It scared me when I found out such a high percentage of people are sociopaths. I know many are non-violent and live within social norms, but it still unsettles me. How can you have empathy for someone who has no empathy for you or anyone else? Someone who has no guilt?
You're assuming that what we call psychopaths have no empathy and no guilt. I realize that this is the stock definition, but I find it unconvincing and dangerously misleading.
Humans are good at rationalization, and bad at self-reporting. "No guilt" and "no empathy" can be explained by bravado and self-delusion.
Instead, my model goes something like this: there's a spectrum of selfishness. The people we label psychopaths have certain selfish desires that outweigh (for them, sometimes) your human rights. E.g. in an extreme case, an abuser's desire for sexual gratification is more important to them than your right to not be molested.
Dialing it back, consider people who text while driving, or who rush through a yellow light when they could easily stop. In that moment, they aren't seeing the vehicles around them as being occupied by people with all the same rights as themselves. They see vehicles ... nuisances ... obstacles to be routed around. They temporarily lack empathy.
If you go looking for it, there's a lot of sociopathic behaviour on display in daily life, from people who we would never label psychopaths, nor completely lacking empathy.
So, I think that psychopaths are people who are extremely selfish in some specific ways, but that they are not fundamentally "other".
That might be the case. I don't see why it's not possible some people just don't have whatever it is that causes empathy, rather than it being a complete spectrum.
Everyone acts sociopathic to strangers. Empathy can't be felt towards an abstract concept. A normal person is capable of feeling empathy. They could get to know the person or even just learn a little about them and imagine them being in their place. A true sociopath wouldn't be able to do that.
My point is that we don't know that. We're taking that on authority. I'm questioning the basic premise that there are a significant number of people who don't feel any empathy. More than people who congenitally don't perceive pain, say.
None of the actions / behaviours I've seen that are attributed to psychopaths require a total absence of empathy. Instead, just extreme selfishness, impulsivity (delay connecting actions to consequences) and a strong ability to rationalize one's own actions post-facto.
> It scared me when I found out such a high percentage of people are sociopaths.
What, from psychologists? You do understand, don't you, that most of psychology is based on anecdotes, yes? Consider the term "sociopath" itself -- is there a thermometer or a high-tech scanner that flashes a red warning when a sociopath is under the sensor? Or is the label a matter of opinion?
To give you a feel for how loose psychology is, for decades psychiatrists and psychologists treated a condition called "Asperger Syndrome", marked by a tendency to focus one's attention on very few things, even just one, and poor social skills. Eventually people complained that what was being described might be normal, even advantageous behavior, as a result of which a split took place -- half the psychologists begin making lists of famous, very successful people who were supposedly mentally ill with the condition (Albert Einstein, Thomas Jefferson, Bill Gates and many more), and the other half petitioned to have the condition removed from the profession's diagnostic guidebook.
The critics won that battle, Asperger's has been removed, and in a delicious irony, there is now a new therapy meant to get people to focus more, show more intense dedication to a few pursuits, or even just one. Sound familiar? The new fad is called "Grit", and it extols the virtue of the same behaviors that the Asperger's people thought marked one as mentally ill and in need of treatment.
In short, until about five years ago, people paid psychologists to be treated for the defect of too much focus and concentration on too few activities. Now they pay psychologists to develop that very ability -- it's now fashionable to be focused.
To see how psychology works, all you need to do is read its history, see how many fads come and go without any serious science being done. But this era is drawing to a close -- people are beginning to abandon psychiatry and psychology, including some heavyweights like the sitting director of the NIMH:
I'm relatively certain sociopath is a real thing. I don't know how accurate the tests/surveys are or whether it's more like a continuous spectrum rather than a binary on/off switch. But I know there are real full blown sociopaths with no empathy at all, and I have learned it's more common than I thought that it was.
I don't know if there is a name for that fallacy but you seem to be disputing an entire field of science because of a single controversy over another unrelated issue.
> whether it's more like a continuous spectrum rather than a binary on/off switch.
This seems like a reasonable starting assumption when talking about a personality trait, doesn't it? Especially one that is sometimes but not always advantageous to the possessor.
I've met people that seemed to me to be moderate sociopaths, and a great many people--maybe all people--seem to be able to turn off their empathy in particular circumstances.
> I'm relatively certain sociopath is a real thing.
It's not a question of it being real, it's a matter of science and objectivity. If we can't reliably measure it, it doesn't matter that it exists, because anyone can claim to have, or not have, the condition.
> ... you seem to be disputing an entire field of science because of a single controversy over another unrelated issue.
I'm not doing that. The director of the NIMH is doing that. His reasons are excellent -- psychology is not a science and cannot be relied on to produce repeatable results.
Quote: "While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been “reliability” – each edition has ensured that clinicians use the same terms in the same ways. The weakness is its lack of validity."
I couldn't have said it better myself -- the DSM, the "Bible" of mental health, is simply not valid, and cannot be used for scientific investigations.
> I don't know if there is a name for that fallacy ...
Paying attention to evidence, or the lack thereof, is not a logical fallacy. Ignoring an absence of evidence, and of scientific discipline, is.
What's ironic about this exchange is that the linked article makes the same point. Its author was forced to the conclusion that even the high-tech scans that led to his conclusion, far removed from ordinary psychological practice, are very questionable and sometimes flat wrong.
Psychology is certainly a science that has produced tons of repeatable results and discovered lots of things that were not previously known. Like any science it has provided insights that make sense of the world and it has useful applications in treating mentally ill people, for example.
I'm not entirely certain what you are claiming or disputing here.
>It's not a question of it being real, it's a matter of science and objectivity. If we can't reliably measure it, it doesn't matter that it exists, because anyone can claim to have, or not have, the condition.
That's really misleading. Psychological symptoms are not that subjective. Behavior is directly observable. And even subjective measurements are still data points. Not to mention things like brain scans.
> Psychology is certainly a science that has produced tons of repeatable results ...
False, and false. Psychology is not science (defined as a discipline steered by empirical evidence) and has not produced any repeatable, testable, empirical, falsifiable evidence or theories. Why? Because psychology's topic is the mind, and the mind is not -- cannot be -- a source for empirical evidence.
For psychology to become a science, it would have to study an empirical organ like the brain. Instead, psychology relies on self-reporting by the owners of the minds under study. This has always been, and is now, an impenetrable barrier to entry into the world of science.
Quote: "But to claim it [psychology] is 'science' is inaccurate. Actually, it's worse than that. It's an attempt to redefine science. Science, redefined, is no longer the empirical analysis of the natural world; instead, it is any topic that sprinkles a few numbers around. This is dangerous because, under such a loose definition, anything can qualify as science. And when anything qualifies as science, science can no longer claim to have a unique grasp on secular truth."
> For psychology to become a science, it would have to study an empirical organ like the brain.
No, it could just study an empirical thing like behavior (which, incidentally, it does.)
> Instead, psychology relies on self-reporting by the owners of the minds under study.
Some branches of psychology study the relationship between other empirical facts and people's self-described experience of mental states, but both the other fact and the descriptions are empirical facts.
>> For psychology to become a science, it would have to study an empirical organ like the brain.
> >No, it could just study an empirical thing like behavior (which, incidentally, it does.)
Anthropologists study behavior. Psychologists study behavior, then come to unsupportable conclusions about the mental sources of that behavior. It is the second step that (a) distinguishes psychology from anthropology, and (b) prevents psychology from taking any claim on science.
In a nutshell, psychology studies the mind. The mind, not a physical organ, cannot provide empirical evidence, evidence gathered from reality in a way that forces agreement about its meaning between similarly equipped observers. Science requires empirical evidence. Therefore psychology is not a science.
> Some branches of psychology study the relationship between other empirical facts and people's self-described experience of mental states, but both the other fact and the descriptions are empirical facts.
So which part of "Psychology's topic is the mind" are you not getting? No mind, no psychology. Everything that psychology studies relates to the mind, the field's topic of study.
Quote: "But to claim it [psychology] is 'science' is inaccurate. Actually, it's worse than that. It's an attempt to redefine science. Science, redefined, is no longer the empirical analysis of the natural world; instead, it is any topic that sprinkles a few numbers around. This is dangerous because, under such a loose definition, anything can qualify as science. And when anything qualifies as science, science can no longer claim to have a unique grasp on secular truth."
> In a nutshell, psychology studies the mind. The mind, not a physical organ, cannot provide empirical evidence
The mind is a name given to a collection of epiphonemena of various physical sources, included, but not limited to, the brain and other physical organs. As such, it is no less a valid subject of empirical investigation as any other collection of physical phenomenon.
> Science requires empirical evidence.
And psychology gathers empirical evidence from environmental facts and their relation to physical behaviors.
The DSM ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manu... ) was created by the psychiatric profession and psychiatry is quite different than the field of psychology. Disclaimer: I have a B.S. in psychology (and a B.S. in Computer Engineering) so I'm probably biased.
But I do agree the DSM is useless. I think psychiatry is a reductionist framework that tries to mechanize everything about a person, treating them like a engineering problem. But it is only useful in limited circumstances, much less than it claims, and from that follows all the controversy around anti-depressants, the overuse of powerful psychiatric drugs in children, etc.
To use a bad analogy, thinking everything can be viewed through a psychiatric framework is like trying to debug software errors by analyzing each of the individual chips of the motherboard. People are a lot more complex than that, and so psychology is the more appropriate framework to handle this fuzziness. Psychiatry is only useful when the person's biology is definitely out of spec and most people's aren't.
Not really. Psychiatrists and psychologists receive the same psychological training. Psychiatrists hold a medical degree, psychologists don't. Psychiatrists can prescribe drugs, psychologists cannot. In a nutshell.
> Psychiatry is only useful when the person's biology is definitely out of spec and most people's aren't.
Wait, what? If a person's biology is out of spec, a mental doctor is the wrong choice. The mind is not part of biology, but biology can certainly play havoc with the workings of the mind. Therefore if a biological problem is suspected, one would want to consult a real doctor, a practitioner in the biological realm.
Treating a biological problem with mental therapy would be like giving a cancer patient a more comfortable pillow -- someone will surely argue that it's beneficial, but it's equally obvious that it's missing the point.
Also, surely you have noticed that more and more "mental" conditions have turned out to be physical ailments with mental symptoms, yes? There will be more of those, and I predict that, in the final analysis, no purely mental illnesses will remain.
> it's a matter of science and objectivity. If we can't reliably measure it, it doesn't matter that it exists, because anyone can claim to have, or not have, the condition.
>> it's a matter of science and objectivity. If we can't reliably measure it, it doesn't matter that it exists, because anyone can claim to have, or not have, the condition.
> Does this apply to people experiencing pain?
Yes, because pain has been shown to be very subjective -- disappearing when a pain-relieving drug was claimed to have been administered but wasn't, as many studies have shown, or appearing out of nowhere with no empirical cause.
So yes -- most certainly. Pain is not a reliable form of scientific evidence, because it relies on self-reporting (among other reasons).
For utilitarian purposes, sure. But I'm not sure how I feel about someone who would have no problem killing me or torturing me if it was ever a benefit to them. And I'm not sure how I feel about having empathy for someone who can't give it in return.
> I'm not sure how I feel about having empathy for someone who can't give it in return
That is always the hard part because at some point pretend empathy always slips up and isn't as deep as real empathy. Some people are able to make up the gap using manipulation (not myself).
