What It’s Like Living As a Diagnosed Psychopath
thecut.com
thecut.com
Given that (in popular culture, not necessarily in reality), it's also associated with cruelty and lack of empathy, this scares me a little.
What’s more interesting is the comments though, there sure seem to be a lot of tabu around this topic. I wonder why that is.
Children: why is that person so dirty? Why do they ask for money and food? Why do they hurt? Why are they talking to the air?
Media:
https://nypost.com/2018/08/18/state-senate-candidate-launche...
https://www.economist.com/britain/2018/08/18/no-end-in-sight...
(I cherry picked two articles from google news after searching "homeless")
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-love-hate-relat...
Even feeling empathy for someone in pain doesn’t naturally lead to compassion. Empathy is just the ability to mirror someone else’s emotions and is a neurotypical response. If your happy, I’m happy. If you hurt, I hurt.
If I’m hurting because you hurt my natural response is to stop my pain. In some cases that mirrored pain can result in acts of compassion but can also result in lashing out, victim blaming or fleeing. These are all normal responses for someone feeling pain.
Empathy is a “normal” response but compassion is a choice. Few people have the emotional regulation skills and patience to see someone in pain, feel their pain and sit with them in their pain.
Additionally, her descriptions of not feeling fear, processing emotions at a lower intensity level than others, needing constant stimulation, and having a cognitive, but not truly emotional, understanding of romantic love and empathy ring true to my experience knowing these people.
I wonder if there is a legitimate grey zone at which these disorders overlap.
Or, alternatively, maybe my friend is just a psychopath.
Disclosure: I have ASD diagnosis.
You could also literally have both at once, since these conditions/states/differences/whatever aren't necessarily mutually exclusive.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-with-autis...
This linking of alexithymia to autism has caused harm by making it harder to get the diagnosis for people who can recognise emotion within themselves and others.
Aspergers is not associated with “not feeling fear.”
If you’re just assuming this from your experiences with these individuals, you’re just assuming this, and might do well to expand your considerations of what different people find fearful.
I’m sure you would find many of them fear people who jump to conclusions before thinking through the various possibilities; or the outcomes of hasty judgements.
And, I recommend you read about it.
I was constantly struck by how she didn’t seem to fear any sort of physical risk. It may well be the stimulus/risk seeking nature of ADHD, or just her personality - I’m honestly not sure.
The bitter irony is, psychopaths are far more dangerous and yet they make better imitators, and can avoid triggering the uncanny valley instinct. That's why they can be so charismatic and attract followers.
And unfortunately, I believe this may be why to some degree, having the difference being physical/visible may make someone with a disability more sympathetic/liked. Disability itself has an uncanny valley setup ranging from 'can pass as completely normal' (certain high functioning psychopaths)to 'is visibly different and accepted'.
I also wonder if fiction may have had an effect here too. The average fictional psychopath/sociopath/whatever may look more like someone on the autistic spectrum than a genuine psychopath or sociopath.
They do not express them the same way, they may lack awarness of them (another symptom), they don't understand them and they occure in different situations then the ones that would make neurotypical angry etc. But, they do feel and are not machines.
Kind of like how the Dark Mirror Universe in Star Trek managed to get so far.
That’s the opposite of what she was saying. From what I could gather, she does trust people, but simply by measuring their actions. I suspect such a society would work the same way: people who demonstrate they can be trusted would receive positive responses. Taking advantage of others would quickly lead to a form of ostracism.
But why would this be the case if everyone in society mostly felt it was okay to take advantage as long as you could get away with it?
So many people seem to be entirely blind to this dynamic.
You can look at a business person and point out "You know browser fingerprinting is a bit like a salesman walking into a User's house and taking a bunch of metrics to send back to base before making a sales pitch right?"
Then they look at you horrified by the mental image and say "But it decreases fraud!"
The cognitive dissonance is delicious, but our obsession with the Market mediating the worthiness of anything to the point where ethical and moral violations are encouraged as long as they can be hidden is a blight on our society at large.
On one hand you want some doves because they work together well and society is nice, but on the other hand if there’s too doves then hawks will thrive. But if everyone is hawks, then society as a whole doesn’t work as well together. So there’s push and pull of both and in the end the natural equilibrium is mostly doves with some hawks. I suspect this is how it works for psycopaths in society.
Like a warzone in Africa or the Middle East.
Like a maximum security prison in the US.
Virtually every desire a human can have is better fulfilled if most people on earth are happy and productive. Whether you want to travel the world, waste away in VR, escape to Mars, or live forever, these pursuits are more achievable if human progress advances. In no future is it better for other people to be unhappy.
Then explain why some people are criminals or parasites on the system it it's better for everyone to be happy? Why take advantage of others if it's better overall not to do so? My guess is because some people don't care about others. Psychopaths generally fall into that category. Question is what they would do if they made up all of society, which means everyone is understood to be looking to take advantage.
Moreover, afaik development of language is hypothesized to be interlinked with social behaviors (and empathy as a whole), so a species of antagonists would probably have trouble establishing civilisation in the first place.
The true problems of recent societies might in fact be overdiagnosis and Hollywood-style oversimplifications, not the traits themselves. Not everyone needs to be hyper emphatic (though we probably need a great number of such individual to keep our societies cohesive).
In other words, don't judge, do live and let live, defend yourself and people around you if attacked. Don't watch TV.
Many people get anxious, and this causes them to look at people with anxiety disorders and think "That's like what I've got. Why don't you just pull yourself out of it?" but what they don't consider is that the difference is one of degree, not of kind.
Are all mental traits that affect our lives negatively mental illness? I think it's quite a leap to say that just because you have negative effect in your life from a mental perspective/problem/limitation/etc... doesn't mean it's "illness" that requires a cure.
Sometimes it really is "just get over it", if not, then every person I know needs emergency therapy and drugs right now cause they are all ill.
If you want to say it's a matter of degree, sure, a valid a argument, but who lets who decide what the degree is? What if the person that says "pull yourself out of it" was affected many hundreds of times worse than the person hearing that advice? Now is degrees a purely personal and relative matter?
How many people have heard stories of spoiled rich brats scream bloody murder and acted like they were dying because they didn't get the exact color they wanted in their designer luggage? (replace in the nouns for different scenarios)
And conversely, the poor child with nothing, is happy and grateful just to have a little more food at mealtime? "Just get over it" _is_ the answer to the rich brat who wants to wallow when you put it in perspective of others. But from their own perspective, it's the end of the world. (lots of personal experience seeing both sides of this issue)
In between health and pathology is a vast grey area where things get complicated, and people are biased to think everyone else is just acting like a spoiled rich kid.
>pathology: the science of the causes and effects of diseases, especially the branch of medicine that deals with the laboratory examination of samples of body tissue for diagnostic or forensic purposes.
In the words of Allen Frances: "psychiatric diagnosis still relies exclusively on fallible subjective judgments rather than objective biological tests".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Frances
There are no known causes for psychiatric illnesses. Once a biological cause is discovered, it is no longer deemed a mental illness, but an actual biological pathology.
On the other hand, sometimes there are dudes whose bad behavior is intractable, and the only halfway effective intervention is when I tell them forcefully to stop. Not viciously, but mercilessly direct, and little concession made for their comfort.
Although as I write that out, it looks like maybe the issue is that the framing is wrong - it's not empathy vs force, it's more like empathy and force. A question of choosing the right communication strategy for the person and situation.
I have no doubt when entitlement is the issue, getting (metaphorically?) punched in the face a couple of times is an important "teaching moment". It's probably not the case that all lessons are best taught like that.
Some people do care once you tell them that blocking the bike lane is rude and a real safety problem for cyclists. Others don't care at all that a cyclist has a problem with this. Those people tend to respond best to me threatening to call the police to ticket their car. Once I recognize which category the driver is in, I know which approach to take.
I do not feel much empathy, except to my children and pets.
I am still attached to people but tend to rationalize a lot of things. My wife was diagnosed with MS, zero reaction. I help her to go through that but do not feel any emotion. Her neurologist mentioned that a lot of relationships break out when MS is diagnosed. I can understand this, but cannot comprehend which emotions push people to run away (I know them, just do not understand how one can feel them).
My mother was diagnosed with cancer, zero reactions from me. I love her very much, in some weird rational way.
I was diagnosed with an auto-immune illness, zero reactions. In that case it was really "zero fucks given" because I did not need to externalize anything.
At the same time I like very much to spend time with people and it bringd me joy.
So yes, I think it is a matter of spectrum.
Or it could point to the fact that the traits that make an effective “hacker” (tendency to exploit systems to gain power and control) happen to be the same traits that make an effective sociopath.
Broadly speaking, psychopaths exploit social systems while hackers exploit technological systems. But there’s really not much of a barrier. What hackers call “social engineering” is what manipulators and sociopaths would refer to as manipulation.
To be clear, I don’t mean to imply that all hackers are sociopaths. Or even that most of them are. It is quite possible to be an extremely effective hacker with a solid moral foundation. “With great power comes great responsibility”, etc. I’m merely trying to encourage some self-awareness in the hacking community.
"Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath (2014)"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16584565 (122 comments)
That's the most interesting quote I find. It poses a paradox. What makes a person awful and toxic? Are there common personality traits to this? Are there biological causes?
Do we need a new pathology for this? Toxipath?
She later mentions this:
> I think it’s important to hold people responsible for their actions, not brain formation. People make choices. Psychopathy is not an excuse, and it’s definitely not a reason why someone does bad things.
So what are those reasons then? And what are those bad things? And what mechanism governs one's choices?
It does seem to me like psychopaths, by definition, lack all natural controls which would allow them to know what the bad things are and that they shouldn't choose to do them.
Thus, they need social controls instead. Like, society has to make it easier to achieve her goals through good means, and make it very hard to do so through bad means. Otherwise she has no means of containment. She does not fear, she does not rejoice. She does not regret or feel guilt. She does not hope and dream.
That said, what are her goals? What drives a psychopath? Adrenaline rush alone? That's what she hints at.
Finally, I noticed the quoted doctor goes out of his way to mention a spectrum. And that he'd only classify of psychopath the more extreme cases, at the far end of it. For those, he says all four traits must be clearly demonstrated. And those by definition mention:
> take pleasure in hurting others
> are physically aggressive
Which are arguably at the top of the list for "bad things".
So purely from the quoted doctor, if she does not have those traits, she's probably not high enough on the spectrum to be labeled a psychopath. At least not based on the quoted doctor's diagnostic model.
This is the first time I've seen it explained by someone else but it's how I feel all the time. Makes me wonder...
It's kind of like how overeating people struggle to curb their craving now with thoughts of seeing their weight increase later. Some succeed, and some can't do it at all. They'll feel negative emotions when they look at the scales, not when they get the ice cream and imagine the numbers. Except psychopaths don't even want to fight this tendency of theirs.
To be fair, positive reinforcement works for them about as well as for others.
Definitely not a sociopath either. She cares enough not to want to cause pain even if she can't always read the symptoms of emotions. So.. if you have psychopathy but care enough to work around it, do you really have it?
There are pure sociological benefits to socialization and relationships, and it may be that the effort of going out of her way to foster those relationships is evaluated as being worth the effort in the benefit it brings.
But yes, that aspect of the interview was extremely interesting, and I wish the interviewer had asked about that directly (essential asked "what do you get out of your relationships"?).
Not caring doesn’t make you evil, it makes you indifferent. I think feeling less is an advantage if you do want to hurt others, but there is really no correlation between the two. You don’t automatically start wanting to hurt people, just because you don’t feel empathy.
Thats not what I meant. its bleak, because its emotionless. its unempathetic engagement. For me, its stepped over uncanny valley, into a dialogue with somebody who has no emotional engagement with you, only rational response. For some things, thats what you want. Personally, I don't think a relationship we normally couch as an emotional one, ie friend, or best-friend, or life partner, is one which is complete if its devoid of emotion. Preferably reasonably symmetrically, but there is room for variance. One sided? Thats pretty bleak, on the giving side: nothing comes back.
So apparently the PCL-R is a scale to measure how nasty a son of b one his.
I just don't get it. What happens at the 30 mark in the scale that makes it an illness versus you just being a terrible human being?
>No. Psychopaths use what we call a ‘mask.’ It’s basically an entire affectation of being like everyone else. We learn at a really young age that if we respond to things the way that we naturally respond to things, people don’t like that. So you just learn how to affect the behavior and how to appear like everyone else, and that’s just what you have to do.
Psychopaths always believe this to be true, and to their “credit,” it does deceive many people. But it’s also symptomatic of their narcissistic delusions.
It’s been my experience that people who have had the misfortune of spending a lot of time around a psychopath can quite quickly identify others. It’s hard to describe exactly, but psychopaths are very deterministic in their behavior patterns. It’s as if the dulled emotions and fear response subtract some of the randomness that makes people without this pathology actually unpredictable. They can still be surprising in the moral thresholds and social boundaries they’ll cross without hesitation, but in terms of what they pursue (opportunities to deceive and manipulate, power over others), they’re dully predictable.
So, many do actually see completely through them, it’s just that this knowledge isn’t very useful. Social hierarchies and asymmetries of power do more to preserve their capacity to cause damage than anything else, so without the opportunity to fundamentally change the context you’re navigating, there’s not much you can do. Your boss will, in most cases, still be your boss, even if they’re transparently psychopathic. And their power to harm you is inherent to their title, not the specifics of their personality.
This is why if you ever read a book about dealing with psychopaths, the first thing they’ll almost all tell you is that nothing is gained by confronting them and your best recourse is to disengage as completely as possible. It’s a realpolitik approach to social dynamics, because only in rare and limited circumstances does a deep understanding of the psychopathic mind allow you to transcend them.
What's the value in those relationships to a psychopath? I can't imagine there's the same desire for consensual validation, etc that drives so many normative relationships.
I really wish the interviewer dived a bit deeper into what her need fulfillment was in her interpersonal relationships.
The interviewee more or less admits this in speaking about how her “friend” would frequently ask if she was unwelcome around the interviewee, despite her not doing anything explicit to suggest this. It’s a typical psychopathic lapse into bragging about one’s ability to manipulate or inspire fear in others, albeit under the guise of the ability to “feel concern.” I guess it’s kind of a clever manipulation within the context of the interview itself, if again, it wasn’t so remarkably predictable. Few psychopaths can seem to go very long without slipping in examples of their inherent superiority or delighting in some prior act of sadism.
To be frank, I feel like I'm reading paraphrases of Pieter Hintjens' self-help book "The Psychopath Code" which is quite popular with this website's users. The book is no longer open source, but I read a fair bit of it when it was. It struck me as a dangerous work that teaches how to perceive your foes as psychopaths, and then to cut them out of your life. I can see how the practice is empowering, but it irresponsibly elevates the armchair psychologist reader.
I think your comments should be be composed like the opinions they are, and not made to sound like objective truth.
The guy otherwise had a wife, children and positive social environment, so it was something of a surprise discovery to him. It was much more introspective and informative on the possible nature of the condition - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-neuroscien...
> Similarly, he takes issue with neuroscientist James Fallon’s calling himself a psychopath because his brain imaging profile matched that of psychopathic individuals.
> “Just because the amygdala shows hypoactivation does not make you a psychopath,” says Neumann. “This is a characteristic that’s associated with psychopathy, but biology is not destiny. We believe that the syndrome, the personality disorder, is a coming together of these four major domains.”
A moderately extensive reading of the popular and professional literature on psychopaths. I know this is an internet message board, so it’s best to doubt such claims, but that’s the answer.
>The claim that psychopaths pursue long-term relationships doesn't jive with the antisocial nature of this condition
You’ll notice that I prefaced that with “high functioning.” High functioning psychopaths often come from financially and emotionally stable families/backgrounds, which help inhibit what we’d think of as overtly anti-social behavior (e.g. violence). And as you say, psychopaths are not without reason. Given a set of sufficiently pro-social developmental circumstances, some can learn to delay their “gratifications” to obtain greater “rewards,” just like anyone else.
>I'm also troubled by your view that any engagement with a psychopath is wasted.
It’s not so much wasted, but about reducing your exposure to harm. And it’s not my view, you can find the same stated in the work of people like Hare, Stout, and Babiak.
>A premise of your views is that you are able to unambiguously diagnose psychopathy in others, and that it is appropriate to treat those people radically differently based on your casual diagnosis.
I claim no such ability. I’m speaking only to a fuzzy heuristic intended to reduce my own exposure to psychopaths after damaging experiences with people who quite consistently match their patterns of behavior.
>To be frank, I feel like I'm reading paraphrases of Pieter Hintjens' self-help book "The Psychopath Code" which is quite popular with this website's users.
I’ve never read this book, so I can’t speak to it. Again, you’re well warranted in your skepticism because it’s the internet.
I guess for me I find it easy enough to ascertain the emotional drivers behind what someone is saying (or I think so). From that you can tell where they're coming from and what their motivations really are. A useful skill one gets in spades once you've dealt with an actual psychopath...
But I generally very much agree with you, (m)any of the psychopathy traits listed in the article can be, or even are to a certain degree, present in everyone. So there is real danger in stigmatazing just about regular people.
And sure interaction with a psychopath doesn't need to be destructive for everyone, that'd have to be some kind hard working super villain to be able to hurt everyone around them.
And to emphasize, antisocial behaviour or just put plainly being a bad person is something everyone is guilty of.
So if this psychopath term is to be considered real it would just mean that psychos do a certain combination of (bad) things to a much higher degree than everyone else.
But if it all comes down to a degree, it makes me wonder if there really is no therapy for these people? Can they really not change? Can they really not learn to accentuate wider spectre of emotions?
Regular people can change their behaviour albeit it can be really hard, and they need to want it. Thus I'm not really buying the whole it's a fixed thing, it's brain chemistry-morphology whatever narrative.
In simplest terms psychopaths are people who do not "get" the particularity of human relationships. To a psychopath, relationships are always and everywhere abstract conceptual power relations. They don't get jealous (but they can fake jealousy), they don't fall in love (but they can fake love) and when people leave their lives it's more like losing money on a bad investment then, you know, losing one's best friend or lover. This is not magical or antisocial or deviant. Psychopaths are just everyday people who never really miss other people. They are just as stupid and irrational as everybody else but in different ways.
There is an argument here to be made here that just as society is welcoming of people who fall in love at the drop of a dime it should also be welcoming of people who can't fall in love. It's the sort of thing, like homosexuality, that people might think is a big deal but is really not and eventually will just be sort of normalized.
Well now, I'm pretty sure you can't use this as a definition for psychopathy, as many other types of disorders fit this definition.
In my comment I was thinking of the definition given by this article, and the list of traits it provides.
So going by that definition I have to disagree with your argument: "...that people might think is a big deal but is really not and eventually will just be sort of normalized."
If someone checks all the boxes from the points raised in this article I would really hope that that sort of behavior never gets normalized because these traits are the exact opposite of what people should strive for in their lives.
I don't see any cause for concern. Putting aside Hollywood nonsense there doesn't seem to be any reason why psychopaths would inherently engage in destructive behavior. In reality psychopaths are quite probably among the most interesting and charming and entertaining people you will ever meet.
Psychopaths can be very manipulative but there's no inherent malicious intent behind this manipulation. They need to be manipulative because all human relations are based on manipulation and so to get anything done they have no choice but to "play the game."
Again, psychopaths are just people who don't get jealous. There are so many stories (really, all of them, from the Bible to virtually every pop song) about jealousy, where jealousy plays a central motivation for virtually all the characters, but to a psychopath, reading stories about characters motivated by jealousy is like reading stories about aliens. Abstractly it makes sense as a motivation but there's no actual 'there' there. Saying "I did X because I was jealous" is like saying "I did X because the voices told me to."
The problem for psychopaths is that virtually all human relations are motivated by jealousy. All of the politicking, the status games, the in-group/out-group and intrapersonal power dynamics that define so much human experience come down to this. And so psychopaths, out of pure necessity in order to participate in such relations, will quickly learn to fake jealousy, to deliberately inspire it in others or carefully suppress it in those they care about it. This is no different from everybody else does, really, they're just doing it for different reasons and are perhaps a bit more deliberate about it.
At this point it's also important to understand the difference between psychopaths and sociopaths. This comment [1] lays it out well. Note the end result here: both psychopaths and sociopaths end up being manipulative of those around them but while sociopaths are often consumed by jealousy and paranoia and will do anything to ensure they "win", psychopaths, more often than not, are seeking a generally optimal or neutral solution, they have little real interest in hurting or helping you in any given encounter.
[1] http://www.thecut.com/_pages/cjkmuv88b00500xy6u0morj7n@publi...
Another way to look at this is that psychopaths seek and respond to different kinds of stimulation. They have little interest in gossip, hanging out or generalized bonding rituals. Instead they may be drawn to competitive, "results-oriented" games where individuals or groups have a clear objective. They may also, on the whole, be more drawn to "high-stakes" games because they perceive less downsides and more potential upsides to such games. Again, this doesn't suggest any real malicious intent. Psychopaths are just using different risk metrics. While some people may shy away from high-stakes status games because they are very sensitive to the potential loss of status, to a psychopath, "loss of status" isn't a thing and so such games can be perceived as pure upside.
> It’s a typical psychopathic lapse into bragging about one’s ability to manipulate or inspire fear in others, albeit under the guise of the ability to “feel concern.”
Again you seem to deliberately attributing some kind of malign intent without justification. This woman is trying to explain how she relates to others and why. There's no reason to think she is lying or that she cannot actually feel concern.
So is the rational decision to be together with a S/O less worthy than being bound together by the subconscious (chemical?) force of love?
The guy was an obvious ass&*$% but had wormed his way into defining himself as the 'head' of the org and people went on with it because A) the dominant behaviors B) he'd turned himself into the public face of the org C) and I quote "yeah, but he's productive, he motivates other people, he gets things done"... But that was just the Stockholm syndrome talking - people like this are little more than parasites. I was the new guy so could see through the mask a lot quicker. I wish I'd asked questions about the backstory...
I concur with everything you say about social hierarchies and power. I'm American and my take on the English, based on my living here for over a decade and all the sociopathically inclined I've run into, is that there is a very good reason there seems to be so many adult bullies etc in the UK (versus my take on America). The rigid class structure and etc conceals a lot of fundamental psychological pathologies in English society - sure, they're present in every society, but the English seem to revel in them and even regard them as virtues.
Reminds me of the “zombie problem”: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
my current gf is also a psychopath, if she wasn't in jail we probably would have killed each other already.
More concretely, it’s a neurological variation that is “fit enough” to survive within human populations at a low threshold, so it persists. There’s no “guiding hand” beneath it all.
The fundamental pattern these terms are all trying to address is the same: antisocial behavior, or a consistent pattern of behavior that harms others. Do we all have it in us to act selfishly sometimes? Yes. Just like we all have it in us to act altruistically. Psychopathy is a spectrum with Mother Theresa on one end and Hitler on the other. (I realize Mother Theresa may not have actually been all that saintly in real life, but bear with me for the sake of argument.)
The major flaw in the article is how it focuses on someone who was eventually diagnosed as a psychopath after seeking treatment. The issue here is that the people who are actually dangerous, i.e. very high on the Hare psychopathy checklist, i.e. true psychopaths, are never going to voluntarily be diagnosed. Real psychopaths don’t seek treatment to change their behavior. If they get caught, they try to destroy whoever exposed them, and if that doesn’t work, they move on to new targets and start over.
My point is that we need a consistent way to refer to people who are dangerous social predators. It doesn’t matter what the term is, sociopath, psychopath, ASPD, whatever. What matters is that the term doesn’t get watered down or confused with other so-called personality disorders which don’t share this aspect of harm to others. For example, aspergers/autism has absolutely nothing to do with psychopathy. If the term “psychopath” becomes meaningless, then it becomes harder to talk about and expose the real predators in our midst. In other words, the psychopaths win.
> 1. Psychopaths do not have a conscience (e.g., they do not feel guilt) and do not bond or love like most people. Sociopaths do have a conscience, albeit a weak one, so they are able to feel some degree of guilt in certain situations. However, they usually quickly deflect that guilt and place blame on others for causing to do whatever they feel guilty about. Sociopaths are capable of love but it is usually a very dysfunctional form of love/bonding.
> 2. Psychopaths tend to not take a lot things personally. They don't care if you don't like them. They are usually egotistical, though, so if you attack them personally, they will feel anger but not other forms of emotional hurt/wounding. Sociopaths will feel both and tend to take everything very personally, even stuff that isn't meant to be.
> 3. High-functioning psychopaths tend to think things through and plan their actions/steps in a logical manner without emotions coming into play. Their thinking is very organized and it is about reaching whatever goal they have. If they hurt you in the process, well, that is because you were most likely an obstacle and you got run over for being in the way, but not because it was personal. Psychopaths typically inflict pain because it's a means to an end, not because they enjoy it.
> 4. Sociopaths are basically the opposite: they tend to be very disorganized in their thinking and planning because they are much more subject to certain emotions such as vanity/narcissism, anger and jealously. If you get in their way, they will inflict pain to eliminate you, but will also likely enjoy it. Sociopaths will often seek to inflict pain because they enjoy inflicting it (psychopaths don't get that kind of rush) but will often feel mixed with their anger or violence a tinge of guilt, which their narcissism will require them to deflect as being caused by others (think of the killer who does something to their victims to show regret or respect, such as posing them in a certain manner. It doesn't mean they regret their actions, only that they regret that they were forced by someone or society to kill).
> 5. Most sociopaths end up in jail and have lower than average IQs. Most high functioning psychopaths don't and end up in jobs that require turning down one's emotional reactions, such as a trauma surgeon, butcher or CEO.
[1] https://www.thecut.com/_pages/cjkmuv88b00500xy6u0morj7n@publ...