Before his execution in the Florida electric chair in 1989, Ted Bundy confessed to murdering 30 young women, typically by bludgeoning them to death and often raping them as well. He almost certainly had many more victims than that, perhaps more than 100. But he avoided suspicion for much of his five-year killing spree, in part because he was good-looking and clean-cut, a college grad and a law student.
Despite this outward appearance, Bundy was socially clueless. He was introverted and by his own description had no sense of how to get along with people. Near the end of his life he described himself this way: "I didn't know what made things tick. I didn't know what made people want to be friends. I didn't know what made people attractive to one another. I didn't know what underlay social interaction."
Psychopaths can be paradox. Some, like Bundy, are intellectually high functioning, and they clearly know right from wrong. They are not delusional, but they are socially inept. They seem to lack normal self-control, and they persistently violate social, legal and moral rules. They don't -- as Bundy's words suggest -- comprehend the human social contract.
But why? What's the glitch in the mental machinery? Is there a specific neurological and cognitive deficit underlying their abhorrent actions? Are they incapable of weighing risk or comprehending the regular quid pro quos of social life -- or both? Two psychological scientists at the University of New Mexico, Elsa Ermer and Kent Kiehl, suspected that such specific reasoning deficits might underlie the disorder, which would explain why psychopaths' general reasoning ability seems to stay intact.
To explore these questions, Ermer and Kiehl went where they knew they'd find a good sample of psychopaths -- to prison. They interviewed and tested 67 prisoners -- some psychopaths and some not -- for three different kinds of rule comprehension. Some of the rules were simply descriptive, for example: "If a person is from North Dakota, that person likes the cold." Others were based on social contracts, for example: "If you borrow my car, you will have to fill the gas tank." And finally, some of the rules were related to risk and precaution: "If you work with tuberculosis patients, you must wear a surgical mask." They asked all the prisoners -- as well as a control group of college students -- to reason about these rules, to see how well they understood the different forms of reasoning.
The results were unambiguous. As reported recently in the journal Psychological Science, the prisoners who were not psychopaths reasoned pretty much like college students -- that is, not great at general logic but much better at understanding social contracts and precautionary reasoning. The psychopaths also did about the same on straight logic, but they were poor at understanding social agreements and proper precautions.
Understanding quid pro quos is a core human trait, the foundation of all cooperation and morality. It's not surprising that it would be askew in people who don't know right from wrong, honorable behavior from cheating. It's also not shocking that psychopaths are lousy at weighing risk and taking precautions -- another core human trait. That's why most of them get in trouble -- and end up in prison.
PS I'd like to echo the distrust of the author's use of the idea that "the majority" of "psychopaths" are in prison; this seems like one of those baseless stats that folks love to throw at criminal populations with no regard for actual information...
People are not born evil, but there is plenty of scientific evidence pointing to children born with certain defects which lead to aberrant behavior.
We create psychopaths.
Their aptitude at straight logic is adequate (to succeed professionally), but like psychopaths, do poorly when involving social matters. They so easily bomb and destroy innocent lives for material money.
So your contention is that a person must be *mentally ill* if they don't agree with your political views? Wow, what an ego.
I'm firmly convinced that President George W.. Bush was, and is, a sociopath.
Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD) is a DSM-IV-TR diagnosis (being reformulated to Antisocial/Psychopathic Type in DSM-V). It is an amalgamation of features associated with both psychopathy and sociopathy (which are not the same thing). The majority of personality researchers (in general) and psychopathy researchers (specifically) do not agree with the DSM's current conceptualization. If one is diagnosed with APD, it does not also necessarily mean they are a psychopath, as for the DSM diagnosis one only needs to show 4 features, some of which may be relatively benign.
Further, these does seem to be a distinction both at the developmental, behavioral, and neuroanatomical level between those we typically refer to as psychopaths and those we refer to as sociopaths. Psychopaths are individuals found in all segments of society. They lack social emotions (guilt, shame, remorse), and are unable to understand many vocal and facial emotive cues in others (e.g., fear, disgust, sadness). Further, they show frontal lobe differences in relation to "normal" folk. Sociopaths tend to be found in segments of society where it pays to be a cheater, where essentially it is the best strategy to get ahead. They do feel the social emotions, yet choose to ignore them when necessary. Further, their frontal lobes look the same as "normal" folk. Essentially we have the difference between psychopaths who are the way they are because of a biological imperative, and sociopaths who are the way they are because of environmental context.
Can you name any?
I believe a study of imprisoned psychopaths showed that when they played games that involved getting rewards or penalties based on their behavior, they played as if there were no penalties. They seemed to respond to rewards but to fail to respond to threats of punishment.
Only the poor ones. The rich ones go to Ivy League colleges and become senators, presidents and CEOs.
As Dartagnan points out below, most incarcerated psychopaths are not very high in intelligence (contrary to how Hollywood tends to depict psychopaths). Most intelligent ones make their way into positions that allow them to engage in their behaviors and not get caught (e.g. lawyers, politicians, corporate fat-cats, academics).
For a drawn-out discussion of what I posted here and above look at some of the work done by Robert Hare and Scott Lillienfeld.
They're both crimes, they're both rapes. Minors can NOT consent.
"Instruments to predict general recidivism are not necessarily applicable to determining sex offender recidivism.
Being sexually abused as a child was not found to be related to becoming a repeat sex offender.
The underreporting of sexual assault contributes to the underreporting of recidivism which leads to sex offenders having a low base rate (defined as the overall rate of recidivism of an entire group of offenders). This low base rate problem decreases our ability to accurately predict recidivism.
Studies show different base rates for different types of sex offenses. For example, child molesters have a higher rate of rearrest than rapists (52% versus 39 percent when tracked over 25 years).
One review of recidivism rates found: "Incest offenders ranged between 4 and 10 percent. Rapists ranged between 7 and 35 percent. Child molesters with female victims ranged between 10 and 29 percent. Child molesters with male victims ranged between 13 and 40 percent. Exhibitionists ranged between 41 and 71 percent."
Several studies and interviews of sex offenders support the claim that sex offender recidivism is highly underreported, with imprisoned perpetrators having many times more victims than the official criminal reports record."
http://www.sexoffender.com/sorecidivism_review.html
A prime example is the lie provided by Bundy that he was socially inept and had no idea how to get along with people, ask any successful hunter about knowing and understanding their prey, the scope of Bundy's hunting success put's paid to the lie that he did not understand his prey, how to hide in plain site amongst it, and how to create ease whilst stalking it.
For the psychopath a genetic absence of empathy and conscience are the chief drivers, their behaviour is governed by frustration and easing of that frustration, chief frustration is seeing the display of human emotions around them and whilst fully understanding it, never being able to share in it.
They ease their frustration by forcing the most negative of emotions on those around them to pay for those frustrations, their success at this appeases and feeds their ego, the more pain they inflict upon a greater proportion of those who frustrate them the better they felt and, this extends to the whole of the human race.
Risk taking amongst psychopath is based upon the intelligence and education, those that succeed do so whilst escaping the law and still being able to punish humanity upon extreme scales, creating circumstance where thousands die to feed the ego of the psychopath.
For the psychopath a genetic absence of empathy and conscience are the chief drivers[ absence of something a driver? Maybe in the case of a vacuum...], their behavio[_]r is governed by frustration and easing of that frustration, chief frustration is seeing the display of human emotions around them and whilst fully understanding it, never being able to share in it. They ease their frustration by forcing the most negative of emotions on those around them to pay for those frustrations, their success at this appeases and feeds their ego, the more pain they inflict upon a greater proportion of those who frustrate them the better they felt and, this extends to the whole of the human race.[Sounds like you are projecting here.]
Risk taking amongst psychopath is based upon the intelligence and education [proof?], those that succeed do so whilst escaping the law and still being able to punish humanity upon extreme scales, creating circumstance where thousands die to feed the ego of the psychopath. [Interesting point. You ought to articulate it better though.]
First off the main error[ i]s asking a psychopath what they feel, the psychopath knows little difference between the lie and the truth and will only ever provide answers they feel provides them with advantage. [and you are defining advantage how?]
A prime example is the lie provided by Bundy that he was socially inept and had no idea how to get along with people, ask any successful hunter about knowing and understanding their prey, the scope of Bundy's hunting success put's paid to the lie that he did not understand his prey, how to hide in plain site amongst it, and how to create ease whilst stalking it. [Alternative explanation that challenges yours... some people, through no fault of their own, are great hunters. Quite, intuitive, observant, but all on a subconcious level. Some men attract women despite or because of their ineptness. It is not necessary for a man to have great intelligence or insight to attract women, although some do and they use it. You haven’t defined how to separate the two.]