Even if that’s true – which I am skeptical of, since this guy doesn’t name the bank or offer any evidence of his claim – and psychopaths are well-suited to certain jobs that doesn’t mean society needs psychopaths. I doubt that psychopaths are the only people qualified to be investment bankers. Human society also predates investment banking by thousands of years.
I’m saying that just because a train is present in a population, that does not mean if confers some evolutionary advantage. Generally, traits which are net* disadvantageous will be culled from the population, but that is an entirely different matter.
*Some traits confer both advantages and disadvantages, depending on how they are expressed.
Yes, traits that are not advantageous but confer no disadvantage can survive.
To expand on this, the classic example would be sickle-cell anemia, a trait caused by a recessive gene. Sickle-cell anemia is unambiguously negative, and has no advantages. However, someone who’s got one sickle-cell anemia allele* and one non-sickle-cell anemia allele will be somewhat resistant to malaria, allowing them to survive better in an environment where malaria is present without actually having sickle-cell anemia. Therefore, sickle-cell anemia survives even though it’s evolutionarily disadvantageous.
*Loosely, an allele is half of a gene. In the nitpickiest way imaginable, it’s technically incorrect to say that I have two blue-eyed genes. I have two blue-eyed alleles (and therefore blue eyes). If I had one blue- and one brown-eyed allele, I’d have brown eyes. There are lots of exceptions and technicalities to this.
Heck, things that are distinctly harmful can still be passed down. Take Huntington’s, for example. That disease usually (not always) doesn’t manifest itself until a victim’s middle years, giving said victim plenty of time to procreate and pass on the gene for the disease.
The clinical diagnosis of Antisocial Personality Disorder is the closest analog to the concept of psychopathy. They both emerged from the same roots (the 18th century concept of “moral insanity” and the more recent descriptions of psychopathy through the mid 20th century, esp. Cleckly’s descriptions), but when the DSM III was being developed, and APD was introduced, many components of psychopathy were not included out of a fear of potential problems of interrater reliability.
Emerging evidence, however, illustrates that measuring elements relating to a callous, manipulative interpersonal style does provide important useful information in identifying particular individuals who are at risk for future antisocial behavior. Thus, the revised DSM 5 will include callous and unemotional features as a subtype of Conduct Disorder. This recognizes that such features are present earlier in development than adulthood.
The construct of psychopathy, which is still going to be an overlapping, but distinct, construct from the clinical diagnoses, includes two factors: antisocial behavior (aggression, rule breaking, criminality, impulsivity) and selfish and deficient interpersonal style (like being glib, manipulative, remorseless, frequent lying). Cut-offs for the most commonly used measure, the aforementioned PCL-R, are not particularly well developed. But this relates to an important concept for the present discussion, that of categorization versus dimensionality.
To be categorized as a psychopath, one needs to show a high level of antisocial behavior and selfish interpersonal features. It’s simply wrong to suggest that most or even many people would meet these criteria; when cut offs are used, very low percentages of most general populations meet criteria (like around 1%), and modest proportions of forensic populations (like around 30%) are categorized as psychopaths.
When considered as dimensions, though, the concept is that everyone could be placed somewhere along dimensions related to psychopathy (such as from 0 to 100 on some fictitious scale).
Thus, in the context of the present discussion, there’s just no way to conceive of someone being a “psychopath” being a positive thing for society. By definition they would be antisocial. It’s not helpful for someone to engage in criminal behavior or to be significantly physically aggressive. However, it is possible to think about ways that some societally necessary tasks could be enhanced by someone who is somewhat higher on a dimension underlying the construct. For instance, I was watching Argo last night, and thinking that I would suck at the job of going in to extract those hostages because I’m just not particularly good at lying and manipulating others like that.
Lots of other tasks benefit from someone who is less affectively impacted by things. Being able to cut into someone else is helpful in order to remove a cancerous tumor, for instance. Nevertheless, it remains the case that being a psychopath, as in falling into the categorization, could not conceivably be a positive thing for a society.
They’re all narcissists. I swear I can smell them from a mile away. You know who else is? Rick Snyder, George Zimmerman, Paul Ryan, Bill O’Reilly, and Mark Zuckerberg. I could go on. The problem with narcissists, is that they’re a specific kind of sociopath who seek out positions of power in order to control others and, by proxy, their environment. They’re the worst kind of social monster because they callously utilize others for personal gain or for their own amusement. The fact that narcissists and, by extension, other sociopaths may have individually contributed to society is an unintended side effect of their behavior.
I’m down with that.
Need them.
I’d expect that psychopaths and sociopaths make up a high percentage of every culture’s most revered warriors, soldiers, and leaders. Research by S.L.A. Marshall and Lt. Dave Grossman indicated that only a small percentage of those on the battlefield are actively striving to kill the enemy; as such many key battles must have hinged on such men. Psychopaths and sociopaths have also been quite handy for expanding a faction’s borders and power, as could be seen in the American West, Colonial Africa, etc.
Well, I don’t know about that; success is one thing, and value is another. Perhaps corporations would have more social value without psychopaths leading them.
Thank you, this is exactly, PRECISELY the kind of thinking we need to stop doing. We have often given power to sociopaths when we feel threatened, and it rarely works out well.
For example, let’s say the leader of Village A is a sociopath back in very early Biblical times. The crops are not god one year, some villagers may starve, and being a sociopath, he hits on the plan to get all the village males together, and go raid Village B, stealing their crops so all who live in Village A will survive. The people in Village B will die in droves, those that survive the raid, but the leader of Village A don’t care … he’s a sociopath.
So he succeeds, Village A residents survive, hurrah for the Glorious Leader, and the few survivors of Village A go to Village C and D and tell the people there about all the horrible things Village A did to them. And an ambitious sociopath in Village C realizes this is his chance to seize power, he plays on the fear of what happened to Village B to gain power in Village C, then realizes that he can gain more power by attacking Village A … before they attack Village C, of course. And so Village A is attacked, and to make sure Village A does not attack Village C ever, all the men are killed and all the women and children are enslaved.
And thus you have the entire history of the Middle East in a nutshell.
Most of human history is the human race slowly, painfully pulling away from the influence of sociopaths, without really knowing what sociopaths are, or even that they were different from the rest of us. Now that we know, we need to positively act to destroy the power of sociopaths. Might be important to the survival of the human race.
And “advantageous” and “disadvantageous” mean, here, only to the enhancement or diminution of the differential reproductive success of those individual organisms bearing that trait – not necessarily advantageous/disadvantageous to their social group, if there is one.
I admit that unattributed hearsay, phrased as perfectly appropriate, non-colloquial soundbites is, to put it mildly, highly unconvincing.
This is really an absurd question. People have this romanticized view of psychopaths and sociopaths as Dexter, Hannibal Lechter or Patrick Bateman. Charming, brilliant, manipulators with an almost omnipotent ability to achieve their nefarious goals.
Real psychopaths and sociopaths typically have a difficult time holding down any job, let alone a job as an investment banker or CEO. Someone who displays “irresponsibility, impulsivity, criminality, antisocial behavior, and a parasitic lifestyle” tends to make a poor employee or manager.
People use the terms psychopaths and sociopaths interchangeably with the term “greedy selfish jerk”. And corporate America is full of greedy selfish jerks. Even if someone isn’t a jerk, decisions are often expected to be based on an unemotional analysis of costs vs benefits to the company. And the effects of those decisions are often disconnected from the person making them, who typically only sees numbers on a spreadsheet. Add in the effects of incomplete information and personal bias, you have an emergent behavior of large corporations appearing to act in a capricious and sociopathic manner.
Which raises the question of whether an organization or system made up of non-psychopathic individuals can still be a kind of collective psychopath.
Psychopathy is a condition present in a human being. Asking if an organization can be a psychopath is like asking if an organization can have the flu.
Let’s take a turn 90° left and ask: Does society need authoritarians? Control freaks?
I can tell you for a fact that this is not necessarily true. Due to certain neurological issues I won’t go into, I’ve had to learn how to emulate a variety of emotional responses. This includes being able to read and understand non-verbal communication and emulate non-verbal cues in return - consciously. If I did not have a very strong moral sense of right and wrong, it would be easy for me to use those skills to mislead and deceive and in situations where something of great significance was at issue for me, I have indeed done precisely that.
The point is that while I am certainly not a sociopath, I do have traits that would fall under that rubric. Therefore this is not, never has been and never will be a black and white issue of extremes. When we talk about people with sociopathic traits and just loosely label them sociopaths, it’s purely out of convenience since they evince these traits to a significant enough degree to be noteworthy. It doesn’t mean that they get pushed out to the violent, criminal end of the continuum.
… then you might be a psychopath. But you do have that sense.
“Learning how to emulate emotional responses” isn’t indicative of psychopathy. If it were, then a professional actor would be showing traits of psychopathy, assuming they were good at it.
In fact, msmith is correct; most psychopaths do have trouble holding down jobs. An inability to act in one’s own **long term **best interest is a classic trait of psychopaths. Psychopaths may be good at charming someone into lending them eight hundred bucks, but tend to lack foresight and the ability to learn it.
Sorry. The implication was that there was no innate ability to express those emotions - which somewhat overstates my case but is sufficiently accurate.
As to what psychopaths are capable of, again, you are invariably talking about the violent, criminal variety. The whole idea that there are psycho/sociopathic traits that may not rise to the level of creating dysfunction I believe is fairly new. However the idea makes perfect sense. If you are an intelligent psychopath, why would you ever commit armed robbery to get a few thousand dollars when you can legally steal a few million from behind a computer terminal.
I’m not sure why people are having such a hard time with this simple concept. 
edit: simply put, not only can psychopaths work w/in the rules of society, but they can game and exploit those rules to their own advantage.