A new study looks at how psychopaths see the world:
Here are people who can understand what their victims are thinking but just don’t care. Hence their actions. But Baskin-Sommers found that there’s more to their minds than it seems.
Most of us mentalize automatically. From infancy, other minds involuntarily seep into our own. The same thing, apparently, happens less strongly in psychopaths. By studying the Connecticut inmates, Baskin-Sommers and her colleagues, Lindsey Drayton and Laurie Santos, showed that these people can deliberately take another person’s perspective, but on average, they don’t automatically do so to the extent that most other people do. “This is the first time we’re seeing evidence that psychopaths don’t have this automatic ability that most of us have,” Baskin-Sommers says.
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The U.S. prison system doesn’t assess psychopathy at intake, so Baskin-Sommers administered a standard test herself to 106 male inmates from the Connecticut prison. Of them, 22 proved to be psychopaths, 28 were not, and the rest fell in a gray zone.
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The psychopaths proved to be “glib, narcissistic, and conniving,” she adds. “They can be aggressive, and they like to tell us gruesome details of murders, I think to shock us. But it’s not like that all the time. They do a lot of impression management.”
After assessing the 106 volunteers, she then gave them a computer-based task. They saw a picture of a human avatar in prison khakis, standing in a room, and facing either right or left. There were either two red dots on the wall in front of the avatar, or one dot in front of them and one dot behind them. Their job was to verify how many dots either they or the avatar could see.
Normally, people can accurately say how many dots the avatar sees, but they’re slower if there are dots behind the avatar. That’s because what they see (two dots) interferes with their ability to see through the avatar’s eyes (one dot). This is called egocentric interference. But they’re also slower to say how many dots they can see if that number differs from the avatar’s count. This shows how readily humans take other perspectives: Volunteers are automatically affected by the avatar’s perspective, even when it hurts their own performance. This is called altercentric interference.
Baskin-Sommers found that the psychopathic inmates showed the usual level of egocentric interference — that is, their own perspective was muscling in on the avatar’s. But they showed much less altercentric interference than the other inmates — the avatar’s perspective wasn’t messing with their own, as it would for most other people.
This sounds a bit like another condition:
Other groups of people also show differences in their theory of mind. For example, in one study, Frith asked people to predict where a girl might search for a marble that had been moved without her knowledge. The onlookers knew the marble’s whereabouts, so could they override their own knowledge to step into the girl’s shoes? Eye-tracking software revealed that neurotypical adults look at the same place the girl would, but people with Asperger’s syndrome are less likely to. They don’t seem to spontaneously anticipate others’ actions. “It is a bit worrying if [Baskin-Sommers and her colleagues] are proposing the very same underlying mechanism to explain callousness in psychopathy that we used previously to explain communication problems in autism, albeit based on a different test,” Frith says. “These are very different conditions, after all.”
Get back to me when these oh-so-smart “genius” researchers start looking at the rest of the population, and actually start comparing the people in prison to the “normals”.
It’s like that doctor who was researching “the criminal mind”, and discovered that his brain scan looked just like the crazies he was researching.
You can’t look at small group of the outliers, and then make broad, sweeping generalizations about the rest of the population. Sure, there are people who commit crimes that match perfectly with the subset of what we’re diagnosing as psychopathy or sociopathy, but what we don’t know, because we’re not looking at the rest of the population, is if this is correlation or causation. I would wager that there are a lot of people out there who are what we could term “functioning psychopaths” who don’t go to prison because they never commit crimes, and that there are likely a bunch of people that have committed crimes, but who aren’t stupid enough (or, the cops aren’t lucky enough…) to be caught.
You can’t look at the people in prison and say “Yes, possession of this brain/mental condition means you’re doomed to be a criminal…”, because you don’t know what the incidence of that condition is in the general population. The scary thing about this sort of research is that the people setting public policy look at it, fail to recognize the limitations, and then make decisions about what needs to be done. And, with today’s technology…? The odds of enormous damage go up, tremendously.
I think we need to start implementing the precautionary principle a lot more, with this stuff, because we seem to be in a continual process of “discovery, misinterpretation, misapplication, disaster, ohshitwhatdowedonow…?”. Look at the nutritional BS, where the government seems to have triggered the obesity epidemic due to piss-poor biased research that appears to have been paid for by certain sections of agribusiness…
I recommend this page on Quora- I just read the currently top comments by Carlis Kwok [who adds fun pictures], Jay Jones and Jesse Gusta.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-it-like-to-be-a-psychopath
Interesting to read some self-perceptions, to note how many people might actually have this as a diagnosis and to note two other points these comments suggest:
1. There are actually ways in which this is a positive[ish] personality type and avoids some of the worst of other borderline personalities [they don't have wild, insane mood swings, depression, mania or anxiety.]
2. It kind of does have some interesting points of comparison with the autism spectrum, comparable cause or not.
I also recommend the short book Confessions of a Psychopath by the pseudonymous ME Thomas. Her book was illuminating and got some media play a few years ago. It started with her article in Psychology Today and she turned it into the book.
I perhaps demonstrated mild psychopathy myself by reading her article in a free copy in a waiting room and then, less passively, reading her book for free in installments while standing in a bookstore over a week or so. My contribution to the prevailing irony of life. It’s a very good read although structured in a periodically repetitive way.
One thing both those Quora people and Thomas do suggest is just how much this is a type within the normal range of human personality, far more able to function than anyone very far along the spectrum, let alone those with bad cases of BPD, a few other PDs, anxiety or depression. Once you get so bad as a psychopath to hit ASPD territory, less so.
On the whole, using the term as a shorthand for “dangerous” obscures more than it helps.
I’ve been thinking about this, a bit, and the question that keeps surfacing in my mind is this: Just how much damage has been done, over the years, by these people who keep studying these narrow little cases and then trying to apply what they learn across the rest of the world?
The psychopath question is an interesting and extreme example, but you see the same sort of thing going on in areas like education: How many little boys have been judged to be “hyperactive”, and then drugged into quiescence?
Did the people doing the research that created the standards for determining what constituted hyperactivity actually look at what was normal behavior across the population, or did they select a small sub-group the same way they look at psychopathy in criminals that are incarcerated, and then infer that the behavior they were looking at was abnormal and in need of medication, while it was actually the natural state of the average boy?
The one thing that I think needs to change in our society is the unquestioning veneration that the average person offers up to the “expert class”. Nine times out of ten, when you go looking at what these people have pronounced, against “popular wisdom”, it turns out there was an agenda, like the sugar industry was paying them to say that “fat is bad”. With the track record our brilliant researchers have, it’s a wonder anyone pays any attention to them at all, these days–How many times have they reversed themselves on coffee, in just my lifetime? Seems like every three-five years or so, there’s a new study out reversing what the last one said. After a bit, you start reading the damn papers with a very jaundiced eye, and looking cynically for who paid for what…
I know what psychopaths are. They are the remnants of Humans before civilization. All humans used to be mostly psychopathic. Most animals are psychopathic. The rise of “empathy” in humans IS the reason for the rise of civilizations. Just think for a moment of a city full of psychopaths. Have ever been alone with someone and could have killed them and taken their money and knew you could get away with it? Why didn’t you? Empathy. In a city full of psychopaths you can’t have a city because everyone would constantly take advantage of any weaknesses. You can’t have a civilization of psychopaths. There would be so much disorder it make civilization impossible.
There was book written a long time ago called.”The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind”. He was right that earlier minds were different but wrong on what the difference was.
Supporting evidence for this is studies that show Blacks have less empathy and a brief look at any place they control. Another good source is tame foxes. In four generations they took wild foxes and made them tame. They acquired a lot of attributes of dogs. Quote,”… By 2005-2006, almost all the foxes were playful, friendly and behaving like domestic dogs. The foxes could “read” human cues and respond correctly to gestures or glances. The vocalizations they made were different to wild foxes…”.
I believe that the foxes were breed for empathy even if that’s not what they were aiming for.
It’s possible that this came about by the elites “taming” humans. What they got was less violent people with a side effect of more empathy.
Sam J’s theory of civilization,”Civilization came about because of the rise of empathy. This allowed people to work together”.
Sam J’s theory of civilization, ”Empathy is necessary to form civilization. As capacity for empathy rose civilization rose with it.”