Victims have a certain way of walking, and psychopaths can spot it. That’s the conclusion two bloggers for Psychology Today reached, based on a scientific study released last year.
The study, Psychopathic traits and perceptions of victim vulnerability, was authored by Sarah Wheeler, Angela Book and Kimberly Costello of Brock University. The abstract states:
The purpose of this study was to determine whether individuals scoring higher on psychopathic traits would be better able to judge vulnerability to victimization after viewing short clips of targets walking. Participants provided a vulnerability estimate for each target and completed the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale: Version III (SRP-III). Higher SRP-III scores were associated with greater accuracy in assessing targets’ vulnerability to victimization.
Psychology Today blogger Marisa Mauro, Psy.D., explained the study further. A group of male university students were asked to watch video clips of 12 people walking. The videos were shot from behind, and the students were asked to rate the ease at which each could be mugged. Several of the individuals had, in fact, been victimized. The students who scored high in psychopathic traits were better at picking out the people who had already been mugged.
Mauro works as a prison psychologist. Based on her experience and this study, she wrote:
Certain personal characteristics are associated with tendency to be on the receiving end of bullying such as harassment and manipulation. I have found that the demonstration of confidence through body language, speech and affective expression, for example, provides some protection.
Wallflowers
Another Psychology Today blogger, Jeff Wise, also commented on the study and what it says about victims. Wise wrote that he recently came across a guy who seemed to have the traits of a psychopath. The man was charming, good-looking, athletic, financially successful—and he left a trail of destruction in his wake. His victims sounded like wallflowers. Wise wrote:
The women who wound up on the receiving end of his attentions were individuals who, in their own description, were not very worldly, experienced, or outgoing. They were psychologically vulnerable and hence ill-equipped to either resist this fellow’s predations or to deal with them emotionally after they had occurred.
Wise concluded that, “people who are on the receiving end of crime often do mark themselves out, if only subliminally.” Mauro suggested that people can decrease perceived vulnerability by projecting dominance—more eye contact, less movement of the hands and feet.
If only it were that easy.
Traits of targeted women
The research both bloggers quoted described a particular situation—people walking down the street, and how vulnerable they might be to being mugged. It should not be generalized to describe all victims of psychopaths. After all, how many of us were involved with muggers?
Consider the research by Dr. Liane Leedom on women who were targeted by psychopaths. She found that they have three traits in common:
- Extraverts. The women are outgoing, competitive, strong-willed and liked excitement. Sometimes they are free-spirited.
- Cooperative. They are high in empathy, tolerance and compassion. They value getting along with others, and are willing to compromise their own interests for the larger picture.
- Invested in relationships. They like being around people. They are sentimental and focus on special moments.
Dr. Leedom’s research relates to women. But I’ve heard from many Lovefraud readers, both men and women, who were successful, take-charge individuals—until they met the psychopath.
Personally, I don’t think anyone who watched me walk down the street would tag me as timid or vulnerable. I’m an athlete, and my stride is confident. But I was victimized by a psychopath, who took $227,000 from me, and cheated on me incessantly. And the guy started setting his hooks via e-mail, before he ever saw me walk.
Maybe projecting dominance would work to avoid muggers. But it’s not going to stop victimization by a card-carrying psychopath intent on finding a resourceful new supply.
I just read GeminiGirl’s story, and I really do feel bad for your situation, and of course nobody could have known your daughter would be a spath.
I hate to be this way, but I’m going to say something judgmental. But maybe GeminiGirl gets it anyway. She’s older and wiser now. I was only BORN in ’63.
The way this story is told, it’s like you had no choice but to go next door for a good lay after being hit on by a lesbian roommate. But you did have a choice. There were many other things you could have done. And there were many other choices besides marrying this man, even though in 1963 those choices were severely limited and not always attractive ones.
It’s a story about a lack of responsibility. And again, I know I’m going to get clobbered here, but hear me out.
It’s the kind of lack of responsibility all of us fall into at some point. We’re all victims of something we actually could have done something about.
Someone once explained this to me as the “Dear Abby” way of life: Dear Abby, I forgot my umbrella in the rain, but this nice man came by and let me share his, and he invited me in for a drink, and I would have seemed ungrateful if I didn’t come in, and he seduced me and I would have used contraception if I’d had any, but I got pregnant anyway, and my mother says I have to marry him, but he disappeared, and Dear Abby, what should I do?
Dear Abby says: Pray for rain.
Spaths really do home in on this kind of victim. And they play the victim in this story equally well, too.
It’s a script. Straying from a script is hard (especially pre-1970). But try it sometime: Turn around to face everyone on an elevator. Somebody I know said everybody got off at the next floor. That’s how scary it is to take responsibility for one’s actions — not in a “be responsible,” moralistic way, but just a matter-of-fact rewriting of the script to how you want it to end.
Being the prime actor in your own life. Affecting the outcome.
Oxy, I was saying exactly that about having intense compassion. Intense compassion isn’t a sin. But it needs open eyes because it’s definitely the duck’s pond, his game not yours, if you’re not looking out.
sister sister,
even people who have NO compassion can attract a spath.
My little sister was 15 and I was 18 when she first met my spath. I was in the hospital and she came to see me. So did he. I noticed nothing unusual but that night I had a dream that he left me for her. in the dream I was filled with jealousy, an emotion I don’t typically feel, especially about men. The next morning I woke up and thought, “how strange and ridiculous”.
Now that I know that he is a pedophile, I realize that my subconscious had picked up his predatory urges coming out of him. Exactly the way I had picked it up the first time I was in his presence and felt panicked fear “for no reason”.
He couldn’t just move in on her because then he would lose me and he knew I had a large settlement coming. So he bided his time. Instead he sent a trojan horse to marry her- 15 YEARS LATER. Vicariously experiencing her suffering is almost just as good as getting her himself. Maybe better because it shows just how clever and diabolical he is.
But she is a person with NO COMPASSION, she only cares about money and she has no problem saying so. She was beautiful and she had money. She is also a sociopath. So he has the trojan horse trick her into doing his bidding. But in the end, the plan is to kill her. The trojan has taken out a million dollar policy on her. Did I mention she is as dumb as a sack of bricks.
Dear sistersister,
I don’t know about Geminigirl, but I definitely have been the one who made the POOR DECISIONS in the things I did as well, partly because I was born in 1946 and “that was how you should do it” back then…and those poor decisions had later consequences that turned out to be HORRIBLE.
As a teenager I went to live with my P-sperm donor for ADVENTURE and to get the heck away from egg donor—sure it was an exciting thing for a teenager to get to travel out of the country, fly airplanes and photograph wild animals in the middle of Africa, what teenager wouldn’t go for an opportunity like that! But I SAW he was doing things illegal, that he was mean as a snake, etc and I “went along” with the things he was doing instead of getting away from him when I could have done so. I saw his lack of empathy, I saw how he cheated others financially, and I KNEW those things were immoral but I “went along” with what he was doing, and I didn’t warn these people.
In the end, he hurt me, he beat and raped me and I barely got away with my life. I had to come crawling back to egg donor for a while because I had no where else to go…but I made the decision to STAY with P sperm donor even when I had seen what he was and when I had been WARNED by people who cared about me (some of his employees) that I should leave while the “getting was good” but I didn’t listen. I didn’t heed the warnings.
Back in the day that Gemini and I were married and had kids (late 60s and 70s) you didn’t get a divorce or have a “bastard” kid without it being a stigma for not only you but also for your kid. Women of our generation put up with a lot, but slowly women are getting financial independence which allows a lot more choices.
I’ve been reading about the women in the middle east lately, and how they are PROPERTY even in the “upper classes” and how few choices they have even in a “modern” world. It is a combination of financial, physical and legal repression and thought control. That poor girl that came to the US not long ago because her husband cut her nose and ears off when she ran away from his abusive family—is the man necessarily a psychopath? Maybe, but it is the “culture” of his HONOR among other men and the culture of her being PROPERTY just like a horse is property…except he wouldn’t mutilate the horse for running away he might only whip it. Women have less value than a horse or a camel.
I read another story in NYTimes the other day about a man and his wife who went to West Africa where they were from, told parents that they would get education for their daughters, and collected up a large group of young teenagers, brought them to the US and used them as SLAVE LABOR in their hair braiding business–WTF??? Slavery in the US TODAY??? Yep! They got away with it for YEARS!!!! Jaycee Dugard. Elizabeth Smart! How many unnamed women and girls are property? Trauma bonded?
How many of us made poor choices based on “what people should do in such and such a circumstance?” ME!!!!! (wildly waving my hand here!) It never dawned on me to do otherwise.
Just like I CHOSE to try to “help” my psychopathic son after he started his criminal career. Just like I chose to continue to “help” him after he went back to prison for murder. (head shaking here) my INTENSE COMPASSION MADE ME BLIND TO WHAT HE WAS—OVER AND OVER AND OVER. I think Geminigirl was the same kind of blind I was, kept hoping her daughter would “repent”—kept making the same kind of poor decisions I was making in trying to “help” out of love, because that’s “WHAT A MOTHER SHOULD DO.”
Now I am learning what I think are better choices, and that there is NOTHING I am obligated to do for another adult. It is all a choice. MY choice.
@Oxy, what you’re describing is conditioning. From day one, and perfectly understandable, about what a “good girl” does and doesn’t do. And yes, it’s horrible that women of my generation don’t understand just how oppressively enforced that expectation could be. Even where it didn’t show up as an outright restriction, it was like some kind of invisible fence.
But here’s the thing about invisible fences: Remarkable people have found ways around them, throughout history.
No blame, no shame, on you or GeminiGirl, because I totally get the sea you were swimming in and how hard it was to see out of it. I would be expecting an early ’60s 18- or 23-year-old to be some remarkable being.
But I wonder how many of us go on, even today, with that kind of conditioning hard-wired into us.
It goes to show just how hard we must strain to see out the porthole, think outside the box — because this society is so conformist and limiting of even what we think of as possibilities, even today.
I can certainly buy the part of the story about having to marry this guy, and quite frankly, it could have been the adventurous, can-do part had it turned out differently. The part about having to go next door and get banged out of feeling an insulted femininity is more suspect. There is a definite choice there, but also subject to conditioning. Truth is, you don’t have to feel anything; or you can feel something, acknowledge it, and separate that feeling from your next act.
It’s the conditioning that’s the problem. Women and girls aren’t even aware of their own “Dear Abby” abdication — it’s normal female behavior.
I posted a link to that woman’s story on another thread, I couldn’t remember where I had mentioned her (CRS!) it is from the NYTimes. We (humans) are not so far out of the stone age as we might like to think we are…and that young woman is proof and there are other women here in the US and world wide today who re still “property.” We can get down on our knees and thank the universe and whatever God we believe in that we have choices now, ANY choices at all.
Seems like for the last two years, since I’ve been recovering from the trauma that my ex-spath produced, I keep hearing the word, VICTIM! Every time I go to some self development, or leadership conference, and I’m in a “break out” group, discussing issues in the work place, people will walk by me and say, VICTIM out of the blue!
Makes me wonder if I have some sort of target on my back! I don’t even have to say it was ME, I just have to say, here’s the problem at work… pathological liar vs victim = conflict in the work place. I’ll ask “how do you deal with it, when someone really DID do something wrong, but you can no longer prove it?”
Oxy told me to get a recorder, because no one ever believes me when I say he STILL is doing it. They say I have to let the PAST be the past, and he’s all professional now, but he’s NOT, he just knows his audience. So I tried to record when he was having an unprofessional conversation near my desk, and I got a letter from HR calling me a CRIMINAL!!!! Hey guys, it’s NOT illegal to tape conversations held in public in OREGON, unless you are in a STATE building, and the person you are taping is more important then you!
They keep telling me, I’m imagining it. Then they tell me I’m a criminal because I try to tell them in a way that can be proven since they choose not to believe me no matter what. Then when I think I’m getting over the trauma that working around this hostile environment is doing to me, I have total strangers and trainers come up to me, and say that my “identity, job, position” at work is that of the VICTIM!
I’m sick of being blamed for being his victim. I’m sick of being identified as it, and for being threatened with getting fired for creating a HOSTILE work environment for every one else, because they want to look the other way as the office sociopath gropes women in the elevator, or what ever his pass time is now.
I didn’t get a promotion because HE is the #2 man in this unit, and I insisted that they NOT have him in a position of authority over me. So sad, can’t do, you have an issue Sherry, because he’s such a nice, polite, professional person. And if I disagree, threats again to fire me for bringing up something that has expired the 2 yrs I had to complain. And when I bring up the verbal attack and threatening behavior he showed 9 months ago, I’m told “because they couldn’t prove it happened when I complained, I am NOT allowed to even mention it to any one, and that would be grounds for firing me, since it must NOT have happened, if they couldn’t prove it happened.”
And they wondered WHY I wanted to record what he says as proof? Oh, and every one and their mother has a cell phone that can record conversations in this building, but I can’t bring my recorder for school in, because if I do, I’m a criminal.
Life sucks, and then you die…. that’s what he used to say.
I just want a world where he doesn’t exist, and where his lies about and to me, no longer take away every inch of worth I seem to have to the world.
Dear Sherry,
How did they know you have a recorder? I would keep the recorder hidden until I got some GOOD evidence that I needed then spring it out.
As long as you are not violating a LAW then do it, but do it quietly and secretly. The new digi recorders can be placed in a pocket or purse and still record.
I hear your frustration, woman, and I am so sorry you are still being targeted! It is enough to make you want to run screaming as if your hair were on fire! (((Hugs))))
If I could I’d reach through the screen and give you a big hug, so consider yourself hugged, Sherry!!!!
Sherry,
when a psychopath begins a con, first he goes into test mode.
He will create a little scenario which will have some drama involved so that he can see your reaction. Or various peoples’ reactions. But he has a “punchline” waiting. It’s the escape strategy: “look! it was all a joke, hahahaha, we’re all friends here and I’m not laughing at you, I’m laughing with you.”
He does this to gauge your temperment and see how you are likely to respond to the REAL con he will pull on you.
Unfortunately, when dealing with a psychopath, you must think like a psychopath. You will have to arrange little “tests”. I don’t know your situation so I can’t say how, but like the P, you will have to watch for opportunities. It will involve making up little lies, to test for reaction. As the tests progress, you will get an idea for his weaknesses. This is what they do ALL THE TIME. Do it back.
Example:
my exP took me out for valentine’s day 1984. I drove. before we arrived at the fancy restaurant, he said, “did you just hit something? I felt a bump. Did you hit that pedestrian.?” I responded, “if I hit someone, don’t you think I’d know?”
When we got to the restaurant, a police officer came up and arrested me for hit and run. As I put my hands up to be handcuffed, he started singing and dancing to a jukebox machine. IT WAS A SINGING TELEGRAM FROM THE P!
Rigggght. It was a TEST. Often times since then, he has said, “it was AMAZING how easily you allowed yourself to be handcuffed”
So, point is, when you pull a joke like this, you have to have proof that it was a joke at the end. Some fine print or a birthday card or people jumping out to say SURPRISE!
It might not be your cup of tea, but at least be aware of how they think and operate.
It’s not your fault you’re the “victim.”
HR can call you a “criminal” and that and two dollars will get them on a bus. No value to this at all. Just name-calling and (presumed) intimidation. (It’s only intimidation if you let yourself be intimidated.)
The only “victim mentality” I see in this story is the fact that you haven’t filed a lawsuit yet. Keep documenting everything.
No more drama, no more wondering who is saying what about you. All extraneous stuff. Shut it down.