Does society need psychopaths and sociopaths?

Great Debates
41

There are other conditions that can imitate sociopathy. Two that come to mind are ADD and chemical dependency. In fact what happened with Wall Street looks very much like what happens with excessive cocaine use to me.

In respose to RickJay, groups of people and how they function together are frequentle described by the people who study them as healthy or dysfunctional. And often they take on certain traits depending on what influences them. Guess you could call those “metaphors.” It’s a tool to understanding.

I’m in agreement with mssmith537 that a sociopath is more likely to be institutionalized or on the run than he is to be behind a desk having gradually worked(or manipulated) his way to a powerful business position. In fact, isn’t one of the diagnostic criteria for character disorder the fact that the person’s life has become unmanageable? Remember he doesn’t have to agree about that.

If he hasn’t totally trashed his life by the time he is in his late forties it is possible that he’ll burn out and be able to live a semblance of a normal life, perhaps with a few pecadillos here and there.

42

I don’t want to be rude, but I’ve said this several times and I don’t know if I’m just not communicating properly or if there is an unwillingness to go beyond the narrowly defined criteria for the disorders in question.

From the very beginning I think I’ve made it clear that we’re talking about a continuum of traits. Just like a test of IQ’s will give you a normal distribution, I suspect that this will also be true for pretty much any trait for which one has a sufficiently refined test.

Therefore, by definition as per above, people with socipathic traits are not necessarily dysfunctional. Rather, they can harbor these traits to a greater or lesser degree and not only function within society but use the rules and conventions of society to the detriment of social order and cohesiveness.

It is only when you move out the the far end of the continuum of psychopathic traits that the definition becomes synonymous with dysfunction. Now can we agree on this much or am I missing something critical to this discussion?

43

Typically because a true psychopath can’t maintain the discipline needed to finish business school. That is not to say that people can’t be successful displaying sociopathic behaviors. I was watching a show the other day about former Lehman CFO Erin Callan. The gist was that she spent her entire life working her way to the top (well…second from the top) until she lost her job when Lehman collapsed and woke up in her 40s divorced, no family, no personal relationships and no real life to speak of outside of work. Now I don’t think she’s a sociopath or anything like that. However, I often wonder about the makeup of people who are so focused on their career that they have nothing else going on in their life.

You are being overly broad in your use of the term “sociopathic”. It is perfectly logical and acceptable for me to act in my own self interest, and to put those interests ahead of other people, my company or “society”. Indeed, there is no such thing as “society” as a single monolithic entity, just collections of people with different interests.

44

Since I don’t care to ask you for a cite on every single statement, I’m just going to note that (a) you don’t seem to understand what a Sociopath is, and (b) your grasp of history seems to revolve around shaggy dog stories.

45

Okay. I believe I’m tracking and you don’t seem rude to me.

What I’m suggesting is that if you add another disorder on top of sociopathic traits you may have what appears to be diagnosable sociopathy. Deal with those and your “sociopath” disappears.

46

I read through the first dozen or so responses to this thread and had copied so many quotes to reply to, I just dumped them all and decided to post this instead.

First, the Hare Psychopathy Checklist is considered an industry standard in assessing psychopathy. You may accept it or not, but if you are on a parole board, a probation counselor, or work in the administration field of corrections, you better understand what the scores are and what they mean. The persons who score the interview (the PCL-R) are trained in not only how to administer the test, but how to score it. If a person is not trained in scoring the test, and an attorney subpoenas the administrator, the test is considered invalid. I was trained in how to administer and score the test.

Further, generally, the results of the psychopathy checklist are reviewed by another person who only reads the interview questionnaire and the file information. The results have to match. (I am fighting my own battle with a person who was trained the same as I was who seems to want to lower everyone’s score so she has a lower caseload. When I get her results reviewed, they usually match mine.)

Next, psychopaths don’t do well in war because they don’t do well with the discipline that most Soldiers accept as part of the job. I have heard the statistic that about 5% of the general population is psychopathic, less than 1% of the Military is psychopathic. Most would fail out or quit Basic Training because of the Irresponsibility factor and the Impulsive Factor.

According to Reid Malloy, a student of Dr. Hare, there is (or was) a purpose to psychopaths surviving in the human society. Psychopaths have what he calls “predatory acuity.” That is, psychopaths have an innate ability to spot the weakest member of a herd and target that individual. When hunting Mammoths on the plains or fighting for the ability to reproduce with the fertile female in the earliest days of humankind, this would be an advantage. In the current age, this is a longer sentence in a max custody section.

In short, you may see some psychopathic traits in yourself, or with some other people you meet or read about, but unless the person has been through the ten hour screening and interview process, you are not going to get a valid assessment of psychopathy.

SFC Schwartz

47

All I can say is that if people don’t want to look at these traits on a continuum and recognize that a bankers can be recruited based on the prevalence they show of sociopathic traits, then there really is much for me to discuss here.

48

Not it isn’t. Stop saying it that way. An allele is a version of a gene. Whether it’s sorta-true to say it’s “half of a gene” depends on whether it’s dominant, recessive, etc. and whether you’re dealing with a diploid organism in the first place (and whether or not it’s on a sex chromosome). In fact, sickle-cell anemia is a good example of how an allele isn’t “half a gene”. Also, eye color is a polygenic trait, so it would be a bad example to illustrate what you meant.

As for the linked article, I’m going to need a better TL;DR summary than has appeared in the thread thus far. It sounds like the gist of it (or at least the OP’s assertion) is that:

  1. A portion of very successful people are beneficial to society.
  2. A portion of psychopaths and sociopaths are able to be very successful.
  3. Therefore, psychopaths and sociopaths are so beneficial to society that we’d be worse off if there were no psychopaths or sociopaths.
    That’s pretty tenuous reasoning.
49

No, a good summary would be that there are a certain constellation of traits we associate with psychopathic and sociopathic personalities. These traits individually and as a group tend to appear in the population at large to varying degrees.

IOW, individual traits such as lack of empathy will show up to varying degrees in the sense that some individuals will show little or no empathy and others will show more or less normal levels.

Further, some individuals with show a few traits in the constellation to a notable degree while others will show most or all of the traits but to a less significant degree.

Certain roles in our economy and society are well suited to individuals who express certain traits to a certain degree thus making them able to excel in these roles. In most cases they are rewarded for this “excellence” however the debate is whether or not this serves or harms the society.

50

I think we could do without them. It might work out for the best.

51

Everyone has to detach emotionally sometimes, and some professions require this more than others. Even professionals that we think of as “touchy feely”–like social work and psychotherapy. If those people were completely empathic with their clients, they would be terrible at their jobs.

A little disinhibition and impulsivity can also be positives. I know the former is related to creativity, and I wouldn’t be shocked if the same goes for the latter.

I also think a little narcissism can also be helpful to a individual in a competitive society. A mild narcissist will have the confidence and swagger to convince others that his ideas are awesome. Narcissists are also brave enough to break away convention and defend themselves when called to the carpet. Society benefits from these people when they do have awesome ideas. The narcissism isn’t responsible for the creativity, though. It’s just a good vehicle for disseminating those ideas.

But all of these traits are beneficial in small doses. And maybe only in isolation.

52

I was basing my example on the accounts in the Old Testament of the Bible, where it was standard procedure for one village to raid another, kill all the “men” (defined as males above the age of 12 in those days) and enslave all the women and children. This was not something the bad guys did, it was what EVERYBODY did, including the good guys, i.e., the Jews of that time. In fact God once had his people slaughter EVERYONE in a village, women and children included. I take this as evidence that the Old Testament folks had no idea that what they were doing was wrong.

Now if people treat each other in ways that sociopaths are noted for treating people, and I’d say mass slaughter is covered there, you have to consider the possibility that sociopaths were in charge.

BTW, I want to make it clear: my understanding is that sociopaths are not necessarily antisocial, whereas psychopaths are. A sociopath may want your job, and scheme and do all sorts of horrible things to get it, but he or she is not wondering what your head would look like on a stick. Sociopaths simply have no empathy, they are not interested in tormenting others for it’s own sake. That’s psychopathology.

Most of history is replete with stories of mass slaughter, torture, etc., which to my mind argues for a strong influence of sociopaths and, indeed, psychopaths, in leadership positions. I agree many sociopaths do not do well in society, but the ones who are able to control and mask their pathologies do very well indeed, because ethical behavior can be quite the hindrance to success.

53

The linked article is actually about how a lot of investment bankers are (allegedly) psychopaths and that this is why we wound up with a global financial crisis. I have no idea why the OP thinks it indicates that psychopaths or psychopathic traits are necessary or even useful to society.

To be brutally honest here, you are communicating badly. I wasn’t sure what your point was in the OP, particularly since the article you linked to did not support your idea about psychopaths being necessary to society, and now your position seems to be one quite different from that suggested by the thread title and OP.

No, you didn’t. In the very beginning you asked “Does society need psychopaths and sociopaths?”, wondered “if it isn’t necessary that certain pathologies in general and these in particular be present in some small percentage of the population”, and described psychopathy as “sufficiently well defined that it is used in the criminal justice system as well as for other purposes.” All that seemed to pretty clearly indicate that you were interested in discussing true psychopaths, people who’d be classified as psychopaths by whatever assessment tool is used by the criminal justice system, and that is how others have been responding. You say now that you really want to talk about “people with socipathic traits [who] are not necessarily dysfunctional”, but I don’t see even a hint of that in your OP.

I say this not to argue with you about what you meant, you presumably know perfectly well what you meant, but if you’re unhappy with the direction this thread has taken it’s because you failed to express the intended topic clearly.

54

Nitpick: psychopathy is not psychopathology.

Psychopathology is the study of pathological processes in mental or behavioral functioning, or in other words the study of any mental disorders.

55

I can see that I may have inadvertently created some confusion, but when I quoted an article, IN THE OP, that talked about hiring bankers based on sociopathic traits, I really think it should have been obvious that I wasn’t talking about the Dexters of the world.

edit: BTW, I do apologize for any confusion and that it’s taken me this long to set up a firm groundwork for the discussion.

56

You actually did not quote that part of the article in the OP. You quoted a part that said there were psychopaths in the corporate world, that they were responsible for the global financial crisis, and that they were probably going to keep making things worse.

57

Maybe I need to be clearer and you need to read more carefully.

58

QUOTE=Evil Captor;16105432]

BTW, I want to make it clear: my understanding is that sociopaths are not necessarily antisocial, whereas psychopaths are.

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[/QUOTE]

This is an odd thing to say. Sociopaths are people with Antisociall Personality Disorder.

59

Here’s an interesting link about corporate psychopaths from the FBI’s web site.

Again, I think you are mistaking what you are calling “psychopathic traits” from true psychopathy. Psychopaths are predisposed to violence, but every boxer, wrestler and MMA fighter isn’t a psychopath.

I know a fair number of bankers and traders. I’ve also done a lot of consulting work in corporate fraud. Bankers, traders, sales people and similar types are typically recruited based on quantitative skills, drive, aggressiveness, personality plus a fair amount of having the right image and pedigree. A fair amount of their job does involve deception in order to get the best deal possible. And they are also working in extremely competitive, results driven environments.

What often happens is the pressure to succeed overrides more nebulous moral concerns over “right and wrong”. These guys are risk takers. And when risks don’t pan out, they often believe they are “one more deal” way from making things right. And like a degenerate gambler, they end up digging a hole they can’t get out of.

Also, I smell bullshit in the article. I would be very surprised if any investment bank actually tested for psychopathy and then actively recruited those individuals.
Another thing. I think that in many ways, our corporate culture fosters sociopathic attitudes. As I alluded to earlier, top corporations typically hire top grads from the top schools. Typically these are people who have worked their entire lives to achieve their goals at the expense of everything else. And they are praised and rewarded for it. What I have found is that these people have a glorified sense of their own achievement and a disdain for anyone who isn’t in a position to advance their career. They may not be psychopaths, but at the very least they are pretentious, narcissistic jerks.

60

And I think I’m tired of repeating myself.

I’m quite sure that circumstances often push otherwise “normal” people to emulate psycho/sociopathic traits – which just highlights rather than negates the point I’m making. The fact that you don’t see that puzzles me.

See my last comment.