books, even though he is not making any discoveries and doing research.
He's not even making the genetics argument, and if he was I would post articles citing nutritional deficiencies as causes of aggression or how gene expression changes due to epigenetics.
I just want to insist that anyone interested in reading up on psychology stick to the scientific research, specifically cognitive- psychology\neuroscience\computing\science
The classic example is Nazi Germany\The Holocaust. Everyone started asking how could the Germans commit so many horrible atrocities, it must be something intrinsic and Freudian about their personality maybe they have a strong need for discipline, etc.
Then along comes Milgram and his famous electroshock study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment , showing that Americans will perform actions even if they directly violate their internal beliefs, returning the primacy of behavior to the situation. It has been reproduced cross-culturally\many different times and variations. Another influential study is the Stanford Prison Experiments.
Personally I still agree with the poster (samd) that everything is physical including brain states, and dualism is bonkers. But if we take that step, there is no longer a metaphysical ego holding personality. There is no distinction between individual and environment and the causality between the two is bidirectional, rendering the question moot.
You are definitely on to something.
Psychology (like many sciences) is all about developing reliable abstractions for these complex physical states. The surprising thing is that it works: you can change the neurotransmitter balance of the brain in many cases just by sitting down and talking to people for a year.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy
Further, there should be nothing outrageous in the claim that some people have radically different emotions from "normal people," especially considering the fact that you can take a pill and instantly change the sort of consciousness and emotions that you experience.
It's a classical false dichotomy that the article promotes in sensationalist terms.
The fact that it's not a black & white issue doesn't mean that there aren't concrete physical differences between the brains of the general population and the 1% of the population labeled as psychopaths. It's the same situation for any mental "disorder", i.e. Asperger Syndrome, etc.
"According to Hare, the consensus among researchers in this area is that psychopathy stems from a specific neurological disorder which is biological in origin and present from birth[10] although this was not what was reported by a 2008 review which instead indicated multiple causes and variation between individuals"
I am obviously not arguing that antisocial behavior doesn't exist, murder obviously is an action that has happened at least once before. What I am arguing strongly against is the idea that people are born intrinsically evil. Also the point he hammers in is all about "empathy", but empathy is also absent in autism... his category is too broad to be usable at helping people.
Treating an individual as an individual rather than a category allows you to take off the blinders and address there specific situation better to promote more positive change. The methodology of categorizing someone as having an intrinsic psychological disorder is extremely pessimistic and hinders resocialization. It has also been out the door with the advent of positive psychology, here is a speech by a president of the american psychological association: http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_seligman_on_the_state_of_psy...
http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/10773.html
The above is a completely different approach to looking at antisocial behavior. It is also one that leads to positive outcomes. It is also quantifiable.
That's ridiculous, it's an article about how early malnutrition can cause antisocial behavior, that in no way disproves any of Hare's research.
> What I am arguing strongly against is the idea that people are born intrinsically evil. Also the point he hammers in is all about "empathy", but empathy is also absent in autism... his category is too broad to be usable at helping people.
You're splitting hairs at this point. The term 'evil' is totally subjective. Hare himself doesn't use it, and if you read the article, you'd know that he too is fully aware of the potential for misuse of labels and his own research by people who lack any training in this field. No surprise, he doesn't approve of that.
Some people are _born_ with mental disorders. Some people get mental disorders from environmental factors such as childhood malnutrition. Hare is fully aware of this, and none of that detracts from his research, or the existence of psychopaths and its worth as a label in describing a mental condition.
And no, people are NOT born with mental disorders due to environmental factors, they are born with NEUROLOGICAL disorders: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurological_disorders
The two musn't be confused.
What is the difference? At some level, all "mental" (i.e, psychological) disorders are neurological.
As it stands now, they are considered to be fundamentally different (thanks to Descartes and dualism), which is why you have psychiatrists\diagnostic-psychologists as a completely separate field from neurology.
That there is a dangerous, dogmatic attitude that I suggest you lose. And I say this as a neuroscience buff myself.
Abstracted fields are useful because they can be practical and an application of knowledge. That doesn't make them natural science. I say this not as a "buff" but as someone whose primary in university was cognitive science and has done their fair share of hooking people up to EEGs.
In this video you can see him still using internal and external seperate. Behaviorism to him means the direction of causality is external to internal and it contrasts it to the notion of free-will, where the direction is internal to external. He doesn't completely reject the notion of the metaphysical, just the importance of it, otherwise there would be no black box in his black-box experimental science. Behaviorism gets pretty boring when you can't study thoughts or ideas.
Non-dualism posits that what we associate with the mind does exist, and it exists in the same manner or plane of existence as everything else. Basically, a thought or idea or emotion physically exists in the same sense that a rock, river, or black hole does. Studying the brain and neurons is the study of thoughts and ideas. Evidence in neuroscience heavily supports non-dualism, and there is a lot of awesome information you can read. I submitted a John Searle video from the IBM Cognitive Computing lecture series, it didn't get picked up but a link is here:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3295448672203577230...
Skinner's a materialist, too. He may reject emotions, thoughts, and free will as fiction, but that's because there was, at his time, no scientific evidence for them. Neurology may have changed that, and so in fact may have continued behavioral research. (I suspect there are behavioral studies which would have shown a consistent "internal state" factor to animal behavior, for instance.)
I don't understand this. How is he making a term 'more catch-all' by defining a peer-reviewed checklist that defines what 'psychopathy' actually is? Prior to that it was a term that had no exact or standard meaning. By creating a formal definition, debate can happen as to which parts of the definition are right or wrong, but prior to that serious debate was meaningless since everyone had a different definition.
Secondly, if you don't believe in psychopathy, you clearly haven't met my mother-in-law. (And I only wish I were joking.)
I figured the theatre paper was on a subject related to a different article the other day (the title of which I've forgotten, but it was about a particular subculture fitting in to regular society by faking the role), but this was something I found rather interesting and ... ironic?
[as an immediate side-note upon starting to read the theatre article: it doesn't seem to be on what I expected it to be, at all; furthermore, I'm finding the other subject quite interesting]
We offered Lucas $20 for taking out the garbage each week. Twenty dollars for five minutes of work, an extreme amount, just to see of our instinct was accurate. He seemed excited by the prospect of all that money and the first week eagerly took the garbage out. We immediately paid him the $20 he had earned.
The following week I ended up taking the garbage out. Even though the $20 offer was still in effect, Lucas had no interest. It simply wasn’t worth it him to do something he didn’t want to do. We could have raised the offer to $100, or $1000 and it wouldn’t have mattered.
Question:
Does any one know how to alleviate motivational problem described above? Not in psychopath but in otherwise almost normal person.
Sometimes the things I do aren't even that enjoyable by themselves. (Why do I bite my fingernails? I certainly don't enjoy that but I can't seem to stop doing it and I've tried several techniques.) I feel like I program because I need to and I need to because I feel like it. Or something. There's a logical loop here that I can't seem to break out of - but it makes it hard to get me to do things I don't want to do and it's even worse when I know there's something I need to do that I don't want to do because I'll put it off as long as possible (and sometimes slightly longer).
What's weird (to me) is that the trait will even infect the things I enjoy - like programming. If there's a certain "big" thing I need to do (maybe it's a bunch of boring boilerplate or adapting old code to some new use-case) in order to progress on the part that I consider to be the real problem that I'm working on, I'll put it off and comment on Hacker News instead - sometimes for days. I feel terrible about it and it nags at me the whole time, but I still do it. Why?! :P
I have same problem as you but I fail to develop even simplest routines myself. I do things periodically only when there is outside pressure to do them periodically. Like going to school or to work. Otherwise I do things only if they bother me directly or I have spark of enthusiasm to try something out or straighten something out.
I could just sign last paragraph of your comment with my name.
First of all, it's a part of life to have unpleasant tasks that we don't feel motivated to do. I think that will never change. What will change is how we approach these tasks.
Try this mental trick: avoid judgments. Simply see your day as a web of causes and effects. If I do X, Y will happen. If I don't do X, Y will not happen. Don't tell yourself "I need to do X." Give yourself permission to not do things if you are fine with the consequences.
Here's another thing to think about: saying "I want" is a fiction, because we are a complicated bundle of desires that sometimes conflict. We desire basic physical things like comfort as well as more complex things like a coherent and good sense of self. Get to know your desires. Why do you bite your fingernails? There is a kinesthetic side of you trying to express itself. Why do you want to avoid work? Perhaps there is a chance of failure so your ego's desire to protect itself is putting on the brakes. Or perhaps the work is simply boring and your inner child wants some adventure. The skill here is, after you get to know your inner desires, to learn how to harmonize them. It's like managing people: try to come to an outcome where everyone gets what they want, if possible. If you like the feeling of biting your fingernails but there's a part of you that doesn't like the habit, then you have an internal conflict. An unenlightened way to deal with this is to simply try to snuff out the habit (willpower to stop doing it). A better way is to find something else that's as kinesthetically pleasing and that you don't find objectionable. Same thing goes for programming: if a part of you wants to do that task and a part of you doesn't, listen to the opposing desires and try to harmonize them.
The interesting research would be to see if there are techniques that would help a psychopath to integrate into society while limiting destructive tendencies. Perhaps others are doing this research, but Ive heard none of it.
The conclusion doesn't seem to follow from the premise. Can you fill in some more of the intermediate steps?
As evidenced in the article, normal people show remorse after committing violent crimes. Police take that as a way to focus their attention during an interrogation to get the suspect to admit fault. In a psychopaths case, appeals to emotioon does not work. Instead the example that worked was to compare to the "greats" of what they committed. That lead the suspect to start bragging and admit fault.
Perhaps, in this similar vein, that psychopaths are trainable. They have different emotional processes and thoughts. Perhaps we can make a training course that focuses on using their uniqueness to reform them.
And as I said, these steps would require a great deal of research with all types of psychopaths, and not just the ones in prison.
Not to say we should give up, just saying it's not a simple thing to approach.
The closest thing to your original claim is "'Our results might lead to fertile research on the role of oxytocin in several mental health disorders with major public health significance.'"