The Mind of a Sociopath

I am very interested in the question of whether psychopaths can be good people (i.e. law-abiding and productive in society). In this case, the fear in the original posts in this thread would be overblown. It may even be to my benefit to seek out psychopaths in my business or as a drinking buddy.

The prototypical psychopath has deficits or deviances in several areas: interpersonal relationships, emotion, and self-control. Psychopaths lack a sense of guilt or remorse for any harm they may have caused others, instead rationalizing the behavior, blaming someone else, or denying it outright.[64] Psychopaths also lack empathy towards others in general, resulting in tactlessness, insensitivity, and contemptuousness. All of this belies their tendency to make a good, likable first impression. Psychopaths have a superficial charm about them, enabled by a willingness to say anything without concern for accuracy or truth.

This extends into their pathological lying and willingness to con and manipulate others for personal gain or amusement. The prototypical psychopath's emotions are described as a shallow affect, meaning their overall way of relating is characterized by mere displays of friendliness and other emotion for personal gain; the displayed emotion need not correlate with felt emotion, in other words.

Shallow affect also describes the psychopath's tendency for genuine emotion to be short lived and egocentric with an overall cold demeanor. Their behavior is impulsive and irresponsible, often failing to keep a job or defaulting on debts.[64]

Most research studies of psychopaths have taken place among prison populations. This remains a limitation on its applicability to a general population.

It has been shown that punishment and behavior modification techniques do not improve the behavior of what Hare and other followers of this theory call a psychopath. They have been regularly observed to respond to both by becoming more cunning and hiding their behavior better. It has been suggested by them that traditional therapeutic approaches actually make psychopaths if not worse, then far more adept at manipulating others and concealing their behavior. They are generally considered to be not only incurable but also untreatable.[65]

Psychopaths also have a markedly distorted sense of the potential consequences of their actions, not only for others, but also for themselves. They do not, for example, deeply recognize the risk of being caught, disbelieved or injured as a result of their behaviour.[66]

Psychopaths may often be successful in the military, as they will more readily participate in combat than most soldiers.[67][unreliable source?]

Thanks David.

I believe that your friend Mr. Hare distinguishes between sociopathy and psychopathy, and i believe that Miss Wabbit did also in an earlier post.

Relationship to sociopathy

Main article: Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R)

The difference between sociopathy and psychopathy, according to Hare, may "reflect the user's views on the origins and determinates of the disorder."[58]

David T. Lykken proposes that psychopathy and sociopathy are two distinct kinds of antisocial personality disorder. He holds that psychopaths are born with temperamental differences such as impulsivity, cortical underarousal, and fearlessness that lead them to risk-seeking behavior and an inability to internalize social norms. Sociopaths, on the other hand, he believes to have relatively normal temperaments; their personality disorder being more an effect of negative sociological factors like parental neglect, delinquent peers, poverty, and extremely low or extremely high intelligence. Both personality disorders are, of course, the result of an interaction between genetic predispositions and environmental factors, but psychopathy leans towards the hereditary whereas sociopathy tends towards the environmental.[53]

...Concerns about validity were a particular problem for the behavioral disorder under consideration, which was termed antisocial personality disorder (APD) and defined purely behaviorally in terms of chronic antisocial behaviors, such as stealing or failure to meet financial obligations. These behaviors could be objectively observed or discovered reasonably accurately and thus independent raters could agree about whether the person under consideration met the criteria, but the diagnostic criteria omitted the less observable, clinical inferential criteria, such as the ability to feel empathy or guilt, that many clinicians thought were the touchstone of the disorder. Such clinicians believed that antisocial behavior could certainly be a product of underlying psychopathology, but antisocial behavior could be produced by many other variables as well. Thus, DSM-III's behavioral definition apparently failed to distinguish true psychopaths, whose antisocial behavior was produced by the underlying clinical pathology, from people whose similar antisocial behavior might be produced by poverty, subcultural influences, or other potential causes. But until good operational measures of the underlying pathology could be developed, it was impossible to make conceptual and empirical progress.source

Setanta wrote:

I believe that your friend Mr. Hare distinguishes between sociopathy and psychopathy, and i believe that Miss Wabbit did also in an earlier post.

I'd love to see where.

I see references from someone named Lykken about sociopathy, but I haven't seen anything by Hare.