I think there is some confusion about what “psychopath” means, it sounds like it is being conflated with “psychotic” (meaning someone who has a skewed perception of reality). Consider Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Gary Ridgeway, these guys were in fact quite functional in the general social setting, they simply kept their urges compartmentalized. Perhaps they were not actually psychopaths, in which case I would have no clue what that word might mean.
That’s possible, but the bigger issue seems to be that people want to take the extreme definitions of both disorders and ignore anything short of that, in which case this whole discussion is moot since it would be ridiculous on its face - something that REALLY shouldn’t have to be explicitly pointed out, especially on a forum such as this. :smack: :smack: :smack:
I can only read what you have written. I cannot read your mind. Given how much you’ve been complaining about being misunderstood I thought you might welcome an explanation of where you went wrong. If I’d realized you were just looking to blame others for your own shortcomings I wouldn’t have bothered.
Uhhh, sure. Thanks for “helping out.”
I said nothing about violence. I in fact was quite close to a pretty classic psychopath who wasn’t at all violent - but was quite unable to think beyind immediate satisfaction.
Because it takes a long time to learn the skills needed to steal millions of dollars. Psychopaths aren’t good at long term planning.
I get the sense you’re not operating from a full understanding of the range of typical psychopathic traits. Psychopathy is not just “being a mean, selfish person,” it has a number of typical associated personality characteristics, with SSG Schwartz alludes to. A lack of foresight and long term planning is an absolutely classic trait of psychopathy; psychopaths are, typically, unable to see beyond immediate gratification, and after the fact will rationalize their failures in life by externalizing blame. The idea of the “intelligent psychopath” facilitating computer crimes is unlikely because the ability to delay gratification is not directy tied to intelligence. A psychopath can be super intelligent but still be unable to finish school, because they just can’t stick to things where the payoff is years down the road.
While this is possible, it is unlikely, because psychopathy makes it hard for a person to do this. It’s hard to folow society’s rules when you have limited foresight, an inability to set and execute long term plans, an inability to delay gratification, a predisposition to lying to the point that it becomes impossible to hide, have trouble holding jobs or having a real career, and prove unable to control your temper. These are NOT useful career traits.
I give up. I’m convinced at this point that I while I may not have communicated clearly on a few occasions, I have now stated my case so many times and so many different ways that clearly the problem is no longer on my end so I’m leaving this thread to the rest of the forum to do with what you will. Enjoy.
What’s the difference between a psychopath and a narcissist?
A narcissist desperately needs the attention of others focused on them. They need the validation of their worth through the recognition and feedback from others. They are excessively grandiose.
They overlap with psychopaths in their diminished capacity for empathy. It’s hard to take the perspective of others when your desire is for others to attend to and validate you. They are also more likely to manipulate or exploit others than the average person, but their goals and purposes for doing so tend to be different (mostly in order to fulfill their needs for adoration and admiration).
They are not otherwise any more antisocial. They don’t particularly violate rules or laws.
For You, I really haven’t noticed anyone bringing up or confusing psychopathy with psychotic disorders in this thread.
Let me try to reiterate what I believe others have said.
Are psychopaths/sociopaths good for society? No. Because by their very definition they are dysfunctional.
Can a person with sociopathic traits, undiagnosed and functional, use those traits in a way that benefits society? Yes.
Psychopathy/Antisocial Personality Disorder and Narcissistic Personality Disorder share a number of traits (which people can look up on their own), but I believe psychopaths tend to be more destructive and unreliable.
An extremely narcissistic person can be very successful simply focusing on their own professional goals.
Then just accept people don’t agree with you.
Your assumption is that we think those roles need to exist. The fact that psychopaths are good at handling business finances is exactly the reason why I hate big business. It means that big business does things that only psychopaths can do. Heck, I often describe the fictional “person” of a business as a psychopath.
You seem to have this idea that psychopathy is a list of a traits (true) and that everyone who has a little bit of those traits is a little bit of a psychopath (false). Of course small amounts of the traits that psychopaths have can be good. That’s why they having those small amounts is not defined as a disorder. And I do wonder if the reason why psychopaths exist is that we can’t try to get rid of those traits entirely.
The thing is that a psychopath does not have the other traits necessary to control those bad traits. They are only good when controlled by good traits.
Is it? There are all kinds of individual psychological characteristics that are also detectible in groups or organizations. E.g., “institutional memory.”
It doesn’t sound like you know the first thing about business or finance. Psychopaths aren’t “good at handling business finances” because they lack the single most important thing you need out of someone who handles your finances - that you can TRUST THEM NOT TO FUCKING ROB YOU!"
What psychopaths are good at is finding victims and not caring about acting in an immoral manner if it benefits them.
Treating corporate personhood as a “psychopath” is pure left-wing hyperbole. Can a corporation also be manic-depressive or bipolar? Can it suffer from borderline personality disorder? Or high cholesteral?
Companies are made of people and it is the decisions of those people that determines whether a company is acting ethically.
This is all correct and a very good post showing a good grasp on the subject. There’s a lot of misunderstanding of what psychopathy is and isn’t, but the Cleckly/Hare model of psychopathy is a very well-studied psychological construct. Some of the expressed doubts that psychopathy exists because everyone expresses traits that could be labeled antisocial or psychopathic from time to time are “correct but misplaced,” so to speak - everyone may lose sight of their principals occasionally and act in an antisocial, narcissistic or aggressive manner occasionally, but with the psychopath those traits are pervasive and at the core of their personality. Colloquial internet usage aside, msmith537 is exactly right; psychopath isn’t just a synonym for “asshole.”
Psychopaths not only display a constellation of antisocial and interpersonal personality traits, they also differ from nonpsychopaths in that they suffer from certain neurological deficits and have some different physiological and brain activity. A psychopath lacks a normal startle reflex and shows decreased palmar sweat and heart rates in response to stress compared to a nonpsychopath, and show a different reaction to words with emotional content measured by an EEG. In other words, if most of us hear the words box, pencil and rape, we will show a stronger reaction to the word with greater emotional content, but a psychopath will react much the same to all of them. Maybe most tellingly, CT scans and MRI’s of the brains of psychopaths show structural brain abnormalities like deformities in the amygdala and a smaller frontal cortex and show low activity in those regions. A psychopath isn’t just a garden variety asshole, he’s very different from other people in many ways both physically and psychologically. The Psychopathy Checklist - Revised (or PCL- R) commonly used to evaluate psychopathy is regarded with some suspicion by the general public, but that’s largely for the potential of misuse when carelessly scored and the grave consequences of mislabeling someone as a psychopath, which is a very real concern. properly scored, though, the instrument has an acceptable degree of interrater reliability, is positively associated with the physical, physiological, and psychological traits described above, and has been extensively peer reviewed.
As to whether psychopathy is “needed” by society, it’s really hard to see how other than keeping law enforcement, criminal justice and prison systems with an ongoing source of employment. There’s been a lot of speculation that psychopathy is useful or necessary to the military as a supply of “natural born killers,” but no studies have borne this out and it doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. Psychopaths have different reactions to fear stimuli and can act without remorse, but they also tend to lack certain instincts for self-preservation, they don’t respond well to authority or handle responsibility well (to put it mildly), they tend to commit crimes, cause trouble and violate the rights of friend and foe alike, they don’t typically do well with long term planning as RickJay notes, etcetera etcetera, all of which would be extremely detrimental in a military setting. Anecdotally, a board member here who scores the PCL-R at a military prison reported that only one or two percent of those he scored reached a scored consistent with psychopathy, which is surprising since in a civilian prison that number would be 25 to 30 percent. I suppose it’s possible that the reason the military prison has so few psychopaths is because they’re all in Special Forces, but I really, really doubt it. There’s a big difference between being able to act mercilessly through careful training and lacking the capacity for or understanding of mercy in the first place.
As far as in the corporate world, while it’s true that we don’t know nearly as much about psychopaths outside of forensic settings, no studies have shown that psychopathy runs rampant among CEOs and on Wall Street; while psychopaths can be superficially charming, the longer they are interacted with the more likely they are to out themselves and metaphorically step on their hoo hoo. Dr. Hare (author of the PCL-R) wrote a book on the subject called Snakes in Suits, but he noted that despite superficial similarities there are fundamental differences between psychopathic traits and real leadership. and while there most likely are psychopaths in the business world (and everywhere else), they’re more likely to be the guys taking credit for other peoples work, manipulating and stabbing coworkers in the back, maybe cheating or skimming profits, etc. than they are to be the hard charging captains of industry.
So, long story short, psychopaths take far, far more out of society than they give. Perhaps some of them can make some individual contributions; e.g. writer Ann Rule worked with Ted Bundy at a suicide hotline and said she saw him save lives, but on the whole Bundy was a disaster. Most won’t impact lives the way Bundy did, but on the whole we spend massive amounts of time, money and energy to protect ourselves from psychopaths, prosecuting them, imprisoning them, having our lives negatively impacted by them, and so on. The net loss to society inflicted by psychopaths far exceeds any theoretical gain.
And strving to expand a factions borders is a GOOD thing?
Really?
What if no-one did that anymore…would that be a BAD thing?
Bolding mine.
This is beyond my expertise, but there is some support for the idea that the bolded portion IS the benefit, that protecting against “cheaters” in the biological sense (which includes but is not limited to psychopaths) is the foundation of society. Here’s one such, from the animal kingdom:
But you could also say that psychopathy (assuming it exists) is a set of identifiable behaviors undertaken by an individual. And an organization can certainly do that. What comes to mind are companies that in a way, epitomize capitalism, like Bain Capital, or whatever shell companies that so-called “corporate raiders” use. They buy out companies. Some they build and improve, others they devour for assets and sell off the carcass, whichever is more profitable for them.
So to throw out this for the sake of argument, let’s say capitalism is in fact institutionalized psychopathy (or sociopathy, whichever). If that’s the case, we certainly need it, because the economy would collapse without it. Maybe, after a catastrophic collapse, something could be rebuilt without capitalism. I’m kinda failing to imagine what.
FYI, I truly believe we are headed for a very bad collapse, not directly due to capitalism, but because of some of its principles. I think sooner or later automation will make most
people irrelevant to the production of most goods and services. And we will then have a consumer economy with consumers who can’t afford to buy stuff, even if it’s made more cheaply than ever. Because they’ve lost their jobs.
I give that post a Full Colbert with two Self-Awareness Clusters.
Well, sure, but so could a computer. Or an appliance. Or my car. No one attempting to be taken seriously would describe a refrigerator as psychopathic, yet my refrigerator continues to do things without regard to the emotions of others.
I would argue that, logically, the more psychopathic a business is, the likelier it is to fail. Again, “psychopath” does not mean “greedy” or “mean.” It is a lack of specific mental functions that most human beings normally have, and the more psychopathic a person is the likelier they are to be a total failure. A truly “psychopathic” corporation would have no ability to plan, for instance, and would, consequently, be doomed to bankruptcy.
That’s already happened and yet most people have jobs anyway.
I was speaking about the term as meaning “utter disregard for the well-being of others and only interested in advancing one’s own interests.” I don’t know how close that is to a precise medical definition that is, but that’s what I meant. And while lots of institutions exhibit that behavior, but I think it’s a very large stretch to apply that to a home appliance.
As far as this:
What’s happened to date is just a drop in the bucket. I’m talking about machines replacing doctors, nurses, pilots, and even moreso people like cashiers at McDonald’s. Shit, there will be machines to fix the other machines. There are very few job descriptions outside of some creative ones that won’t eventually be able to be done faster and cheaper by machines.