Williams Syndrome: What World’s Most Sociable People Reveal About Friendliness | Hacker News Reader

Williams Syndrome: What World’s Most Sociable People Reveal About Friendliness

theatlantic.com

13 pointspseudolus5 comments

There’s a theory that dogs are just wolves with the canine equivalent of Williams Syndrome.

It's a charming theory, though it's important to note that Williams Syndrome also comes with a huge range of other problems that impact physical health. Both impact the neural crest, which is suggestive, though the fact that dogs are healthy indicates that the "canine equivalent" is also very different.

Interesting, but this seems to be more about "superficial charm" than friendliness, cooperation and reduced aggression per se. Psychopaths also show superficial charm as well as a markedly reduced response to fear and negative emotions in general, driven by comparable changes in the amygdala - but they have increased aggression and callousness compared to controls, and this is thought to be a result of them lacking the ordinary social emotions (which means they don't have "affective empathy" in the usual sense - and in particular, their theory-of-mind intuitions are going to view every social interaction as a zero-sum, win-lose situation!). So it seems that there are at least two independent mechanisms at play here.

Williams is not just superficial charm, it is also, for example, trust. People with Williams often cannot manage the degree of skepticism needed to stay safe, children cannot wrap their minds around stranger danger, etc.

Sort of like not feeling pain, it sounds great until you realize you can get deep into horrifying situations with no idea that anything is wrong until too late.

Yes, but the article talks a lot about the former, and things we would expect to cause the former (such as the reduced fear response, this does show up in psychopaths as well) and only briefly mentions the hyper-trusting attitude - as if one could conflate both or as if the hyper-trust was just a natural consequence of the superficial charm. Though it makes sense that reduced fear + superficial charm + normal social emotions and affective empathy would make for an extreme amount of trust, to the point of being entirely unable to detect and manage social threats. In a way, if you're going to be fearless and superficially-charming, it might then be in your best interest to also be callous and to lack a standard empathy response, since that attitude (though quite damaging in very real ways, especially to the prospects for cooperation) would at least protect you from other social predators!

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