Contrary to a prevailing myth, sociopaths are really no smarter than the average individual”¦probably dumber. Sure, a good one can dupe you, but as I’ve written elswhere, this is no great shakes, as most of us can dupe each other if that’s our goal.
That’s because we enter relationships risking trust and faith in each other, which makes the exploitation of our trust and faith really easy. It takes no genius or particularly smart, crafty person to exploit this trust and faith. It’s as easy to do as it’s wrong.
And so, most sociopaths aren’t really that clever, or ingeniously bright. Most make messes not only of others’ lives, but their own too. Many end up in jail, and those who don’t are often finding trouble in other areas, exercising poor judgement all over the map, squandering friendships, family, and all sorts of meaningful opportunities.
By most standards of a successful life, sociopaths live lives of abject failure, accomplishing little more, at the end of the day, than having produced plenty of havoc and pain. None of this indicates that, as a group, sociopaths are smart.
Sometimes the media sensationalizes the sociopath as the dark, brilliantly predatory monster, especially in classic cases of psychopaths like Ted Bundy. But Ted Bundy wasn’t so smart. In the end, he was nothing but a vicious, sadistic murderer who managed to lure young, naïve girls sufficiently into his proximity to then viciously murder them.
How much of an accomplishment was this? To be able to lure naïve girls near enough to his car to then kidnap and kill them? Otherwise, OJ Simpson style, Bundy was ambushing dormitories at night and butchering innocent, sleeping college kids. Not exactly a genius, or courageous guy, at work here. Just a perverse, murderously violent, cowardly man.
Sure, Bundy was reputedly charming and articulate (video of him bears this out). But this didn’t make him “smart.” He was, clearly, adept at “masking” himself. But again, effective maskers aren’t smart; they’re just good maskers. And nonsociopaths routinely are good maskers.
Good masking, good self-disguising is a type of social skill, and not the purview of sociopaths exclusively. Also, many sociopaths are terrible maskers, just as many nonsociopaths are.
My point is that the “mask” is not an indication of “smartness.” It’s merely the case that some sociopaths, and some nonsociopaths, can mask aspects of themselves and their agendas effectively; but bear in mind, just as many do this very poorly.
In the end, sociopaths, as a group, have a poor track record of living effective lives. Rather, they live disruptive, unsatisfying lives”¦fraught with pathological attitudes and empathic deficits that bring misery to others and, correspondingly, much trouble and, at best, empty satisfaction, to themselves.
Sociopaths simply are not successful people. They may (or may not) skate along under the radar for some stretch of time, but this is not a “game” that smart people play, and that smart people get off on.
Only dumb people play this game. Only really dumb people live this way. Only really really dumb people derive satisfaction, for however long they can swing it, from pulling the wool over others’ eyes.
It’s just no great shakes to do this, and it doesn’t make you smart.
Great article, Steve.
I’m just now watching all the shenanigans about Charlie Sheen.
I find this very interesting. He’s clearly STOOOOOPID, if not downright foolish, as Sky mentioned foolishness earlier.
BUT isn’t celebrity and the public a bit forgiving about this man? I don’t think he even BOTHERS to hide that he’s spath. He just IS….but why isn’t he IGNORED, rather than REVERED (even if negatively) for his behavior? I find this absolutely appalling, yet also like a HUGE train wreck…..it’s so amazing the opinions so varied, the interviews so many….that it’s nothing less than disgusting AND AMAZING that there is so much attention paid to him. I wonder what would happen if this man was not garnering all the attention he’s getting….by being STOOOOOOOPID!!!
LL
Steve – with all due respect your article reads like a thumbing of the nose to some spath who has irritated you. I don’t think you found the real gem or kernal in your article; i think it needs more development.
on the relative intelligence of spaths – i doubt it is any different than the rest of the population. sometimes a particular spath look smarter to us as they are all about manipulating people and getting what they want, and other times they look dumber as their motivations are so different than ours are.
One,
yes, so it does, but is there anything wrong with that!? 😛
I personally enjoyed it. hehehehheee!
No matter how smart they are, they sit around wasting their time on the most useless endeavors. In the end they cut off their nose to spite their face. The psychological reward they get for wasting our time, only earns them a momentary satifaction which they need to repeat over and over again in order to maintain it as “real”.
Once again, you hit it.
At the end of the experience, you have t look back and shake your head.
The compulsion to lie like that is something remarkable.
In the Native American Folklore of the Southwest. they tell stories about Coyote, the trickster who tricks himself into and out of trouble all the time.
The stories are funny, but over and over we see the coyote try to gain and then, in the end wind up the loser for all his trickery.
But to none, does the coyote represent less than a determined and able predator who is equally determined to survive.
I’ve never forgotten the morning they executed Ted Bundy. I remember exactly where I was at the time. I was staying at a hotel right across the road from Sea World in San Diego—though it was a business trip I was on, not a vacation. When I woke up to the radio alarm that Tuesday morning, Florida of course was three hours ahead of California, so Bundy had already been dispatched. While I was getting ready to go to a meeting, the radio announcer was telling his listeners all the news of the execution. It was memorable for one remark especially.
Bundy in fact was fairly intelligent. However, it’s interesting that even then, some people have inflated the public perception of Bundy’s intelligence further still, in the way Steve described. I myself had been left with the impression Bundy had an IQ of 140. When I looked it up, it appears his measured IQ was only 123 or 124. That does rate as “superior” intelligence, but he was no mastermind. I have no idea where the 140 meme came from. Perhaps somebody started the myth that Bundy was some kind of “genius,” and they picked 140 because that’s one proposed threshold for “geniuses,” Mensa level.
Steve’s article highlights an important philosophical point: that there’s a difference between being “intelligent” and what we call “smart.” Generally we reserve the word “smart” for people who are successful in practice at achieving whatever it is they set out to do. A lot of people can be “intelligent” yet still do “dumb” things and fail. Especially if they’re under the influence of some obsession or delusion, or their behavior is influenced by some flaw in their psyche—as Bundy’s undoubtedly was.
So there’s more than one truth in this article. It’s perfectly true that psychopaths as a class are no more intelligent than people at large, and they may well be less so. Certainly plenty of CRIMINALS are dumb—granted that criminals don’t all have to be psychopaths. More than one police officer has observed that it’s lucky for us that so many criminals ARE dumb—otherwise they wouldn’t be so easily caught!
Clive Bunyan of Yorkshire, England, was an outstanding example. He wore a “mask” of a different kind. One day in 1970 he decided to rob a store in the village of Cayton. His motorcycle could make a swift getaway, and wearing his crash helmet in the store would make it hard for anyone to recognize his face.
The robbery went without a hitch. Clive marched into the village store, threatened the cashier and ran out with £157. In seconds he had roared off down the road and was nowhere to be seen. Police however had no difficulty getting on Clive’s trail. Stenciled across the front of his helmet was the name CLIVE BUNYAN in large gold letters.
Clive and other bunglers are honored in this Top Ten List of Stupid Thieves (mong other places). Not every thief is as stupid as those, but it’s highly likely that some people turn to crime because they’re too dumb to earn a living by more honest means!
The trouble with modern mass media is that they often give us a distorted picture of the world. Many events “make news” precisely BECAUSE they’re unusual, EXCEPTIONS to the norm, and therefore “newsworthy.” Run-of-the-mill events that constitute the norm don’t make it into the newspapers. So we don’t hear so much about the run-of-the-mill psychopath (or criminal) who gets caught. The ones we hear most about—like Bernie Madoff—are exceptional in one way or another. Madoff was exceptional, not only in the colossal amount of damage he did, but in getting away with it for so many years. Most miscreants couldn’t come close to a run of success like that, even though Madoff’s empire was bound to come crashing down in the end.
Ted Bundy was quite intelligent, but he was decidedly not “smart.” Granted, he did make a couple of very clever escapes. And he did get away with a string of murders for a time. But predatory killings of this type can be notoriously hard to solve, when there’s no prior connection between killer and victim. Yet if Bundy kept on doing it, there was no way he was going to get away with it for ever. The laws of chance would see to that. Sooner or later there was bound to be a slipup of the kind that happened with Carol DaRonch.
Just as important, Bundy did made mistakes. His first blunder was to run from a police officer when he could have stopped and bluffed it out. His second mistake was not getting his cover story right, which flagged him as a liar. His third mistake was keeping items in his car that were altogether TOO suspicious. These included a “mask” of pantyhose with holes cut in it. A ski mask alone would have attracted far less attention. And why take a crowbar as his “blunt instrument” when he could have used a lug wrench, a natural tool to have in a car? His fourth mistake was leaving a paper trail of evidence: maps, brochures, and gasoline credit card charges that proved he’d been in Colorado when women were abducted. He should have paid cash.
And all of that pales into insignificance compared with his most colossal blunder of all. Once his second jailbreak had succeeded, he might have stayed free for longer, and he could at least have preserved his own life. Instead, he had to go and commit MORE murders, for which he was sure to be caught—and in FLORIDA at that, a state (unlike many others) that resolutely applies the death penalty! Bundy wrote his own death warrant right there.
If all Bundy had “achieved” was to slaughter several dozen women, creating pain, havoc, and fear for hundreds or even thousands of people, that alone didn’t have to mean he was “not smart.” Not if he’d gotten away with it. After all, his success was not to be measured by our standards, but by his, by what he himself set out to do. If we think butchering a string of innocent victims is a ghastly and perverted thing to do, not something we’d ever dream of wanting, that wasn’t true of Ted. Apparently he took pleasure in it. He may well have felt the same pride in each “kill” as a hunter displaying his trophies. And if this caused pain, grief, fear and rage among countless humans, what was that to him? He was a psychopath, so why should he care about the suffering of others?
If he could have gotten away with it indefinitely, I would have had to admit he was “smart.” EVIL beyond all doubt, but still “smart.” He’d be getting all the sick pleasure HE wanted out of life, perhaps gloating secretly over his own cleverness as well, the way he was putting it over on the whole world. But that’s not how events turned out, and he’d embarked on a predatory lifestyle he couldn’t possibly have kept up. It was bound to bring him down eventually, and that was NOT smart.
Perhaps he never looked that far ahead—a failure of “intelligence” typical of many psychopaths. At any rate, the world did find out his secret, so he LOST—beaten at his own game. His “chosen lifestyle” came to an end at only 32 years of age. Then, after the usual interminable delay, they stuck him in Old Sparky at 7:16 in the morning—4:16 California time—and fried him. Listening to the radio that morning, I never forgot the news report about the Jacksonville DJ who was broadcasting to all the people having breakfast in their Florida kitchens at the time. The DJ urged them to turn off their electrical appliances to make sure there was plenty of juice for the Chair! Crowds chanted “Burn, Bundy, Burn!” When Bundy had taken so much pleasure in bringing death to others, it was fitting that his own death should be the cause of CHEERING and MERRIMENT among the population at large. To act in a way that brought such an ignominious end upon himself, that was not “smart” by anyone’s standards.
Hi Redwald. I enjoyed reading your post above.
I gre up in Washington State, near Seattle. I was 15 years old while Bundy was on his reign of terror. I had long brown hair, parted down the middle, and fit the profile of Bundy’s victims.
This was when, for the first time we started locking our doors at night; I was not allowed to walk to the store alone.
I moved to Florida shortly before Bundy’s execution. Restaraunt reader boards advertised, “Bundy fries.” LOL.
I would like to disagree about one thing, though. I don’t think Bundy’s getting caught has much to do with his relative smarts.
First of all, his raping and killing was probably compullsive, so I’m sure he had little control over it. As a Psychopath, he probably had little impuse control, and couldn’t see around corners. He probably had less fear and anxiety than the rest of us, and increased Narcissism, thinking he was above the law, and smarter than the average bear. Those factors have nothing to do with smarts, particularly…although they did get him caught.
I wonder if they cut open his brain and learned anything new about serial killers.
I went to bed early and missed some of the later/earlier comments until this morning and I’d like to comment on some of them.
First: Sky: QUOTE:I personally enjoyed it. hehehehheee!
” No matter how smart they are, they sit around wasting their time on the most useless endeavors. In the end they cut off their nose to spite their face. The psychological reward they get for wasting our time, only earns them a momentary satifaction (sic) which they need to repeat over and over again in order to maintain it as “real”. ”
While I agree with you that “gray rock” (not showing a lot if any emotion to their behavior) in SOME cases works—some how I don’t think that trying to tell them about their short comings, or their own problems, even while showing concern for them, will necessarily work with any but the most passive personality disordered person—I got two black eyes and a broken nose to show for that tactic from my P sperm donor.
As far as “enjoying” trying to convince them that they have a problem, it seems to me to be sparring with the devil and a dangerous tactic that can back fire if you misjudge how passive your oponent is.
Silvermoon, very good analogy of coyote and his antics–VERY GOOD analogy! I love those stories, BTW.
Redwald–good points about the smarts/not smarts of various bungling robbers. ONe of the kids my son recruited for a home invasion robbery actually left a MC helmet at the scene of the crime with the victims left tied up—with his NAME AND ADDRESS inside it. When they went back a few hours later to try to get it, the victims were up and untied and SHOOTING OUT THE DOOR—my son’s jacket got a bullet hole in it as he and the other kid fled the scene! LOL
While at least “one part” of me would have cheered at “Bundy Frying” and would have actually wanted to flip the switch myself, actually, that cheering Oxy (even cheering at someone getting what they richly deserved, and he did richly deserve to pay for his crimes!)…that CHEERING person at the death of another human being, even an evil one, richly deserving their execution, is NOT the OXY I WANT TO BE. I would much rather be the Oxy that is SAD that another HUMAN BEING is so evil that they must be executed, or locked in jail forever.
I can into my own healing process a big proponent of the death penalty—and in Bundy’s case I think there was plenty of evidence that he was guilty of more than one murder, so I don’t have a problem at all with him being executed, though it does make me sad. But now, I see that our “justice” system, or IN-justice system as I call it now, is so fraught with ERROR and injustice that too many times people have been “convicted” because of faulty evidence or rushes to judgment and the many people being freed off of death row and life without parole by DNA evidence 10-20-30 years AFTER THE FACT, PROVING THEY ARE INNOCENT, (not a technical “not guilty.”) makes me leery of the evidence that is sending men and women to their death. The thought of even one innocent man or woman being executed for a crime they did not commit makes my blood run cold. So I am, because of the way it is administered, no longer in favor of the death penalty in general. There is a young man in Arkansas’ death row that I think it is becoming apparent is innocent, with the case based almost entirely of a “witch hunt” and him and his two friends being “goth” dressing smart mouthed low class trashy teenagers, presto, case solved, get the retarded one to “confess” and CASE CLOSED. 18 years later there is finally going to be a new evidence hearing for the DNA of what MUST be the real killer (because of WHERE the DNA was found) so hopefully, after 18 years in death row, and 18 years for the other two in gen pop, they will be released for a crime they did not commit.
KIM: QUOTE: “First of all, his raping and killing was probably compullsive, (sic) so I’m sure he had little control over it.”
I disagree completely Kim, he had enough CONTROL to plan his killings. “Compulsive” is not something over which someone has ANY control for. He Tried to HIDE his crimes, so therefore he had some control over when and where he chose to do them, and hiding of the evidence (though he wasn’t really good at hiding things, he did try)
COMPULSIVE is someone with OCD who washes their hands 300 times a day even though their hands are raw and bleeding, because of a fear of germs, it’s a way to decrease their anxiety about the germs they fear….I think Bundy KNEW what he was doing and did it because he WANTED TO, he ENJOYED the thrill he got from it, he might have been impulsive, but he could decide to do it or not. He was not compelled by some force he could not resist if he had tried to resist it, in my opinion.
Because my P son is in the “genius” range (99th percentile on an IQ test) and is ALSO one of the most STOOOOOPID criminals I have ever seen with so little foresight or successful planning to keep his crimes undiscovered or unproven—i.e. the partner who left the MC helmet at the scene of the crime—taking the murder weapon home and putting it under his mattress, telling the victim’s room mate he killed the victim, telling one of his ex-convict buddies he INTENDED TO KILL HER days before the crime, then calling that same buddy on a TAPE RECORDED JAIL PHONE, and telling him where the body is and asking him to move it. DUH!
So IQ and “life-smart” are NOT THE SAME THING, I think that is pretty well proven. My son could have had a free ride to any college he wanted to get any kind of a job that would have made him “relatively rich” and he could have afforded all kinds of risk taking exciting hobbies or professions, so why did he choose to be a small time crook? Why was he unwilling to get the degree and the job and the money that was available to him for only the most normal amounts of patience and effort?
I think he got hooked on the “adrenaline rush” of the risk taking when he was a teenager and started the petty theft and crimes. When he got away with one, he got a “fix” and it was so addicting he had to have another FIX…and another and another and another….and just as if he was on crack or crank or heroin, he needed bigger and bigger fixes and he needed to share these “highs” with others just as addicts like to shoot up together, share needles etc. it is a “social” thing as well as a “high.” It is the anticipating the fix and plotting to get the fix, it is getting and sharing the fix with their buddies, and then talking about the high later. Just like a bunch of drunks or junkies talking about the last drunk or high and enjoying it in retrospect….my P son tells his P buddy in letters about how his “crime is worse than the cops even knew.” That doesn’t mean that they don’t have any CONTROL over it though. They just manufacture their own “drugs” inside their body—adrenaline! What a rush! It becomes their life, but they can control it, or could channel the getting of it into more socially acceptable channels than robbery and murder. We all like the adrenaline rush, and we watch scary movies, or sky dive, or ride horses, or motorcycles, but find more socially acceptable ways to get our “fixes” than crime.
Okay, Oxy. Agreed.
Oxy,
My reference about enjoying…was:
I personally enjoyed STEVE’S ARTICLE. My reference was to One’s comment on it.
As far as my BS with the spath. The intent was to let him know that he was not unique or creative in anyway, no matter how many avenues of deceit he could come up with. I let him know that I could read his mind. The end result is he stopped talking to me. which is what I wanted.
What Steve said is true. The ONLY reason they are able to put one over on us is because we have no concept of such an audacious liar. I mean WHO WOULD LIE LIKE THAT?
Once we have that piece of the puzzle, once we KNOW that when they move their lips, it means they are lying, they have nothing. They KNOW THIS. That’s why they slither away once unmasked. Even the violent sociopath is faking. Most of the rage is a show to see the terror on our faces. The truly scary sociopath is one like Ted Bundy, who – out of the blue – hits you over the head with a crow bar. Who DOES that?
Sky,
QUOTE: The truly scary sociopath is one like Ted Bundy, who ”“ out of the blue ”“ hits you over the head with a crow bar. Who DOES that?
Truly scary psychopath for you maybe, but for me, the truly scary one is the one I KNOW IS AFTER ME and unmasking him or NC doesn’t make him slither away but only makes him more determined to do me in. One who cannot stand to “lose” by letting a victim get away, who will stalk me to the end of the earth and/or his or my life. Who would still feel he had “won” if he died in the act of getting revenge on me.
The Ted Bundys of this world are much less scary to me because they are not so focused on ME as an individual. All the random killers in the US are still statistically UNLIKELY to converge on my house on any given night, but a psychopath who is targeted on me as an individual is another dimension. I still refuse to live in TERROR, but I will live in caution and continue to do so as long as he is alive.
Statistically, more women are harmed or killed by a KNOWN KILLER than are harmed by random killers. Most murders are by people who KNOW YOU, NOT BY PEOPLE WHO KILL AT RANDOM.