After reading about the book, The Psychopath Test, Kayt Sukel, a Psychology Today blogger, wondered if psychopaths were, in fact, everywhere. So she asked Joshua Buckholtz, a neuroscientist. He said that psychopathy needed to have meaningful diagnostic boundaries. Buckholtz told her “a true psychopath is going to show high aggression, low empathy and high narcissism in all contexts.”
I wondered about that description. Here at Lovefraud, we know that psychopaths are capable of faking love and concern, quite convincingly, when it suits their purpose. How does the expert account for that?
Read Psychopaths everywhere? on PsychologyToday.com.
Link supplied by a Lovefraud reader.
Thanks Donna for an interesting link. To me there is no question that the structure of corporations, that put the growth of the bottom line, openly and admittedly, above any other concern for the well being of people and the planet, does directly reward and encourage psychopathic behavior.
Can a business man who’s actions destroy lives and environments go home at night and be a good person? No. The lie is the lie that he can be a ruthless destroyer by day, and have empathy in other areas of life, regardless of how well he fakes it.
If we included those how behave in self serving ways that are destructive to others, and said they were high in sociopathic traits, the numbers of them amongst us would be enormous, I would venture more like 20% than the 4% usually cited.
I look forward to studies that can help us determine if we are in fact “teaching” sociopathic behavior in our constant growth model of predatory capitalism. We do reward and celebrate a lot of leaders in business and politics that have committed callous acts and delivered much injustice to others. We make heroes out of those who have the “guts” to be “tough”.
Are we building sociopathy into our model of how we do business? I think the answer is yes. And we are witnessing the costs to all of humanity. Be it the handling of Fukishima or the Bhopal disaster in India or the banking and foreclosure scandals, all of these harmful events were first initiated by those who cared not for others.
Sorry to sound so dark so early in the day, but hopefully the more light is shed on this pervasive problem the more hope we have of one day, as a society, going NC.
For me, I think the “definition” of psychopathy should hinge on Empathy or lack of it. As Dr. Baron-Cohen points out in his books and research though, empathy is not just a “you have it or you don’t” but is on a “bell curve” with most people iin the middle, having “enough” empathy, but 1-2% of people lack empathy almost entirely, and another 2-3% are VERY low in empathy.
To me, as your empathy decreases, your ability to use and abuse others without any second thought about it increases. It doesn’t have to be phyisical violence, though it can include that. People can be frequent liars for many reasons, and people can be violent for many reasons, people can do lots of things that are anti-social and still have empathy, but the person lacking empathy enjoys doing those things, and has the “duping delight.”
The person without empathy or with low empathy will be fairly consistent in his or her behavior in all aspects of their lives, but they may be also very careful in HIDING and MASKING these abusive and anti-social behaviors. The man may beat his wife in secret, but appear to be a loving husband in public. The person may molest children in secret but appear to be a philanthropist during the day. A person may be a church leader or a school teacher, policeman or judge and yet hide the dark secret of psychopathic behavior.
Just like most people there will be various parts of their personality, like some will have more or less narcississm just like ther est of us have different aspects to our personality, they may be more introverted or more extroverted, but I think the bottom line is how much if any empathy they have, and that will determine how they ultimately treat others.
I use the “mask of sanity” as the benchmark for psychopathy. The lie about who they are and what their intentions are is the most distinctive feature of psychopaths IMO.
The fact that they use masks of charm, pity and rage to coerce emotional responses out of others is part of it. They can cycle from one mask to the other very quickly if one isn’t working. This is because, as Hare says, they have shallow affect. They never felt the emotions very deeply to begin with. My spath sister told my spath mom that her spath husband will rage out of control and she will be so upset and crying, but then 20 minutes later, he acts as if it never happened. This is classic spath behavior and indicates that they don’t feel things deeply, so how can they feel empathy? They don’t.
I’m not sure about corporate psychopaths because empathy in the workplace isn’t the primary reason someone is hired, competence is. But in a marriage and family, it IS all about empathy. The family is based on emotional attachments, so betraying those IS what I would call psychopathic.
I don’t see any conflict here. Buckholtz’s comment about psychopaths having “high aggression, low empathy and high narcissism in all contexts” only covers certain features of the disorder. It does not address other features we know about, including the psychopath’s well-known propensity for lying, deceit, and manipulation. Nor does it mean that a psychopath is openly displaying aggression all of the time. We all know how psychopaths can often mask their aggressive intentions, or simulate such things as “empathetic behavior” when it suits their purposes. I can’t believe that anything in Buckholtz’s statement was intended to exclude those deceptive behaviors.
Nothing in his statement excludes the possibility that “Chainsaw Al” is a psychopath, either. Buckholtz is only saying he can’t be sure. Otherwise, all that Buckholtz is warning against is the tendency some people have to use terms like “psychopath” too loosely, and stretch them too far. Others do the same with other terms too, like “narcissist.” Some people make these terms into trendy buzzwords, but that doesn’t mean they’re using them accurately. Buckholtz is simply pointing out that not every “bad guy” is clinically a psychopath. That’s absolutely true, and does need pointing out to people at large.
A figure as large as 20 percent does illustrate the need for Buckholtz’s comment. If we took the 20 percent of people who were most self serving and cared least for others, assuming we could see their brain structure clearly enough, only some small percentage (whether it’s four percent or whatever) would turn out to be psychopaths. Quite a number of others might turn out to have some different personality disorder or mental condition, but not psychopathy. Then out of a figure as large as 20 percent, I dare say a few percent wouldn’t have any identifiable “disorder.” They’d just be on the selfish end of “normal,” that’s all, and we wouldn’t have any justification for pathologizing them with terms like “psychopath”/”sociopath.”
Red if you look at the “Psychopath” term on a BELL CURVE, which I think really it IS, as some people will have more or less of the TRAITS that make up a psychopath…and we know it is not an “either or” situation, as some of them are “more so and others less so” Like for example, while 25% of the prison population at any given time scores a 30 on the PCL-R, the AVERAGE score is 22, and the average score of the general population is about 4-5 I think.
Now, if you look at the number of EX- convicts in this country where a HIGH NUMBER OF THE POPULATION ARE INCARCERATED Or have been, I would say that there is a higher than 1% level of people who SCORE HIGHER THAN a 4-5 on the PCL-R, so thought they might not FULLY qualify as a “psychopath” (scoring a 30) they are NOT NICE PEOPLE.
I’m getting to the point that I can recognize people HIGH IN THE TRAITS without possibly even thinking that they are full fledged psychopaths. ON a personal level I don’t want any one high in traits in my immediate circle…but at work, sometimes we don’t have choices but to interact with these people that we can see are LOW on the empathy scale or just plain vicious when it comes to work “success” and success at work is usually not about people liking you or being nicey nice, but the bottom line, the amount of money coming into the til.
In my opinion, from a practical standpoint for the layperson, the diagnostic labels mean nothing. Furthermore, I think the labels keep people who are psychopathically bonded, or even just those with high relationship investment, “stuck” in these toxic situations longer. “Oh, well, my partner doesn’t exhibit a few of the diagnostic characteristics, so there’s hope things will change in our relationship.” The chance of ever getting a diagnosis of the disordered person is slim to none, and it just doesn’t matter when your well being and safety are at stake. Patterns of behavior are important, but sometimes even a single instance of a particular behavior should be adequate justification to get out.
Tallgrrl_can
To quote you: “sometimes even a single instance of a particular behavior should be adequate justification to get out. ”
NO TRUER WORDS HAVE EVER BEEN SPOKEN, even a SINGLE instance of some behaviors are more than enough to GET OUT!
Thanks for posting this.
My first comment. “Brilliant Harvard Neuroscientists” are often highly Narcissistic. Being that, there views tend to be very black and white, as evidenced by Buckhotlz’ need to put boundaries around the definition. Moreover, such types (the brilliant Harvard professors) think they are so smart that they cannot be deceived by a psychopath? For example, Buckholtz only seems to recognize overt aggression, when covert aggression can be equally destructive, especially in relationships.
This is why I believe there must be separate definitions: sociopaths and psychopath, primarliy differentiated by the level overt aggressiveness and criminal behavior. Doing so is crucial because I agree with Jon Ronson. When you go hunting for Psychopaths (and Sociopaths) they do turn up everywhere.
BBE, you are right, PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE **is** aggressive! Sometimes worse than aggressive aggressive.
Buchholtz is too stuck in the Ivy Tower to understand this…