Abigail Marsh on Psychopaths (Rerun)

0:00 Well after a year full of exciting podcasts and very interesting Episodes. I and my producer Leo really were in need of A little break. So This is the week in the year.

0:11 That we have Taken off. We thought that's the first time. We would re run. Uh one of the

0:19 Beach read conversations we had during the year, one of the conversations we found to be most interesting, even if not necessarily light. a the really interesting conversation I had with Abby Marsh. On Psychopaths. You will be back.

0:31 From our holiday next week with lots of new and exciting Conversations about The deep issues in the world and about the latest news events in the world. Thank you for being a loyal listener. I hope you too have enjoyed a little time away summer. See you when we're back.

0:57 I don't think any psychopathy researcher I've ever met says that there's any kind of tell in casual conversation that can reliably indicate that somebody is psychopathic because people who are psychopathic are shape shifters. And this is not true of everybody, right? But the but most of the psychopathic people that I've worked with and uh the work that I do. We'll say that they mask uh in most interactions that they're in. And now the good fight. With Yasha Monk. What is

1:29 A psychopath. Is there a difference between a psychopath and a So is your puff. Can you Recognize. The lack of

1:39 Care for other human beings. A likely to engage. In In children as young as

1:47 Two or three years old. If that is the case. Is Live.

1:54 The right treatments with the right. Therapy. Is The course. Uh

1:59 Psychopathy. Genetic? Or is it that parents have done something wrong in their upbringing? Offers. Sure.

2:07 And what are the social Impacts. Uh. psychopathic. Traits.

2:12 Are psychopaths over represented in the ranks of successful people like CEOs? And how have we represented Aave? In the ranks of Less successful. People.

2:21 Like Those In Jail. Finally, how does all of this relate to very different kinds of

2:27 human emotions. Why is it? That the existence of psychopaths may prove But most human beings I rather Altruistic.

2:35 Well, to answer all of his questions. I invited onto a podcast. Abigail Marshall Abby. Is a professor in the department of psychology.

2:44 At Georgetown. And as you will see, she has done tremendous amount of research on psychopathy, including many Interviews. With

2:55 Psychopaths. In which way Tell her. About The way of seeing

3:00 Yeah. And despite the rather dark topic, I have to say that this was not just a fascinating But also a really fun conversation. In the last part of this conversation. We asked

3:12 Yeah. But I think we all want to know. When Considering this. Topic.

3:18 Which is How do you protect yourself? Against psychopaths. If you think that you know somebody who's a psychopath, how do you spot the signs and What should you do?

3:27 To make sure. But they can't. Rack. Your life. To listen to that part of the conversation.

3:33 Please become a paying subscriber. Please support this project. please go to yashamunk.subtech.com and become a paying subscriber. Heavy mass. Welcome to the podcast.

3:53 Thanks so much for having me. How should we think about what a psychopath or do you prefer sociopath actually is? That's a great question. Um So There is a this weird dichotomy in how people talk about the disorder. The term sociopath is vastly preferred in the media, in literature. Um, there's a couple of very famous memoirs that came out about people who are self described sociopaths. It's not a term that's used anymore by clinicians or researchers. Um and we

4:22 primarily use the term psychopathy. Um, and I don't even use the term psychopath anymore. Um, mainly because it occurred to me that we don't refer to any other people by their disorder anymore. You know, we don't refer to somebody as a schizophrenic or an anoreptic anymore. We've switched to a kind of person first language. And so I've thought that, you know, people with psychopathy probably deserve the same. So all that said, uh psychopathy is a personality disorder. Um, it's not in the diagnostic and statistical manual, the DSM that's used to um define and diagnose other personality disorders for really complicated reasons. Um

4:56 But it is a clinical disorder and it's uh characterized by Should have three main types of traits. One, a bold, fearless, dominant personality, socially dominant. Uh meanness or callousness, this is probably the trait people most closely associate with it. Uh lack of remorse, lack of guilt, lack of compassion, et cetera. And then finally disinhibition. So difficulty sticking to a plan, difficulty keeping promises, irresponsible behavior. Sometimes very spontaneous, um, you know, clearly poorly planned anti social behavior that lands people in trouble. So I once uh

5:31 had somebody explained to me the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath as being that A psychopath is somebody who has, I guess, in your language, all three of those sets of traits, right? Um, who is disinhibited to want to dominate the world and so they end up doing really bad acts. Whereas the sociopath may be somebody Who doesn't Have fellow feeling.

5:53 Right, who doesn't feel remorse if they've hurt somebody, who doesn't feel bad about things that they've done in the world. But you may be relatively well adjusted. You may think that it's in my interest not to hurt others because otherwise I might go to jail or other bad things might happen. Um but but still is lacking that that dimension of fellow feeling. Now you're saying that sort of there isn't this principle distinction between The terms have the terms acquaintance. Is there a distinction between those two types of people? Like would you say that there are some people who have this one set of traits quite strongly but not the other sets of traits, or are they really correlated with each other?

6:27 Such good questions. Um and that's a really interesting description that you were given about the difference between the two. That's even a new one. I mean, I've heard, you know, probably twenty different and this includes clinicians and researchers describing the two terms, you know, um, and what distinguishes them and and you'll get many, many different explanations. Um So First of all, like it's totally possible for people to be persistently anti social. but not because they lack the capacity for empathy or remorse. And

6:58 I would say that most people with psychopathy, it's not that they totally lack the capacity for empathy or remorse, but it's very It's down regulated. Yeah. It's very suppressed. It's very um they feel these emotions very mildly or very, very rarely, like maybe only with reference to one or two people. Oh that's interesting because I think we do also tend to think about like it's a switch, most people have it, and then some people don't have it at all. Whereas you're talking about it nearly I know if it's a normal distribution or something, but like most people have it to a Relatively. typical degree. And then like a bunch of people are going to have it less than others, but they might still feel it for the mom or for the best friend or for the person they love or whatever, but but not for anybody else. Or they might feel it more dimly than others. That's that's that's interesting. What do you think is the distribution? I mean, is is it something like a normal distribution or like how

7:46 How should we think about this? I think it's it's certainly a distribution. So it has that classic sort of Belker shape, but um probably it's shifted so that most people are on the uh plenty of empathy side of the distribution and then the tail of people who um experience very little empathy and compassion is a long tail, but a very small number of people are down there. I have worked with people who say they have never experienced anything like what

8:12 most people describe as empathy or remorse or compassion. So they exist. Um, but that's a small percent of people. Much smaller than the percent of people who say they wish that they could experience less empathy and compassion for others. Interesting. Right. Because that too can be debilitating if you're sort of you know you you you inadvertently, you know, step on a bug and you you're so empathetic for the natural world that you're you know terribly guild ridden about having inadvertently done that. That that also seems like a kind of ill adjustedness. Um. Yeah. And empathy and compassion and guilt do sort of swim together. So that's the downside of being a compassionate empathic person is you'll also feel guilt about not having done even better, even though you're probably a nicer person than average.

8:54 Interesting. So I let's get back to to empathy and and what people who have really strong empathy uh feel uh as part of a conversation as well. But sticking with the other end of the the spectrum Um you know. Obviously, one reason why we're interested in this topic is but it drives a lot of bad behavior, right? But a lot of uh criminals, a lot of people who you know, serial killers, a lot of uh perhaps some politicians who do terrible things, uh seem to uh suffer from some form of psychopathy. Um It what drives bad behavior here? Is it really primarily this question of do you have empathy for others? Or is it

9:32 Do you have MPV for others? Plus. those other ingredients. What do you think is sort of predictive, you know, w you know with the patients you work with, when do you really think, oh dear I'm worried for the people in their life. Is it just how little empathy they have for others, or is it That plus some other thing about them.

9:49 These are great questions. Yeah. So each one of these prongs that makes up psychopathy, the bold, socially dominant personality, th the empathy and compassion. low amount and the disinhibition, each one of those can drive antisocial behavior for different reasons. And I sort of think of um them as like each a different kind of gas or breaks. And so you can be a very anti social person who has At least the capacity for empathy and compassion, just because you're so disinhibited, you get right, you just you see something, you want it, you want to do it, or for maybe you're very bad at controlling your anger. You have something called an immediate expulsive disorder, where it's just really easy for things to get under your skin and you blow up in a disproportionate way and you feel awful afterward. You just every time this happens, you're like, I can't believe I did this again. Again.

10:33 And it just was too hard for you to control those emotions. Uh in addition I think there are people who are driven In particular by status goals. So people who are very bold and socially dominant really, really like to have higher status than other people. And I think

10:53 that sometimes those goals can drive you to act in ways that are anti social, even though you have a capacity for empathy, but you've just decided not to deploy it. You don't you know there's certain people who you view as not worthy of empathy. You're you're compartmentalizing your empathy. And I think um There are a lot of people who are pretty functional. in their normal social lives, right? They have a pretty normal family life, they have friends. Um and long term friendships, right? Friendships that don't typically uh emerge in people who are truly pathologically psychopathic. It's very hard to maintain friends long term when you um view other people as instrumental ends.

11:30 uh to be used to achieve your goals. And that I would say is at some point they're gonna figure that out and they'll feel used and they'll think, I don't wanna be your friend. Right, because the friendship was only ever Based on the in people who are highly psychopathic on the desire to get something out of it. You know? It's not it's not a typical way of bonding with people. Um

11:51 But I do think that there are people who can feel close bonds with people, but they're just so driven by their, you know, need to dominate or to acquire. um that that empathy capacity gets switched off um or suppressed by those goals. I'm I'm trying to think of what this model looks like. I mean one perhaps overly simple way of thinking about this is that Um, we have desires in the world and um, you know, we do things in order to serve those desires, and then we have inhibitions, right? And one of the obvious inhibitions is Empathy for others. Um is you know, I'm not gonna do this because it'll upset somebody, right?

12:26 Um, and so is it sort of like one minus the other? I mean, is it really sort of like uh what is the the relation between those two things? And so you could imagine somebody who's actually very empathetic, but Who has such uncontrollable rages. but they act really poorly, or somebody who perhaps has very, very little, perhaps no compassion for others. Um, but that's just quite impassive. They just don't happen to have particularly strong desires in the world and so they calculate that it's in their rational self interest never to break the law, never to do something that'll cause lots of drama because they just want a quiet life of, you know, sitting at home watching Netflix or whatever. And there are plenty of psychopathic people exactly like that who they don't particularly care about other people. They just kinda want what they want.

13:06 But the stuff that they want is pretty easy for them to get for whatever reason, maybe because they have put you know, particular cognitive skills and talents that make, you know, having a pretty easy life not that big of a challenge for them. I will say the other thing that makes psychopathy um such a challenge is that the the bold dominant personality is associated with being fearless, and that means being unafraid of being punished. And so the other thing that keeps people who are psychopathic from uh, you know, behaving in pro social ways is that they don't fear the punishment that comes from behaving anti socially.

13:39 And so it's very difficult to um contain their behavior using threats of jail or other serious. They just won with it. And what is it that makes them unresponsive to that fear of punishment. Is it that they don't care that if they end up in jail for twenty years, they're just as happy in jail as they would be somewhere else? Or is it if they don't have mechanisms of self control that they basically fail the mass model of a test and how should we how how should he think about what what what drives that behavior. Well, many of them would definitely fail the marshmallow test. And that's true of people who end up in jail in general. Um, and that's, you know, even in a typical jail or prison, the only a minority of people would be considered clinically psychopathic. I mean, close to half, but um but not even most people. And and disinhibition and just failure to control impulses or

14:29 you know, difficulty sort of balancing risks and rewards. Um, you know, that's a that's a major factor that puts people in um detention. So that's definitely true of people with psychopathy too. Um And but they don't like jail. It's not that they want to be there. It's that the there does seem to be um neurodevelopmental differences in them such that very early in life they just don't fear the punishment ahead of time. They don't like it when they get it. But they don't fear it ahead of time and they don't do things to avoid the threat or the punishment.

15:02 Even if they won't like it when they get it. Well, uh you just mentioned just that uh sort of by the by was just striking. So you said some close to half of people in prison, as far as we know. have a psychopathic trait, um uh how does that relate to the general population? I mean it's hugely disproportionate, right? Yeah, um you know, because psychopathy is a continuum, it's sort of hard to put a clear marker on exactly what proportion of the population, you know, has psychopathy, because it kind of depends on where you decide to draw the clinical line. But most people estimate it's about one or two percent of the population has clinically significant levels of psychopathy. So that's in the general population. And then of course it is much higher in populations where people are doing enough antisocial things that they have ended up um punished for it.

15:47 Interesting. So it is, you know, to the chain of twenty five X, fifty X. um uh uh more likely for somebody who's uh who's psychopathic to end up in in jail. Do we know something about again, I'm I'm sure it'll depend on exactly where we draw the line, but you know, what percentage of people with psychopathy will be um present at some point in their lives? We don't know this. We don't know this at all. I mean, we do know, you know, there's something called the Pareto principle or the eighty twenty rule, you know, for example, twenty percent of people are responsible for all for eighty percent of absenteeism and the workplace, for example.

16:22 And that's that's true for all antisocial behavior. A small minority of the population is responsible for most antisocial acts. And when you look at, for example, violent crime, some people have estimated that maybe one percent of the population is responsible for two thirds of all serious violent crime. Yeah. And so um We don't know the odds that any particular person with psychopathy will offend over their lifetime. It's definitely higher than the average person's. So we did uh recently. A big population study of um psychopathy and um Rates of offending were, you know, twice as high to ten times as high as the general population, depending on the specific Antisocial behavior in question with the most

17:04 Uh and this is a s a paper actually that's just about to come out. Um We found that the most common kinds of antisocial behavior that very high psychopathy people engage in, in terms of like what they're most likely to have done, is actually risky, reckless driving. Um driving out of the influence, not obeying traffic laws, driving way too fast, et cetera. And you know, vast majority of highly psychopathic people have done that. Um, you know, somewhat smaller percentages have actually been convicted uh or punished for it, but they they all do it.

17:32 Um And then, you know, much smaller percents have uh committed assault, maybe forty percent. Uh again, smaller proportions actually have been Um Arrest probe. Interesting. Um

17:45 So if we think again of these three different uh classes of character traits that are necessary according to the DSM to to to to uh classify somebody as as as uh psychopathic. Are they correlated with each other? I mean if you have one of these three character traits is that m make it more likely that you have the other two as well? Or are we simply saying that say Um, you know, fifteen percent of the population have each of us have the traits and the people who end up having psychopathy ever ones who just happen to have

18:17 Point one five times point five times point one five, you probably end up with a little bit. lower, so you'd say twenty percent of each, right? And and are really not correlated with each other. Does does having one of these sets of character traits also drive the other or is just genetically related in some kind of way, or related in terms of your upbringing? Or are they uh are they independent of each other? Oh my gosh, you have like twelve really interesting questions all embedded in there. So The Top question is whether these three um

18:43 clusters of traits are correlated with each other, yes, to some degree. So especially the sort of meanness and callousness. And the disinhibition, those are pretty strongly correlated with each other. Maybe point four. I mean not you know, point seven or they'd be the same thing. Um And then the bold dominant personality less so. I mean You know, as low as point one five, probably.

19:02 Um although When you do the developmental studies that follow kids over time, that does seem to be the core trait. That's the first trait that we see emerging early in childhood that puts the child at risk for all the other sequelaes. of um psychopathic traits. I'll also mention that these um this sort of triad of traits isn't in The DSM diagnosis that's closest to psychopathy, which is anti social personality disorder.

19:30 Which, you know Why did it why did they sh change the name? Why did they change the criteria when they put in the DSM? Who's to say? I mean, I I'm sure you're aware of what uh, you know, uh Buck. created by committees the DSM is and it has it has some flaws. Um, so a lot of these trades are in there, but you won't find this exact triad of traits in the DSM. Normally you find the term psychopathy.

19:52 Well, and I I would venture I know we'll agree that a term invented by I believe a doctoral advisor, Steven Pinker, and of course a former guest on this podcast has something to do with this, which is a euphemism predmill. There's there's uh, you know, if you find a term for something that has negative associations when the term itself will start to be negatively charged over time, and then therefore people say, well, there's something offensive about the term, so let's Not deal with it. And so even if Um, you know, something like psychopathy or sociopathy.

20:20 were invented as relatively neutral terms. Um uh, you know, over time we obviously associate it with the underlying behaviors, and so it comes to seem like a slow word. And so perhaps somebody in the committee said, We can't call people that, that's fine, a new term. Exactly. Yes. And um yeah, Steven Pinker was on my dissertation committee, I should mention he wasn't my advisor, but I really appreciated his uh fantastic advice. Um Then and and I really appreciate this term euphemism treadmill, which is a huge problem for psychopathy because It is an incredibly common disorder and it's uh you know, antisocial behavior. So and I should again reinforce that

20:56 the psychopathic traits that we see in adults are all almost without exception present in adolescence and childhood and people who develop psychopathy. And so you know, we i i it's a disorder that occurs throughout the lifespan. And it's the most common reason that children are referred to psychiatric care in childhood is antisocial behavior problems. Not all of which is related to psychopathy, but a big chunk of it is. And um And yet there's like very little help for the affected kids and families out there. There's you know so little in the way of resources or

21:28 Um clinical training is devoted to helping clinicians help these kids. Um, and then on top of that, the clinician and researcher community does the, you know, population of patients a double disservice by coming up with eight thousand terms that all mean more or less the same thing. So sociopathy was in part a remedy to the stigma that the term psychopath had acquired antisocial personality disorder, same thing. It's like let's just try to get the stigma away from having a disorder that causes you to do really antisocial things all the time. And The reality is, you're never gonna take the stigma away from the disorder. Like, of course, if you do really antisocial things persistently, that's going to be stigmatized. There's no getting around it. The way we get rid of the stigma is by finding treatments for it so that people don't uh continue to perceive this as some sort of a, you know, a bad seed moral disorder that's a permanent stain and we should just lock you up forever. That's how to get rid of the stigma.

22:22 So you mentioned that uh one of the first things you can diagnose in children is this desire to dominate, and that's the predictor. of the other uh character traits emerging. Um, at what age in a child's development Do we start to see warning signs? Um

22:41 And and how predictive are they? You know, if you go and visit uh some relative of yours or you know, the child of some friend. And they have some concerning set of behaviors. You know, at three years old, at seven years old, at ten years old, at what point Um uh can you say hey Uh, you know, okay, I'm not a trained psychologist, but you know what, I'm really starting to be concerned here and I'm not just being crazy.

23:06 Yeah. Um, it's hard, right? Because the age two to three is statistically the most violent period of the lifespan. Because it's so typical for little kids to have. terrible tantrums um and be quite violent in some cases, you know, biting and doing things that just don't happen later in life. So it is hard. Um, but the thing that you're looking for in kids who are, you know, two to three years old, which most parents of kids um who develop psychopathic traits will say that's when they started noticing something was different. Is again this fearless personality, which mostly manifests in the kid not seeming scared of things that other kids are scared of. Big dogs, the dark, um sort of being alone, um, you know, very high places, doing things that are just unusually risky. And that includes not being a But some of those those some of those might be good traits, right? So

23:54 So I guess w how do you know like like where does the you know like you want your kid to be Happy go lucky and relatively fearless and like, you know, it's like, yeah, it's a big dog, but it's our friend's dog. We don't have to be worried about it. Like like like you you can be proud if your kid is like, Hello, big doggy, right? Like like like what isn't like what what what makes you like like where's the line between oh I just have like A kid but loves the world and hasn't ha ever had anything really bad happen to them. And so they just don't have a lot of fear versus Oh my God, you know, perhaps I'm raising a little, you know, psychopath. Well. And and so this trait by itself is probably not enough to worry you. And I will say that

24:34 Being afraid of something and loving something are sort of two different axes. So that people who really love something will override their fear for it, even if they have a normal amount of fear. So Alex Hunnell, the like the free civil climber, is a really famous example of this. He is not a fearless guy at all. And in fact, he talks about how terrified he was before giving his TED talk, but people always assume he must be fearless because of these incredible climbs he does. But the reality is he just loves to climb. It gives it gives him so much joy. He's so driven to do it that that sort of overwhelms the sort of regular effect. Yeah. Exactly. That's how I'm not a particularly fearless person at all, but that's how I am about dogs. Big dogs small dogs, barking dogs, whatever. When I was a little kid, I would just throw myself all of them. But it wasn't fearlessness, it was just love. Um, and so you're looking for kind of fearlessness across the gamut, including when it comes to punishment. So, you know, for many little kids, having uh mom or dad get mad at you.

25:26 When you've done something you shouldn't do. has enough to make that behavior less and less likely going forward. Um and some kids might need a little bit more structure, um, you know, reinforcement system like the one two three magic system, which I highly recommend, which you know results in the one two three magic system. Oh, One Two Three Magic is a fantastic book about how to use principles of behavioral psychology to help. um, kids uh manage their behavior in a way that doesn't involve arguing or yelling or harsh punishment. It's just if it's basically just behaviorism. Um, and when a child uh does something disruptive that they shouldn't do, You count them. Yeah, that's one the first time they do it, that's two the second time they do it. And on three, they have they have a mandatory timeout. No talking, no arguing, no explaining. They just have to have a timeout. It's very boring.

26:12 So rather than you don't shout at them, you don't get angry, you don't whatever, the the y you know, you couldn't I mean i I I guess this is true in w in discussions criminal law as well. when punishment is certain And uh when it is immediate that's the most likely deterrent and it's basically applying the same thing to kids. Don't charge the kid, but make sure you punish the kid. Yes, it should be swift, it should be certain, it does not need to be harsh. It should be annoying. Um, and I think punishment, I you know, I hate to say this, like I don't want this to be some horrible quote that gets associated with me, but punishment has gotten a bad name, you know? It again, like uh p uh punishment is just any response that reduces the likelihood of bad behavior in the future.

26:52 And when you are a parent, there was just no possible way to only use reward and reinforcement to shape your kids' behavior. Kids will just do things they shouldn't do sometimes. And uh and just using simple, you know, swift, certain annoying consequences like timeout, for most kids, that's plenty and it that will shape their behavior just fine. For pu for kids who have this bold fearless personality, though, it won't. And one of the problems is that for most parents who just have no idea what they're dealing with, they're like, I don't understand. Like I have other kids and this worked fine for them. Like, why is this kid not responding to these mild punishments? And unfortunately then what happens is the kid starts, um, the parents will often ratchet up the punishment. So like, oh, the timeout didn't work. Well, now I'm gonna lock you in your room. Oh, locking you in your room didn't work? Well, now I'm going to start screaming at you. Maybe I'm going to even use physical punishment. And the problem is if the kid doesn't fear the punishment in advance, none of it's going to work. And so now what happens is you've got a kid who's fairly fearless. Um

27:49 And thinks that everybody around them is a jerk. Right. They're being treated so unfairly. They're being treated totally different than the other kids around them, including their siblings. And the reason is because their behavior is different, but a little kid isn't gonna put that together. And so this is the developmental cycle that it leads to is the the the fearless temperament, which sometimes is coupled with kind of low sort of affiliative Um, desires. And we don't know if those two things are intrinsically linked or um if you just have them both, that's extra bad. And low affectionate. They don't get bonded to their parents, or Yeah, they don't seem to find

28:24 affection as rewarding as other people. Um, and so what parents unfortunately sometimes do is they try to be respectful of the child and dial back on the affection, not as many hugs. you know, try to, you know, give them their space. You don't snuggle with them, um, because they don't seem to like it as much. And that's the exact opposite of what you should do, right? Kids don't always know what they need. And the problem is the kids who are not that sensitive to affection actually need extra of it. I mean, you don't want to like, you know, lock them into bear hugs while they struggle, but you a like Big, big warmth, big smiles, lots of affectionate touches, because that's what it takes to get through to them. Uh anyway, so just

29:03 J just to go back to how to sort of, you know, you're you're facing this three old and you're trying to figure out you know, is Is a free old just an asshole like many free old are assholes, or is it a special asshole? You know, I mean one thing that I've you know observed with with kids, friends and family members, et cetera, is that, you know, kids at that age, terrible twos, they'll behave in horrible ways. I mean bite their pants and whatever. Um they will afterwards Feel obvious remorse.

29:30 Right, like like they'll look first for them that they've hurt mommy or dad and they'll you know, and and they'll be obviously hurt by the punishment and and you'll see that they're sort of like, what did I do, right? Um Is it the absence I mean is is the absence of that a pretty reliable indicator at that age? Is that something that even at that young age you can sort of Observe or or is that not a kind of key thing to look out for?

29:54 I mean it's I would say it's a slightly less reliable indicator because unfortunately that is something you also might see in a child with autistic traits. that you might not see quite as much of that um attention to other people's sadness or anxiety or stress. But if you couple that fearless personality with that like sort of lack of seeming to care if you've hurt somebody, you know, it's very normal for a two or three year old who one minute is just a screaming terror. You know, if mom starts crying or if mom seems really sad, they'll be like, Oh, mommy, are you okay? And like, you know, and try and not in the middle of the tantrum necessarily, but most of the time you should be seeing like later. Yeah. And what that means is that the child is coming to intrinsically value Other people's welfare. Um you know, and that's a normal human trait that should develop. Like when other people are doing the people that you love are doing well, that should bring you joy automatically. And when they're

30:46 in distress that should bring you distress automatically. And so children need to develop that. And kids with psychopathy don't have that. Other people's welfare just doesn't have intrinsic value to them. Um And that's a thing. And so you're starting to speak a little bit about You know. Some parents understandably step back from expressing affection for kids who don't seem to value affection in the same way, but that's the wrong thing to do.

31:09 How much Agency is there. I mean if by the age of uh two or three you realize there's something wrong and you you do everything right. You took you take the kids to a specialist, to you know, whatever doctor first in a specialist, and they're diagnosed with, you know, this kid is in danger of developing psychopathy, or, you know, they may have uh inclination towards bad.

31:32 Um, you know, uh what can you do? And how much of a difference is that gonna make? I mean, if kids just are born without that sense of empathy for others. I is that something that you can give them through treatments and therapy and the right uh behavioralism? Or um you know, is the best you can hope for just to manage that condition in such a way that hopefully the outcomes aren't as terrible as they often turn out to be. That's a great question. So it is definitely treatable. I mean, you're not gonna bring a kid's personality from one end of the spectrum to the other. So if you so if you're a parent of a child who's three, four, five years old and you're noticing

32:08 Like punishment just doesn't seem to do anything to my kids' behavior. When I punish them consistently, you know, swiftly and you know ideally not too harshly for their behavior. Don't they don't seem to care. They don't seem that affectionate. They're misbehaving a lot more than their peers. They're lying more often than usual. They might be starting to steal things. What do I do? You know, most people start out taking their kid to a pediatrician. It's likely the pediatrician will have no clues what's going on. They have not been trained to assess behavior problems in child. But hopefully that was helpful.

32:37 Yeah. I yeah, just don't yeah. This is it's something so I I uh co founded an organization called the Society for the Prevention of Disorders of Aggression to try to work on some of these problems, but the problems are big. Um, so any case, so hopefully they'll recommend a child psychologist or social worker um to assess the child next. They may or may not know how to assess these problems in kids. Um, and they may even if they recognize that your child probably c qualifies for a diagnosis of conduct disorder.

33:06 Which is, you know, kind of the child equivalent of psychopathy or at least some of it is. Or opposition defiant disorder. Those are the major disorders names that we give kids who look like they're on they're on a trajectory toward persistent social behavior. They may deliberately give you a different diagnosis anyway. Deliberately. Because um There's fear of stigma. There's fear that a family reject these diagnoses.

33:31 There's a misperception, even among many clinicians, that they're untreatable. And so we just want to give them a diagnosis like autism. because so many resources will come your way, uh if you have that diagnosis. Maybe we'll just give them ADHD and that'cause that's kind of a light definition and it's not quite so offensive. Or maybe even depression. Maybe we'll decide that the reason that this kid seems sort of cold and unemotional is because they're depressed. So it's really common that parents get a wrong diagnosis. And then even if you do get a right diagnosis, the odds of finding somebody who can who is trained to use one of the kinds of therapy works is not that high. However, there is therapy that works. You know, my favorite example being um it's called PCIT parent child interaction therapy. Um and it's basically therapy where the parents are trained in how to use um

34:19 techniques that will bring out the best in the child, that will over time eliminate their antisocial behavior. Um show the kid tons of warmth, like more warmth than you think you need to show them to develop a bond between you and the child. So they actually care about you. And they care what you want and they care what you think. Um and then going into too much detail what kind of uh behaviors are that. What what what can you do as a parent? So you're saying um one thing is just to show even more warmth to your kid. I mean most plants give a lot of warmth to

34:48 Most of the kids, right? But what do you do? It's interesting. Parents sh yeah, I I'm sure you're familiar with the Pop psych book about love languages, which I think there's a nice little kernel of truth there. I think sometimes parents fail to realize that the way they're showing their children love is not as interpretable to the child as they might think. So for example Taking your kid to swim lessons and piano lessons and doctor's appointments and PTA stuff, like that's all love, right? That is that is very much. It doesn't feel like it to the kid, like being taken to the doctors. I feel like love, right? Making sure that their clothes are clean and that they've had breakfast and they get out the door on time. Like those are all things that loving parents do, but to a kid it just feels like being harassed and nagged. And so one of the things that PCIT entails and a lot of um

35:32 uh many good behavioral therapy uh programs in involved. It's something called floor time. Where you set aside five to ten minutes every day. with your child to engage in behaviors that just show that you care about your child, that you like them, that you approve of them, um, and that you feel positively about them. And so they involve things like while your child is playing on the floor, kind of imitating what they're doing, playing alongside them, narrating what they're doing. um sort of positively commenting on what they're doing. And it feels like so simple and dumb, but like Um

36:06 In reality, what that sh what that is, is it a moment in the in your life where you're not nagging your child, you're not hustling them from one thing to another, you're not telling them what to do, you're not asking them questions, which I think a lot of parents interpret as a sign of care, which it is. But into a child just being endlessly peppered with questions, What did you do in school today? What did you have for lunch? Who did you sit next to? How did you you know, it kind of feels like an interrogation and so What time is this like? kind of isolated time where you're just showing approval and kind of positive regard. And it's amazing how much um just 10 minutes of that a day will do. I mean, just like a seven minute workout doesn't seem like it should be enough to improve health, but it really does.

36:43 Um, ten minute floor time can do wonders for a child. So that's the sort of baseline that you do. Um, and then there's a whole um separate set of behaviors that parents engage in that help their child learn to avoid bad behaviors. And adopt good ones. Through reinforcement, basically. Interesting. And so um let's say in the best case

37:04 Um uh y you can take a kid that has a tendency towards psychopathy and avert the worst kinds of outcomes. Um tell us about how the life of a kid like that is likely to go. Uh, and then perhaps tell us about what happens if you don't interbut you in that kind of way and how you know the problems of um you know, misbehaving when you're three years old turn to the problems of misbehaving when you're thirteen or twenty three. So I will say that parents of kids with these problems are blamed and shamed pretty routinely for their kid having this callous, remorseful personality. And it sometimes doesn't help to say, oh, the solution is parenting management. Which just reinforces the idea that you must be a really bad parent. And that's, you know, it's not true. Um

37:50 In general. The kids who develop these traits, um, who are raised by parents who get them into some kind of therapy or f or sometimes just figure out a way to manage their behavior. Um, they'll end up with kids who are not gonna be the warmest, most cuddly people in the world. Um, but usually have learned good habits and strategies to get what they want and don't involve um you know, overtly breaking rules or hurting other people.

38:17 Um so you know they may end up in in professions that uh attract very extroted people, that are maybe sort of high risk, high reward. Um and uh offer a lot of status. And so there's at least some evidence that You know, jobs and kind of finance and banking might attract a little bit higher proportion of people with psychopathy than um, you know, for example, teaching or, you know, just to name some other like quite different job. Um this is one of the questions that that my priestal uh tasked me with asking, which is a bit of a stereotype in the culture that

38:54 uh certain kinds of very successful people uh may be uh more likely to be uh the having s traits of psychopathy, whether that's banking or surgeons or CEOs or, you know, is there something to that that Um uh y you know, perhaps having psychopathic traits makes it less likely to be successful, but that among some subsection of highly successful people, the share of psychopaths is is is higher. Politics.

39:22 Yeah. So My sense is that there's A there's not a Mm. ton of great data on this. There's one there's at least one very good study that found that among um kind of executive level people in the business world, the proportion of people estimated to have clinically significant psychopathy. So that top one or two percent is about four percent. So like

39:45 double the regular population, maybe four times the regular population, but that's also 96% of them who do not have clinical psychopathy. Now They do have And that's like I mean again like the the you know among the prison population you said it's close to fifty percent. And among these people it's four percent. So a a little bit elevated, but not enough to look at your cousin who's a CEO and say, You're probably psychopath. That's why you're a CEO. No, right, exactly. So Well I mean Uh People who go into high risk, high reward professions could include surgery, could include politics, could include business.

40:20 Um, are more likely to be men for various reasons. And uh men do score a little higher in psych copy than women on average. Um for their You know. M definitely more men than women at the very high end and a lot more women than men at the very low end. But the average psychopathy scores of men and women are actually not that different. So but professions that attract more men will have a little higher level of psychopathy just because they have more men. So but even if you co-bury that, there's probably a little bit there.

40:47 But um A lot of those professions attract people who are high in that boldness trait. That's characteristic of psychopathy, boldness socially dominant. But that is sometimes called the sort of adaptive arm of psychopathy or the adaptive feature of psychopathy that may help explain why some level of these traits, you know, persist in the population. Risk taking, bold, fearless, um, you know, of course. I don't know, somebody who's a rock star who performs a hundred fifty thousand people is gonna be a little bit m more fearless than the average person. Um that's not necessarily a bad thing. But it would explain some of that cor statistical correlation. Exactly. I mean this is just personality now we're talking about. Like you know, most personality variation is just what makes the world go round. It's what makes life colorful.

41:33 And and most personality traits, there's quite a wide range that can be adapted in particular context, right? Some context it's more adaptive to be introverted and some extroverted. Um And that's true for psychopathic traits up until you get to the very high end. And that's not adaptive in almost any context because you burn bridges with everybody everywhere you can go by mistreating them and using them for your instrumental purposes. I mean, you know, Bernie Madoff is probably an example of somebody who just based on what I've been able to find about him biography wise was probably psychopathic. He was just using people to meet his own instrumental goals. I don't know that much about the the the made of case. Um what's the evidence for that? I mean Um, from my understanding of it, you know, at the beginning he was kind of like running a relatively normal investment business and then he like made promises though a little bit bigger than they should have been. And then he was like, Oh damn, in order to keep this going, I I I have to take in more and more money and it's sort of turned into

42:27 Um a Ponzi scheme. But but you know, um again, I I really don't know the details of a case and so I'm probably missing key elements of it. But that seems like something that like you know, uh an average asshole might end up in that situation, right? Like like he didn't set off saying, I'm gonna I'm gonna perpetuate the biggest financial fraud in history. He was like, I'm gonna Invest these people's money and make a lot of profit like oh shit, I might go bankrupt now or I somehow fudge the numbers and

42:54 Ten years later he's in way over his head. W what element of what he did sort of indicates to you that actually there was more to it than than bad? It's a good question. So and it's been I will say it's been a little while since I did a little dig into his biography. So what you're looking for is never sort of one thing, because you're a hundred percent right. It's totally plausible that somebody who's, you know, sort of leveraging the money they have to invest and try to build up an even bigger uh portfolio could just get in over their head and not because they're trying to use people, like they really were trying to do the right thing, more or less, and just got in over their head and and ended up getting all these people bankrupt. That could happen. Um the

43:32 information you're looking for to distinguish between somebody who just kinda did one bad thing. even if it's a really big bad thing. And somebody who's truly psychopathic is patterns of behavior sort of throughout the different parts of their life. Um and here I'm not talking about Bernie Madoff in particular because I'm not confident enough about my memory about his biography. But let's say you're looking at somebody's life. The use the spectrum maybe psychopathic on the basis of some antisocial thing that you know that they've done. First you want to look at their relationships and you wanna look at their relationships over time. Do they have evidence of having real friendships, like friendships that are that are based on like true mutual affection And sort of reciprocally, you know, benefiting one another. Uh romantic relationships, relationships with their children. Do those seem to be characterized by true sincere affection when something bad happens to somebody you love? Are you truly upset about it?

44:22 Um You want to look uh over time biographically. So for people who are psychopathic, there's almost always evidence in early childhood that their behavior was already uh very difficult to control. For example, you know, children who were sent to special schools that were trying to manage their behavior, that might be an indicator that their behavior was completely unmanageable to their parents. Um, it's not the only reason kids get sent to special schools, but it is like a characteristic thing you might um see. Was there evidence that they were engaged in sort of juvenile delinquency, were underperforming in school? Um

44:53 And those sorts of biographical details are really helpful to look at. And then You know. it's very rare that people who are doing fraudulent, dishonest things in the business realm are not also doing things like that in the personal realm, maybe in romantic relationships. So you sort of want to look at at sort of multiple prongs to get an overall portrait of somebody who d truly does not care about other people's welfare and mostly is just using other people to get what they want. So so we have another uh set of questions from from Leo. Uh one part of it is uh you know, okay, so perhaps it's not true that CEO is much more likely to be psychopathic. Is it true that psychopaths are often

45:30 Particularly charismatic. that they have this ability to manipulate people that somehow goes beyond that of The average person. And you know, relatedly we have the holidays coming up. You know, if you go to uh, you know, your Christmas gathering or whatever your uh favorite holiday may be.

45:47 Um and uh, you know, your your your cousin's significant other that are bringing around for the first time. uh seems to you to have behaviors that may be indicative of psychopathia. How do you think through whether you just talking yourself into a rage and have uh you know need to touch grass or whether you in fact have to be concerned for the well being of your relative. So this is this is what's so confounding about psychopathy is how hard it is to detect in just a casual interaction. I would say impossible. I don't think any psychopathy researcher I've ever met says that there's any kind of tell in casual conversation that can reliably indicate that somebody is psychopathic because people are psychopathic are shape shifters. They

46:28 Um, again, and this is not true of everybody, right? But the but most of the psychopathic people that I've worked with and uh the work that I do. will say that they mask uh in most interactions that they're in. They'll present the face to the people they're interacting with that they think those people want to see. And often that results in there being some of the most charming, likable, friendly people that you will ever interact with. And they don't seem fake. Like not and most of us have way too much confidence in our ability to detect deception in regular life. Um you know, we we really are not good at it. Um and everybody I know that works with people with psychopathy has found themselves um duped. At least once. Um, and so uh you're you're out of luck when it comes to detecting psychopathy in your cousin's new

47:13 Uh boyfriend. Unless um you happen to know somebody who knows them and can say, like, that guy is not trustworthy. Like he talks a big game and it turns out like half the stuff he says isn't true. And it's not even clear like why he was making it up. Like what was even the point. And like he's had like six different jobs in the last two years and nobody quite knows why. And like he definitely cheated on his last girlfriend. And like that's the kind of biography you're looking for. Um So there's that. Um, whether people who are psychopathic are usually charismatic is really hard to say. There's not good data on this. They certainly report that they are.

47:47 Exactly. Exactly. Um, but that's not very satisfying. It's also possible that it's just that if you like pu again, if you want to manipulate people, being charismatic is a really good tool to do it. And so a lot of people who are psychopathic may develop a more sort of charismatic demeanor. You may invest into that skill because it's particularly important to them to be socially dominant or to get the way. Exactly. It may also be the case that it's just people who are very psychopathic and charismatic cause them those trouble. Those are the ones who you really don't protect. We've maybe an availability bias, right, where you know if there's a hundred people of psychopathy Um, the ninety of them that are not particularly charismatic, probably are less successful, less likely to become celebrities, less likely to become elected uh office holders. Um and so the the subset of psychopaths where you think about when we've w when we consider the conditions are the one is very charismatic. That's a very good point, actually. Yeah.

48:42 That's entirely possible. But there's really uh there's not as good data as I would like on whether, you know, just ha a conversation with the average person who has high in psychopathy, do they really come across as more charismatic? Really what they come across is as a genuinely likable person who does not seem particularly antisocial. We're we we really um I have done a little research on this at this point not published that um people tend to conflate how nice a person is, like how good a person is with whether they personally like them. And so, for example, like we are very overwhelmingly likely to assume that political figures on the opposite side of the aisle from ourselves are psychopathic. Right. That's and so I that's why I always uh wanna, you know, urge people to, you know, like just because this person has politics that you don't like, whether they're a national politician or just a voter, like that's not a sign of the

49:32 Like you don't like them. And I totally get that. But it may be that they think they're doing the right thing, like sincerely and honestly. Yeah, and that's I mean and that's true. probably for descriptions of psychopathy, it it's more broadly just true for descriptions of moral evil, right? Um I think it's it's very tempting to think that my way of seeing the word politically Is so obviously true. That anybody who disagrees with me must either be stupid or a bad person.

50:01 Yes. Um and and and that's something, you know, uh an assumption that I see people make all of the time. Um and I think one of the things that you get from Um attending a lot of focus groups and listening to people listening to people of very different political points of view, but to we do seem like

50:18 but generally struggling to to think about what's right. Or in a very different way. One of the things that I think you get from reading the most brilliant political thinkers of the past who lived in very different moments, uh and therefore also had very different political assumptions and very different values. Is that there are a lot of well intentioned, very smart people who have used but a very different from those that I happen to have. And and I think that's really a The code. to to beginning to have any kind of productive

50:42 form of politics. Exactly. Yeah. No people can Do things that you dislike, have beliefs that you dislike, and be a sincerely well intentioned person who is trying to be moral and is being moral according to what they view as moral. Um, and I think that that is um Really important when trying to explain to people what psychopathy is and isn't. It's not just everybody who disagrees with you politically.

51:10 That'll be easy to diagnose and more than one conversation with academics that they're like, Well, I I'll tell you where you can find all the people with psychopathy. They're on the, you know. They're on the Republican side of the aisle and I'm like no This isn't how it works. I mean, you know, like the most famous social psychology experiment of all time, you know, the Milgram study is was it was More or less.

51:31 designed to dispel the idea that Germany was a nation full of psychopaths. Um, you know, the the belief at the time was, well, you know, you could never have had such a thing happen in Germany as what happened in World War Two. Unless German people were just unusually callous and heartless and cruel. And it's like, Well, that wasn't true at all. You know, and obviously there's a historical point that it it's sort of hard to understand why uh Germans in nineteen twenty five were not psychopaths, and then, you know, nineteen forty three were all psychopaths. And by nineteen seventy we're all back to having normal psychologies, right? It's not a very

52:04 Not a very convincing explanation. Um Uh you spend a lot of time with psychopaths, right? You you spend time studying them in research setups. where you know there's a lot of layers of confidentiality so that uh you elicit really honest responses. Um Tell us what it's like, as best you can tell from speaking with with those people. uh to be a psychopath, I mean, w what how do people think about their own condition, how do people think about the world

52:31 Yeah. This is a great question. Um, and one thing I should also mention is that there are a couple of members of the organization I created, uh the nonprofit, who themselves have been diagnosed with psychopathy. Um And they've uh written uh fairly well known memoirs in the last couple of years. One is Patrick Gagney and the other is uh Amy Thomas. And so I've really valued them as colleagues. So I should say I should also uh you know, part of the interactions I have with people to psychopathy is as um valued colleagues. So

53:00 Um I I come at this from a lot of different angles. The the first work I did uh in people with clinical psychopathy or Yeah. uh call us on emotional traits, which is the euphemism that we use for children.

53:13 Um was in my postdoctoral research when we were doing brain imaging research, um trying to understand the neural basis of psychopathy. Um, and so we interviewed kids from all over the greater Washington D C area and w interviewed their parents to try to get a little bit better sense of what made these kids tick. Um One of the really interesting um

53:36 Sort of discrepancies we found was that there was a a wide range And how uh sort of aware the kids were that there was anything different about them. And this it turns out to be true of adults with not only psychopathy, but lots of different conditions, bipolar disorder, stroke. Um some people seem to recognize that there's something different about them, and some people think that there's nothing different about them. Everybody else just like them. Um And that obviously makes a big difference when it comes to treatment. Um, if somebody truly has no idea that there's anything different about them, then you know, it's hard to convince them to get treated.

54:12 But um So I would say the kids who recognize there was something different about them. you know, had reasonably good insight about the fact that they just found themselves doing anti social things repeatedly that other kids didn't do. Um

54:29 And some of them said that they wish that they knew how to stop because They could tell that it was not working out for them in the long term. Might feel like they didn't say, Oh, uh I wish I knew how to stop because it makes mummy and daddy really sad. Very sad. Like I realise like you know, I I keep getting punished for it, or like You know, like nobody seems to like me or something. Like what what what is it that bothers them?

54:54 Because they say this isn't the life I want. And I've heard I've talked to many adults who say the same thing. They're like, This isn't the life I want. I want to have friends. I wanna have a r you know, if you're an adult, I wanna have a regular job. Um, I want to do, you know, well in my life. Um, you know, for the many of the kids I work with, they've been kicked out of multiple schools. Um, you know, and this just w wasn't you know, many of them kind of do have an image of like what a good life looks like and that's not it for almost anybody. Um some of them didn't care. I will say there was a subset of kids who just really didn't care. They they found school boring, they didn't see what the point was in doing well, you know, getting kicked out of multiple schools would hopefully eventually end in being a no school and then they would have been very happy. Um But um I would say

55:37 people who are psychopathic and in their teenager twenties are the least likely to appreciate that they're the source of their own problems and want to change. But as time goes on, I would say it's more common for people to be like, yeah, I'm the problem, it's me to paraphrase Tilly Swift. Um and to have some inkling that they could learn how to do better. Some of them actually do learn how to do better. Um, at least some of the people that I've talked to out of a desire to not lose a romantic partner that they realize has been a really lucky outcome for them to have a really good, kind romantic partner.

56:14 Oh, I've talked to a couple men who say, like, I was a way worse person before I started dating this woman. I don't want to lose her. I just tried to act like a nice person for like a year and a half. And then it sort of started to click and I sort of started to want to be a nice person. And so it's almost like they gave themselves therapy. Um, because that's exactly what therapists would tell you to do. Like you just need to start acting like a nice person. Do the things a nice person would do. learn how rewarding and sort of beneficial that is and eventually it will become habit and and when they succeeded that, I mean Do they now genuinely love their partner and they they genuinely

56:51 um have remorse when they act in ways that upset the partner? Or is it just that they've kind of in a way that perhaps Aristotle would have said that you know, once it becomes a habit to act in a certain kind of way, it becomes an ultimatism and and you know, they've just gotten out of the habit of acting in ways that are going to upset or hurt. the partner but really deep down when the partner's upset it still doesn't kind of doesn't do you know, the wrenching feeling that that that

57:17 that you and I have when we've done something to make somebody sad. I've talked to people for whom both are true. So, you know, or for some or one band and somewhere in the other. So I have talked to people who said that the the only time in their life they've ever felt something that approached love where like something bad happening to this person made them feel very emotional and they felt like bad about it in a way they never felt about anybody else. Um, and so I think there's some people with psychopathy for whom that there is some lingering latent capacity to experience something akin to real love. It's just it takes a lot. Um that person has to be really, really nice, um and and a and a really um kind, a fashionate partner. And then other people for whom it never really approached what I would call love.

58:01 But there was Sort of mutual understanding and reciprocity in the relationship where It was a stable relationship where both people were glad that they were in it. And this person was just motivated to like kind of keep up their end of the bargain. Something like loyalty. So I've talked to people who are psychopathical to say like over time they learn to feel something like loyalty, even if not love in a more emotional way. And so, you know, are these people the norm?

58:29 Uh, it's hard to say. You know, maybe not. Um But I think that they do um give some cause for optimism about what's possible. Other people with psychopathy who are um less insightful or less repentant as time goes on will say You know, like I just want to get what I want. You know, I all of my relationships with people are aimed at getting what I want and figuring out what they want for me and then

58:58 uh you know, I give them what they want as is to the limited degree that I have to. Um, to try to get you know, what I need. And I don't really like my job. I you know, I don't really like people. Like I, you know, I maybe take a lot of drugs to feel of something. Um to feel some sense of enjoyment. Um

59:17 Uh, you know, or maybe engage in risky behavior like breathless driving to feel something. Um, but like this is kind of a crappy life and but uh this is just the way I am. How honest and open are people about the lack of remorse for bad actions or some of the things that they've done. Um you know, I understand that this is a context in which they uh know that uh you know you're not going to report what they say to the police, et cetera. I mean w what are the kind of things that they would tell you in that context? What what are some of the most shocking things that that that people have told you?

59:50 Well, I can't tell the details, unfortunately. Pretty shocking things. Um yeah, I've I've I've been pretty shaken by some of the things I've heard in conversations. I I wish I could tell the details, but I can't. Um are the the research that we do is protected by what's called a certificate of confidentiality from the NIH that that protects us from you know, even having to reveal what we're told under subpoena. Um, because we would never be able to do this research if the people that we work with thought that we were, you know, gonna reveal what they've told us. And I will say the And you never attempt it to to to send in a a phone call to a tip line for, you know, some of Well, we are, you know, we're mandatory reporters if they tell us about something they're going to do, right? If they're planning on hurting somebody else or themselves.

1:00:36 or if there's any indicator of uh child or elder abuse, we do have to report that. But we tell them that. We're like, look, if you tell us anything about these these kinds of items, we're mandatory reporter, just like, you know, lots of professionals are. Um, but if it's something they did in the past, you know, like we, you know, that we would never be able to do this kind of research if we we couldn't Um so let's say that they've, you know, confess to, you know Terrible terrible crimes, uh in this kind of context. Um would they sound Like to this tell that to you, like I will tell you, Oh yeah, today for lunch I went to a Japanese restaurant. Or like what's the like like what's the tone? What's the

1:01:13 J just sort of casual, uh I would say is the best way to describe it. Um You know, like yes, this is I this is something that I've done because and there's always a reason, you know. Um one of the things that people with psychopathy are very good at doing is externalizing blame, you know? So it wasn't I I did it because I'm something like that. Yeah, they they put me in this position. The classic line of um abusive uh partners in domestic settings, right? Is well they made me do it. They pushed me to it. And that and you know, so I had no yeah. Right. And domestic violence is something that, you know, people with psychopathy are much more prone to. Um, yeah, and it's never your fault if you're psychopathic. Everything is somebody else's fault. And so you will get explanations like that a lot. It's like, well, I was, you know, they put me in this position. They told me that they were gonna like telling me. And so I had to do what I had to do. Um I've even

1:02:04 you know, worked with people who explain what they do through a sort of moral framework that they have created where like a good person um you know will only physically hurt people who do racist things. And so I'll only hurt people who say or do things that are racist. Um And you know, it's an interesting moral framework, uh, because it does sort of channel

1:02:29 their anti social impulses in ways that you know, their in their framework are relatively pro social. Um That's interesting. I mean there's some research that I've seen, I don't know how you feel about it, but People with uh dark tried personality disorder.

1:02:45 uh are attracted to political extremes. Because And I took the the expansion to be the other way around because those are cover for or uh an excuse. for engaging in these kind of behaviors. Right. Um you you're you're sort of saying, look, um

1:03:02 uh you know, I I I have a desire to act in incredibly cruel ways. I'm gonna find a political cause that gives me an excuse for saying actually most Americans are terrible human beings and so I can engage in wanting cruelty online, for example, you know, participate in cancellation campaigns or other kinds of things, and it's a way for me to live out this desire. within a kind of socially sanctioned Sphere. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

1:03:26 Uh, I think that that makes perfect sense. Um I haven't talked about politics too much with most of the participants that we brought through. But I think that that that fits with all of the things that we know. Certainly we know that people who are very anti social online are much more likely to have psychopathic personality traits. It's not like, you know, you become a different person when you go online. Although that would have been a reasonable hypothesis, but it seems now that uh people's online behavior is a reflection of their real personality, even if they put on a more pro social front in uh in person settings than they put uh under the cloak of anonymity online.

1:04:03 So uh you know, I know that you also are interested in altruism and we've talked about it a little bit earlier in the conversation. Um, you know, it strikes me from what we've talked about so far. But perhaps the problem of altruism is somewhat ill posed. in philosophy and perhaps even in biology, which is to say that the basic paradox of altruism is uh why is it that we evolve to have altruism, right? If um U you could expect uh people who just serve their own interests to be the most successful.

1:04:32 um uh particular passing on the genes to the next generation. when over time, um you know, altruism would be selected out in a population. Um and there's various ways of trying to explain that, you know, group level Uh selection versus individual level selection, et cetera, et cetera. But it strikes me that what you're describing is that if you have somebody Who is not

1:04:55 uh altruistic at all. Um, who has no kind of sense of care for others. the live outcomes end up being really poor. Um and and so perhaps actually some amount of altruism is necessary for success.

1:05:09 Which seems paradoxical, but would give a sort of rather more straightforward explanation. to why altruism has evolved as a human trait. Absolutely. I think that's a really good way of putting it. Um Yeah, so I mean to me one of the strongest arguments for the idea that humans on average have the capacity for altruism is the existence of psychopathy. Right, and because psychopathy is r is really, you know, fundamentally boils down to not caring about other people's welfare for its own sake. Right. That is the the trait. So one way right, so so so so one way of being skeptical about the existence of altruism is to say well people seem like they care about others all the time

1:05:49 But because you can get o things out of seeming like you care for others all the time. Um actually perhaps deep down we really aren't. Obviously, even make the same argument about pets, right? Like your dog seems like he loves you, but he just realized it is a smart way of getting food and actually doesn't give a shit about you, right? And what you're saying is well that was what everybody was like, but everybody would suffer from psychopathy. Right. That is what's just but clearly we see in the population. Yeah. Exactly. I will say that um a a sort of a cynical, untrusting personality tends to go along with being relatively untrustworthy and callous yourself. Uh, and so when I talk about my research with altruism and sort of general audience settings and and people ask questions that reveal a fundamental disbelief in the possibility that people could be altruistic.

1:06:36 You know, I usually give an answer along the lines of, you know, like this question doesn't say much about what people are like as a whole There it clearly is a spectrum of altruistic capacities in people, but your question has told me a lot about you. And you say that? Ha

1:06:49 Every so often. If they really push me because um, you know, some people really are very cynical about whether it's possible for people to genuinely care about other people. And again, many of those people just don't have that experience themselves. They they just don't really care about other people. They don't. Um and some of them, you know, may live lives that are ordinary enough or pro social enough that they just it hasn't occurred to them that there's something really unusual about them. They just think they're like everybody else. We're all like this to some degree. Well if anybody in the audience now thinks, oh my God, you know, I'm skeptical about altruism Um, you know, am I a psychopath? Like how do you how how how how can people can people self test whether whether they are or not? Yes, you can go to my organization's website, um, disordersofaggression.org, and there's a link you can click on for some screeners for psychopathy. Totally anonymous. So what what kind of screeners uh I mean, what kind of questions do do you ask? So uh the psychopathy screener we have for adults is called the Tri PM, the triarchic psychopathy measure. Um, and it assesses those three bins of traits that we've asked about before. Um, there are questions along the lines of, you know, I have the ability not to let my emotions uh dictate my behavior.

1:07:56 Uh, I like to do risky and dangerous things for fun. Um, I'm uh, you know, I'm more competent and uh capable than the average person. Uh, you know, it's it's it's questions that really just get out all the traits that we've been talking about. Interesting. I I I realized, you know, the the pull of psychopathy is such that we've gone uh a away again from from altruism. You know, one obvious question to ask about both of these traits is Um Is it nature or is it nurture?

1:08:22 Um I mean, is there just something in the constellation of a particular genes that A child has that uh makes them just far more likely To be you know, displaying these psychopathic traits. Or on the other hand, perhaps to be, you know, an ultra

1:08:37 Altruist, uh somebody who's particularly altruistic, or is it something about um you know the early childhood environment, et cetera, that triggers this in some kind of way. Yeah, it's great question. Um, I would say the best estimates are that about half of the variation of these personality traits is genetic. So, you know, at which is true for most personality traits. The the the estimates always end up about there. About half the variation is genetic factors and about half is environmental factors, although not in a simple way, um, as you know, like shared environment, so the you know, socioeconomic status of your family and what kind of school you went to and you know, did your mom work? I mean, none of these things. Um

1:09:14 uh are terribly predictive of life outcomes in general, mostly because different kids respond differently to the same environmental variable. If they don't affect every kid the same way. And so you can't make simple predictions. Um But there's a very strong genetic um component to psychopathy, which I think is, you know, hopefully relief to parents of kids who have these traits, that it's not like you cause the kid to have these traits. But because there's a big non genetic component, it means there is the capacity for environmental variables to help. Uh treat them.

1:09:45 So, you know, that's the good and the bad. Yeah, but I I was thinking about this because I think sometimes this idea of Genetic traits seems harsh or mean or something like that, but in a sense i it is not. Right, uh precisely because if we said that this is all about upbringing, etcetera. then, you know, if somebody has psychopathy, it's probably that, you know, but mom wasn't loving enough or whatever sexist tribes

1:10:12 you can immediately bring out. Whereas if there's very strong genetic component Um and it's obviously I imagine a pol polygenic trait, so it's uh polygenetic trait. So it's not one where it's just like you have the one thing that's passed down because of this gene, you're a psychopath, it's that um, you know, there's a combination of many, many genes, and some of those combinations are more likely to result in in in these kind of trades. Um so you can have one sibling that doesn't have any inclination towards that at all, and another sibling um uh that does by by random combination of of of of genes.

1:10:44 Um you know, in a sense that it's a less harsh view of the world, or at least a less harsh view of the responsibility of parents. I completely agree. No, I think parents parents give themselves m more credit and blame than I think they deserve. Uh, children are agents of their upbringing in a way that I don't think is often clear in parenting books. They children elicit parenting from parents. Um they don't they're not just passive receptacles of things that are done to them. Um, and children are also fairly robust. They, you know, I'm not an invitation for people to treat their children harshly, absolutely. Uh

1:11:20 Your child will be attracted to certain kinds of outcomes and they will want certain kinds of behavior from parents in ways that that shape you in in this sort of complicated dance. Um and your job as a parent is not to like shape your child to turn out some particular way. Um, there's the analogy of the gardener and the carpenter by the psychologist Alison Gobnick that I really like. Parents think of themselves as carpenters too often, like that they're trying to like build a chair. And if they do this, then they do that, then the chair will like have a nice sturdy frame and strong back. And it's like that's no, throw away the wood. You are a gardener, like your child is a seed. that could be a geranium seed or a marigold seed or a Zenia seed and like you have no idea what they're gonna be. And your job is just to try to help foster and like let that seed grow as best you can. But like they they're gonna turn out the way they're gonna turn out to some degree because genetics are pretty powerful.

1:12:07 That's a lovely analogy. Yeah. I'm gonna have a dear friend uh who's an avid listener to this podcast, um, who uh you know studied sociology and You know. quite ideologically believe that, you know, most outcomes uh due to culture and social factors and other kinds of things.

1:12:26 Um, and now as she has children, uh she told me recently, you know what? I was wrong. Like kids just come out one way or the other. And obviously Bringing them up in the right way, nurturing them and all of those things is really important, but they're just different from each other and and it's not because you know you treat one by one way or the other the the other way. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Good Fight. Well, After all of this

1:13:01 Really interesting and sometimes scary insight. About psychopathy. I know that you're probably asking yourself the same question, but I've been asking myself For the last hour. Which is.

1:13:11 How do you protect yourself? From the psychopaths. Oh that. If you

1:13:17 Somebody in your life maybe Psychopathic. What steps should you take? in responses. There's some way that you can encourage them

1:13:26 Condition or should you just Cut ties. Listen. Two. Listen to

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