The article could be rewritten with one sentence: "don't be naive".
Yes, on the ground that it has no objective definition. Anyone can be assigned the label based on the right choice of anecdotes.
It will be interesting to see how neuroscience deals with such labels, as more objective causes for human behavior are matched up with effects, over the coming decades as psychological interpretations are finally set aside.
It has a precise psychiatric definition, based on the results of a particular psychometric assessment (PCL-R). Whether this qualifies as "objective" to satisfy a CS/math practitioner, I'm not sure, but it does have a well defined set of criteria.
> It has a precise psychiatric definition ...
Surely you are aware that "psychiatric definition" is a contradiction in terms? That the DSM consists entirely of lists of symptoms, and no causes, which allows a great deal of latitude in diagnosis?
> Whether this qualifies as "objective", I'm not sure, but it does have a well defined set of criteria.
Perhaps you should read the controversy surrounding the just-released DSM-5, in which new conditions were added by -- clinical research? -- no, by people voting in secret. The outcome was so embarrassing that the director of the NIMH has reluctantly decided to abandon the DSM as a source for science (it will remain as a diagnostic guide).
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...
A quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity ... Patients with mental disorders deserve better."
Also, read the history of Asperger Syndrome -- once believed to be a rare condition, then its inclusion in DSM-IV resulted in an epidemic of false diagnoses, then reluctantly removed from DSM-5.
Your comments suggest that different qualified practitioners can use the DSM to arrive as the same diagnosis, given the same symptom set. But this has never been true and is not true now. Tom Widiger, who served as head of research for DSM-IV, says "There are lots of studies which show that clinicians diagnose most of their patients with one particular disorder and really don't systematically assess for other disorders. They have a bias in reference to the disorder that they are especially interested in treating and believe that most of their patients have."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist
There are definitely imperfections in the way psychiatric disorders are defined and diagnosed. Most of the difficulties happen in the edge cases. A person who scores a 0 or a "perfect 40" on the PCL is a pretty clear diagnosis.
Interestingly, the signature of sociopathy (aka psychopathy) appears to have an organic basis - it can be observed via functional MRI. See, for example, the article about Dr Kent Kiehl in the New Yorker.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/10/081110fa_fact_...
If psychology were a science, there would be precisely one catalog of mental conditions, not as many as there are people who care to publish their own list. And the catalog would list causes as well as effects, something famously absent in modern psychological practice.
> There are definitely imperfections in the way psychiatric disorders are defined and diagnosed
Imperfections? Psychiatrists and psychologists famously and consistently cannot agree on diagnoses, when confronted by the same subjects. The reason is that no one knows what causes these conditions, which makes psychological clinical practice an exercise in symptomatic relief.
> Most of the difficulties happen in the edge cases.
Asperger Syndrome was removed from DSM-5 because all the cases were edge cases -- the diagnosis had no objective validity whatsoever. This pattern is true for many similar conditions. Tom Widiger, who served as head of research for DSM-IV, says "There are lots of studies which show that clinicians diagnose most of their patients with one particular disorder and really don't systematically assess for other disorders. They have a bias in reference to the disorder that they are especially interested in treating and believe that most of their patients have."
> Interestingly, the signature of sociopathy (aka psychopathy) appears to have an organic basis - it can be observed via functional MRI.
If the work were more advanced (if it were anything more than a correlation), we might consider removing sociopathy from the domain of psychology and give it to neuroscience. But we won't get away with that -- psychologists are notoriously protective of their turf.
Also, the "signature" to which you refer is a correlation, not a cause-effect relationship, it isn't definitive and it doesn't identify a source for the condition.
And finally, present evidence suggests that all serious mental conditions are ultimately organic, so describing them as having an organic basis is sort of self-evident.
It has been extensively studied in part because it's such an insidious personality disorder that many high-functioning people have to varying degrees, and the depth of psychological research on the topic very quickly shows how wrong mjfl's comments are. There is definitely a flippant, pop-psych use of the word 'sociopath', but it doesn't really shed much light on the actual phenomenon.
The cause of that condition we informally call "sociopathy" won't be uncovered by psychiatry or psychology. For that, we need neuroscience. And to date neuroscience isn't ready to shoulder the load.
> There is definitely a flippant, pop-psych use of the word 'sociopath', but it doesn't really shed much light on the actual phenomenon.
The absence of science in psychiatry and psychology should prevent anyone from seriously arguing that any imaginable use of the word "sociopath" is morally or ethically wrong. This may change in the future, but at the moment, such terms have no objective definition.