Show business. These people make wonderful actors, and if you can do it well, show business will look the other way as long as you are not murdering people, and some people probably could get away with murder.
Interestingly, the sociopath I knew (and, sigh, dated; and no, it’s not bitterness, most of the women I dated were nice people) was an exceptionally talented actress.
But she never got anywhere with that because she was a psychopath. An acting career requires excellent interpersonal skills, networking, planning, and career management. She burned every bridge sooner or later.
When I took abnormal psych, we learned “sociopaths” are commonly people with antisocial personality disorder. List of symptoms from the Mayo Clinic:
* Persistent lying or stealing
* Recurring difficulties with the law
* Tendency to violate the rights of others (property, physical, sexual, emotional, legal)
* Aggressive, often violent behavior; prone to getting involved in fights
* Inability to keep a job
* A persistent agitated or depressed feeling (dysphoria)
* Inability to tolerate boredom
* Disregard for the safety of self or others
* A childhood diagnosis of conduct disorders
* Lack of remorse for hurting others
* Possessing a superficial charm or wit
* Impulsiveness
* A sense of extreme entitlement
* Inability to make or keep friends
With psych disorders reading the DSM, you usually need a certain number of symptoms for any disorder for a certain period of time to qualify as having the disorder. So you don’t need to qualify for all of these.
We spoke about two ways in which antipersonality disorder can manifest: one as a repeat criminal offender, and another as the person who fits in with society but something is “off.” The latter could be the stereotypical “slick businessperson” type of sociopath that is good at faking and cunningly uses other people as means to their own ends. Sociopaths aren’t always super violent or “crazy,” they just don’t give a shit about anyone but themselves. Anyone seen the show Dexter? How he talks about not ever knowing how to act when people around him get emotional? Because he doesn’t get those types of feelings? Very few things excite him (like when teenage Dexter stands on the roof at the edge of a building with the wind blowing to try to get his heart to beat fast)? Besides his killing, he isn’t a bad person really, he just doesn’t understand people at a basic level.
I’d guess though that most sociopaths are:
repeat criminals whose major crimes are likely theft/robbery, assault, other property crimes
“regular” people that are not violent and can be found in many walks of life
I read that book “The Sociopath Next Door” (which got bad ratings and I haven’t researched the author much) and the sociopaths discussed had regular types of lives, but they were just extreme assholes due to their lack of empathy and seeing people as tools to get what they want. I vaguely remember one example of a woman who faked her resume, lied out the ass, sabotaged coworkers, etc. to get and keep a job. Her goal was getting the job, so she did whatever she felt like to get it - including really hurting other people. And she didn’t care.
It seems like certain areas of academia would be conducive to a person with a single-minded devotion to his or her research, with sufficient aggression to step on others in the fight for grant money, etc.
And anyone who’s read Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential can envision successful psychopathy in the restaurant world.
Top salesman to new protege:
“The key to success in sales is sincerity: learn to fake that and you’ve got it made!”
You say that like its a bad thing.
…but all that aside,
What is meant by the term ‘narcisistic’ because it appears to me a term that is widely bandied about, for instance to describe individuals with which the US has a certain type of disagreement.
I’m also sure that there is a public perception of what it means, but this is not really technical description favoured by proffessionals
One other term often used, if someone isn’t ‘narcissistic’ then they will be described as being a ‘Walter Mitty’ character, again this seems to have been used as an attempt at political character assassination rather than any clinical meaing.
I would expect that there isn’t such a thing as ‘sociopathic’ in the classic sense of the word, but rather there is a range of conditions, from one extreme to another, with other disorders that may be associated.
For instance, in a tribal society there may be huge concerns for ones own group, and absolutely none at all for those of another, it could be religios based, such as in Sudan.
I also think that lack of empathy can be scenario based, so that someone can be an absolute brute in one set of circumstances, and a perfectly sane and rational person in another set.
I disagree; I think only unsuccessful sociopaths can not control those tendencies. I think there are lots of very successful sociopaths with absolutely no respect for or comprehension of the need for rules and laws and norms and the like, but obey them to stay out of prison and make good money legally (because, in the long run, it’s easier than illegal money).
There are smart and ambitious sociopaths, smart enough to learn the rules, and ambitious enough to play by them to get what they want.
And there are stupid and/or self-destructive sociopaths, who get caught and studied; they are a type of self-selecting sample, who skew the results.
Oh, yeah. One just like yours. I still haven’t recovered.
But I’ve run across the other kind, too; the ones with lots of ‘friends’, good jobs, admiring co-workers, and bosses happy to mentor them. I’ve watched them destroy careers, just to entertain themselves. They don’t have to fool most people for long, because they keep moving; up, rather than away. They only have to really fool one person, a mentor, at a time.
They’re kind of like the monster in most horror stories; they are so successful because people don’t believe they exist.
There are a couple of conflicting definitions of sociopathy. The layman’s definition is of someone who has no inherent emotions or empathy, but the technical version is someone who is anti-social, is violent, cheats, is lazy, and is unremorseful. While it may be that the former leads to the latter, in terms of talking about official, sanctionable sociopaths (psychopaths), being bad is part of the diagnosis, so it’s a given that they will “go bad.”
If you want to go by the layman’s definition, it’s entirely possible to be anything from an a-hole to a saint, it just depends. I personally have essentially no emotions or empathy for other people, but when I grew up and observed people around me, I came to conclusions similar to the iterated prisoner’s dilemma and the self-benefit of the golden rule.
Not really. If you’re a good study of people and how to play them, it’s perfectly easy to act in ways that endear them to you or your cause. If you want to believe that people are telepathic and can tell between true emotions and pretend, then I suppose that’s up to you, but so far as I can tell a good actor with a good script will do better than just any blowhard venting off his emotions.
It sounds from the posters’ descriptions that the ability for empathy, and the ability to accurately predict human reaction and behavior, are intimately linked together in the brain.
If true, then there cannot be a “Data style” emotionless sociopath who can coexist peacefully in society, simply because they cannot accurately emulate, and thus predict, others finding out their own deceit, and thus they carry out lies and sabotage that an otherwise normal person would know he or she would be caught at sooner or later. It would also explain other aspects of sociopathy, such as why they seem so impulsive and cannot hold a job.
I’d disagree. Humans aren’t random beings and the brain is a pattern detection machine at heart. Emotions and morality aren’t random either. There’s a history that leads up to philosophical and moral ideas that’s based on an “evolution” of societal necessities and superstitions. So it’s entirely possible to dissect and understand other people from a “3rd party” perspective. Now, any sociopath can and will incorrectly predict what other people will do from time to time but so will normal people. How often that happens is really something that’s going to depend on the individual and their ability to pick up on and reason through what they see.
Probably a majority of people on internet dating sites are socially incompetent, but it’s unlikely that most of them are sociopaths. That’s just the way it goes.
I think a lot of people are confusing being a sociopath with being a lying self-serving phoney jerk. That is not to say that there aren’t very malicious and manipulative people in business, politics and other fields. They may even be suffering from other personality disorders. But working for any job requires a certain degree of toeing the line and putting up with other people’s crap. I don’t think sociopaths are good at that.
In her classic “The Stranger Beside Me,” Ann Rule states that she thinks, given the right set of circumstances, Ted Bundy wouldn’t have become a serial killer. However, it was her opinion that the best he could have been would be as a driven businessman, someone who rises to the top by his intelligence and phoney friendships, while getting his urges taken care of with prostitutes.
I think a good fictional example of a successful sociopath was Norman Daniels in Stephen King’s “Rose Madder.” The guy is a successful police officer who beats his wife, tortures suspects, and later does become a serial killer. It is fiction, but King has done his research.