Loading summary
Transcript115 lines
- [00:01]
A
Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line, whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com I don't think any psychopathy researcher I've ever met says that there's any kind of tell in casual conversation that can reliably indicate that somebody is psychopathic. Because people are psychopathic are shapeshifters. And this is not true of everybody, right? But most of the psychopathic people that I've worked with and the work that I do will say that they mask in most interactions that they're in and
- [00:50]
B
now the good Fight with Yasha Monk. What is a psychopath? Is there a difference between a psychopath and a sociopath? Can you recognize the lack of care for other human beings? A likelihood to engage in terrible violent behaviors later in life in children as young as 2 or 3 years old? If that is the case, is it possible to intervene with the right treatments, with the right therapy? Is the cause of psychopathy genetic? Or is it that parents have done something wrong in their upbringing of those children? And what are the social impacts of psychopathic traits? Are psychopaths overrepresented in the ranks of successful people like CEOs? And how overrepresented are they in the ranks of less successful people like those in jail? Finally, how does all of this relate to very different kinds of human emotions? Why is it that the existence of psychopaths may prove that most human beings are rather altruistic? Well, to answer all of these questions, I invited onto a podcast. Abigail Marsh Abby is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Georgetown, and as you will see, she has done tremendous amount of research on psychopathy, including many interviews with psychopaths in which they tell her about their way of seeing the world. And despite the rather dark topic, I have to say that this was not just a fascinating but also a really fun conversation. In the last part of this conversation we ask the question that I think we all want to know when considering this topic, which is how do you protect yourself against psychopaths? If you think that you know somebody who's a psychopath, how do you spot the signs and what should you do to make sure that they can't wreck your life? To listen to that part of the conversation with Please become a paying subscriber. Please support this project. Please go to jasamung.sabtech.com and become a paying subscriber. Avi Marsh, welcome to the podcast.
- [03:24]
A
Thanks so much for having me.
- [03:26]
B
How should we think about what a psychopath? Or do you prefer sociopath? And actually is.
- [03:32]
A
That's a great question. So there is this weird dichotomy in how people talk about the disorder. The term sociopath is vastly preferred in the media and literature. There's a couple of very famous memoirs that came out about people who are self described sociopaths. It's not a term that's used anymore by clinicians or researchers. And we primarily use the term psychopathy. And I don't even use the term psychopath anymore, mainly because it occurred to me that we don't refer to any other people by their disorder anymore. You know, we don't refer to somebody as a schizophrenic or an anoreptic anymore. We've switched to kind of person first language. And so I've thought that, you know, people with psychopathy probably deserve the same. So all that said, psychopathy is a personality disorder. It's not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM that's used to define and diagnose other personality disorders for really complicated reasons, but it is a clinical disorder and it's characterized by sort of three main types of traits. One, bold, fearless, dominant personality, socially dominant, meanness or callousness. This is probably the trait people most closely associate with it. Lack of remorse, lack of guilt, lack of compassion, et cetera. And then finally disinhibition. So difficulty sticking to a plan, difficulty keeping promises, irresponsible behavior, sometimes very spontaneous, you know, clearly poorly planned, antisocial behavior that lands people in trouble.
- [05:00]
B
So I once had somebody explain to me the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath as being that a psychopath is somebody who has, I guess in your language, all three of those sets of traits, right? Who is disinhibited, who wants to dominate the world, and so they end up doing really bad acts. Whereas a sociopath may be somebody who doesn't have fellow feeling, who doesn't feel remorse if they've hurt somebody, who doesn't feel bad about things that they've done in the world, but. But who may be relatively well adjusted, who may think that it's in my interest not to hurt others because otherwise I might go to jail or other bad things might happen, but still is lacking that dimension of fellow feeling. Now you're saying that sort of there isn't this principal distinction between the term sociopath and the term psychopath, Is there a distinction between those two types of people? Would you say that there are some people who have this one set of traits quite strongly but not the other sets of traits, or are they really correlated with each other?
- [05:58]
A
Such good questions. And that's a really interesting description that you were given about the difference between the two. That's even a new one. I mean, I've heard probably 20 different. And this includes clinicians and researchers describing the two terms and what distinguishes them. And you'll get many, many different explanations. So, first of all, it's totally possible for people to be persistently antisocial, but not because they lack the capacity for empathy or remorse. And I would say that most people with psychopathy, it's not that they totally lack the capacity for empathy or remorse, but it's very.
- [06:36]
B
It's downregulated.
- [06:37]
A
Yeah, it's very suppressed. It's very. They feel these emotions very mildly or very, very rarely. Like maybe only with reference to one or two people.
- [06:46]
B
Oh, that's interesting, because I think we do also tend to think about, like, it's a switch. Most people have it, and then some people don't have it at all. Whereas you're talking about it nearly. I know it's a normal distribution or something, but like, most people have it to a relatively typical degree. And then a bunch of people are gonna have it less than others, but they might still feel it for their mom or for their best friend or for the person they love or whatever, but not for anybody else. Or they might feel it more dimly than others. That's interesting. What do you think is the distribution? I mean, is it something like a normal distribution or how should we think about this?
- [07:18]
A
I think it's certainly a distribution. So it has that classic sort of bell curve shape, but probably it shifted so that most people are the plenty of empathy side of the distribution. And then the tail of people who experience very little empathy and compassion is a long tail. But a very small number of people are down there. I have worked with people who say they have never experienced anything like what most people describe as empathy or remorse or compassion. So they exist, but that's a small percent of people, much smaller than the percent of people who say they wish that they could experience less empathy and compassion for others.
- [07:55]
B
Interesting, right? Because that too can be debilitating if you're sort of, you know, you inadvertently, you know, step on a bug and you're so empathetic for the natural world that you're, you know, terribly guilt ridden about Having inadvertently done that, that also seems like a kind of ill adjustedness.
- [08:11]
A
It can be. It can be, yeah. And empathy and compassion and guilt do sort of swim together. So that's the downside of being a compassionate, empathic person is you will often feel guilt about not having done even better, even though you're probably a nicer person than average.
- [08:25]
B
Interesting. So let's get back to empathy and what people who have really strong empathy feel as part of a conversation as well. But sticking with the other end of the spectrum, obviously one reason why we are interested in this topic is that it drives a lot of bad behavior, that a lot of criminals, a lot of people who serial killers, a lot of perhaps some politicians who do terrible things seem to suffer from some form of psychopathy. What drives bad behavior here? Is it really primarily this question of do you have empathy for others or is it, do you have empathy for others plus those other ingredients? What do you think is sort of predictive with the patients you work with? When do you really think, oh dear, I'm worried for the people in their life. Is it just how little empathy they have for others or is it that plus some other thing about them?
- [09:20]
A
These are great questions. Yeah. So each one of these prongs that makes up psychopathy, the bold, socially dominant personality, the empathy and compassion, low amount, and the disinhibition, Each one of those can drive antisocial behavior for different reasons. And I sort of think of them as like each a different kind of gas or breaks. And so you can be a very antisocial person who has at least the capacity for empathy and compassion. Just because you're so disinhibited. Yeah, right. You just, you see something, you want it, you want to do it. Or for maybe you're very bad at controlling your anger. You have something called intermittent explosive disorder, where it's just really easy for things to get under your skin and you blow up in a disproportionate way and you feel awful afterward. You just, every time this happened, you're like, I can't believe I did this again. And it just was too hard for you to control those emotions. In addition, I think there are people who are driven in particular by status goals. So people who are very bold and socially dominant really, really like to have higher status than other people. And I think that sometimes those goals can drive you to act in ways that are antisocial. Even though you have the capacity for empathy, but you've just decided not to employ it, you don't, you know, there's certain people who you view as not worthy of empathy. You're compartmentalizing your empathy. And I think there are a lot of people who are pretty functional in their normal social lives, right? They have a pretty normal family life. They have friends and long term friendships, right? Friendships that don't typically emerge in people who are truly pathologically psychopathic. It's very hard to maintain friends long term when you view other people as instrumental ends to be used to achieve your goals. And that I would say is at
- [11:05]
B
some point they're going to figure that out and they'll feel used and they'll think, I don't want to be your friend. Right?
- [11:10]
A
Because the friendship was only ever based in people who are highly psychopathic on the desire to get something out of it. You know, it's not, it's not a typical way of bonding with people. But I do think that there are people who can feel close bonds with people, but they're just so driven by their, you know, need to dominate or to acquire that that empathic capacity gets switched off or suppressed by those goals.
- [11:36]
B
I'm trying to think of what this model looks like. I mean, one perhaps overly simple way of thinking about this is that we have desires in the world and we do things in order to serve those desires. And then we have inhibitions, right? And one of the obvious inhibitions is empathy for others, is I'm not going to do this because it'll upset somebody. And so is it sort of like one minus the other? I mean, is it really sort of like what is the relation between those two things? And so you could imagine somebody who's actually very empathetic, but who has such uncontrollable rages, but they act really poorly, or somebody who perhaps has very, very little, perhaps no compassion for others, but that is quite impassive. They just don't happen to have particularly strong desires in the world. And so they calculate that it's in the rational self interest never to break the law, never to do something that'll cause lots of drama, because they just want a quiet life of sitting at home watching Netflix or whatever.
- [12:31]
A
And there are plenty of psychopathic people exactly like that who they don't particularly care about other people, they just kind of want what they want, but the stuff that they want pretty easy for them to get for whatever reason. Maybe because they have, you know, particular cognitive skills and talents that make, you know, having a pretty easy life not that big of a challenge for them. I will say the other thing that makes psychopathy Such a challenge is that the, the bold dominant personality is associated with being fearless, and that means being unafraid of being punished. And so the other thing that keeps people who are psychopathic from, you know, behaving in pro social ways is that they don't fear the punishment that comes from behaving antisocially. And so it's very difficult to contain their behavior using threats of jail or other serious punishments. They just want with it.
- [13:19]
B
And what is it that makes them unresponsive to that fear of punishment? Is it that they don't care that if they end up in jail for 20 years, they're just as happy in jail as there would be somewhere else? Or is it that they don't have mechanisms of self control that they basically fail the marshmallow test? And how should we, how should we think about what drives that behavior?
- [13:42]
A
Well, many of them would definitely fail the marshmallow test. And that's true of people who end up in jail in general. And that's, you know, even in a typical jail or prison, the only minority of people would be considered clinically psychopathic. I mean, close to half, but not even most people. And disinhibition and just failure to control impulses or, you know, difficulty sort of balancing risks and rewards. You know, that's a major factor that puts people in detention. So that's definitely true of people with psychopathy too. But they don't like jail. It's not that they want to be there. It's that there does seem to be neurodevelopmental differences in them such that very early in life they just don't fear the punishment ahead of time. They don't like it when they get it, but they don't fear it ahead of time. And they don't do things to avoid the threat or the punishment, even if they won't like it when they get it.
- [14:35]
B
Well, you just mentioned just that sort of by the by, which is striking. So you said close to half of people in prison, as far as we know, have those psychopathic traits. How does that relate to the general population? I mean, it's hugely disproportionate, right?
- [14:51]
A
Yeah. You know, because psychopathy is a continuum, it's sort of hard to put a clear marker on exactly what proportion of the population, you know, has psychopathy. Cause it kind of depends on where you decide to draw the clinical line. But most people estimate it's about 1 or 2% of the population has clinically significant levels of psychopathy. So that's in the general population. And then, of course, it is much higher in populations where people are doing enough antisocial things that they have ended up punished for it.
- [15:18]
B
Interesting. So it is to the tune of 25x50x more likely for somebody who's psychopathic to end up in jail. Do we know something about. Again, I'm sure it'll depend on exactly where we draw the line. But what percentage of people with psychopathy will be imprisoned at some point in their lives?
- [15:40]
A
We don't know this. We don't know this at all. I mean, we do know, you know, there's something called the Pareto principle or the 8020 rule. You know, for example, 20% of people are responsible for all. For 80% of absenteeism in the workplace, for example. And that's. That's true for all antisocial behavior. A small minority of the population is responsible for most antisocial acts. And when you look at, for example, violent crime, some people have estimated that maybe 1% of the population is responsible for two thirds of all serious violent crime. Yeah. And so we don't know the odds that any particular person with psychopathy will offend over their lifetime. It's definitely higher than the average person. So we did recently a big population study of psychopathy, and rates of offending were, you know, twice as high to 10 times as high as the general population, depending on the specific antisocial behavior in question with the most. And this is a paper, actually, that's just about to come out. We found that the most common kinds of antisocial behavior, that very high psychopathy people engage in, in terms of, like, what they're most likely to have done is actually risky, reckless driving, driving under the influence, not obeying traffic laws, driving way too fast, et cetera. And, you know, vast majority of highly psychopathic people have done that. You know, somewhat smaller percentages have actually been convicted or punished for it, but they, they all do it. And then, you know, much smaller percent have committed assault. Maybe 40%, again, smaller proportions, actually have been arrested. Probe.
- [17:15]
B
Interesting. So if we think again of these three different clusters of character traits that are necessary according to the dsm, to classify somebody as psychopathic, are they correlated with each other? I mean, if you have one of these three character traits, make it more likely that you have the other two as well. Or are we simply saying that, say, 15% of a population have each of those character traits and the people who end up having psychopathy at once, who just happen to have 0.15 times. 0.15 times 0.15. You probably end up with a little bit lower. So let's say 20% of each, and we're really not correlated with each other. Does having one of these sets of character traits also drive the other, or is just genetically related in some kind of way or related in terms of your upbringing, or are they independent of each other?
- [18:05]
A
Oh, my gosh. We have like 12 really interesting questions all embedded in there. So the top question is whether these three clusters of traits are correlated with each other. Yes, to some degree. So especially the sort of meanness and callousness and the disinhibition, those are pretty strongly correlated with each other. Maybe 0.4. I mean, not, you know, 0.7, or they'd be the same thing. And then the bold dominant personality less so, I mean, you know, as low as 0.15, probably. Although when you do the developmental studies that follow kids over time, that does seem to be the core trait. That's the first trait that we see emerging early in childhood that puts the child at risk for all the other sequela of psychopathic traits. I'll also mention that this sort of triad of traits isn't in the DSM diagnosis. That's closest to psychopathy, which is antisocial personality disorder, which, you know, why did it. Why did they change the name? Why did they change the criteria when they put in the dsm? Who's to say? I mean, I'm sure you're aware of what a, you know, book created by committees the DSM is, and it has. It has some flaws. So a lot of these traits are in there, but you won't find this exact triad of traits in the dsm, nor will you find the term psychopathy.
- [19:23]
B
Well, and I would venture, I know we'll agree that a term invented by, I believe, a doctoral advisor, Steven Pinker, and of course, a former guest on this podcast, has something to do with this, which is euphemism, treadmill, that there's, you know, if you find a term for something that has negative associations, then the term itself will start to be negatively charged over time. And then therefore, people say, well, there's something offensive about the term, so let's not go with it. And so even if something like psychopathy or sociopathy were invented as relatively neutral terms, you know, over time, we obviously associate it with the underlying behaviors, and so it comes to seem like a slower word. And so perhaps somebody in the committee said, we can't call people that find a new term.
- [20:05]
A
Exactly. Yes. And, yeah, Steven Pinker was on My dissertation committee. I should mention he wasn't my advisor, but I really appreciated his fantastic advice then. And I really appreciate this term euphemism, treadmill, which is a huge problem for psychopathy because it is an incredibly common disorder and it's, you know, antisocial behavior. So, and I should again reinforce that the psychopathic traits that we see in adults are all, almost without exception, present in adolescence and childhood and people who develop psychopathy. And so, you know, we. It's a disorder that occurs throughout the lifespan and it's the most common reason that children are referred to psychiatric care in childhood is antisocial behavior problems. Not all of which is related to psychopathy, but a big chunk of it is. And yet there's like very little help for the affected kids and families out there. There's, you know, so little in the way of resources or clinical training is devoted to helping clinicians these kids. And then on top of that, the clinician and researcher community does the, you know, population of patients a double disservice by coming up with 8,000 terms that all mean more or less the same thing. So sociopathy was in part a remedy to the stigma that the term psychopath had acquired. Antisocial personality disorder, same thing. It's like, let's just try to get the stigma away from having a disorder that causes you to do really antisocial things all the time. And the reality is you're never going to take the stigma away from the disorder. Like, of course, if you do really antisocial things persistently, that's going to be stigmatized. There's no getting around it. The way we get rid of the stigma is by finding treatments for it so that people don't continue to perceive this as some sort of a, you know, a bad seed moral disorder. That's a permanent stain and we should just lock you up forever. That's how to get rid of the stigma.
- [21:54]
B
So you mentioned that one of the first things you can diagnose in children is this desire to dominate. And that's a predictor of the other character traits emerging. At what age in a child's development do we start to see warning signs and how predictive are they? If you go and visit some relative of yours or a child of some friend and they have some concerning set of behaviors at 3 years old, at 7 years old, at 10 years old, at what point can you say, hey, you know, okay, I'm not a trained psychologist, but you know what, I'm really starting to be concerned here and I'm not just being crazy.
- [22:37]
A
Yeah, it's hard, right, because the age 2 to 3 is statistically the most violent period of the lifespan because it's so typical for little kids to have terrible tantrums and be quite violent in some cases, you know, biting and doing things that just don't happen later on life. So it is hard. But the thing that you're looking for in kids who are, you know, 2 to 3 years old, which most parents of kids who develop psychopathic traits will say that's when they started noticing something was different, is again this fearless personality which mostly manifests in the kid not seeming scared of things that other kids are scared of. Big dogs, the dark sort of being alone, you know, very high places, doing things that are just unusually risky. And that includes not being.
- [23:22]
B
But some of us, some of us might be good traits, right? So, so I guess how do know, like, like where does the, you know, like you want your kid to be happy, go lucky and relatively fearless and like, you know, it's like, yeah, it's a big dog, but it's our friend's dog. You don't have to be worried about it. Like, like, like you even be proud if your kid is like, hello, big doggy. Right? Like, like, like what? Like what, what, what makes you like, like where's the line between oh, I just have like a kid that loves the world and yeah, hasn't ever had anything really bad happen to them and so they just don't have a lot of fear versus oh my God, you know, perhaps I'm raising a little, you know, psychopath.
- [23:59]
A
Well, starting a business can seem like a daunting task unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into sign up for your $1 per month trial@shopify.com specialoffer and so this trait by itself is probably not enough to worry you. And I will say that being afraid of something and loving something are sort of two different axes so that people who really love something will override their fear for it even if they have a normal amount of fear. So Alex Honnold, the like the free civil climber, is a really famous example of this. He is not a fearless guy at all. And in fact he talks about how terrified he was before Giving his TED Talk, people always assume he must be fearless because of these incredible climbs he does. But the reality is he just loves to climb. It gives him so much joy. He's so driven to do it that that sort of overwhelms the sort of regular effect. Yeah, exactly. That's how I'm not a particularly fearless person at all, but that's how I am about dogs. Big dogs, small dogs, barking dogs, whatever. When I was a little kid, I would just throw myself at all of them. But it wasn't fearlessness, it was just love. And so you're looking for kind of fearlessness across the gamut, including when it comes to punishment. So, you know, for many little kids, having mom or dad get mad at you when you've done something you shouldn't do is enough to make that behavior less and less likely going forward. And some kids might need a little bit more structured, you know, reinforcement system like the 1, 2, 3 magic system, which I highly recommend, which, you know, results in.
- [25:40]
B
What is the 1, 2, 3 magic system?
- [25:41]
A
Oh, 1, 2, 3 magic is a fantastic book about how to use principles of behavioral psychology to help kids. Kids manage their behavior in a way that doesn't involve arguing or yelling or harsh punishment. It's just, it's basically just behaviorism. And when a child does something disruptive that they shouldn't do, you count them, you know, that's one the first time they do it, that's two the second time they do it. And on three they have, they have a mandatory timeout. No talking, no arguing, no explaining. They just have to have a timeout. And kids hate timeout. It's very boring.
- [26:11]
B
Anyway, so rather than you don't shout at them, you don't get angry, you don't whatever they, you know, I mean, I guess this is true in discussions, criminal laws as well. When punishment is certain and when it is immediate, that's the most likely deterrent. And it's basically applying the same thing to kids. Don't charge with the kid, but make sure you punish the kid.
- [26:32]
A
Yes, it should be swift, it should be certain. It does not need to be harsh, it should be annoying. And I think punishment. You know, I hate to say this, like I don't want this to be some horrible quote that gets associated with me, but punishment has gotten a bad name. You know, again, like punishment is just any response that reduces the likelihood of that behavior in the future. And when you are a parent, there was just no possible way to only use reward and reinforcement to shape your kids behavior. Kids will just do things they shouldn't do sometimes and just using simple, you know, swift, certain annoying consequences, like timeout. For most kids, that's plenty, and that will shape their behavior just fine. For kids who have this bold, fearless personality, though, it won't. And one of the problems is that for most parents who just have no idea what they're dealing with, they're like, I don't understand. Like, I have other kids. And this worked fine for them. Like, why is this kid not responding to these mild punishments? And unfortunately, then what happens is the kid starts, the parents will often ratchet up the punishment. So, like, oh, the timeout didn't work well, now I'm going to lock you in your room. Oh, locking you in your room didn't work well, now I'm going to start screaming at you. Maybe I'm going to even use physical punishment. And the problem is, if the kid doesn't fear the punishment in advance, none of it's gonna work. And so now what happens is you've got a kid who's fairly fearless and thinks that everybody around them is a jerk, right? They're being treated so unfairly. They're being treated totally different than the other kids around them, including their siblings. And the reason is because their behavior is different. But a little kid isn't gonna put that together. And so this is the developmental cycle that it leads to is the fearless temperament, which sometimes is coupled with kind of low sort of affiliative desires. And we don't know if those two things are intrinsically linked or if you just have them both. That's extra bad.
- [28:16]
B
And low affiliation and low affiliative desire just means they're not seeking out friendship. They don't get bonded to their parents
- [28:21]
A
or, yeah, they don't seem to find affection as rewarding as other people. And so what parents unfortunately sometimes do is they try to be respectful of the child and dial back on the affection. Not as many hugs, you know, try to, you know, give them their space. You don't snuggle with them because they don't seem to like it as much. And that's the exact opposite of what you should do, right? Kids don't always know what they need. And the problem is the kids who are not that sensitive to affection actually need extra of it. I mean, you don't want to, like, you know, lock them into bear hugs while they struggle. But you like big, big warmth, big smiles, lots of affectionate touches, because that's what it takes to get through it them anyway just to Go back to
- [29:04]
B
how to sort of, you know, you're facing this free old and you're trying to figure out, you know, is a free old just an like many free or is it a special, you know, I mean, one thing that I've, you know, observed with kids, friends and family members, etc. Is that, you know, kids at that age, terrible twos, they'll behave in horrible ways, I mean, bite their parents and whatever. They will afterwards feel obvious remorse, right? Like they'll look crest formed that they'll hurt mommy or daddy and they'll, you know, and they'll be obviously hurt by the punishment. And you'll see that they're sort of like, what did I do right? Is it the absence? I mean, is the absence of that a pretty reliable indicator at that age? Is that something that even at that young age you can sort of observe or is that not a kind of key thing to look out?
- [29:53]
A
I mean, it's, I would say it's a slightly less reliable indicator because unfortunately that is something you also might see in a child with autistic traits that you might not see quite as much of that attention to other people's sadness or anxiety or stress. But if you couple that fearless personality with that like sort of lack of seeming to care if you've hurt somebody, you know, it's very normal for a two or three year old who one minute is just a screaming terror. You know, if mom starts crying or if mom seems really sad, they'll be like, oh, mommy, are you okay? And like, you know, and try. And not in the middle of a tantrum necessarily, but most of the time you should be seeing three minutes later.
- [30:30]
B
Yeah.
- [30:31]
A
And what that means is that the child is coming to intrinsically value other people's welfare, you know, and that's a normal human trait that should develop. Like when other people are doing, the people that you love are doing well, that should bring you joy automatically. And when they're in distress, that should, should bring you distress automatically. And so children need to develop that. And kids with psychopathy don't have that. Other people's welfare just doesn't have intrinsic value to them. And that's a big.
- [30:58]
B
And so you're starting to speak a little bit about, you know, some parents understandably step back from expressing affection for kids who don't seem to value affection the same way that that's the wrong thing to do. How much agency is there? I mean, if by the age of, of two or three you realize there's something wrong and you do Everything, right? You take the kids to a specialist, to whatever doctor first and a specialist and they're diagnosed with this kid is in danger of developing psychopathy or they may have inclination towards that. What can you do? And how much of a difference is that going to make? If kids just are born without that sense of empathy for others, Is that something that you can give them through treatments and therapy and the right behavioralism? Or is the best you can hope for just to manage that condition in such a way that hopefully the outcomes aren't as terrible as they often turn out to be?
- [31:55]
A
That's a great question. So it is definitely treatable. I mean you're not gonna bring a kid's personality from one end of the spectrum to the other. So if you're a parent of a child who's 3, 4, 5 years old and you're noticing like punishment just doesn't seem to do anything to my kids behavior. When I punish them consistently, you know, swiftly and you know, ideally not too harshly for their behavior. They don't seem to care. They don't seem that affectionate. They're misbehaving a lot more than their peers. They're lying more often than usual. They might be starting to steal things. What do I do? You know, most people start out taking their kid to a pediatrician. It's likely the pediatrician will have no clue what's going on. They have not been trained to assess behavior problems in. But hopefully that's helpful. Yeah, I like. Yeah, just don't. Yeah, this is, it's something. So I co founded an organization called the Society for the Prevention of Disorders of Aggression to try to work on some of these problems. But the problems are big. So any case. So hopefully they'll recommend a child psychologist or social worker to assess the child next. They may or may not know how to assess these problems in kids. And they may. Even if they recognize that your child probably qualifies for a diagnosis of conduct disorder, which is, you know, kind of the child equivalent of psychopathy, or at least some of it is, or oppositional defiant disorder. Those are the major disorders names that we give kids who look like they're on a trajectory toward persistent social behavior. They may deliberately give you a different diagnosis anyways. Deliberately because there's fear of stigma, there's fear that families reject these diagnoses. There's a misperception even among many clinicians that they're untreatable. And so we just want to give them a diagnosis like autism because so many resources will come your way if you have that diagnosis, Maybe we'll just give them adhd, because that's kind of a light definition and it's not quite so offensive. Or maybe even depression. Maybe we'll decide that the reason that this kid seems sort of cold and unemotional is because they're depressed. So it's really common that parents get a wrong diagnosis. And then even if you do get a right diagnosis, the odds of finding somebody who is trained to use one of the kinds of therapy that works is not that high. However, there is therapy that works works with, you know, my favorite example being it's called pcit, Parent Child Interaction Therapy. And it's basically therapy where the parents are trained in how to use techniques that will bring out the best in the child, that will, over time, eliminate their antisocial behavior. Show the kid tons of warmth, like more warmth than you think you need to show them to develop a bond between you and the child so they actually care about you, and they care what you want and they care what you think.
- [34:38]
B
Going into too much detail, what kind of behaviors are that? What can you do as a parent? So you were saying, and one thing is just to show even more warmth to your kid. I mean, most parents give a lot of warmth to most of their kids, right? But somehow they do.
- [34:51]
A
It's interesting, parents, I'm sure you're familiar with the pop psych book about love languages, which I think there's a nice little kernel of truth there. I think sometimes parents fail to realize that the way they're showing their children love is not as interpretable to the child as they might think. So, for example, taking your kid to swim lessons and piano lessons and doctor's appointments, PTA stuff like, that's all love, right? That is. That is very much love. It doesn't feel like it to the kid, like being taken to the doctors. I feel like love. Right. Making sure that their clothes are clean and that they've had breakfast and they get out the door on time. Like, those are all things that loving parents do. But to a kid, it just feels like being harassed and nagged. And so one of the things that PCIT entails and a lot of many good behavioral therapy programs involved is something called floor time, where you set aside 5 to 10 minutes every day with your child to engage in behaviors that just show that you care about your child, that you like them, that you approve of them, and that you feel positively about them. And so they involve things like why your child is playing on the floor, kind of imitating what they're doing, playing alongside them, narrating what they're doing, sort of positively commenting on what they're doing. And it feels like so simple and dumb. But in reality, what that is is a moment in the, in your life where you're not nagging your child, you're not hustling them from one thing to another, you're not telling them what to do, you're not asking them questions, which I think a lot of parents interpret as a sign of care, which it is. But often to a child just being endlessly peppered with questions. What did you do in school today? What did you have for lunch? Who did you sit next to? You know, it kind of feels like an interrogation. And so wartime is this like kind of isolated time where you're just showing approval and kind of positive regard. And it's Amazing how much 10 minutes of that a day will do. I mean, just like a seven minute workout doesn't seem like it should be enough to improve health, but it really does. 10 minute floor time can do wonders for a child. So that's the sort of baseline that you do. And then there's a whole separate set of behaviors that parents engage in that help their child learn to avoid bad behaviors and adopt good ones. Reinforcement, basically.
- [37:00]
B
Interesting. And so let's say in the best case case, you can take a kid that has a tendency towards psychopathy and avert the worst kinds of outcomes. Tell us about how the life of a kid like that is likely to go, and then perhaps tell us about what happens if you don't intervene in that kind of way, and how the problems of misbehaving when you're three years old turn to the problems of misbehaving when you're 13 or 20. Free.
- [37:30]
A
Yeah. So I will say that parents of kids with these problems are blamed and shamed pretty routinely for their kid having this callous, remorseless personality. And it sometimes doesn't help to say, oh, the solution is parenting management training, which just reinforces the idea that you must be a really bad parent. And that's, you know, it's not true. In general, the kids who develop these traits who are raised by parents who get them into, into some kind of therapy or sometimes just figure out a way to manage their behavior, they'll end up with kids who are not going to be the warmest, most cuddly people in the world, but usually have learned good habits and strategies to get what they want and don't involve overtly breaking rules or hurting other people. So they may end up in professions that attract very extroverted people that are maybe sort of high risk, high reward and offer a lot of status. And so there's at least some evidence that, you know, jobs in kind of finance and banking might attract a little bit higher proportion of people with psychopathy than, you know, for example, teaching or, you know, just to name some other, like quite different job.
- [38:47]
B
This is one of the questions that my producer Leo tasked me with asking, which is stereotype in the culture that certain kinds of very successful people may be more likely to be having traits of psychopathy, whether that's banking or surgeons or CEOs or, you know, is there something to that, that, you know, perhaps having psychopathic traits makes you less likely to be successful, but that among some subsection of highly successful people, the share of psychopathic is higher. Politics.
- [39:23]
A
So my sense is that a, there's not a ton of great data on this. There's at least one very good study that found that among kind of executive level people in the business world, the proportion of people estimated to have clinically significant psychopathy, so that top 1 or 2% is about 4%. So like double the regular population, maybe four times the regular population. But that's also 96% of them who do not have clinical psychopathy. Now they do have.
- [39:53]
B
And that's like, I mean, again, like the, you know, among the prison population, you said it's close to 50% and among these people it's 4%. So, yeah, so a little bit elevated, but not. Yeah, yeah. Not enough to look at your cousin who's a CEO and say you're probably psychopath, that's why you're a CEO.
- [40:08]
A
No, right, exactly. So look, I mean, people who go into high risk, high reward professions, could include surgery, could include politics, could include business. Business are more likely to be men for various reasons. And men do score a little higher in psychopathy than women on average. For there are, you know, definitely more men than women at the very high end and a lot more women than men at the very low end. But the average psychopathy scores of men and women are actually not that different. So but professions that attract more men will have a little higher level of psychopathy just because they have more men. So but even if you co vary that, there's probably a little bit there. But a lot of those professions attract people who are high in that boldness trait that's characteristic of psychopathy. Boldness, socially dominant, but that is sometimes called the sort of adaptive arm of psychopathy or the adaptive feature of psychopathy. That may help explain why some level of these traits, you know, persist in the population.
- [41:08]
B
Risk taking, bold, fearless, you know, of course, I don't know, somebody who's a rock star who performs 150,000 people is going to be a little bit more fearless than the average person. That's not necessarily a bad thing. But it would explain some of that statistical correlation.
- [41:25]
A
Exactly. I mean, this is just personality now we're talking about. Most personality variation is just what makes the world go round. It's what makes life colorful. And most personality traits, there's quite a wide range that can be adapted in particular contexts. Some contexts, it's more adaptive to be introverted and some extroverted. And that's true for psychedelics, psychopathic traits, up until you get to the very high end. And that's not adaptive in almost any context because you burn bridges with everybody, everywhere you go, by mistreating them and using them for your instrumental purposes. I mean, you know, Bernie Madoff is probably an example of somebody who just based on what I've been able to find about him, biography wise, was probably psychopathic. He was just using people to meet his own instrumental goals.
- [42:05]
B
I sold my car in Carvana last night.
- [42:07]
A
Well, that's cool.
- [42:07]
B
No, you don't understand.
- [42:09]
A
It went perfectly. Real offer down to the penny.
- [42:11]
B
They're picking it up tomorrow.
- [42:12]
A
Nothing went wrong. So what's the problem?
- [42:15]
B
That is the problem.
- [42:16]
A
Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch. Maybe there's no catch.
- [42:20]
B
That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.
- [42:23]
A
Wow. You need to relax. I need to knock on wood.
- [42:25]
B
Do we have. What is this? Table wood?
- [42:26]
A
I think it's laminate. Okay.
- [42:28]
B
Yeah, that's good. That's close enough.
- [42:29]
A
Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees may apply.
- [42:34]
B
What's the. I don't know that much about the made of cash case. What's the evidence for that? I mean, from my understanding of it at the beginning, he was kind of like running a relatively normal investment business. And then he made promises that were a little bit bigger than they should have been. And then he was like, oh, damn. In order to keep this going, I have to take in more and more money and it sort of turned into a Ponzi scheme. But again, I really don't know the details of the case. And so I'm probably missing key elements of it. But that seems like something that, like, you know, an average asshole might end up in that situation. Right? Like he didn't Set off saying, I'm going to perpetrate the biggest financial fraud in history. He was like, I'm going to invest these people's money and make a lot of profit. Like, oh, shit, either I go bankrupt now or I somehow fudge the numbers. And 10 years later, he's in way over his head. What element of what he did sort of indicates to you that actually there was more to it than that?
- [43:31]
A
It's a good question. So. And it's been. I will say it's been a little while since I did a little dig into his biography. So what you're looking for is never sort of one thing because you're 100% right. It's totally plausible that somebody who's, you know, sort of leveraging the money they have to invest and try to build up an even bigger portfolio could just get in over their head. And not because they're trying to use people like they really were trying to do the right thing, more or less, and just got it over their head and ended up getting all these people bankrupt. That could happen. The information you're looking for to distinguish between somebody who. Who just kind of did one bad thing, even if it's a really big bad thing, and somebody who's truly psychopathic is patterns of behavior sort of throughout the different parts of their life. And here I'm not talking about Bernie Madoff in particular, because I'm not confident enough about my memory about his biography. But let's say you're looking at somebody's life, the useless baby psychopathic, on the basis of some antisocial thing that, you know, that they've done. First, you want to look at their relationships, and you want to look at their relationships over time. Do they have evidence of having real friendships? Like, friendships that are. That are based on, like, true mutual effects, affection, and sort of reciprocally, you know, benefiting one another. Romantic relationships, relationships with their children, do those seem to be characterized by true, sincere affection? When something bad happens to somebody you love, are you truly upset about it? You want to look over time biographically. So for people who are psychopathic, there's almost always evidence in early childhood that their behavior was already very difficult to control. For example, you know, children who were sent to special schools that were trying to manage their behavior, that might be an indicator that their behavior was completely uncomfortable, manageable to their parents. It's not the only reason kids get sent to special schools, but it is like a characteristic thing you might see. Was there evidence that they were engaged in sort of juvenile delinquency were underperforming in school. And those sorts of biographical details are really helpful to look at. And then, you know, it's very rare that people who are doing fraudulent, dishonest things in the business realm are not also doing things like that in the personal realm, maybe in romantic relationships. So you sort of want to look at sort of multiple prongs to get an overall portrait of somebody who truly does not care about other people's welfare. And mostly it's just using other people to get what they want.
- [45:49]
B
So we have another set of questions from Leo. One part of this is, okay, so perhaps it's not true that CEO is much more likely to be psychopathic. Is it true that psychopaths are often particularly charismatic, that they have this ability to manipulate people that somehow goes beyond that of the average person? And you know, relatedly, we have holidays coming up. You know, if you go to, you know, your Christmas gathering or whatever your favorite holiday may be, and you know, your cousin's significant other that you're bringing around for the first time seems to you to have behaviors that may be indicative of psychopathy. How do you think through whether you just talking yourself into a rage and have, you know, need to touch grass or whether you in fact have to be concerned for the well being of your relative.
- [46:39]
A
So this is, this is what's so confounding about psychopathy is how hard it is to detect in just a casual interaction. I would say impossible. I don't think any psychopathy researcher I've ever met says that there's any kind of tell in casual conversation that can reliably indicate that somebody is psychopathic. Because people who are psychopathic are shape shifters. They again, and this is not true of everybody. Right, but that, but most of the psychopathic people that I've worked with and the work that I do will say that they mask in most interactions that they're in, they'll present the face to the people they're interacting with that they think those people want to see. And often that results in there being some of the most charming, likable, friendly people that you will ever interact with. And they don't seem fake. Like, not. And most of us have way too much confidence on our ability to detect deceptive in regular life. You know, we, we really are not good at it. And everybody I know that works with people with psychopathy has found themselves duped at least once. And so you're, you're out of luck when it comes to detecting psychopathy in your cousin's new boyfriend. Unless you happen to know somebody who knows them and can say like, that guy is not trustworthy. Like he talks a big game and it turns out like half the stuff he says isn't true and it's not even clear like why he was making it up, like what was even the point. And like he's had like six different jobs in the last two years and nobody quite knows why. And like he definitely cheated on his last girlfriend. And like that's the kind of biography you're looking for. So there's that. Whether people who are psychopathic are unusually charismatic is really hard to say. There's not good data on this. They certainly report that they are. They who doesn't? Exactly, exactly. But that's not very satisfying. It's also possible that it's just that if you like people, again, if you want to manipulate people, being charismatic is a really good tool to do it. And so a lot of people who are psychopathic, psychopathic may develop a more sort of charismatic demeanor.
- [48:34]
B
You may invest into that skill because it's particularly important to them to be socially dominant or to get the way.
- [48:40]
A
Exactly. It may also be the case that it's just people who are very psychopathic and charismatic cause the most trouble. Those are the ones who you really don't detect.
- [48:48]
B
Yeah, it's maybe an availability bias. Right. Where you know, if there's a hundred people of psychopathy, the 90 of them that are not particularly charismatic probably are less successful, they're less likely to become celebrities, they're less likely to become, become elected office holders. And so the, the subset of psychopaths where you think about when we, when we consider the conditions are the ones that are charismatic. That's a very good point actually.
- [49:11]
A
Yeah, that's entirely possible. But there's really, there's not as good data as I would like on whether, you know, just have a conversation with the average person who has a high end psychopathy. Do they really come across as more charismatic? Really what they come across is as a genuinely likable person who does not seem, seem particularly antisocial. We really, I have done a little research on this at this point, not published that people tend to conflate how nice a person is, like how good a person is with whether they personally like them. And so for example, like we are very overwhelmingly likely to assume that political figures on the opposite side of the aisle from ourselves are psychopathic. And so I, that's why I always want to, you know, urge people to, you know, like, just because this person has Politics that you don't like, whether they're an actual politician or just a voter, like that's not a sign that they're psychopathic, like you don't like them. And I totally get that. But it may be that they think they're doing the right thing, like sincerely and honestly.
- [50:10]
B
Yeah. And that's true probably for ascriptions of psychopathy. It's more broadly just true for ascriptions of moral evil. Right. I think it's very tempting to think that my way of seeing the world politically is so obviously true, that anybody who disagrees with me must either be stupid or a bad person. And that's something, an assumption that I see people make all of the time. And I think one of the things that you get from attending a lot of focus groups and listening to people of very different political points of view, but do seem like they're generally struggling to think about what's right or in a very different way. One of the things that I think you get from reading the most brilliant political thinkers of the past who lived in very different moments and therefore also had very different political assumptions and very different values, is that there are a lot of well intentioned, very smart people who have views that are very different from those that I happen to have. And I think that's really the core to beginning to have any kind of productive form of politics.
- [51:13]
A
Exactly. Yeah. No. People can do things that you dislike, have beliefs that you dislike, and be a sincerely well intentioned person who is trying to be moral and is being moral according to what they view as moral. And I think that that is really important when trying to explain to people what psychopathy is and isn't. It's not just everybody who disagrees with
- [51:38]
B
your political like that would be easy
- [51:40]
A
to diagnose more than one conversation with academics that they're like, well, I'll tell you where you can find all the people with psychopathy. They're on the, you know, they're on the Republican side of the aisle. And I'm like, no, this isn't how it works. I mean, you know, like the most famous social psychology experiment of all time, you know, the Milgram Study, it was more or less designed to dispel the idea that Germany was a nation full of psychopaths. You know, the belief at the time was, well, you know, you could never have had such a thing happen in Germany as what happened in World War II unless German people were just unusually callous and heartless and cruel. And it's like, well, that wasn't True
- [52:18]
B
at all, you know, well, and obviously there's a historical point that it's sort of hard to understand why Germans in 1925 were not psychopaths. And you know, 1943 were all psychopaths. And by 1970 we're all back to having normal psychologies. Right. It's not a very, not a very convincing explanation. You spend a lot of time with psychopaths, right. You spend time studying them in research setups where there's a lot of layers of confidentiality so that you elicit really honest responses. Tell us what it's like as best you can tell from speaking with those people to be a psychopath. I mean, how do people think about their own condition? How do people think about the world?
- [53:01]
A
Yeah, this is a great question. And one thing I should also mention is that there are a couple members of the organization I created, the nonprofit, who themselves have been diagnosed with psychopathy, and they've written fairly well known memoirs in the last couple of years. One is Patrick Gagne and the other is Amy Thomas. And so I've really valued them as colleagues. So I should say I should also, you know, part of the interactions I have with people with psychopathy is as valued as colleagues. So I, I come at this from a lot of different angles. The, the first work I did in people with clinical psychopathy, or, you know, callous on emotional traits, which is the euphemism that we use for children, was in my postdoctoral research when we were doing brain imaging research trying to understand the neural basis of psychopathy. And so we interviewed kids from all over the greater Washington, D.C. area and interviewed their parents to try to get a little bit better sense of, made these kids tick. One of the really interesting sort of discrepancies we found was that there was a wide range in how sort of aware the kids were that there was anything different about them. And this, it turns out to be true of adults with not only psychopathy, but lots of different conditions. Bipolar disorder, stroke. Some people seem to recognize that there's something different about them, and some people think that there's nothing different about them, everybody else just like them. And that obviously makes a big difference when it comes to treatment. If somebody truly has no idea that there's anything different about them, then, you know, it's hard to convince them to get treated. But so I would say the kids who recognized there was something different about them, you know, had reasonably good insight about the fact that they just found themselves doing antisocial things repeatedly that other kids, kids didn't do. And some of them said that they wish that they knew how to stop because they could tell that it was not working out for them in the long term, might feel.
- [55:07]
B
And they didn't say, oh, I wish I knew how to stop because it makes Mommy and Daddy really sad. They said, like, I realize, like, you know, I. I keep getting punished for it, or like, you know, like, nobody seems to like me or something. Like, what, What. What is it that bothers them?
- [55:24]
A
Because they say, this isn't the life I want. And I've heard, I've talked to many adults who say the same thing. They're like, this isn't the life I want. I want to have friends. I want to have a, you know, if you're an adult, I want to have a regular job. I want to do, you know, well in my life. You know, for many of the kids I worked with, they've been kicked out of multiple schools, you know, and this just wasn't, you know, many of them kind of do have an image of, like, what a good life looks like. And that's not it for almost anybody. Some of them didn't care. I will say there was a subset of kids who just really didn't care. They. They found school boring. They didn't see what the point was and doing well. You know, getting kicked out of multiple schools would hopefully eventually end in being a no school, and then they would have been very happy. But I would say people who are psychopathic and in their teens or twenties are the least likely to appreciate that they're the source of their own problems and want to change. But as time goes on, I would say it's more common for people to be like, yeah, I'm the problem. It's me. To paraphrase Taylor Swift, and to have some inkling that they could learn how to do better. Some of them actually do learn how to do better. At least some of the people that I've talked to out of a desire to not lose a romantic partner that they realize has been a really lucky outcome for them to have a really good, kind romantic partner. I've talked to a couple men who say, like, I was a way worse person before I started dating this woman. I don't want to lose her. I just tried to act like a nice person for like a year and a half, and then it sort of started to click, and I sort of started to want to be a nice person. And so it's almost like they gave themselves therapy, because that's exactly what a therapist would tell you. To do. Like, you just need to start acting like a nice person, do the things a nice person would do, learn how rewarding and sort of beneficial that is, and eventually it will become habit.
- [57:14]
B
And when they succeed at that, I mean, do they now genuinely love their partner and they genuinely have remorse when they act in ways that upset their partner? Or is it just that they've kind of. In a way that perhaps Aristotle would have said that once it becomes a habit to act in a certain kind of way, it becomes an automatism, and they've just gotten out of the habit of acting in ways that are going to upset or hurt the partner. But really deep down, when the partner is upset, it still doesn't do the wrenching feelings that. That. That. That you and I have when we've done something to make somebody sad.
- [57:50]
A
I've talked to people for whom both are true, so, you know, or some. Or one band and some are in the other. So I have talked to people who said that the. The only time in their life they've ever felt something that approached love, where, like, something bad happening to this person made them feel very emotional, and they felt, like, bad about it in a way they'd never felt about anybody else. And so I think there are some people with psychopathy for whom there is some lingering latent capacity to experience something akin to real love. It's just. It takes a lot. That person has to be really, really nice and. And a really kind, affectionate partner. And then other people for whom it never really approached what I would call love, but there was sort of mutual understanding and reciprocity in the relationship, where it was a stable relationship, where both people were glad that they were in it, and this person was just motivated to kind of keep up their end of the bargain, something like loyalty. So I've talked to people who are psychopathic who will say, like, over time, they learn to feel something like loyalty, even if not love, in a more emotional way. And so, you know, are these people the norm? It's hard to say, you know, maybe not. But I think that they do give some cause for optimism about what's possible. Other people with psychopathy who are less insightful or less repentant as time goes on, will say, you know, like, I just want to get what I want. You know, I. All of my relationships with people are aimed at getting what I want and figuring out what they want for me. And then, you know, I give them what they want, as is, to the limited degree that I have to. To try to get you Know what I need and I don't really like my job. I, you know, I don't really like people. Like, I, you know, I maybe take a lot of drugs to feel something, to feel some sense of enjoyment, you know, or maybe engage in risky behavior like reckless driving, to feel something. But like, this is kind of a crappy life and, but this is just the way I am.
- [59:57]
B
How honest and open are people about their lack of remorse for bad actions or some of the things that they've done? You know, I understand that this is a context in which they know that, you know, you're not going to report what they say to the police, etc. I mean, what are the kind of things that they would tell you in that context? What, what are some of the most shocking things that, that, that people have told you?
- [60:20]
A
Well, I can't tell the details, unfortunately. Pretty shocking, shocking things. Yeah. I've, I've, I've been pretty shaken by some of the things I've heard in conversations. I, I wish I could tell the details, but I can't. Our, the research that we do is protected by what's called a certificate of confidentiality from the nih that, that protects us from, you know, even having to reveal what we're told under subpoena because we would never be able to do this research if the people that we work with thought that we were, you know, going to reveal what they've told us. And, and I will say.
- [60:52]
B
And you never attempted to, to, to send in a phone call to a tip line for, you know, some.
- [60:58]
A
Well, we are, you know, we're mandatory reporters. If they tell us about something they're going to do, right? If they're planning on hurting somebody else or themselves, or if there's any indicator of child or elder abuse, we do have to report that. But we tell them that we're like, look, if you tell us anything about these, these kinds of items were mandatory, reporters just like, you know, lots of professionals are. But if it's something they did in the past, you know, like, we, you know, we would never be able to do this kind of research if we, we couldn't get.
- [61:26]
B
And so let's say that they've, you know, confessed to, you know, terrible, terrible crimes in this kind of context, would they sound like, do they tell that to you? Like, I will tell you, oh, yeah, today for lunch I went to a Japanese restaurant. Or like, like, what's the, like, like, what's the tone? What's the.
- [61:43]
A
Just sort of casual, I would say, is the best way to Describe it. You know, like, yes, this is, this is something that I've done because. And there's always a reason. You know, one of the things that people with psychopathy are very good at doing is externalizing blame. You know, so it wasn't. I did it because I.
- [62:00]
B
This person really pissed me off or something.
- [62:02]
A
Yeah. They put me in this position. The classic line of abusive partners in domestic settings. Right. Is well, they made me do it, they pushed me to it and that. And you know, you didn't do the washing up.
- [62:12]
B
So I. Yeah.
- [62:14]
A
And domestic violence is something that, you know, people with psychopathy are much more prone to. Yeah. And it's never your fault if you're psychopathic. Everything is somebody else's fault. And so you will get explanations like that a lot. It's like, well, I was, you know, they put me in this position. They told me that they were going to like tell on me. And so I had to do what I had to do. I've even, you know, worked with people who explain what they do through a sort of moral framework that they have created where like a good person, person, you know, will only physically hurt people who do racist things. And so I'll only hurt people who say or do things that are racist. And you know, it's an interesting moral framework because it does sort of channel their antisocial impulses in ways that, you know, their, their framework are relatively pro social.
- [63:07]
B
Um, that's interesting. I mean there's some research that I've seen. I don't know how you feel about it, that people with dark triad personality disorder are attracted to political extremes because, and I took the, the expansion to be the other way around because those are cover for, or an excuse for engaging in these kind of behaviors. Right. You, you, you're sort of saying, look, you know, I, I have a desire to act incredibly cruel ways. I'm going to find a political cause that gives me an excuse for saying, actually most Americans are terrible human beings. And so I can engage in wanton cruelty online, for example, participate in cancellation campaigns or other kinds of things. And it's a way for me to live out this desire within a kind of socially sanctioned sphere.
- [63:55]
A
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that that makes perfect sense. I haven't talked about politics too much with most to the participants that we brought through, but I think that that, that fits with all of the things that we know. Certainly we know that people who are very antisocial online are much more likely to have psychopathic personality traits. It's not like you Know you become a different person when you go online, although that would have been a reasonable hypothesis. But it seems now that people's online behavior is a reflection of their real personality, even if they put on a more pro social front in, in person settings than they put under the cloak of anonymity online.
- [64:33]
B
So, you know, I know that you also are interested in altruism and we've talked about it a little bit earlier in the conversation. You know, it strikes me from what we've talked about so far that perhaps the problem of altruism is somewhat ill posed in philosophy and perhaps even in biology. Which is to say that the basic paradox of altruism is why is it that we evolve to have altruism? Right. If you could expect people who just serve their own interest to be the most successful, successful, particularly passing on the genes to the next generation, then over time altruism would be selected out in a population. And there's various ways of trying to explain that. Group level selection versus individual level selection, et cetera, et cetera. It strikes me that what you're describing is that if you have somebody who is not altruistic at all, who has no kind of sense of care for, for others, the life outcomes end up being really poor. And so perhaps actually some amount of altruism is necessary for success. Which seems paradoxical, but would give a sort of rather more straightforward explanation to why altruism has evolved as a human trait.
- [65:49]
A
Absolutely. I think that's a really good way of putting it. Yes. So I mean, to me, one of the strongest arguments for the idea that human, humans on average have the capacity for altruism is the existence of psychopathy. Right. Because psychopathy is really fundamentally boils down to not caring about other people's welfare for its own sake, right? That is the trait.
- [66:10]
B
So one way, right? So one way of being skeptical about the existence of altruism is to say, well, people seem like they care about others all the time, but because you can get things out of seeming like you care for others all the time. Time, actually, perhaps deep down we really aren't. Obviously you can make the same argument about pets, right? Like your dog seems like he loves you, but he just realized that this is a smart way of getting food and actually doesn't give a shit about you. Right? And what you're saying is, well, that was what everybody was like, but everybody would suffer from psychopathy, right? That is. What's this?
- [66:39]
A
But clearly we see in the population.
- [66:43]
B
Interesting.
- [66:43]
A
Yeah, exactly. I will say that sort of a cynical untrusting personality tends to go along with being relatively untrustworthy and callous yourself. And so when I talk about my research with altruism in sort of general audience settings and people ask questions that reveal fundamental disbelief in the possibility that people could be altruistic, I usually give an answer along the lines of this question doesn't say much about what people are like as a whole. There clearly is a spectrum of altruistic capacities in people. But your question has told me a lot about you. And you say that every so often if they really push me, because some people really are very cynical about whether it's possible for people to genuinely care about other people. And again, many of those people just don't have that experience themselves. They just don't really care about other people. They don't. And some of them may live lives that are ordinary enough or pro social enough that it hasn't occurred to them that there's something really unusual about them. They just think they're like everybody else. We're all like this to some degree.
- [67:46]
B
If anybody in the audience now thinks, oh my God, I'm skeptical about altruist, you know, am I a psychopath? Like, how do you, how can people self test whether they are or not?
- [67:58]
A
Yes, you can go to my organization's website, disordersofaggression.org, and there's a link you can click on for some screeners for psychopathy, totally anonymous.
- [68:06]
B
So what kind of screeners? What kind of questions do you ask?
- [68:10]
A
So the psychopathy screener we have for adults is called the tripm, the Triarchic Psychopathy measure. And it assesses those three bins of traits that we've asked about before. They're questions along the lines of, I have the ability not to let my emotions dictate my behavior. I like to do risky and dangerous things for fun. I am, you know, I'm more competent and capable than the average person. You know, it's, it's, it's questions that really just get out all the traits that we've been talking about. Interesting.
- [68:40]
B
I realize, you know, the pull of psychopathy is such. Or we've gone away again from altruism. You know, one obvious question to ask about both of these traits is, is it nature or is it nurture? I mean, is there just something in the constellation of the particular genes that a child has that makes them just far more likely to be, you know, displaying these psychopathic traits? Or on the other hand, perhaps to be, you know, an ultra altruist, somebody who's Particularly altruistic or is it something about, you know, the early childhood environment, etc. That children triggers this in some kind of way?
- [69:16]
A
Yeah, it's great question. I would say the best estimates are that about half of the variation in these personality traits is genetic. So you know, which is true for most personality traits. The estimates always end up about there. About half the variation is genetic factors and about half is environmental factors, although not in a simple way as, you know, like shared environment. So the socioeconomic status of your family and what kind of school you went to to and you know, did your mom work? I mean, none of these things are terribly predictive of life outcomes in general. Mostly because different kids respond differently to the same environmental variable. They don't affect every kid the same way. And so you can't make simple predictions. But there's a very strong genetic component to psychopathy which I think is, you know, hopefully relief to parents of kids who have these traits that it's not like you cause the kid to have these traits traits, but because there's a big non genetic component, it means there is the capacity for environmental variables to help treat them. So, you know, that's the good and the bad.
- [70:17]
B
Yeah, I was thinking about this because I think sometimes this idea of genetic traits seems harsh or mean or something like that. But in a sense it is not right Precisely because if we said that this is all about upbringing, it's, etc. Then if somebody has psychopathy, it's probably that the mom wasn't loving enough or whatever sexist tropes you can immediately bring out. Whereas if there's this very strong genetic component and it's obviously, I imagine, a polygenic trait, so it's a polygenetic trait. So it's not one where just like you have the one thing that's passed down because of this gene, you're a psychopath, it's that there's a combination of many, many genes and some of those combinations are more likely to result in these kind of of traits. So you can have one sibling that doesn't have any inclination towards that at all and another sibling that does by random combination of genes. In a sense, that is a less harsh view of the world or at least a less harsh view of responsibility of parents.
- [71:21]
A
I completely agree. No, I think parents give themselves more credit and blame than I think they deserve. Children are agents of their upbringing in a way that I don't think is often clear in parenting books. Children elicit parenting from parents. They don't. They're not just Passive receptacles of things that are done to them. And children are also fairly robust. They, you know, it's not an invitation for people to treat their children harshly. Absolutely. But your child will be attracted to certain kinds of outcomes, and they will want certain kinds of behavior from parents in ways that shape you in this sort of complicated to dance. And your job as a parent is not to, like, shape your child to turn out some particular way. There's the analogy of the Garden and the Carpenter by the psychologist Allison Gopnik that I really like. Parents think of themselves as carpenters too often like, that they're trying to, like, build a chair. And if they do this, then they do that. Then the chair will, like, have a nice sturdy frame and strong back. And it's like, that's no, throw away the wood. You are a gardener. Like, your child is a seed that could be a geranium seed or a marigold seed or a zinnia seed. And, like, you have no idea what they're going to be. And your job is just to try to help fall posture and let that seed grow as best you can. But they're going to turn out the way they're going to turn out to some degree, because genetics are pretty powerful.
- [72:37]
B
That's a lovely analogy. Yeah. I mean, I have a dear friend who's an avid listener to this podcast who studied sociology and used to quite ideologically believe that most outcomes are due to culture and social factors and other kinds of things. And now, as she has children, she told me recently, you know what I would wrong. Like, kids just come out one way or the other and obviously bring them up in the right way. Nurturing them and all of those things is really important, but they're just different from each other. And it's not because you treat one way or the other the other way. Thank you so much for listening to this episode. Episode of a Good Fight. Well, after all of this really interesting and sometimes scary insight about psychopathy, I know that you're probably asking yourself the same question that I've been asking myself for the last hour, which is, how do you protect yourself from the psychopaths out there? If you believe that somebody in your life may be psychopathic, what steps should you take in response? Is there some way that you can encounter, encourage them to better their condition, or should you just cut ties with them? To listen to Abby's answer to this question, to support the work we're doing here and make it possible for us to bring these twice weekly conversations directly into your favorite podcast app, please go to jaschamonk.substack.com and become a paying subscriber. And since we have compassion for all of our listeners, we are offering a special discount today, 25% off for your first year of subscription, which means that the cost of this podcast is about a dollar a week. Go to yashamonk.substat.com the Good Fight to take advantage of this offer. Thank you for listening.
- [74:45]
A
Sam.