If there is one thing that gets me argumentative it is statements like this one that appeared in a recent research paper: “non-incarcerated psychopaths have an arguably equal potential to illuminate our understanding of the emotional difficulties, such as lack of empathy and lack of conscience, which underlie psychopathy and which lead to offending behaviour.” (emphasis mine)
Now I agree that we can learn from non-incarcerated psychopaths, I wrote recently about a well designed study where sociologists conducted interviews of some. But I cannot believe that statements like the one above make it through editorial review for another reason. Researchers in psychology have spent the last 50 years and untold millions of dollars uncovering the cause of behavior. There is no mystery, we know what causes behavior!
Behavior is caused by rewards and stopped by punishment. Actually rewards cause behavior a lot better than punishment stops it in most people. That is because the brain reward system is functionally stronger than the brain punishment system for most, and especially for sociopaths/psychopaths. The rewards that cause behavior do so because they increase dopamine activity in the mesolimbic dopamine system.
Offending behavior exists and persists because it is rewarding and that reward affects the activity of the mesolimbic dopamine system. To put it bluntly, nothing but desiring/liking to offend leads to offending behavior. To say otherwise is to negate all the work that has been done in this area. The evidence is so strong that genes involved in dopamine metabolism and that system have been identified as candidate genes in the familial transmission of “offending behavior”.
I will repeat, a lack of empathy does not cause offending behavior, neither does a lack of conscience. These two may cause a person to show restraint if he is tempted to aggress against another, but it is the aggressive impulse that causes aggression. So a person with empathy and conscience can still offend if he has the inclination to do so. Furthermore, there is evidence that repeated offending erodes away empathy and conscience.
There is another source of evidence that calls into question the hypothesis that lack of empathy causes the sociopath’s behavior. That source of evidence is people with autism and autism spectrum disorders.
I recently found two very impressive discussions comparing moral agency in autism and psychopathy. The first is, Autism, Empathy and Moral Agency, a paper published in The Philosophical Quarterly (52:340, 2002) written by Dr. Jeannette Kennett, Deputy Director and Principal Research Fellow, Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, The Australian National University. Since I didn’t know to search Philosophical Quarterly for papers on psychopathy, I didn’t find that paper until I read “Moral Psychology, Volume 3, The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Brain Disorders and Development” MIT Press, 2008. Dr. Kennett also has two chapters in that book. But Chapter 5, Varieties of Moral Agency: Lessons from Autism, is a discussion of Dr. Kennette’s paper by Dr. Victoria McGeer, of Princeton University’s Center for Human Values. There is a back and forth discussion of the issues raised, with several noted professors also participating.
Both sources begin their discussions by saying that moral agency has two parts two it, a thinking part and a feeling part. They trace these concepts back to philosophers Kant and Hume. Dr. Kennett concludes that Kant is right and that reason is the most important aspect of moral agency. Dr. McGeer points to emotions being important even for people with autism. I am going to summarize the arguments, then give you my own opinion.
Now like sociopathy, autism is a spectrum. A large percentage of people with autism are mentally retarded, so this discussion involves those autistic individuals who are not mentally retarded. I should point out that many sociopaths also have poor intellectual functioning. These sociopaths tend to live in prison.
Dr. Kenneth quotes the following description of autism,
The most general description of social impairment in autism is lack of empathy. Autistic people are noted for their indifference to other people’s distress, their inability to offer comfort, even to receive comfort themselves. What empathy requires is the ability to know what another person thinks or feels despite that is different from one’s own mental state at the time. In empathy one shares emotional reactions to another person’s different state of mind. Empathy presupposes amongst other things a recognition of different mental states. It also presupposes that one goes beyond the recognition of difference to adopt the other person’s frame of mind with all the consequences of emotional reactions. Even able autistic people seem to have great difficulty achieving empathy in this sense.
Autistic people also experience an “aloneness,” yet this aloneness does not bother them. They are indifferent to the presence of other people and do not require affection. One autistic adult is quoted as saying, “I really didn’t know there were other people until I was seven years old. I then suddenly realized that there were people. But not like you do, I still have to remind myself that there are people. I could never have a friend. I really don’t know what to do with other people really.”
High functioning autistic people recognize that they are very different from other people and report feeling “like aliens.”
Dr.Kenneth correctly concludes, “Both psychopaths and autistic people experience outsider status, deficiencies in social understanding and social responsiveness… Both have a tendency to treat other people as tools or instruments, (they have) a lack of strong emotional connectedness to others and impaired capacity for friendship.” She says clinicians and researchers link these impairments in both psychopathy and autism to impaired empathy. But autistic people are in fact worse off in this respect than psychopaths. Psychopaths at least can interact socially with ease and behave in a charming way.
She correctly questions, “If empathy is crucial to the development and exercise of moral agency, then why is the autistic person not worse off, morally speaking, than the psychopath?” She points out that in spite of the lack of empathy which is at the core of the disorder, “Many autistic people display moral concerns, moral feeling and a sense of duty or conscience.”
That autistic people are not antisocial is evidenced by the observation that few come to the attention of police. I did a Google news search using the terms autistic and arrest. Although there were many arrests of people for abusing those with autism, all of the arrests of autistics for aggression were for aggression that stemmed from self-defense. For example, a 10 year old boy with autism was arrested for assaulting staff at his treatment facility. The boy assaulted staff members because he was afraid and they tried to prevent his escape.
Drs. Kenneth and McGeer basically agree on the source of moral agency in those with autism, and what they say is fascinating with respect to sociopaths. The source of moral agency in autism is a preference for order and organization. Autistic people have reported that their sense of morality comes from a desire to see their world as orderly and organized. Dr. Kenneth states that this need for order gives rise to an extraordinary rationality in high functioning people with autism. She says that since morality is organized and logical that those with autism easily pick up moral principles.
I also did a search on morality in autism and can attest to several studies demonstrating normal levels of moral reasoning in autistic children who are not mentally retarded.
Drs. Kennett and McGeer also agree on the issue of the lack of moral agency shown by sociopaths/psychopaths. They both say that this group just plain doesn’t care about morality or regard moral principles as important. This is where psychopaths and autistics differ. Autistics identify with and value moral principles. Dr. Kennett states, “It is not the psychopath’s lack of empathy, which (on its own at any rate) explains his moral indifference. It is more specifically his lack of concern, or more likely lack of capacity to understand what he is doing, to consider the reasons available to him and to act in accordance with them.”
The point of disagreement of the two experts involves the relative role of emotion and reason in autistic people’s moral agency and valuation of morality. Dr. Kennett says that the autistic person is like Dr. Spock of Star Treck, and views life in purely logical terms. Since morality is logical and rational, autistics embrace it. Dr. McGeer disagrees, she states that the autistic need for order leads to an emotional connection to order and rationality. She feels that emotion does play a role in the moral lives of autistics, since she sees them as emotionally as well as rationally invested in maintaining order.
What about sociopaths/psychopaths and the need for order/organization? This disorder truly involves disorder. Psychopaths/sociopaths thrive on chaos and seem to have a dislike for order. Everywhere they go they are a source of extreme entropy as they take order and turn it into disorder. Both Drs. link the lack of appreciation for order to a lack of thoughtfulness in sociopaths/psychopaths. Sociopaths are both disordered and not fully rational or logical.
Dr. McGeer States:
This failure of reason may seem surprising. After all, our image of the psychopath is of a person who is rather good at serving his own interests without concern for the damage he does to others; hence of someone who is rather good at thinking and acting in instrumentally rational ways”¦As Dr. Carl Elliot observes, “While the psychopath seems pathologically egocentric, he is nothing like an enlightened egoist. His life is frequently distinguished by failed opportunities, wasted chances and behavior which is astonishingly self-destructive. This poor judgment seems to stem not so much from the psychopath’s inadequate conception of how to reach his ends, but from an inadequate conception of what his ends are.”
I agree with Dr. McGeer in that I believe that the emotionality associated with the need for order leads to the rationality of autistic people. The brain punishment system is relatively intact in autistics as compared to sociopaths and when an autistic person senses danger instead of being disconnected from the source of anxiety/fear, the autistic person engages thoughtfully to avoid danger (punishment).
The brain punishment/anxiety system of sociopaths is both hypofunctional and hyperfunctional in that they experience anxiety but fail to engage their thinking brains in the presence of danger. The high functioning autistic is well practiced at using his thinking brain to avoid anxiety. The psychopath rarely uses the thinking brain he has- to do anything other than get into trouble and hurt other people.
There are interesting parallels between the autistic’s use of reason to manage anxiety and normal development. It turns out that anxiety and fearfulness in the first two years of life actually predicts the development of conscience. The brain punishment system seems to be more plugged in to the rational brain in kids who are dispositionally more anxious. These kids also have a more highly developed sense of empathy later on.
I am thankful to Drs. Kenneth and McGeer for their seminal contributions to our understanding of sociopathy/psychopathy. I encourage the scholars among you to purchase their book from Amazon. However, I think they both missed a further unifying explanation for why autistics are moral and psychopaths/sociopaths are not.
That explanation involves the brain reward system, which is fundamentally different in autistics and sociopaths. Autistics do not experience social reward, maybe not even in the sexual sense. They are indifferent to relationships. The main reward autistics live for must be the love of thinking because that is all they have. I don’t see that too many are obese, so I don’t think they even turn to food for their source of pleasure. Instead their inner worlds are rich with thoughts and reason. They busy themselves with their own thoughts. Most like who they are, enjoy life and wouldn’t choose a different life if they could.
The sociopath on the other hand, is completely dependent on social reward. The sociopath cannot tolerate aloneness because he has no entertaining thought-life to fall back on. The problem with the social reward system in sociopaths is that the only social reward they experience is dominance. All of their antisocial behavior is motivated by their dominance drive. When they lie, cheat or steal it is about gaining short term interpersonal dominance over some poor unsuspecting person. Autistics can’t lie and are as indifferent to dominance reward as they are to affection reward.
Dr. Keltner and associates at UC Berkeley are engaged in important research on the effects on people of obtaining social power. It turns out that when many people get power reward they change. Self-esteem increases, empathy is suspended, and they become uninhibited and less rational. They also think more about sex and tend to use more foul language. Their moral agency is diminished.
I believe that this response to power reward is the point of connection between sociopaths and the rest of us. Sociopaths are constantly in a state of power intoxication, or are in search of their next power fix. The rest of us can manage the power reward better, but the behavior of our politicians suggests that power intoxication doesn’t only make sociopaths less rational.
I could use your help on two things this week. First, I want your opinion on the term moral agency. I have been looking for a single term that would describe the moral deficits of sociopaths. Up until now I have used the term low “moral reasoning ability” because I couldn’t find another better term. Do you think people will better connect with/comprehend the term low “moral agency” or poor “moral reasoning ability”? Actually moral agency is more precise and technically more correct, but will people get it?
The second question I have concerns successful psychopaths. When I read the autism papers, it occurred to me that successful psychopaths do one of two things that unsuccessful ones don’t do. They either have a better appreciation for order or organization, or they find someone to organize and order their lives for them. If you know a successful psychopath, can you comment on how he/she is successful in spite of the chaos he/she tends to cause?
SOS
psychopaths tend to be more successful in short-term relationships than average men, have more relationships and tend to father more children. these children will tend to be psychopathic genetically although there is now evidence that this psychopathy will be expressed slightly differently in boys than in girls. As well, at least according to Lykken, when these men move on they leave the mother and child fatherless, another contributing factor to psychopathy developing. (or to use Lykken’s terminology, sociopathy) –based on this idea, Lykken advocated licensing parenthood.
I should’ve also added that psychopathy appears to be very consistent in the population and contrary to popular belief the incidence of psychopathy does not appear to be increasing genetically as society moves forward. I think it’s legitimate to ask a related question — is sociopathy increasing based on factors like more single parents more latchkey children more violence on videos etc.
It would be nice if we could identify all of the lions and tigers but remember they only constitute about 1% of the overall population. The question was asked — if psychopaths are not doing all of this damage who is and the answer is illustrated in our percentages of average men judged antisocial in prison about 50% to 80% depending on the study, compared to about 15% judged psychopathic. Contrary to the suggestion that any man acting in this way should be considered psychopathic — a suggestion that would water down the definition of psychopathy and make it meaningless — we need to acknowledge that there are two groups — the obvious psychopaths — the 1% Lions and Tigers and as well, there is a larger group by three or four times of non-psychopathic average men who behave in ways extreme enough to constitute antisocial personality disorder. Of course, these are the most difficult to identify because they blend in to the general population the most.
Psychopathic, Not Psychopath: Taxometric Evidence for the Dimensional Structure of Psychopathy
First off, I’m not a scientist. But I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express long enough to learn that most people who stay there aren’t scientists. Anyways:
Although the clinical and theoretical importance of psychopathy is well established, there remain a number of unresolved and intensely debated issues regarding the nature of the construct… the putative existence of variants or subtypes of psychopathy.
Are you kidding me? Still debating? Are there other creative ways to gain useful data? Maybe a website where (screened) participants can fill out a structured questionnaire regarding their own personality and upbringing, their experiences with what they believed were sociopaths, and details about S behavior they’d witnessed? This place has some ideas for format:
http://similarminds.com/personality_tests.html
The dimension versus taxon question
I’m not a lawyer nor law maker, but just a working man who cannot afford or tolerate anything that resembles “sociopathic” again. I’ve gotta survive.
The only way that “taxon” makes any sense to me, would be if psychopathy was a sort of behavioral addiction which one falls into when etiological variables combine to cause the experiencer to cross some irretrievable threshold. The attachment disordered child abused ESTP of psychopathy, might then be the aboriginal Nome Alaskan bartender of alcoholism.
Dimension make far more intuitive and experiential sense to me.
…most individuals who commit crimes are not psychopathic, nor are most callous individuals psychopathic
I have no experience with prison life or convicts, ouside of MSNBC’s “Lockup” series. But I think it’s safe to assume that they’re more on the barbaric-nasty side of the barbaric-nasty — politically-correct-nasty continuum, than are the SS’s I’ve encountered. My SS’s stole, murdered, raped, conned, mobbed…, but did so in ways that were more… politically correct, and appeared to have an equal amount of apathy about what they’d done as those prisoners on TV.
Our results are consistent with recent calls for closer research linkages between the often-disconnected domains of personality and psychopathology
What’s taking you guys so long? Sensitive types are obviously far more at risk of becoming avoidant than psychopathic. Extraverted mercurial types are obviously far more at risk of becoming borderline than schizoid. And extreme versions of each are more at risk than those more ’moderately flavored’.
Moreover, they are encouraging in that they suggest that researchers ultimately may be able to draw from the large body of research on the assessment and causes of continuously distributed personality traits to better inform their understanding of psychopathy among criminal populations.
Just don’t forget the criminal population which is skilled at avoiding getting caught and punished.
“Just don’t forget the criminal population which is skilled at avoiding getting caught and punished.”-S O S
I agree. There are a grat number who avoid detection, fly below the legal radar, or have even been granted immunity by the legal system…they do a lot of damage to society.
Unfortunately, I think that many mental health professionals seem to think that there is a “cure” for everything. Just as many medical physicians will “treat” a 90 year old terminally ill cancer patient with life support, surgery, and medicine when it is obvious that there is no benefit to anything in the way of treatment. They just (as a general rule) can’t bring themselves to be HONEST with the patient and/or family, and say, “There isn’t any thing we can do for your loved one except keep them comfortable.”
When my late husband was taken to the hospital, with burns over 95% of his body and there was NO CHANCE he would survive for more than a few hours, the physician did not even indicate to me that his burns were terminal….and was going to ship him to a medical center about 150 miles away.
Since I had been first on the scene at the crash site and am a registered nurse practitioner, I knew my husband was terminal, and my husband knew he was terminal, but the physician would NOT acknowledge that HE knew as well.
WHY? Beats the heck out of me. I identified myself to the physician as an RNP and told him that I KNEW my husband would not last much more than hours. But if I had NOT been medically educated, this man by his FAILURE to tell me the TRUTH would have “tortured” me with HOPE that was not realistic.
I have fought with physicians for years over this very thing, and even had some physicians hauled by the short hairs before the hospital ethics committees for doing just this sort of thing. And they should be@.......! Yet, there are few people who are willing or able to confront this with physicians.
The lack of agreement of the mental health field is understandable and more I think about semantics than real research or rational thought. The psychopaths do an inordinate amount of damage to our society and yet the professionals (medical and legal) seem reluctant to LABEL them. Children who are absolutely out of control are “treated” and a less “Prejudicial” label of “conduct disorder” or “oppositional defiant” etc is put on them, at least until age 18. They are in and out of “treatment facilities” without any help being done to them over physical control. Their parents are given the “hope” (unrealistic) that they can “treat” these children and the parents’ hopes are repeatedly dashed over and over. They spend every dime they have trying to “save” this unsaveable child.
Not all psychopaths are “visible” by age 10 or 11, but some are. My own son appeared to be (at the time with what I knew) to be just a “rebellious” teenager, a bit over the top, but NOT as dangerous as he really was. (I didn’t know all the things he was doing at the time.)
I have know other rebellious teenagers who went on to be great people—when I look into the mirror I see one, at least the older version—but I never got into criminal activity,, but even some of those kids who do some minor “criminal” activity “grow out of it” and “settle down.”
The hard core criminal kids, though, do usually NOT grow out of it, even if they avoid going back to prison. They stay in the sub-class of society, many using drugs or alcohol, petty theft, etc. The “kids” that murder, rape and commit felonies become the repeat repeat repeat offenders that are in and out of prison, or go to prison for 20-30 years and then come out with a PhD in crime and violence.
A few states have enacted 3-strikes-you’re-out laws of life without parole for these multiple felony offenders, and I applaud this.
Texas is in the process of putting GPS tracking ankle bracelets on people who are convicted of domestic violence so that the victims can know when they are in the vicinity or when the perp goes where he/she is forbidden to go. GREAT idea. Personally, I think all violent X-convicts should wear those for the rest of their lives, and all child molesters etc. It should be attached to the person in such a way it CANNOT be removed short of cutting the leg off or shorting it out in such a way that the cops immediately converge on the person and they are returned to prison for life—without parole.
As technology improves and becomes smaller I think this might be the way to control the behavior and the movements of society’s most dangerous offenders. My P-son’s “best friend” had to wear one for a year after his release. He was returned to prison 4 years after his release for a new crime. The new crime, I think, might have been prevented if he was wearing a bracelet that tracked his movements and monitored his location and activities.
As a juvenile my P-son had to wear one, but because he was a juvenile he was not outfitted with one that could not be cut off, and guess what—he cut it off and ran, out of state on a stolen motorcycle. Of course he got caught eventually and brought back to our state of residence and incarcerated. Didn’t do him a bit of good. I think if he had had one that COULD not be cut off, he might not have run. Who knows, but at least they could have tracked him.
Oxy – I think the reluctance of medical professionals to deliver a death sentence, or to tell a parent their child is a psychopath with no hope of treatment, comes down to a fear of liability. They’re so afraid of being wrong, or being sued, that they stay comfortably in the gray areas. Some people have survived terrible injuries against all odds, some kids may appear to be psychopaths but turn out not to be, nobody wants to be the person responsible for taking that hope away.
Yea, I think you are right, Midnight (I say again you are a smart cookie!) but while the “truth will set you free, first it will pith you off” and I personally know from experience that people are not usually anxious to have the TRUTH about their loved ones impending death, even if that loved one is 99 years old, hasn’t had a thought in years and lies in a nursing home bed. I have heard the cries of “SAVE MAMA!! Oh, God don’t let her die!” I have seen physicians put “mama” on life support when only one out of the ten kids says “do it” and the other 9 say “Mama has a living will, she doesn’t want this.”
That is why I am going to get the tattoo on my left chest that says “Do Not Recusitate” right there on the top of my left breast where the paddles go so there will be NO DOUBT what my wishes are. I have seen docs do this repeatedly on patients whose CHARTS ARE MARKED DNR and the chart is in their hand and they KNOW the patient’s wishes.
We used to have a neurosurgeon who would operate on anyone no matter how gone their brain was, and we had a special ward in this hospital (a step down unit) filled with his patients who were all comatose and on life support. We (being a little crude) called it “Dr. X’s VEGETABLE GARDEN.” I honestly think this doctor was an N at least and probably a P, he would curse and slam things, throw things at the nurses, I’ve hung up the phone on him many times. I too am a crusty old bat and was a crusty young bat as well. I actually think he was doing it for the “business” (i.e. money) he did not show any compassion for his patients or their families.
I used to debate with a physician friend whether neurosurgeons had to be arse-holes to become one, or whether becoming one made them arse-holes. I’ve only known one or two neurosurgeons who were NOT arse-holes. But at the same time, they seem to be the best cutters in the business. So, go figure. One of the best surgeons in my little town and he IS GOOD, is a flaming P with all the ex wives, drama in personal life and a biatch to work with (I could never do it) one of the best family physicians I have ever known is also a biatch and a flamming N, but a great physician.. I would GO to her in a minute and once I threated to quit job if they made me work with her, and they said “Okay, we know she is like she is and I wouldn’t want to work for her either” so they didn’t fire me, but I was ready to quit. I did cover her clinic on her day off and there was no problems, but no way I could have worked WITH her.
So even Ps in the medical professions have some good about their work….but the over all thing of not being up front with the patients and families about what is possible and what is not, isn’t handled well even by many of the best and most caring physicians. It causes over use of medical resources, and pain and other trauma to the patients and families which is unnecessary.
I really like the way hospice is structured and works, and I have worked with them and used them for my step dad. Unfortunately, many physicians will NOT refer to hospice even when the patient would benefit and accept it.
Hello. It is very frustrating when one’s experience of the world is not validated by doctors or clinicians. I have just a couple of comments on the last few entries.
It seems very frustrating in psychology and psychiatry that we don’t have better answers to some of these questions the fact remains that we don’t know whether psychopathy is a taxon or a dimension. If it is a taxon, you either have it or you don’t, if it’s a dimension then of course you can have degrees of it. This debate is underscored by another philosophical question — is psychopathy merely an extension of normal personality characteristics (a dimensional viewpoint) or is it a disease per se like cancer (the taxon viewpoint). This question is not simply theoretical it has implications in how we diagnose and treated psychopaths.
You may be surprised when I say that there is no consensus in the research concerning treatment for psychopaths and the latest research cautions that this is an open question. There are three aspects to this question — one, would there be work? Two, as has been suggested, this therapy may psychopaths worse? Or three, would therapy help psychopaths? As I say, today there is simply no answer to this question.
I should clarify a point I made yesterday —
The viewpoint is that if a person has a psychopathic predisposition genetically and they are exposed to great environment then here she may channel their personality characteristics into legal enterprises for example a politician or policeman. Hare goes so far as to suggest that certain occupations benefit from this type of personality and he specifically cites examples of the politician and police who do better in conducting their responsibilities without much empathy.
An individual with a strong psychopathic predisposition exposed to a bad environment will likely go on to develop what we commonly think of as the typical manifestations of psychopathy including a long criminal involvement.
A normal individual can develop criminal behaviors — develop sociopathy if they are exposed to a bad environment — this is Lykken’s argument for preventing fatherless family situation
Dear Check,
Having been the child of one, and having been the mother of one, and having a lot of knowledge about my mental health genetics (I’m fortunate to be acquainted with or know considerable information about both sides of my family, extended family, etc for many generations) I am inclined to believe that it is mostly genetic.
I have also raised foster kids, some the children of psychopaths and some came out ok and some really bad from the same “litters.” Having raised and bred and trained livestock and other animals I also see “temperment” “inborn in animals and am familiar with some of the research on this inborn temperment in animals—from tendencies to be submissive and tendencies to be alplha-dominant.
My P-sperm donor is one of the VERY aggressive ones, fortunately he did not raise me, and my P-son is so much like him it is spooky, facial expressions, stance, violence, cunning, intelligence, etc. but he just went to prison early, but did not commit nearly as many crimes (my P sperm donor never was convicted of any serious criminal conduct though I know personally of two people he killed, and probably more.)
Natural selection “selects” for various things. I raise scottish Highland cattle and since they have long hair they stand in the pond a lot during the summer, and ALWAYS stand head to the shore. European cattle which were coddled by farmers will also stand in water to cool off, but they stand willy-nilly, facing in all directions. WHY? Think about it. The Highlands stood head out because that is where predators come from if you are in the water, and you need to see them. The ones who did NOT stand head out were weeded from the gene pool by being attacked from the rear. (that’s my own guess about why but it makes sense). My cattle have never been attacked at all, so this is not a learned behavior and they do it even as 2-3 week old calves who first go into the water. They wade out and immediately turn to face the shore.
Just like the musk oxen, they will form a circle with the calves and young ones in the center with the entire herd facing out. Most cattle will not do this, and only the mother will come to the defense of her calf and sometimes she will not, but Highlands the whole herd comes to a cry of distress with fire in their eyes, not just the mother. When the herd goes out to graze, they will appoint a baby sitter cow or even the bull will take a turn sometimes and all the little calves will lie down with this one adult animal keeping the kindergarten safe and the mothers off at a little more distance, but always ready to come to a cry.
There is a pecking order in a herd of cattle just like with chickens and the alpha cow is the boss, and usually they don’t abuse this position, but I have seen an entire herd gang up on an abusive cow and put her out of the herd, whip her completely to a stand still and then “shun” her. I’ve never seen that in any other breed of cattle. I’ve never seen a stable herd where the boss cow abused anyone else, much less the herd gang up on her for her abusive behavior, then shun her. (the bull will over come this shunning at least once a year for a day or two) LOL
Our ancestors also were “selected” in the days of cave dwelling and in the days when danger lurked around the corners from other people and animals. I think the psychopath would have a decided advantage in a tribal population unless the tribe would “gang up on” him/her and whip them down and then shun them as my cattle did. There are some primitive peoples who did just that.
The Jewish law of Moses commanded that a disobedient and rebellious son (pretty good description of a psychopathic kid) was to be brought before the elders and then stoned to death.
The early American colonies would shun a person who did not respect and abide by the local culture and laws, or toss them out. The Inuit also did this. There were other less drastic social sanctions as well for someone who endangred the peace of the community.
We have a “criminal justice system” (boy is that an oxy moron!) that is supposed to do that for our society, but does a very poor job of doing this. Our “kinder and nicer” society is not dealing well, (IMHO) with containing these people who do such a LARGE amont of the violence, cause the most chaos and damage to the rest of the population. Until our society and our medical establishment decides what to do about these people they will continue to terrorize the population and cost BILLIONS of dollars yearly in damages not to say anything of the emotional damage they do.
I know that we are not going to be able to “bell every cat” but if we at least corral the worst of the offenders we might be able to decrease the crime rate 90% and cut our prison population by 50% or more. (and the cost that goes with it)
We need to decriminalize drugs and RE-criminalize murder and other violent crimes. And get Matt a job with the prosecution instead of the defense. LOL
Maybe whether its genetics or environment – someday there might be enough research and a cure! As well as for all the other genetic/environmental diseases in the world. In the meantime … NC…NC…NC… watch for RED FLAGS …and protect yourself…but not to the extent that you lose your good spirit and soul along the way. Educate ourselves and grow and learn from our own individual experiences. No two or the same, yet the common link of personality traits in sociopaths are overwhelming. And the common link of personality traits in empathetic people are overwhelming.