I was expecting to read an article about understanding human nature without morality and respect clouding your judgment. Instead I read that psychopaths are clever at thinking up nefarious schemes to get what they want. I don't buy it as "wisdom." Anyone can think of evil ways to get what they want, as long as the situation is hypothetical. Just yesterday I posted a comment describing how if I ran a dating site I would screw over my customers by giving them the exact opposite of what was good for them because it would be more profitable for me [1]. Most people have fantasized about violence from time to time, and half the internet seems to advocate being a psychopath as the best way to get laid. It's the reality of a situation that stops people from being as "wise" as a psychopath, and, I would argue, there's no loss, because in a practical situation there's no point in seeing solutions that you won't execute in real life. Did the author's friends use the asbestos solution? I think not. It would be awkward to explain to friends, they would have moral scruples, and it might very well be illegal. If a non-psychopath and a psychopath both limit their imaginations to plausible options, the psychopath isn't any more wise for seeing options the non-psychopath doesn't.
This was the problem I had with the article as well. It fails to point out, in conclusion, that these people are committed for life because they are extremely dangerous - and not just in theory, but because they have taken actions to achieve goals that have had damaging and terrifying outcomes in the real world. Despite being 5 pages long, the article feels unfinished - maybe that is the author's idea of a teaser for a book, but for me as a reader it felt like a waste of time.
Well it states what Broadmoor is and says that it contains some of the most dangerous people in the country (and mentions the casual references to physical violence a couple of times). Does that not adequately describe how dangerous these people can be? It seemed fairly obvious to me at least.
It also points out that there's such a thing as going too far and that merely learning/using some of the techniques that psychopaths tend to exhibit (in a mild form) is potentially useful. It doesn't seem (to me at least) that he's directly advocating pretending to be a council inspector/whatever to kick people out of their home.
That's a very shallow reading of the article, and given your comments about violence, you seem to have missed the main point, which is that there's a continuum of mental states, from flat out psychopath to neurotic and everything in between. The lawyer mentioned on the first page would appear to be high on the scale, but not enough for him to not care about risking going to jail.
And your 'screwing over customers' is vague in the extreme. How exactly are you going to keep people on your hypothetical dating site but without them meeting people? Withhold phone numbers? On the other hand, the asbestos example given in the article is concrete and specific and seems pretty plausible to me - certainly enough to be worth trying (once you've exhausted other, less risky solutions).
The other part of the article is the psychopaths' "relative indifference to setbacks" and their fearlessness.
> “The thing about fear, or the way I understand fear, I suppose—because, to be honest, I don't think I've ever really felt it—is that most of the time it's completely unwarranted anyway. What is it they say? Ninety-nine percent of the things people worry about never happen. So what's the point?
> “I think the problem is that people spend so much time worrying about what might happen, what might go wrong, that they completely lose sight of the present. They completely overlook the fact that, actually, right now, everything's perfectly fine.
> “So the trick, whenever possible, I propose, is to stop your brain from running on ahead of you.”
He is probably referring to the pick-up artist/alpha male/"game" community. Googling any combination of those terms should show you more. Calling that psycopathy, at least in the pop-science sense, well it's perhaps a bit strong but not completely unreasonable.
If the Scientific American article is representative of the book the world would probably have been better off had it never been written. For psychopaths other people are means, not ends. If wrecking your life will get them a more pleasant afternoon with no/small chance of danger to themselves they'll do it.
Psychopaths are indeed charming, ruthless and focused. They are charming because they got more practice at lying, cheating and stealing before they were fifteen than most get by the time they turn thirty. Vastly diminished anxiety helps too.
They are ruthless because to them other people are objects. You relate emotionally more like a dog than like a psychopath.
And mostly they are not focused on any long term goal. Their focus is very much on the now. They rarely have any long term goals or projects and if they do, remember, people are things. White collar or professional psychopaths may not go to prison for assault but they will lie, cheat and steal their way to any goals they may have.
For further reading on psychopathy read anything by Rober D. Hare, the dean of the field. I can recommend Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths go to Work
I think that their fundamental characteristic might be reduced to a very low emotional response. This explains their lack of empathy and lack of fear. The ruthlessness, charm and cold manipulator behavior are just by product resulting by the need and desire to reach their goal as any normal person have. The lack of empathy, fear and apparent consciousness make them more efficient but also less socially fit because they are deaf to other people's pain.
I think the idea is to paint the psychopath mindset as being so utterly alien to humanity that even the emotional capacity of a dog would seem more familiar to us.
practice at lying, cheating and stealing - this requires lot of self-control, which is considered a virtue.
They are ruthless because to them other people are objects - this is an emotion management, another virtue.
They are not focused on any long term goal. Their focus is very much on the now - and this is called spontaneity, a top of Maslow hierarchy.
So, you call it wrong?)
The point is, there are never been any study of so-called extreme cases. Get your test subjects from slums - you will get different psychology. It does't matter what experts think they will find. They will find what they don't expect.
The common-sense psychology text-book says that family doesn't matter. Well, if it is an average mediocre family, it doesn't, indeed. Children were shaped by their social network - by the street.
Now consider being raised in a family where you father died in an accident and mother became mentally ill, without any treatment, or even diagnosis. What common-sense psychology will say? "We probably would see some systematic differences"?
This is yet another bell-curve. Common-sense psychology studying mostly those 75%. Yeah psychopath is different.
It doesn't matter if it's an extreme end of a spectrum of human behaviors. The words are still just as true, and the actions just as alien to normal people. Just like all other personality disorders.
I find psychopaths incredibly interesting. Probably because I recognize that I am about the furthest thing from one. I incessantly worry about the future and the consequences of what I'm currently doing. I always wonder what people are thinking, what they are thinking about others, and what they are thinking about me. It takes me 50 minutes to type a short email because I'm constantly playing out the scenarios of how it comes across to others in my mind. In fact, I'd say I edit almost all the posts I make on HN multiple times after I've posted them. And finally, I have a tendency to become really sad upon hearing sad news. I avoid the news for this reason. And although I love reading about startups, I could never imagine myself leaving a secure, stable job unless I had very high confidence that my startup would succeed.
This sort of thinking has obvious negative drawbacks. Social interaction becomes a chore because you think you're never going to come across positively, so why interact at all?
I've always wished that for just a day, I could have a psychopathic personality -- just to see how things work out differently. (Realize that psychopathy is not the same thing as evil or immoral by the way).
The author of the book (and OP article) writes about his experience with transcranial magnetic induction that is able to turn him into a temporary psychopath by effectively disabling the center of the brain associated with empathy. (The anecdote is in the full text of The Wisdom of Psychopaths - I don't think I've seen it online.)
Some people with borderline personality disorder have a hyperactive amygdala - this means they're hyper aware of perceived risk and what people think about them, and what they think about themselves.
BPD has a high correlation with various eating disorders and with attachment problems.
Sometimes people with BPD can be involved in horrific deliberate self mutilation, but without wanting to die at that point.
It seems like the opposite of psychopathy would be a mix of insecurity, guilt, social anxiety, and intrusive, excessive, uncontrollable empathy. Imagine that every time an ambulance went by with its lights and siren on, you were overwhelmed with fear and sadness for whoever was hurt, while at the same time feeling guilty for no reason, and being afraid that whatever happened to the poor person in the ambulance, you would be blamed for it.
I think that is generally referred to as self-consciousness, and it can be very extreme (to the point of paranoia and anxiety attacks) or more tame, as in the stereotype of the average teenager.
I'm an anti-psychopath, and most people wouldn't consider me empathetic, because I have such a moral extremism about me.
Actually, I think of psychopaths as lawful evil, so the opposite is chaotic good. Chaotic good tend to have strong empathy but a sort of moral extremism/pathological honesty that can override it. In fact, they're willing to be disliked if they believe they're doing good for others or the world.
The chaotic-good anti-psychopath is the anti-authoritarian who insists on Living in Truth (Vaclav Havel's concept) whereas psychopaths revel in manipulation and lies.
As I understand it, psychopathic traits are very good for getting what you want in the short term. If this author’s interview subjects had appreciated the long-term consequences of their antisocial behavior, they wouldn’t be behind bars.
Effective psychopaths never end up behind bars. They climb the corporate ladder. I've seen them in action and, as bad as they are for the companies they work in, you can't come away from seeing one in action without thinking, "Damn, he's good".
The violent ones are the lower class of psychopaths, and most prisoners aren't psychopaths. The smarter, high-class psychopaths are the corporate back-stabbers. They learn how to "manage up" because the ROI is so high.
"In a typical prison population, about 20 percent of the inmates satisfy the Hare definition of a psychopath, but they are responsible for over half of all violent crime."
Your claim is true but it is an oversimplification. There is at least a factor of ten over representation, since 1-2% of the total population are psychopaths.
Edit: Considering the large incarceration rates in the USA (more than 1% of the adult population), 10-20% of the total number of psychopaths should be in prison there... Oh my!
Edit 2: Consider 50% of all violent crime committed by 1-2% of the population... Everything else pales.
Your claim is true but it is an oversimplification. There is at least a factor of ten over representation, since 1-2% of the total population are psychopaths.
Many HN posters (including myself) have a genetic trait that makes them about 10 times as likely to commit a violent crime: the Y chromosome.
We already idolize psychopaths. Ruthless CEO types and people who generate "success" by whatever means. This article goes one step further. Its author suggests that actually more of that is needed in today's society and sets out to interview psychopaths on how they solve problems. Turns out, they do it by employing deception and (sometimes non-physical) violence.
Even forgetting for a moment that we're actually soliciting murderers and rapists for advice on social situations, am I really the only one who has a problem with this? Is more callousness, more dishonesty, and more manipulation really what's missing from our society?
How would the psychopath's lack of empathy differ from the autistic / asperger's lack of emapthy?
It reminded me of the axis of hypo-mentalist <--> hyper-mentalism from here http://edge.org/conversation/the-imprinted-brain-theory (second figure, ignoring the genetics parts for this discussion) ...but I don't know where would autism and psychopathy would relate and differ. They are certainly very very different things, but I can't think of a simple conceptaul framework that would show their similarities and differences.
This is a very naive generalisation, but, as far as I understand, psychopaths can be very good at assessing other people's mental state, but do not /feel/ it like most people do. People on the autistic spectrum find it very difficult to recognise what other people are feeling.
Very true as autisim which aspergers is part of spectrum wise are classified as learning disabilities and with that mean that the capacity to empathise is there, just not as quick at learning those aspects. A psycopath on the other hand can clearly see those connections and empathise, its just that they don't care too and do not see why they should.
Think of it as comparing somebody with a broken leg who finds it hard to walk in contrast to somebody who has fully working legs but sees no point in walking.
This raise the question if the best entrepreneurs should be psychopaths. Investors seam to favor the psychopath personality characteristics (taking risks, focus, bent rules to reach goal = hack the system, etc.).
It also seam that people with moderated psychopathy might be socially and professionally advantaged and might thus, in the long term, become the dominant humans and the future product or our on going evolution process.
I've worked for two startups and got to know their CEOs well.
The first was probably not a psychopath but definitely a narcissist, and would do bad things if he thought it was necessary to the health of his business, including lying to keep people in the company. He failed after spending millions on a launch party in the early 2000s, and his reputation never recovered.
The second was an out-and-out psychopath: dishonest, manipulative, and hired worse people than him (to do his dirty work and keep him clean). He's still going strong.
A very nice read and if anything too short, want to read more.
The ability to abstract oneself from the problem in a way that enables you to think about the problem is certainly something many would wish to be able to do better in at least one area in there lives. I find it easy to handle most things but anything personal, well I just end up like most and think about every negative permuation more than resolving the issue.
Though in a sence it is the ability to regret things that too me is the seperation that divides most.
I often say if 51% of the population were psycopaths then they would not be psycopaths but normals and the other 49% would be the exceptions and outcasts in many ways.
Ironicly in todays society that is against drugs and can't cope with somebody saying I've had a good life, can it end now we seem too impose the majority will upon them. Indeed if you said I want to die to a doctor and even explained why, many would probably push you to drugs that remove the emotional negatives and or section you in a mental hospital until you towed the line if I want to live even if the World is utterly insane.
Many a wise word is said by what people lable as `mental` patients and with that it is good to see the lable removed and the flash laid upon the bones so to speak with regards to psycopathic traits. When you break it down and look at various jobs and roles in society then you can certainly see that it is a set of skills most would envy. Then only negative is the big gotcha of impossing your will upon others to the detrement of there quality of life. That all said many bankers and financers happily ruin peoples lives in a more agonising way than any mental of phsical torture as we know it and with that have defined legaly allowed means to do what is in effect psycopathic traits. When a bank reposses a house do they send in councelors and break the news over a hot beverage, no they do it in a letter and with that are about as cold as any psycopath could ever come up with.
But we are talking about psycopaths who have crossed a legal moral line like murdering somebody and getting caught. Yet the same actions can be done in far more legal and less liable ways and means if you take the right approach. I'm sure there are psycopaths who have done such things and others who just maybe work in jobs like banks or important positions which enable them a more fine control upon there enviroment too effect others in more subtle indirect ways. After all for those of us who think about what can go wrong and waste that 90% of the time worrying about the unhappened, maybe that in itself is used to out own detrement if leveridged by somebody mindful of such weakness's.
After all not all psycopaths are criminals, we as society have just labeled them by default and with that there exist alot of predispositions that society places as a collective upon others and in many ways when you apply labels and blanket definitions and sterotyping then isn't that how racisism started.
So society could learn and should learn from them, after all everybody has something unique about them and with that you can learn something from every single person on this planet a impossible task but certainly one that should not be dismissed in a way that you ignore by default whole area's/groups/types/variations. That is probably the first leason you can learn and with that the most important one in my book.
> I often say if 51% of the population were psycopaths then they would not be psycopaths but normals and the other 49% would be the exceptions and outcasts in many ways.
There's good reason to believe that such a world would be unstable. When too many people are willing to take advantage of too many other people then you will most likely have a tragedy of the commons [1]. Co-operation and altruism appear to be very important components for the evolution of species and the advance of civilization.
> After all not all psycopaths are criminals
This is true, and as with most things in life what's important is balance. As the article discusses, psychopaths tend to live "in the now" and have a very present-oriented time perspective, which certainly has some value. But too much of a particular time perspective, in this case with no past- and future-oriented time perspectives, creates a distorted map of reality [2].
> When a bank reposses a house do they send in councelors and break the news over a hot beverage, no they do it in a letter and with that are about as cold as any psycopath could ever come up with.
interesting that you mention this, because a "bank", or in general, a corporation can be considered a psychopath. If you watch the documentary "The Corporation" (freely available on thepiratebay), it shows you the criterias that they used to measure a corporation that leads to this conclusion. But number 1 cause is the requirement of a corporation to make as much money for its shareholder as possible, and the CEO/chair/president/etc is legally bound to do this.
Oddly, no previous management research has looked at what the legal literature says about the topic, so we conducted a systematic analysis of a century’s worth of legal theory and precedent. It turns out that the law provides a surprisingly clear answer: Shareholders do not own the corporation, which is an autonomous legal person. What’s more, when directors go against shareholder wishes—even when a loss in value is documented—courts side with directors the vast majority of the time. Shareholders seem to get this. They’ve tried to unseat directors through lawsuits just 24 times in large corporations over the past 20 years; they’ve succeeded only eight times. In short, directors are to a great extent autonomous.
the CEO/chair/president/etc is legally bound to do this.
No, that's an excuse.
CEOs aren't allowed to steal from shareholders by, e.g., making the CEO's political campaign or mansion a company project. That is illegal. However, CEOs have the legal right to prioritize the long-term health of the company, which they can define to include ethical decency and environmental impact.
It almost sounds as if she wants to be killed (stuff like that has happened before, prisoners taking their therapists hostage, for example). What a silly idea, sorry.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5015068