I think these studies are dangerous.
But then again, perhaps I was never properly appreciative of neo-Robespierran rhetoric.
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Gooba Gabba Gooba Gobble!
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In other words, psychopaths prefer authoritarianism because it can be most easily abused and exploited. Kind of like the difference between wanting to govern and wanting to rule.
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Aggression
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Well, yeah. I guess that’s a reason why most others don’t succeed by that metric. We build mechanisms that reward our uglier facets and hope they result in beauty.
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Sorry, but I find that is inappropriate. We don’t get to define like that who is human and who is not. The video in the article explains that a psychopath’s lack of empathy is at least in part a consequence of a certain genetic disposition. If that is true, psychopathy is just another aspect of neurodiversity, and it would be unwise to dehumanize them.
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Who exactly hopes that, apart from a couple of deluded Libertarians?
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I’d argue that psychopaths are ‘mentally incapable’ of being healthy, fully functioning human beings who are a beneficial part of society.
They’re quite human; just very badly damaged ones that often pose a real threat to the well being and safety of those around them.
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We should never jump to conclusions.
It is to early and borders the criminal to make these affirmations based on this study. Two items jump to the eyes from this report.
-First, the sample characteristics: 386 Croatian (Mage = 20.83 years, SD = 2.07, 174 women, 99% Croatian) and 378 Greek (Mage = 20.44 years, SD = 1.91, 238 women, 99% Greek) undergraduates participated in the current study.
-Second, The current study focused on examining anti- immigrant attitudes towards Middle-Eastern refugees and distrust of minorities as prejudicial criteria given the sociopolitical atmosphere in Croatia and Greece.
The samples, present in my opinion, flaws/points that have to be taken in account: it is relatively small group, they are young, relatively homogeneous in their constitution, very confined to a social type of person and the points used to define their right wing tendencies are almost innate to their nationalities because of “recent” historical events.
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This will sound harsh but, is it ironic to title the article in a way that turns on the “common misunderstanding” debunked in the attached video?
Mark, by doing so, are you telling us that you disagree with the video’s points? Or is it also just fun to use the misunderstood meaning?
The best current estimate is that just less than 1% of all noninstitutionalized males age 18 and over are psychopaths.1 This translates to approximately 1,150,000 adult males who would meet the criteria for psychopathy in the United States today.2 And of the approximately 6,720,000 adult males that are in prison, jail, parole, or probation,3 16%, or 1,075,000, are psychopaths.4 Thus, approximately 93% of adult male psychopaths in the United States are in prison, jail, parole, or probation.
Just less than one percent, eh? Where have I heard that phrase before?
But, hey, that 93 percent figure must be so comforting. Just build more prisons!
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I think that psychopaths can be productive members of society. It just takes more work. They need to understand on an intellectual level that hurting people is contrary to their own interests and really work on impulse control, which often requires a lot of work with a psychiatrist trained in treating psychopaths. Hard, yes. Impossible, no.
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Something psychopaths have no interest in doing. Psychogical therapy requires a patient who wants to change.
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Psychopaths are not devoid of any emotion. They want to be happy just like anyone else. Because holding a job and staying out of prison contribute to overall happiness, there are psychopaths who work with therapists to control behaviors that they know would lead to unfavorable life outcomes. I am not saying that they are good people; I am just suggesting that psychopaths can live normal lives by holding down normal jobs and generally staying out of anyone’s way. They can learn to not do bad things for selfish reasons (i.e. staying out of jail and earning a paycheck). Much of therapy (even for non-psychopaths) focuses on managing behavior, rather than outright “change” in terms of personality or whatnot.
(Admittedly, I do not know anyone like this and I can only say for certain that psychopaths in therapy do exist; I cannot say how effective the treatment is).
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For most of us, this was a system built without our input or consent. We continue to have no control what it looks like, or who benefits by it. And the thing we can do to improve it, are constantly undermined by the people who do have power. The little bit we’ve been able to improve and level this system, has too often been met with extreme forms of violence.
If this year has taught us anything, it’s that we have to change the structures of power that rule us, or it’s taking us all down with it.
The people who run the whole thing.
No. Stop that. You know better.
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Hare is urbane and well read, and during dinner he seasoned his clinical descriptions of the psychopath with references to characters from film and literature. Harry Lime, the villain played by Orson Welles in “The Third Man,” is one example. “Iago was a classic psychopath,” he added. “The way Shakespeare wrote him. In films and plays he is portrayed as evil-seeming, but he isn’t written that way.” Hare was friendly but wary of me—several times he said, “I have to see your eyeballs before I can tell you that.” We talked about the checklist. “Am I happy about the way the checklist can be used?” Hare asked rhetorically. “No, not always. Am I happy it is used to help condemn people to death? No, I am not.” Nor does he approve of its use in child-custody cases. However, he believes that, when properly used as a predictor of risk in forensic settings, the social benefits of the checklist far outweigh its drawbacks. Hare rejects the notion that a distinction ought to be made between a violent psychopath, like Ted Bundy, and a nonviolent one who commits financial crimes. Both, he said, are willing to do whatever it takes. He went on, “Can you say Ted Bundy caused more disaster than the guys at Enron? How many destroyed lives and suicides followed as a result of so many people losing their savings?”
So does anybody have a copy of the paper at hand? How many students were judged to be psychopaths? (30 or more on the PCL-R)?
As a Hobbesian, I would argue that intrinsic morality does not exist, but that’s a conversation for another time.
I think that it is important to understand that psychopaths are born that way and have never made a conscious choice not to feel empathy (just as people who are born colorblind did not make a conscious choice not to distinguish between red and green). I don’t believe that they are “poor, disadvantaged fucks with no control,” but I also don’t believe in the blanket demonization of people for how they were born. There are psychopaths who are perfectly harmless.
And people who are fully capable of empathy and still choose to do awful things are the real assholes here.
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Went and checked out other ‘TopThink’ videos and reckon this is a terrible source of information - they are all generally lists of “The Top 5…” type - “The 7 Mistakes That Confident Men DON’T Make” is a doozy and will give you a good sense that they are churning out powerpoint self help with bad animation. I mean the voice over narration, realy???
For example are the terms 'psychopath and ‘sociopath’ interchangeable, quantitatively or qualitatively different, and/or in need of a much more expanded definition than presented here to then draw conclusions.
Interestingly Jacques Lacan (the French psychoanalitical theorist) chose to ‘speak’ in a very opaque academic language to dismantle Fraudian psychoanalisis precisely because Sigmund Fraud’s theories were very often reduced to ‘pop psychology’ because many people, who actually never read the source text, profited from making wacky conclusions!
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