Send them the “So You’re A Sociopath” literature. 
Last I looked into the state of the research, the inter-rater reliability for designating someone as having a psychosis was almost low enough to be alongside of random chance. This is particularly and specifically true for schizophrenia, by the way.
The overwhelming predictive factor for whether or not a person ends up with a diagnosis of schizophrenia is presence of the history of childhood sexual abuse in the subject’s past. Are there inherent differences in brain structure or neurochemistry or genetics that make one person more likely to end up with a diagnosis of schizophrenic than another person if they’re both victims of childhood sexual abuse, or if neither is? Possibly, but it’s a weak signal compared to the experiential component.
Current law perhaps, but not necessarily all ethics. If it is certain that a person is a sociopath, and it is certain that sociopaths are more dangerous to society if they occupy certain positions of power, there is nothing inherently unethical in curtailing their right to occupy such positions. Ethics might even require society to offer treatment. Both of these could easily fit in with utilitarian morality, too.
I don’t think that would fly under current (U.S.) law, but the female right to vote didn’t fly in federal elections for a long time.
~Max
I sure hope primary care physicians are not getting CBCs on everyone. It’s NOT a screening test for the average risk population and should not be used that way. That’s shotgun medicine and it’s not good medicine. Too many false positives, many of which require more testing, some of it will be invasive and do harm.
One needs to be very careful with tests. Back in the day, a physician didn’t order a test unless he was already pretty sure what the result would be based on history and clinical examination.
I’m not a doctor and work for a specialist, plus our majority demographic is senior citizens, so I’m probably biased. Now that I think about it, none of the kids come in with that test. But most of our patients are elderly with lots of medications and chronic problems and I think that makes the blood count more relevant. I know we will order with differentials if there’s recurring infection, since that’s our specialty.
~Max
Depends on what the action is. Screening, fine. Except we don’t do much for people who clearly have problems, like many of the homeless.
Take their guns away? Works for me, but some people would scream.
Lock em up? Ditto.
That isn’t what margin of error means, but no matter. The question is what action to take. Being identified as a potential sociopath might have implications, which would be a big issue if there are many more false positives than real positives. How would you like it? Plus, I don’t think we’re at the stage yet where even a more extensive screening would be perfect.
Much of the homeless problem stems from not providing services to the mentally ill. (And much is from economics also, I get that.) I’d love to see those who oppose decent gun control measures in favor of services for problematic people offer some money for this. So far, crickets.
The elderly generally do merit checking of CBCs as anemia is much more common in that age group.
I hope they did it for at risk populations. A test I took because of my age revealed something nasty which will be fine because it got caught early.
I should know better. I meant false positive rate.
Of course. I think it is unethical to publicly label people “potential sociopaths”, which encourages stigmatism. I might be persuaded to divert public funds towards subsidized mental health services for potential sociopaths, starting with a diagnostic consultation. But then I have no idea how long it takes to make a diagnosis, or how accurate those are.
~Max
I’m not convinced this would be all that helpful at keeping dangerous people from powerful positions. Most sociopaths, or those with antisocial personality disorder, don’t usually rise to positions of power. Most of them have poor impulse control that leads to them being fired, forced to switch jobs often, or landing in jail which makes it difficult for them to advance up the ranks. And I’m wary of armchair psychologist who diagnose CEOs or politicians without some sort of established doctor patient relationship. How do you make a diagnosis without actually examining the patient?
Does it not matter to you what specific interventions we’re talking about when you say “not such a good idea”?
Like, sure, if the intervention is a maximum security lock-up for life, then a 10% false positive rate is horrible no matter what the population size is.
But if the intervention is at least a year of specialized cognitive behavioral therapy and vitamin D shots (because maybe scientists have found a fact-pattern there), then it isn’t tragic at all.
Furthermore, we need to know what kind of individual gets falsely misclassified. Are all the false positives choir boys and girls who would never harm a flea? Or all the false positives individuals who actually do exhibit disruptive behaviors, including law-breaking, but they have enough of a moral center that they’d never do anything truly sociopathic? Could they not benefit from some kind of intervention? I’m thinking of kids who have behavioral problems who get incorrectly labeled as autistic. Sometimes that label does them a disservice, but sometimes it actually gets them needed attention they wouldn’t otherwise get. Maybe through an intervention they can be properly diagnosed and thus properly treated.
And it needs to be said that I didn’t say anything about forcing anyone to do anything. If science has identified factors that strongly predict sociopathy, those factors could be used by medical professionals to advise parents on how best to treat their strange, worrisome children. They could be used to screen embryos so sociopaths aren’t even born. And they could be used in the criminal justice system to figure out what kind of prison sentence a criminal should get and at which kind of facility. It seems to me those are much more likely outcomes than whatever scary things posters in this thread are imagining.
Is your apparent assumption that all sociopaths are criminal actually true? While there is a correlation between convicted criminals and rates of sociopath, it does not automatically follow that being a sociopath will make you a criminal. There is also a high correlation between being a convicted criminal and someone of the male gender but we don’t automatically assume all men are criminals.
That assumes identification will result in treatment rather than stigmatization.
That assumes there even is a treatment. Not everything is fixable.
I strongly doubt that the cause is just one gene and I’m not sure screening programs for disorders/problems caused by multiple genes even exist.
It seems much more likely to me that if there were genetic tests for sociopathy they’d be used to punish people more harshly based on their genes rather than trying to treat their problems more effectively, given what I know of American society.
I don’t know why you are asking me this. Where did I imply I’m making this assumption?
I’m assuming that 90% of sociopaths display disruptive behavior, however you want to define that. Do you think this is a wrong assumption to make? Maybe the sociopaths who don’t display disruptive behavior belong to that 10% of sociopaths who don’t meet the screening test. Does that render the screening test completely useless? Or does it just mean we shouldn’t punish anyone who meets the test?
Correct. So if we devised a program that successfully minimized stigmatization, would you be in support of it?
sigh
Of course. But if we have a test that can identify sociopaths with a 20% error rate, then that means we’ve got some pretty nifty technology and knowledge at our disposal. Even if our intervention results in only a 30% reduction in sociopathic behaviors (maybe the murder rate goes down while the number of workplace jerks increases by the same amount), that’s still something. If the harm associated with the intervention is still less than the harm caused by prescribing chemotherapy drugs to treat a variety of diseases (a current practice, by the way), then why should this feel particularly “icky”?
A lot of people share this doubt. But these same people submit their DNA to a company like 23andMe and confidently brag about where all their ancestors came from. And in a few years, these people aren’t going to hesitate to get their DNA screened so they can know their risk for dementia, diabetes, and heart disease…so that they can take a pill, change their lifestyles, or plan their estate a certain way.
You better believe if scientists were able to reduce juvenile delinquency and improve academic achievement through a blood test and a pill regimen, many of the people who currently doubt that sociopathy can be detected through biomarkers will be the same people clucking their tongues over parents who refuse to take their bad-behaving kids to the doctor. Instead of anti-vaxxer hate, there will be anti-test hate. And you know what? I’ll be one of those people negatively judging the anti-testers. As long as we aren’t talking about penalties just for having a positive test and there are safeguards to prevent medical information from going public, why wouldn’t parents get their bad-ass kids tested? I would hold those parents responsible if their bad-ass kids grow up to be bad-ass adults.
Your genetic testing idea is the worst way to ensure public safety from people who are mentally ill. It’s expensive, way more expensive than treating people with mental illness. It’s unethical, even you want to use it as the basis of a eugenics project, and it’s not effective. Lots and lots of people without mental illness commit crimes.
And lastly, again, sociopath and psychopath are not diagnostic terms. A mental health professional would not use either word to diagnose a patient. The movie version of psychopaths and sociopaths is as fake and non- scientific as the movie version of split personality.
Donald Pleasant was a terrible doctor to poor 8 year-old Micheal Myers.
Lots of people without diagnosed mental illness commit crimes. But that does not mean that those people don’t have something wrong with their brains and/or bodies. It just means our understanding isn’t advanced enough right now to identify all defects.
We all know someone who is straight-up hateful. They are abusive to their kids. They are workplace jerks. They are rude and disrespectful. But criminal? No. They don’t steal. They don’t beat people up. But they are nonetheless very shitty people who do more harm than good.
If scientists develop a test that can detect “shitty adults” with high accuracy when these people are small children and there is a proven medical intervention to help them grow up to be less shitty with few side effects, why should we feel “icky”? Why should we assume this is a more expensive or riskier way of treating disordered individual’s than our current practices–which typically involve a lot of punishment and moralizing with no benefit and lots of harm?
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What exactly would the shitty test be testing for? Lead, we already have that test, best answer is lead remediation and not using lead in paint, gas, or water pipes.
Some other environmental poisoning?
Some genetic information to use as the basis of you eugenics project?
Screening testing for at risk populations is a whole different kettle of fish than screening tests for the ordinary risk population. And they both have their individual nuances and error rates and risk/benefit ratios.
The fundamental concern about any screening test is that if it is done incorrectly or based on flawed assumptions, it can not only fail to be of benefit overall (wasting time and resources), it can actually cause more harm than good. The classic example is screening ordinary risk women for ovarian cancer; the followup invasive testing that would need to be done on all the false positives would result in more deaths than the lives one would save by detecting the cancer earlier. (This ratio is changing with better technology, but the risks of screening still exceed benefit for this disease).
Maybe shitty people have two alleles that together reduce the expression of oxytocin and another that leads to a reduced number of oxytocin receptors.
Maybe they have methyl groups attached to a gene that promotes amgydala development.
Maybe they have a reduced ability to synthesize vitamin D, and this deficiency interacts with their oxytocin deficiency, which only exacerbates the brokenness of their amgydala.
Take away one of these factors and maybe you just wind up with a grouch. But they are still loveable. They can still learn to regulate themselves through typical child-rearing techniques. But someone with all of them will have enormous difficulty being non-shitty without special intervention.
Coercion was implied when you said (in the linked thread and quoted in my original post) “using biometrics to identify potential sociopaths so that they can either be fixed or isolated from others.” Are you backtracking that now?
To this I ask you to consider AHunter3’s post #22:
I haven’t delved into the literature to verify AHunter3’s claim, but if true, you cannot rely on parents to remove the single most important risk factor for schizophrenia (the most common form of psychosis). Neither can you rely on them at the prenatal stage. How could you expect them to voluntarily send their child to a counselor? If the kid actually tells the counselor they have been raped, mommy and daddy go to jail.
If by sociopathy you actually mean behavior contrary to social norms, and not psychosis, I have to strongly disagree that genetic biometrics will ever be found. There are too many environmental factors affecting neural development and “social norms” are for the most part not-built-in, as demonstrated by the wide variety of social norms throughout history. A future-tech brain scan might identify the problem, but I think such a scan must necessarily be invasive and therefore be impractical for screening purposes. Even then, what would the treatment be if there’s nothing medically wrong with the patient? Lobotomy? The Ludovico technique? Exile in Iceland or the Falkland Islands?
~Max