The Dark Triad – Part 4 Psychopath
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The hallmark of psychopathy is a lack of empathy. In fact when it comes to empathy, psychopaths have none; they have special difficulty recognizing fear or sadness on people’s faces or in their voices.
In a 2002 Study, David Kosson and Yana Suchy, asked psychopathic inmates to name the emotion expressed in each of 30 faces; compared to controls, Psychopaths had a
significantly lower rate of accuracy in recognizing disgusted facial affect.
Psychopaths are glib and superficially charming, and many psychopaths are excellent mimics of normal human emotion.
The consensus among researchers is that psychopathy stems from a specific neurological disorder which is biological in origin and present from birth. It is estimated that one percent of the general population are psychopaths.
For Psychopaths other people are just a mark, to be duped, used and discarded. They lack any sense of guilt or remorse for any harm they may have caused others, instead rationalizing the behavior, blaming someone else, or denying it outright.
Psychopaths also feel no anticipatory fears, they are virtually oblivious to the threat of punishment.
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I’m curious as to why you’re so eager to dismiss all psychopaths as being one and the same – all evil. Psychopathy is not properly understood; it suffers from a massive selection bias problem for subjects (most research into it takes its subjects from those who have come into contact with the criminal justice system). It should be no surprise that criminals exhibit criminal behaviour. This isn’t helped by the lack of incentives for psychopaths to come forward (they have no real reason to, and a lot of reasons to hide it from people like you).
So really, how can you be so sure that such a massive generalisation that all people without empathy/guilt/etc. are cruel and manipulative is true? The evidence is very shaky, and, even if there were large amounts of inductive evidence, I’d have thought we’d have moved past collective punishment of demographics (unless you want to go lock up innocent poor black youths due to their high crime rate?).
I’d say a large problem here is that most people cannot imagine why they wouldn’t act cruelly if unconstrained by their negative emotional responses to doing wrong. That, I would say, is a damning indictment of most people’s ‘morality’ (or rather, queasiness).
While you make a good point regarding the generalization of the psychopath based on a prison populace, the fact still stands that the traits that make someone psychopathic are widely regarded as negative. Whether this makes someone evil or not; which the article doesn’t explicitly state, is irrelevant. The point being made is that the psychopath is a person whose function is based on impulsive behavior, and a lack of of empathy; both considered to be negative qualities by most. Despite the negative regard to the psychopath based on these qualities (understandably), the article doesn’t make the connection between psychopathy and evil. With all do respect, don’t make contextual connections that aren’t there, despite your personal opinion.