Looking online, most people seem to equate ‘sociopath’ with ‘asshole’, when the two are not necessarily the same.
Ted Bundy and Adolf Hitler constantly come up as famous sociopaths, but I don’t know if either qualifies. Sociopaths don’t feel emotions like compassion, empathy or anxiety, and there is evidence that Hitler felt all of them.
Hitler loved his mom, his dogs, his girlfriend, arguably his childhood friend Kubizek, etc. Also as the war became unwinnable, Hitler started having severe anxiety issues.
As far as Bundy, I really don’t know. He might be, might not.
The only famous political sociopath I can think of would be Joseph Stalin. Once the Nazis offered to exchange prisoners, Hitler’s nephew would be traded for Stalin’s son. Stalin refused. If Hitler were a sociopath, I don’t think he would’ve done that to help his sisters kid. But Stalin didn’t care about his own childrens lives. He drove his spouses and kids to suicide. I don’t think he ever did anything to imply he was capable of empathy or compassion.
The documentary ‘deliver us from evil’ has a priest who was likely a sociopath.
The BTK killer was a sociopath. Part of me wonders if John Edwards (the politician) is one too, or just a narcissist. Probably the latter.
Tortured animals, severely abused, arsonist, etc. etc. Oh and he was a prolific serial killer and contract killer.
He’s a pathological liar so it’s hard to know for sure how many people he killed but it’s for sure a lot. The kind of guy that would kill a random pedestrian just to try out a new gun.
Pretty much all male serial killers are sociopaths (female serial killers tend to be motivated by personal gain.) Jeffery Dahmer is fascinating simply because he’s been studied more than others. Yoo Young-Chul is also interesting because he didn’t have sex with his victims.
This article describes 3% of males as being sociopaths. This makes me think that the average sociopath is closer to insensitive jerk than serial killer.
I think a more recent example of psychopathic behavior might be Saddam Hussein and his son Uday. I think they might actually have Hitler beat in terms of psychopathic behavior they did personally. Idi Amin also comes to mind.
I happen to respect the sheer simple honesty of Carl Panzram’s philosophy: to openly and outspokenly embrace evil. His only enemies, he claimed, were those who stood in the way of evil. He went to the chair in 1930 wishing he could have murdered humanity itself.
Most serial killers are psychopaths, but the opposite is not true - most psychopaths are not serial killers.
Ted Bundy was a textbook example of a psychopath in every way except one - he was also a sexually motivated serial killer and necrophiliac, which is fortunately rare. Dr. Hare estimates that there are an estimated 2 million psychopaths in the U.S. (and as many as 100,000 in New York City), but only a fraction of those are serial killers. Psychopaths who kill tend to be the headline grabbers, but the crimes psychopaths commit run the gamut. Criminal psychopaths may be bank robbers, swindlers, drug dealers, thieves, rapists, con artists, all of the above, or any other combination of career criminal; psychopaths tend to be “criminally versatile,” jacks of all trades. Only when their psychopathy is comorbid with severe sexual sadism do they turn out like Bundy. Among psychopaths who do kill, expediency or poor impulse control is much more likely to be the reason rather than sexual gratification. Charles Sobraj is a good example of a psychopathic serial killer who killed out of expediency.
Dr. Hervey Cleckley, who probably advanced the study of psychopathy more than anyone else in the 20th other than Dr. Robert Hare, felt that Hitler, Mussolini, and many of history’s other monsters may have had psychopathic traits, but he didn’t consider them full blown psychopaths (others disagree to varying degrees). One figure stood out to Cleckley as likely having embodied the prototypical psychopath: Alcibiades, the great general and traitor of the Peloponnesian war.
The full passage is too long to quote here, but is worth a read.
Perhaps Cleckley’s teacher didn’t classify Alcibiades as a psychopath because certain kinds of psychopathology were once considered to be beneficial in warriors, politicians, or leaders of men.
In fact he seems to hint at a greater good in Alcibiades, ie: perhaps a civilization is not truly great until it can produce such supremely ungovernable men.
He’s being somewhat inscrutable is that passage - if you read further, the “teacher” he’s talking about was Alcibiades’ teacher, Socrates.
It’s impossible to know for certain, of course, but Cleckley’s argument is interesting. Part of the reason Cleckley thought Alcibiades a possible psychopath was that exactly those gifts that could have led Athens or Alcibiades himself to greatness ultimately led to their destruction of both - much like the self destructive psychopaths Cleckley saw in his practice, Alcibiades was arguably his own worst enemy and sowed the seed of his own destruction. Alcibiades whipped Athens into a frenzy and convinced the populace to invade Syracuse with disastrous consequences, switched sides midstream and conned the Spartans into taking him in, had to flee and join up with the Persians after impregnating the King of Sparta’s wife, etc. etc. He was undeniably brilliant, but also seemed to act without conscience or with regard to consequence, and ultimately he brought about the decline of Athens and his own demise.
Yes and no - it depends on how the speaker is using “sociopath.”
Most people use the two terms interchangably - when Dr. Stout talks about “sociopaths,” she’s clearly talking about the Hare/Cleckley psychopathic model, and says as much in her book. “Psychopath” is currently favored in psychology and psychiatry (mostly because that’s what Hare and Cleckley used), but some still use “sociopath” to refer to pretty much the same thing.
However, “sociopath” is also used to refer to individuals with Antisocial Personality Disorder, which is not exactly the same thing as psychopathy, although it was intended to be. When Antisocial Personality Disorder was first introduced into the DSM II in 1968, it was supposed to be a category for what Cleckley was then calling psychopathy and what was previously called sociopathy, but there were problems. The DSM criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder mostly categorize behaviors that violate the rights of other, which a large number of criminals will meet simply by being criminals, while the Hare/Cleckley psychopathy model is more about the mental characteristics such as lack of conscience, grandiosity, lack of empathy, etc. that underlie the criminal behavior of a psychopath. Somebody from a bad environment who grew up modeling criminal behavior can meet the criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder, but not still not be full blown, cold blooded, conscienceless psychopaths. The end result is that about 80% of the prison population will meet the criteria for Antisocial Personality Disorder, but only about 20% are psychopaths. The next edition of the DSM is attempting to reconcile the current differences between the two models with an updated category, Antisocial/Psychopathic Personality Disorder.
Dr. Hare (again!) wrote an article attempting to explain the current difference between Antsocial Personality Disorder and psychopathy:
I read a lot about Panzram and a lot of that comes across as talk. Yes, he was a bad guy, really bad, but he clearly also hurt a lot inside. He was also aware how much he had been hurt and he was also clearly aware how much he hurt others and how that pain felt to them. He wasn’t indifferent to any of it.
This doesn’t change his viciousness one bit but it does show he did have many sides to his personality
I don’t know if Kuklinski was a sociopath. I once saw him express remorse for what he put his family through. And reading his wikipedia entry he seems to regret at least one murder. Also he once murdered a guy who tried to discuss mob business with him at a family event (which implies to me he felt protective towards his family).
Some people in this thread seem to think that to be a psychopath you have to never have felt regret, never have cared about anybody. But is that truly the case, or just a matter of saying “oh, ok, let us not destroy Sodom so long as one good man can be found there”? Being someone who’s cared for both number-one and number-two may make you less of a psychopath than being someone who’s only ever cared for number-one, but it still makes you a psychopath.
