After they'd heard Hare speak they realized they were dealing with a psychopath, someone who could feel neither guilt nor sorrow. They changed their interrogation tactic to, "So you murdered a couple of prostitutes. That's minor-league compared to Bundy or Gacy." The appeal to the psychopath's grandiosity worked. He didn't just confess to his other crimes, he bragged about them.

Nice, reverse psychopathy.

It is expected that there would be different strategies employed by a population.

Game theory can derive this result. John Maynard Smith introduced the idea of a evolutionarily stable strategy. The idea is to use the classic game theory payoff matrix successively to determine a stable mix of strategies used by the population. Some payoff matrix aren't stable since one of the strategies can dominate the others and causing the dominated strategy to be extinct in the population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionarily_stable_strategy

The types of strategy typically discussed are:

  * Doves (always peaceful)
  * Hawks (always attack)
  * Bully (feign attack)
  * Retaliator (peaceful until attacked)

There is an excellent book by psychologist Martha Stout called "The Sociopath Next Door" which examines this subject. The author claims as many as 1 in 25 Americans is a sociopath.

http://www.amazon.com/Sociopath-Next-Door-Martha-Stout/dp/07...

Indeed, this book changed my perception of human nature -- some people are un-reformable. Most of them aren't serial killers, they're just dicks who get their rocks off by controlling other people. Think your asshole boss, or a jerk you knew who was always using people.

This article reminds me of the submission, "Are You Capable of Being Ruthless to Get Ahead?" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1184953 It seems that the "ruthless" character may have been a psychopath.

They have traits similar to ideal leaders. You would expect an ideal leader to be narcissistic, self-centred, dominant, very assertive, maybe to the point of being aggressive.

Is it just me, or would anyone else not follow a person who matched this description?

I recently read a book called "Evil Genes" by Barbara Oakley. One of the interesting stories she tells is about how some of the research into Machiavellian behavior got started.

The original research group decided to focus on "everyday" manipulative, lying, power-hungry behavior. Looking for test subjects, they found plenty of instances, but ended up picking a category of people to study - their own PhD advisors.

The point is, mild versions of psycho/socio-pathic behavior are unfortunately commonplace. Changed my perception of people's behaviors in very fundamental ways.

"The Psychopathy Checklist consists of a set of forms and a manual that describes in detail how to score a subject in twenty categories that define psychopathy. Is he (or, more rarely, she) glib and superficially charming, callous and without empathy?"

What question springs to my mind is, given that these people have something like their 'appreciate other people's emotions' bits of their brains not working properly, why don't we see many female psychopaths?

Off the top of my brain, I can come up with a few likely answers: 1: Female 'psychopaths' don't exhibit the same sorts of criminal behavior that male psychopaths do. 2: Females are less susceptible to being a 'psychopath'

So... anyone here reckon they're a psychopath? ;)

The thing that fascinates me about psychopathy, along with ASPD, autistic-spectrum, etc, is that many of these "disorders" or "syndromes" are just different ways that minds can work. Humans come in so many flavors! In some ways, it's the closest thing we have to interacting with alien intelligences: people who can communicate, process information, make plans, but who don't line up with our deeply ingrained expectations of eye contact, trust, low-risk behavior, or empathy.

While I suspect that normal human behavior has significant adaptive advantages in promoting the success of the species, I frequently wonder about a society of people who are all autistic-spectrum, or who all exhibit schizoaffective disorder, or are all manic-depressive. Would their psychologists form diagnostic handbooks for the clearly maladaptive trait of aggressive interpersonal contact, or trusting another person to watch their children?

Bonus question: if you're religiously inclined, do the deities of your choice love and respect these societies? Is there something morally superior about normal human behavior? What spiritual beliefs might they form for themselves?

A great, enlightening comment on Reddit's Sociapath IamA that discusses 13 rules for dealing with sociopaths: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/a5xvv/iama_diagnosed_s...

What a loaded sensationalist witch hunt. Someone either is an axe murderer or they aren't.

There is no physical thing known as Psychopathy, it is an arbitrary descriptive label known as a category used to group similar behavior together. It is not a scientific discovery but a classification.

This psychology professor is just asserting the classification he's devoted his life's work to is now bigger and applies to more people. He is simply coming up with an excuse to inflate his self-worth and sell more books, even though he is not making any discoveries and doing research.

He's not even making the genetics argument, and if he was I would post articles citing nutritional deficiencies as causes of aggression or how gene expression changes due to epigenetics.

I just want to insist that anyone interested in reading up on psychology stick to the scientific research, specifically cognitive- psychology\neuroscience\computing\science

Am I the only one that finds it ironic that both this article and an article titled (though I haven't read it), "Why theatre was the most important class I ever took", are on the front page at the same time?

I figured the theatre paper was on a subject related to a different article the other day (the title of which I've forgotten, but it was about a particular subculture fitting in to regular society by faking the role), but this was something I found rather interesting and ... ironic?

[as an immediate side-note upon starting to read the theatre article: it doesn't seem to be on what I expected it to be, at all; furthermore, I'm finding the other subject quite interesting]

I wonder what makes some psychopaths violent and others not.

This is a blog by a parent raising a he has identified as a psychopath. The description of his son's behaviors is both interesting and chilling. http://raising-a-psychopath.blogspot.com/

Hmm. Unreformable? It doesn't appear so. As the case with the police using reverse psychotic techniques encouraged the perp to brag, we could also find out other techniques that show these types of people how to care. Now, they may not have empathy. Not everyone does in the same degree, but that's ok, as that is what makes us unique.

The interesting research would be to see if there are techniques that would help a psychopath to integrate into society while limiting destructive tendencies. Perhaps others are doing this research, but Ive heard none of it.

I don't know. That long, rambling, breathlessly-written article makes me wonder about its author's mental stability.

I believe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin pill cures psychopaths.

Another article about sociopathy: http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/the_sociopathic_epide...