This 2005 book is worth purchasing and reading about abnormal personality traits found in a notable minority of individuals (nominally 1 in 25) including both detriments to society as well as some high functioning individuals. The author discusses the role of nature versus nurture in developing such traits, recognizing sociopaths and coping strategies. Some specific details may be more anecdotal than scientific, but it is provides a popularized starting point for additional reading on this topic.
Stout writes: “Many mental health professionals refer to the condition of little or no conscience as “antisocial personality disorder,” a [non-correctable] disfigurement of character that is now thought to be present in about 4 percent of the population—that is to say, one in twenty-five people. This condition of missing conscience is called by other names, too, most often “sociopathy,” or the somewhat more familiar term, psychopathy.
the clinical diagnosis of “antisocial personality disorder” should be considered when an individual possesses at least three of … seven [specific] characteristics:
The author goes on to write: “One of the more frequently observed of these traits is a glib and superficial charm that allows the true sociopath to seduce other people, figuratively or literally—a kind of glow or charisma that, initially, can make the sociopath seem more charming or more interesting than most of the normal people around him. … In addition, sociopaths have a greater than normal need for stimulation, which results in their taking frequent social, physical, financial, or legal risks. Characteristically, they can charm others into attempting dangerous ventures with them, and as a group they are known for their pathological lying and conning, and their parasitic relationships with “friends.” Regardless of how educated or highly placed as adults, they may have a history of early behavior problems … including a failure to acknowledge responsibility for any problems that occurred. And sociopaths are noted especially for their shallowness of emotion, the hollow and transient nature of any affectionate feelings they may claim to have, a certain breathtaking callousness… have no trace of empathy and no genuine interest in bonding emotionally with a mate... If a marriage partner has any value to the sociopath, it is because the partner is viewed as a possession, one that the sociopath may feel angry to lose, but never sad or accountable… is not that this group fails to grasp the difference between good and bad; it is that the distinction fails to limit their behavior…The high incidence of sociopathy in human society has a profound effect on the rest of …Sociopathy stands alone as a “disease” that causes no disease for the person who has it, no subjective discomfort. Sociopaths are often quite satisfied with themselves and with their lives, and perhaps for this very reason there is no effective “treatment.””
Stout writes: “at the beginning of the twentieth century, conscience itself underwent a fundamental transformation, due to … Sigmund Freud [who] proposed that in the normal course of development, young children’s minds acquired an internalized authority figure, called a superego, that would in time replace the actual external authority … With his writings on the superego, Freud imparted to an awakening scientific world that our usual respect for law and order was not simply imposed on us from the outside. We obey the rules, we honor the virtues, primarily from an internal need that begins in infancy and early childhood to preserve and remain embraced by our families and the larger human society in which we live.”
Stout writes: “even a normal person’s conscience does not operate on the same level all of the time. One of the simplest reasons for this changeability is the fundamental circumstances of living inside a fallible, need-driven human body. When our bodies are exhausted, sick, or injured, all of our emotional functions, including conscience, can be temporarily compromised…Very simply, we are programmed to obey authority even against our own consciences.”
Of one experiment, Stout writes: “The aim of the experiment was to discover how long the subjects (the teachers in this experiment) would take to disobey Milgram’s authority when presented with a clear moral imperative. How much electric shock would they administer to a pleading, screaming stranger merely because an authority figure told them to do so? …Thirty-four of Milgram’s original forty subjects continue to shock the learner, whom they believe to be strapped to a chair, even after he asks to be released from the experiment. In fact …62.5 percent of the total group—never disobey the experimenter at any point …” Moreover, the author writes: “Studies … were repeated … and soon involved more than a thousand subjects of both genders and from many walks of life. The results remained essentially the same.” Going on Stout writes: “Because its essence is killing, war is the ultimate contest between conscience and authority. Our seventh sense demands that we not take life, and when authority overrules conscience and a soldier is induced to kill in combat, he is very likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] immediately and for the remainder of his life, along with the depression, divorces, addictions, ulcers, and heart disease that attend traumatic memory…research involving Vietnam veterans has shown that soldiers who are not placed in situations where they are forced to kill are no more likely to develop the symptoms of PTSD than are those who spend their entire enlistment at home.”
About sociopaths in various populations, Stout writes: “According to Robert Hare [et al.] who test convicts, on average only about 20 percent of prison inmates in the United States are sociopaths. Hare and others are careful to note that this 20 percent of the prison population accounts for more than 50 percent of the “most serious crimes” (extortion, armed robbery, kidnapping, murder) and crimes against the state (treason, espionage, terrorism), but the actual sociopathic head count in prisons, for both men and women, is only about two in ten. … The result is that most sociopaths … are out here in the world with you and me.” She goes on to warn: “We try … to judge a person’s character by his or her appearance, but this book-by-its-cover strategy is ineffective in nearly all cases. … Sociopaths, people with no intervening sense of obligation based in attachments to others, typically devote their lives to interpersonal games, to “winning,” to domination for the sake of domination.”
About the odds, Stout writes: “When it comes to trusting other people, we all make mistakes…The bad news is that there truly are individuals who have no conscience, and these individuals are not to be trusted at all. Perhaps an average of four people in a random group of one hundred are limited in this way...the very good news—is that at least ninety-six people out of a hundred are bound by the constraints of conscience, and can therefore be counted on to behave according to a reasonably high baseline of decency and responsibility...”
On who to trust, Stout writes: “Albert Einstein once said, “The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.” … Deciding whether or not someone is trustworthy usually requires knowing that person well for a long time, and in the case of identifying a sociopath, much better and longer than one would have allowed …” And goes on to write: “The most reliable sign, the most universal behavior of unscrupulous people is not directed, as one might imagine, at our fearfulness. It is, perversely, an appeal to our sympathy… Perhaps the most easily recognized example is the battered wife whose sociopathic husband beats her routinely and then sits at the kitchen table, head in his hands, moaning that he cannot control himself and that he is a poor wretch whom she must find it in her heart to forgive … When deciding whom to trust, bear in mind that the combination of consistently bad or egregiously inadequate behavior with frequent plays for your pity is as close to a warning mark…as you will ever be given.”
On the topic of what makes individuals be what they are, the author writes: “Like so many human characteristics, both physical and psychological, the primary question is that of nature versus nurture. Is the characteristic born in the blood, or is it created by the environment? For most complex psychological features, the answer is, very probably, both. In other words, a predisposition for the characteristic is present at conception, but the environment regulates how it is expressed.” And as to one particular study, Stout writes: “The Texas Adoption Project reports that, where scores on the Pd scale are concerned, individuals resemble their birth mothers, whom they have never met, significantly more than they do the adoptive parents who raised them. From this research, a heritability estimate of 54 percent can be derived, and interestingly, this “Psychopathic Deviate” figure is consistent with the heritability estimates—35 to 50 percent—generally found in studies of other, more neutral personality characteristics (extraversion, empathy, and so forth)… Overall in these studies, identical twins are twice or more as likely to have similar scores on the Pd scale as are fraternal twins, strongly suggesting at least some genetic role in the “Psychopathic Deviate” pattern… They are, in descending order of theoretical heritability: “fails to conform to social norms,” “aggressive,” “reckless,” “impulsive,” “fails to honor financial obligations,” “inconsistent work,” “never monogamous,” and “lacks remorse.” Still other studies have found that sociopaths have low “agreeableness,” low “conscientiousness,” and low “harm avoidance,” all of which personality dimensions have a genetic component.”
The author writes: “In terms of reaction time and evoked potentials in the cortex, sociopathic subjects in these experiments respond to emotionally charged words no differently from neutral words. In sociopaths, the evoked potential for sob or kiss is no larger than the one for sat or list, very much as if emotional words were no more meaningful, or deeply coded by their brains, than any other words... Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task.”
The author writes: “In addition to genetic factors, there are environmental variables that affect the condition of being without conscience … in the United States in the ultrahygienic orphanages of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, infants who are not touched at all, for purposes of antiseptic perfection, are prone to die quite literally…nearly all of the untouched babies in these orphanages perished…In 1989, when the Communist regime in Romania fell, horrifying photographs were released to the rest of the world of the hundreds of orphanages that had been kept secret by the psychopathic dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu. Under his regime, Romania was a nation of nearly unsurvivable poverty, and yet Ceauşescu had prohibited both abortion and birth control. Hundreds of thousands of starving children resulted, and nearly 100,000 orphaned children ended up in state-run institutions... except for being given enough food to keep most of them alive, the babies and children were ignored… Well-meaning Western Europeans and North Americans brought Romanian babies into their homes and lovingly tried to nurse them to health. And then a couple in Paris would discover that their beautiful ten-month-old Romanian daughter was inconsolable, and only screamed louder when they tried to hold her…Western Europe and North America had imported an attachment disorder nightmare created by a sadistic Romanian sociopath...”
Delving deeper, Stout writes: “Unlike sociopaths, …a narcissist looks for help, one of the underlying issues is usually that, unbeknownst to him, he is alienating his relationships on account of his lack of empathy with others, and is feeling confused, abandoned, and lonely. He misses the people he loves, and is ill-equipped to get them back. Sociopaths, in contrast, do not care about other people, and so do not miss them when they are alienated or gone…Heritability studies tell us that for sociopathy in particular, biology is half of the story at most. In addition to genetic factors, there are environmental variables that affect the condition …”
As to offering a reason why sociopaths exist in a society, the author writes: “people who have no conscience make excellent, unambivalent warriors. And nearly all societies—Buddhist, Shinto, Christian, or purely capitalist—make war …To some extent, we can think of sociopaths as being shaped and maintained by society because nations so often require cold-blooded killers, from anonymous foot soldiers to the conquerors who have made, and continue to make, human history. Sociopaths are fearless and superior warriors, snipers, undercover assassins, special operatives, vigilantes, and hand-to-hand specialists, because they experience no horror while killing (or while ordering killing) and no guilt after the deed is done.
Stout writes: “Since Darwin published The Origin of Species, in 1859, much of scientific theorizing has considered that all living things, including human beings, have evolved according to the law of natural selection. According to this law, known more popularly as “the law of the jungle,” any characteristic that enhances survival and reproduction (and therefore the continuance of its own genetic components) will tend to remain in the population. If a physical trait or a behavioral tendency bestows this felicitous survival advantage on individuals for countless generations, in many situations and across habitats, it may, incrementally and in the course of time immemorial, become part of the standard genetic blueprint for the species. … When it comes to surviving, clearly there is a certain conflict of interest between the individual and the herd/ community/ flock, and arguments concerning the origin of what evolutionary psychologists call “altruistic behaviors” have generally centered around the unit of selection in evolution. Does natural selection “choose” only individuals for survival, or can selection perhaps operate at the level of groups, thus favoring the survival of whole populations over others? … But if the unit of selection is the group as a whole, then a certain amount of altruism can be explained. Quite simply, a group composed of individuals who cooperate and take care of one another is much more likely to survive as a group than a collective of individuals who can only compete with or ignore one another. In terms of survival, the successful group will be the one that is operating to some extent as an entity, rather than the group in which every single individual is looking out for number one, to the exclusion of everyone else. … Group selection, and all it implies about our true nature, has been an extremely controversial idea among evolutionists, reflecting the fact that the theory of evolution itself is still evolving…Kin selection means that pieces of the individual’s genetic blueprint (the only biological aspect of the individual that stands a chance of being “immortal,” so to speak) will fare better if the individual guards not only his own survival and reproduction odds but also those of other individuals who share some of his genetic makeup. If he behaves generously and protectively toward his blood relatives, their enhanced survival and reproduction rate will increase the numbers of his own genes in future generations, since his relatives and he have many genes in common…For example, if I share my fruit [my relatives], my individual life may be shortened, but on average, the odds that my genes will continue in the population have actually been multiplied, because my genes are shared in part by each of my cousins. And the genes that I have donated to the gene pool by lengthening the lives of my cousins may well include the genes that cause me to feel emotional attachments.”
Moreover, Stout writes: “Furthermore, kin selection explains why we nurture and protect our children despite the fact that doing so lessens our own energies and our individual survival resources. From this vantage point, conscience is the genetically programmed mechanism that makes sure we do not ignore the extra little packages of our genetic material that just happen to be walking around on feet other than ours.” And goes on to write: “As for our genetically designed sense of conscience toward the aforementioned distant relatives and strangers—gene-centered evolutionists propose that their version of natural selection would have favored genes that resulted in “reciprocal altruism,” or non-zero-sum (win-win) behaviors such as the division of labor, friend seeking, cooperation, and the avoidance of conflict. These behaviors would be mediated by emotions such as gratitude, compassion, and conscience, and so emotions such as these would have had an advantage where the natural selection of genes was concerned.”
Stout writes: “Naturalist Gould reexamines the evidence from paleontology and maintains that natural selection operates on multiple levels, from the gene to the individual to the group, and even—or especially—the species. …the absence of conscience may sometimes be even more adaptive for survival. In this way, nature would constantly be fostering conscience in most of us, while, at a different level, continually supporting a smaller percentage of individuals who thrive without the neurobiological underpinnings of emotional attachment and conscience.”
As to one generalized difference between men and women, Stout writes: “Gilligan believed that Kohlberg had derived only an “ethic of justice” because he had interviewed only males, and that if women were interviewed, a very different system of ideals would emerge. She interviewed women who were making momentous decisions in their lives and discovered that these women were thinking about the caring thing to do, rather than pondering “the rules.” Women, decided Gilligan, reasoned morally according to an “ethic of care,” rather than a male “ethic of justice.” … Thanks to Carol Gilligan, psychologists and educators now understand that moral reasoning has more than one dimension and that people develop morally in much more complex ways than we first believed.”
Stout writes: “And as of the time I write these words, virtually identical Y chromosomes are carried by almost 8 percent of the men living in the region of the former Mongol Empire, 16 million of them. Geneticists believe this means that some 16 million people living in the twenty-first century are stamped with Genghis Khan’s thirteenth-century legacy of genocide and rape. Genghis Khan was exceptional among sociopathic tyrants in that he did not die a violent or an ignominious death. Instead, he fell off a horse during a hunt, in 1227 … And sociopathy is almost always a solo routine, another strategy that may sometimes work temporarily but not often in the long run. For the obvious reason of unremitting self-interest, people without conscience make lousy team players. … a person without conscience, even a smart one, tends to be a shortsighted and surprisingly naïve individual who eventually expires of boredom, financial ruin, or a bullet.”
The author provides “Thirteen Rules for Dealing with Sociopaths in Everyday Life”
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I've written a novel dealing specifically with sociopaths and the detection thereof. During my research I found Dr. Stout's wonderful book, and it turned out to be the one source that encapsulated the straight-forward message that I was looking for. That is that sociopaths are usually undetected yet abundant. I've yet to publish and would like very much to talk to Dr. Stout about my particular book and the use of her name and material. I can be contacted at muserwood@yahoo.com
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