Psychopathic (criminals) have empathy switch

[JohnB]

As it seems that psychopaths also become business leaders and politicians, I wonder if there's some way of switching on the empathy for those members of TPTB who are imposing austerity on the peasants, while protecting the interests of their mates.

Psychopaths do not lack empathy, rather they can switch it on at will, according to new research.

Placed in a brain scanner, psychopathic criminals watched videos of one person hurting another and were asked to empathise with the individual in pain.

Only when asked to imagine how the pain receiver felt did the area of the brain related to pain light up.

Scientists, reporting in Brain, say their research explains how psychopaths can be both callous and charming.

The team proposes that with the right training, it could be possible to help psychopaths activate their "empathy switch", which could bring them a step closer to rehabilitation.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-23431793

[PS_RalphW]

Which sort of makes you wonder if the psychopathic brain is the more highly evolved, and that is why they tend to rise to the top of hierarchies where their reproductive success rates will be higher.

shudder.

Hopefully an evolutionary blind alley.

[Little John]

Which sort of makes you wonder if the psychopathic brain is the more highly evolved, and that is why they tend to rise to the top of hierarchies where their reproductive success rates will be higher.

shudder.

Hopefully an evolutionary blind alley.

For every one psychopath who makes it big, there are a hundred in prison or in the gutter. It's a high risk evolutionary strategy. The trouble is, for the rest of us, that 1% of them who make it big then go on to have a disproportionate influence on the wider political, economic and cultural systems in which we must all act. In other words, their wealth and power allows them to set the stage and compose the tune that the rest of us must dance to. So, we all end up acting a little bit like psychopaths ourselves in our daily economic lives since that is what the system we live in rewards. However, it doesn't come naturally to the rest of us and so a large minority of us suffer psychologically.

[PS_RalphW]

The man of one of the families in our village has all the symptoms of a psychopath - superficially charming, trained to be a priest, yet spends his time in on-line poker games making money from outplaying gambling addicts. He now has a job as a children's swimming instructor, and that makes me extremely nervous.

This family is deeply dysfunctional. Wife kept having kids (4 daughters) until they got a son. One daughter was kicked out at 17 and now lives in sheltered housing. The son is going the same way, always filthy, never in uniform, totally physically unregulated and constantly shouted at by his mum. When he was pre-school age he would bite on a regular basis.

Sad thing is, the boy is far better behaved at school and could have grown up quite normal.

I would be ashamed to have such a family.

[RenewableCandy]

As far as Evolution goes, I guess the relevant question here is, do they have more (surviving) kids than the rest of us? Also, are there some of the rest of us who are better-equipped to deal with them than others are? For example, by "seeing through" the charm and alerting (and convincing) others.

[fifthcolumn]

Psychopaths probably make good warlords. History is rife with examples of tribes/countries etc invading each other so the genes for people like that have probably always been around.

It's also (sadly) a very successful mating strategy: in places like the Mexican border region which is currently under the domination of a bunch of gangsters, it's not uncommon for the gangsters to simply snatch young women off the street that take their fancy, have their way and then dump them back on the street. With Slavery et al being "allowed" in historical times it's likely those types of people (warlords/gangsters etc) operated similar tactics thus psychopath genes never got bred out.

An interesting question to me is this: in Anglo culture (i.e. UK/US/Can/Oz etc) the sh!t doesn't flow uphill to the managers and thus psycho behaviour is more or less "rewarded" because it goes unpunished. Is the same thing true in places like Germany where they are forced to take into consideration the opinion of the workers? Are there less psycho leaders in Germany than in other places (obviously excluding the moustachioud guy from the 1940s)?

[RenewableCandy]

Snatching women off the street ad then dumping them is not an optimal mating strategy, as any resulting progeny will be unwanted and therefore probably aborted. Unless they also ban abortion. Oh hang on a minute...

[JavaScriptDonkey]

And yet we have psychopaths amongst us.

More grist for the nature vs nurture debate.

For what it's worth I think some people are just born evil and take pleasure in causing grief to all around them.

[Little John]

And yet we have psychopaths amongst us.

More grist for the nature vs nurture debate.

For what it's worth I think some people are just born evil and take pleasure in causing grief to all around them.

Psychopaths are certainly born with such tendencies, though it is possible, as it is possible with all aspects of human psychology, to nurture a psychopath. It's just not very likely that’s all in the same way it is not likely for someone to learn to be fully schizophrenic. Mostly, they're born.

Where it gets complicated is that although someone will be born with psychopathic tendencies, it is possible to rear them in such a way as to minimise or re-direct those tendencies towards more pro-social behaviours. Again, though, such individual environmental variables get smoothed out in the statistical distribution so that all that remains constant across that distribution is the inherent tendency. In other words, in the long run, the genes win out if the genetic effect is large enough and, with extreme psychopaths, the effect is large enough.

As for what percentage of the population possesses such inherent tendencies, it's actually tiny, thank God. The trouble is, although an even tinier fraction still of these psychopaths actually mange to succeed in life, of those that do, they tend to then have a disproportionate effect on a large number of other people's lives. It's the anonymity of large non-communalist societies that allows them to succeed. In small, communalist societies where there is much greater economic/political and social transparency, they are exposed early on and so suffer for their behaviour at the hands of their fellows.

[jonny2mad]

"Civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been built on slavery and mass murder. Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, cheat, steal, torture, manipulate, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse, in order to establish their own sense of security through domination." - Andrzej Lobaczewski, in "Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes"



I think it is likely psychopaths have a empathy switch and a in group out group

[Little John]

"Civilization, as we know it, is largely the creation of psychopaths. All civilizations, our own included, have been built on slavery and mass murder. Psychopaths have played a disproportionate role in the development of civilization, because they are hard-wired to lie, kill, cheat, steal, torture, manipulate, and generally inflict great suffering on other humans without feeling any remorse, in order to establish their own sense of security through domination." - Andrzej Lobaczewski, in "Political Ponerology: A science on the nature of evil adjusted for political purposes"



I think it is likely psychopaths have a empathy switch and a in group out group

Sadly, I must agree with much of this. However, given the above, you must surely concede, then, that the nature of many societies is not, in fact, the sum total of the nature of the majority of its citizens, but is actually a reflection of the psychology of the relatively few psychopaths who have a disproportionate influence on how those societies operate.