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 The Psychopathic Personality

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PostSubject: The Psychopathic Personality   The Psychopathic Personality EmptySun 31 Jan 2010, 12:40 am

The psychopath feels little, if any, guilt. He can commit the most appalling acts, yet view them without remorse. The Psychopath has a warped capacity for love. His emotional relationships, when they exist, are meager, fleeting, and designed to satisfy his own desires. These last two traits, guiltlessness and lovelessness, conspicuously mark the psychopath as different from other men.

I, Psychopath (CBC Documentary)


"The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless vs. the Rest of Us" by Martha Stout Ph.D. (Broadway Books, New York, 2005, ISBN 0-7679-1581-X). Martha Stout is a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School and elaborates on the tales of ruthlessness in everyday life based on her 25 years of practice as a specialist in the treatment of psychological trauma survivors.

Imagine - if you can - not having a conscience, none at all, no feelings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense of concern of the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibility is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools. Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply assumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal experience that they seldom even guess at your condition.

In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world. You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered.

How will you live your life? What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other people (conscience)? The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same. Some people - whether they have a conscience or not - favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There are violent people and non-violent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites.

Maybe you are someone who craves money and power, and though you have no vestige of conscience, you do have a magnificent IQ. You have the driving nature and the intellectual capacity to pursue tremendous wealth and influence, and you are in no way moved by the nagging voice of conscience that prevents other people from doing everything and anything they have to do to succeed. You choose business, politics, the law, banking or international development, or any of a broad array of other power professions, and you pursue your career with a cold passion that tolerates none of the usual moral or legal encumbrances. When it is expedient, you doctor the accounting and shred the evidence, you stab your employees and your clients (or your constituency) in the back, marry for money, tell lethal premeditated lies to people who trust you, attempt to ruin colleagues who are powerful or eloquent, and simply steamroll over groups who are dependent and voiceless. And all of this you do with the exquisite freedom that results from having no conscience whatsoever. You become unimaginably, unassailably, and maybe even globally successful. Why not? With your big brain, and no conscience to rein in your schemes, you can do anything at all.

Or no - let us say you are not quite such a person. You are ambitious, yes, and in the name of success you are willing to do all manner of things that people with conscience would never consider, but you are not an intellectually gifted individual. Your intelligence is above average perhaps, and people think of you as smart, maybe even very smart. But you know in your heart of hearts that you do not have the cognitive wherewithal, or the creativity, to reach the careening heights of power you secretly dreams about, and this makes you resentful of the world at large, and envious of the people around you.

As this sort of person, you ensconce yourself in a niche, or maybe a series of niches, in which you can have some amount of control over small numbers of people. These situations satisfy a little of your desire for power, although you are chronically aggravated at not having more. It chafes to be so free of the ridiculous inner voices that inhibit others from achieving great power, without having enough talent to pursue the ultimate successes yourself. Sometimes you fall into sulky, rageful moods caused by a frustration that no one but you understands.

But you do enjoy jobs that afford you a certain undersupervised control over a few individuals or small groups, preferably people and groups who are relatively helpless or in some way vulnerable. You are a teacher or a psychotherapist, a divorce lawyer or a high school coach. Or maybe you are a consultant of some kind, a broker or a gallery owner or a human services director. Or maybe you do not have a paid position and are instead the president of your condominium association, or a volunteer hospital worker, or a parent. Whatever your job, you manipulate and bully the people who are under your thumb, as often and as outrageously as you can without getting fired or held accountable. You do this for its own sake, even when it serves no purpose except to give you a thrill. Making people jump means you have power - or this is the way you see it - and bullying provides you with an adrenaline rush. It is fun.

Maybe you cannot be a CEO of a multinational corporation, but you can frighten a few people, or cause them to scurry around like chickens, or steal from them, or - maybe, best of all - create situations that cause them to feel bad about themselves. And this is power, especially when the people you manipulate are superior to you in some way. Most invigorating of all is to bring down people who are smarter or more accomplished than you, or perhaps classier, more attractive or popular or morally admirable. This is not only good fun; it is existential vengeance. And without a conscience, it is amazingly easy to do. You quietly lie to the boss or to the boss's boss, cry some crocodile tears, or sabotage a coworker's project, or gaslight a patient (or child), bait people with promises, or provide a little misinformation that will never be traced back to you.

Or now let us say you are a person who has a proclivity for violence or for seeing violence done. You simply murder your coworker, or have her murdered - or your boss, or your ex-spouse, or your wealthy lover's spouse, or anyone else who bothers you. You have to be careful, because if you slip up, you may be caught and punished by the system. But you will never be confronted by your conscience, because you have no conscience. If you decide to kill, the only difficulties will be the external ones. Nothing inside you will ever protest.

Provided you are not forcibly stopped, you can do anything at all. If you are born at the right time, with some access to family fortune, and you have a special talent for whipping up other people's hatred and sense of deprivation, you can arrange to kill large numbers of unsuspecting people. With enough money, you can accomplish this from far away, and you can sit back safely and watch in satisfaction. In fact, terrorism (done from a distance) is the ideal occupation for a person who is possessed of blood lust and no conscience, because if you do it just right, you may be able to make a whole nation jump. And if that is not power, what is?

Or let us imagine the opposite extreme: You have no interest in power. To the contrary, you are the sort of person who really does not want much of anything. Your only real ambition is not to have to exert yourself to get by. You do not want to work like everyone else does. Without a conscience, you can nap or pursue your hobbies or watch television or just hang out somewhere all day long. Living a bit on the fringes, and with some handouts from relatives and friends, you can do this indefinitely. People may whisper to one another that you are an underachiever, or that you are depressed, a sad case, or, in contrast, if they get angry, they may grumble that you are lazy. When they get to know you better, and get really angry, they may scream at you and call you a loser, a bum. But it will never occur to them that you literally do not have a conscience, that in such a fundamental way, your very mind is not the same as theirs.

The panicked feeling of a guilty conscience never squeezes at your heart or wakes you in the night. Despite your lifestyle, you never feel irresponsible, neglectful or so much as embarrassed, although for the sake of appearances, sometimes you pretend that you do. For example, if you are a decent observer of people and what they react to, you may adopt a lifeless facial expression, say how ashamed of your life you are, and talk about how rotten you feel. This you do only because it is more convenient to have people think you are depressed than it is to have them shouting at you all the time, or insisting that you get a job.

You notice that people who do have a conscience feel guilty when they harangue someone they believe to be "depressed" or "troubled." As a matter of fact, to you further advantage, they often feel obliged to take care of such a person. If, despite your relative poverty, you can manage to get yourself into a sexual relationship with someone, this person - who does not suspect what you are really like - may feel particularly obligated. And since all you want is not to have to work, your financier does not have to be especially rich, just relatively conscience-bound.

I trust that imagining yourself as any of these people feels insane to you, because such people are insane, dangerously so. Insane but real - they even have a label. Many mental health professionals refer to the condition of little or no conscience as "anti-social personality disorder," a non-correctable disfigurement of character that is now thought to be present in about 4 percent of the population - that is to say, one in twenty-five people. This condition of missing conscience is called by other names, too, most often "sociopathy," or the somewhat more familiar term psychopathy. Guiltlessness was in fact the first personality disorder to be recognized by psychiatry, and terms that have been used at times over the past century include manie sans délire, psychopathic inferiority, moral insanity, and moral imbecility.

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PostSubject: Re: The Psychopathic Personality   The Psychopathic Personality EmptySun 31 Jan 2010, 1:13 am

From Robert Hare's Web site devoted to the study of Psychopathy....

"Psychopaths are social predators who charm, manipulate and ruthlessly plow their way through life, leaving a broad trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret. Their bewildered victims desperately ask, 'Who are these people?'"

We often think of psychopaths as the disturbed criminals who capture headlines and crowd the nation's prisons. But not all psychopaths are killers. They are more likely to be men and women you know who move through life with supreme self-confidence -- but without a conscience.

The work of Dr. Robert Hare, currently leading American authority on psychopathy, creator of the Hare Scales for testing levels of psychopathy in adolescence and adults, explains what makes the psychopath physiologically different.

He's author of two books....

  • Psychopathy: Theory and Research (1970)
  • Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us (1993, reissued 1999).
An earlier researcher Dr. Hervey Clekley (Mask of Sanity, 1941) described the problem of fully functional, undetectable psychopaths in society. These aren't the obvious monsters from violent backgrounds and long police records that the public associates with the term 'psychopath' popularized by movie and TV thrillers, but real life highly intelligent individuals from any background or race, they could be the boss, the family man next door, even someones husband or wife, the movie star everyone worships, or the person anyone just voted into public office. They can be anyone.

Psychopath isn't synonymous with murderer - a minority of real psychopaths are homicidal, or violent sex offenders. Those are the ones who generally get caught and thus the stereotype.

Psychopath is in essence a person who processes emotion in a way so alien to normal that people born with normal, healthy brain physiology can't imagine it, because we simply aren't wired to experience it.

"This group," he wrote, "plainly marked off from the psychotic by current psychiatric standards does not find a categorical haven among the psycho-neurotic They are also distinguished practically by their ability to adjust without major difficulties in the social group."

Cleckley perceived that, because the syndrome was difficult to spot from outward symptoms, the psychiatric terminology simply failed to offer a way to understand and address such people.

This way it works has to do with this complex of organs deep in the inner brain, the Amygdala: These organs are the seat of human emotions...how we connect input from our environment as emotional feelings....fear, love, anger, and all the rest.

Illustration of the Amygdala:

http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/flash/i/i_04/i_04_cl/i_04_cl_peu/i_04_cl_peu.html

Hare has been able to do research the earlier Dr. Hervey Clekley couldn't to find out the physiological workings of psychopathy in the human brain, with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to see if there were neurological abnormalities. What he and colleagues found was striking.

When non-psychopaths processed negative emotional words (e.g., rape, death, cancer), activity in the Limbic regions of the brain increased.

For psychopaths there was little or no increased activity in these regions. Curiously, however, there was increased activity in other areas. In short, the emotional word does not have the same Limbic implication for psychopaths that it does for normal people.

"They seemed to be like Spock or Data on Star Trek," Hare explains, "What I thought was most interesting was that for the first time ever, as far as I know, we found that there was no activation of the appropriate areas for emotional arousal, but there was over-activation in other parts of the brain, including parts of the brain that are ordinarily devoted to language. Those parts were active, as if they were saying, 'Hey, isn't that interesting.' So they seem to be analyzing emotional material in terms of its linguistic or dictionary meaning."

In other words psychopaths don't feel emotions - they analyze them.

They are entirely detached. Let's face it, it makes them highly efficient and effective, no being fettered by conscience.

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PostSubject: Re: The Psychopathic Personality   The Psychopathic Personality EmptySun 31 Jan 2010, 1:29 am

Psychopaths naturally form social networks, for they easily self-identify. So, the populations of these types of people will be found in high densities in certain segments of society, where the environment is most appealing. So, to find them in sectors where they have perceived power over others is likely, such as in politics, whether pro or con the establishment.

Key Symptoms Psychopathy
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/execution/who/profile.html

Emotional/Interpersonal

  • glib and superficial
  • egocentric and grandiose
  • lack of remorse or guilt
  • lack of empathy
  • deceitful and manipulative
  • shallow emotions

Social Deviance

  • impulsive
  • poor behavior controls
  • need for excitement
  • lack of responsibility
  • early behavior problems
  • adult antisocial behavior

A cautionary note: The Psychopathy Checklist is a complex clinical tool for professional use.[1] What follows is a general summary of the key traits and behaviors of psychopaths. Do not use these symptoms to diagnose yourself or others. A diagnosis requires explicit training and access to the formal scoring manual. If you suspect that someone you know conforms to the profile described here and in the next chapter, and if it is important to you to obtain an expert opinion, seek the services of a qualified (registered) forensic psychologist or psychiatrist.

Also, be aware that people who are not psychopaths may have some of the symptoms described here. Many people are impulsive, or glib, or cold and unfeeling, or antisocial, but this does not mean they are psychopaths. Psychopathy is a syndrome--a cluster of related symptoms.


Glib and Superficial

Psychopaths are often witty and articulate. They can be amusing and entertaining conversationalists, ready with a quick and clever comeback, and can tell unlikely but convincing stories that cast themselves in a good light. They can be very effective in presenting themselves well and are often very likable and charming. To some people, however, they seem too slick and smooth, too obviously insincere and superficial. Astute observers often get the impression that psychopaths are play-acting, mechanically "reading their lines."

One of my raters described an interview she did with a prisoner: "I sat down and took out my clipboard, and the first thing this guy told me was what beautiful eyes I had. He managed to work quite a few compliments on my appearance into the interview -- couldn't get over my hair. So by the time I wrapped things up I was feeling unusually...well, pretty. I'm a wary person, especially on the job, and can usually spot a phony. When I got back outside, I couldn't believe I'd fallen for a line like that."

Psychopaths may ramble and tell stories that seem unlikely in light of what is known about them. Typically, they attempt to appear familiar with sociology, psychiatry, medicine, psychology, philosophy, poetry, literature, art, or law. A signpost to this trait is often a smooth lack of concern at being found out. One of our prison files describes a psychopathic inmate claiming to have advanced degrees in sociology and psychology, when in fact he did not even complete high school. He maintained the fiction during an interview with one of my students, a Ph.D. candidate in psychology; she commented that the inmate was so confident in his use of technical jargon and concepts that those not familiar with the field of psychology might well have been impressed. Variations on this sort of "expert" theme are common among psychopaths....


Egocentric and Grandiose

Psychopaths have a narcissistic and grossly inflated view of their self-worth and importance, a truly astounding egocentricity and sense of entitlement, and see themselves as the center of the universe, as superior beings who are justified in living according to their own rules. "It's not that I don't follow the law," said one of our subjects. "I follow my own laws. I never violate my own rules." She then described these rules in terms of "looking out for number one."

When another psychopath, in prison for a variety of crimes including robbery, rape, and fraud, was asked if he had any weaknesses, he replied, "I don't have any weaknesses, except maybe I'm too caring." On a 10-point scale he rated himself "an all-round 10. I would have said 12, but that would be bragging. If I had a better education I'd be brilliant."

The grandiosity and pomposity of some psychopaths often emerges in dramatic fashion in the courtroom. For example, it is not unusual for them to criticize or fire their lawyers and to take over their own defense, usually with disastrous results. "My partner got a year. I got two because of a shithead lawyer," said one of our subjects. He later handled his own appeal and saw his sentence increased to three years.

Psychopaths often come across as arrogant, shameless braggarts -- self-assured, opinionated, domineering, and cocky. They love to have power and control over others and seem unable to believe that other people have valid opinions different from theirs. They appear charismatic or "electrifying" to some people.

Psychopaths are seldom embarrassed about their legal, financial, or personal problems. Rather, they see them as temporary setbacks, the results of bad luck, unfaithful friends, or an unfair and incompetent system.

Although psychopaths often claim to have specific goals, they show little understanding of the qualifications required -- they have no idea how to achieve their goals and little or no chance of attaining them, given their track record and lack of sustained interest in education. The psychopathic inmate thinking about parole might outline vague plans to become a property tycoon or a lawyer for the poor. One inmate, not particularly literate, managed to copyright the title of a book he was planning to write about himself and was already counting the fortune his bestseller would bring....


A Lack of Remorse or Guilt

Psychopaths show a stunning lack of concern for the devastating effects their actions have on others. Often they are completely forthright about the matter, calmly stating that they have no sense of guilt, are not sorry for the pain and destruction they have caused, and that there is no reason for them to be concerned.

When asked if he had any regrets about stabbing a robbery victim who subsequently spent three months in the hospital as a result of his wounds, one of our subjects replied, "Get real! He spends a few months in a hospital and I rot here. I cut him up a bit, but if I wanted to kill him I would have slit his throat. That's the kind of guy I am; I gave him a break." Asked if he regretted any of his crimes, he said, "I don't regret nothing. What's done is done. There must have been a reason why I did it at the time, and that is why it was done...."

On the other hand, psychopaths sometimes verbalize remorse but then contradict themselves in words or actions. Criminals in prison quickly learn that remorse is an important word. When asked if he experienced remorse over a murder he'd committed, one young inmate told us, "Yeah, sure, I feel remorse." Pressed further, he said that he didn't "feel bad inside about it."

I was once dumbfounded by the logic of an inmate who described his murder victim as having benefited from the crime by learning "a hard lesson about life."

"The guy only had himself to blame," another inmate said of the man he'd murdered in an argument about paying a bar tab. "Anybody could have seen I was in a rotten mood that night. What did he want to go and bother me for?" He continued, "Anyway, the guy never suffered. Knife wounds to an artery are the easiest way to go."

Psychopaths' lack of remorse or guilt is associated with a remarkable ability to rationalize their behavior and to shrug off personal responsibility for actions that cause shock and disappointment to family, friends, associates, and others who have played by the rules. Usually they have handy excuses for their behavior, and in some cases they deny that it happened at all....


Lack of Empathy

Many of the characteristics displayed by psychopaths -- especially their egocentricity, lack of remorse, shallow emotions, and deceitfulness are closely associated with a profound lack of empathy (an inability to construct a mental and emotional "facsimile" of another person). They seem unable to "get into the skin" or to "walk in the shoes" of others, except in a purely intellectual sense. The feelings of other people are of no concern to psychopaths.

In some respects they are like the emotionless androids depicted in science fiction, unable to imagine what real humans experience. One rapist, high on the Psychopathy Checklist, commented that he found it hard to empathize with his victims. "They are frightened, right? But, you see, I don't really understand it. I've been scared myself, and it wasn't unpleasant."

Psychopaths view people as little more than objects to be used for their own gratification. The weak and the vulnerable -- whom they mock, rather than pity--are favorite targets. "There is no such thing, in the psychopathic universe, as the merely weak," wrote psychologist Robert Rieber. "Whoever is weak is also a sucker; that is, someone who demands to be exploited...."[2]


Deceitful and Manipulative

Lying, deceiving, and manipulation are natural talents for psychopaths.

With their powers of imagination in gear and focused on themselves, psychopaths appear amazingly unfazed by the possibility -- or even by the certainty -- of being found out. When caught in a lie or challenged with the truth, they are seldom perplexed or embarrassed -- they simply change their stories or attempt to rework the facts so that they appear to be consistent with the lie. The results are a series of contradictory statements and a thoroughly confused listener. Much of the lying seems to have no motivation other than what psychologist Paul Ekman refers to as a "duping delight...."[3]

Psychopaths seem proud of their ability to lie. When asked if she lied easily, one woman with a high score on the Psychopathy Checklist laughed and replied, "I'm the best. I'm really good at it, I think because I sometimes admit to something bad about myself. They'd think, well, if she's admitting to that she must be telling the truth about the rest." She also said that she sometimes "salts the mine" with a nugget of truth." If they think some of what you say is true, they usually think it's all true."

Many observers get the impression that psychopaths sometimes are unaware that they're lying; it is as if the words take on a life of their own, unfettered by the speaker's knowledge that the observer is aware of the facts. The psychopath's indifference to being identified as a liar is truly extraordinary; it causes the listener to wonder about the speaker's sanity. More often, though, the listener is taken in....


Shallow Emotions

"I'm the most cold-blooded son of a bitch that you'll ever meet.''[4] So Ted Bundy described himself to the police following his final arrest.

Psychopaths seem to suffer a kind of emotional poverty that limits the range and depth of their feelings. While at times they appear cold and unemotional, they are prone to dramatic, shallow, and short-lived displays of feeling. Careful observers are left with the impression that they are play-acting and that little is going on below the surface.

Sometimes they claim to experience strong emotions but are unable to describe the subtleties of various affective states. For example, they equate love with sexual arousal, sadness with frustration, and anger with irritability. "I believe in emotions: hate, anger, lust, and greed," said Richard Ramirez, the "Night Stalker...."[5]

The apparent lack of normal affect and emotional depth led psychologists J. H. Johns and H. C. Quay to say that the psychopath "knows the words but not the music."[6] For example, in a rambling book about hate, violence, and rationalizations for his behavior, Jack Abbott made this revealing comment: "There are emotions -- a whole spectrum of them -- that I know only through words, through reading and in my immature imagination. I can imagine I feel these emotions (know, therefore, what they are), but I do not. At age thirty-seven I am barely a precocious child. My passions are those of a boy...."[7]

[1] The Psychopathy Checklist is published by Multi-Health Systems (908 Niagra Falls Blvd, North Tonawanda, NY 14120-2060; in Canada, 65 Overlea Blvd, Toronto, Ontario, M4H1P1) and is available to qualified users. The items in the Psychotherapy Checklist are scored by combining interview, case-history, and archival data. However, some investigators have obtained valid scores solely from extensive, good quality file and archival information (e.g., G.T. Harris, M.E. Rice, & C.A. Cormier. Psychotherapy and violent recidivism. Law and Human Behavior, 1991, 15, 625-637).

[2] Robert Rieber (in press). The Psychotherapy of Everyday Life amd the Institutionalization of Distress. New York: Basic Books.

[3] Paul Ekman (1985). Telling Lies. New York: Norton.

[4] Michaud and Aynesworth (1989). p. 3.

[5] From the television program A Current Affair, October 10, 1991.

[6] J. H. Johns and H. C. Quay (1962). The effect of social reward on verbal conditioning in psychopathic and neurotic military offenders. Journal of Consulting Psychology 36, 217-20.

[7] Jack Abbott (1981). In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison. New York: Random House. p. 13.

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PostSubject: Re: The Psychopathic Personality   The Psychopathic Personality EmptySat 20 Feb 2010, 7:02 pm

Thanks for posting, I thought it to be more informative than the wiki page.

What I am wondering is this: is it possible for a person to have a "condition" of not being able to experience guilt and empathy, and yet still follow a strong moral code?

Suppose that his aspirations lie in the realm of intellectual achievement, and sadistic tendencies do not exist. It may be desirable to put effort toward building a healthy state of the others around him, so that his own goals can be achieved with their help (such as the help of researchers who can process material that he has no time for on his own). In this case, the individual brings a product of value to the world (innovation and discovery), while he also contributes positively to the lives of others (by being fair, truthful, and giving useful advice), with the sole motivation being his own self-interest. Yet this is a win-win for everybody.

Can we have a split along a line of morality in the emotionally-handicapped crowd? (Or emotionally-enlightened, depending on perspective.)


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PostSubject: Re: The Psychopathic Personality   The Psychopathic Personality EmptySun 21 Feb 2010, 2:25 am

ArtificialThought wrote:
Thanks for posting, I thought it to be more informative than the wiki page.

What I am wondering is this: is it possible for a person to have a "condition" of not being able to experience guilt and empathy, and yet still follow a strong moral code?

Suppose that his aspirations lie in the realm of intellectual achievement, and sadistic tendencies do not exist. It may be desirable to put effort toward building a healthy state of the others around him, so that his own goals can be achieved with their help (such as the help of researchers who can process material that he has no time for on his own). In this case, the individual brings a product of value to the world (innovation and discovery), while he also contributes positively to the lives of others (by being fair, truthful, and giving useful advice), with the sole motivation being his own self-interest. Yet this is a win-win for everybody.

Can we have a split along a line of morality in the emotionally-handicapped crowd? (Or emotionally-enlightened, depending on perspective.)
My understanding is that the psychopathic personality has no moral compass, but emulates humans around them so as to fit-in and remain undiscovered. So, they have no innate morality, but I imagine if those around them are highly moral they will attempt to behave within those parameters.

I think your example would be interesting to share with Bob Hare, the author of Snakes in Suites, to see how he would answer.

I think it's possible for others to benefit around the psychopath if the psychopath deems that it is in there own best interest. On the other hand, psychopaths recognize each other, and tend to form social networks with other psychopaths. So, I think sabotage of the project is more probably, typically leaving before the impact of that sabotage is known. Personally, I have never worked or been involved socially with a psychopath where a project came to fruition to the benefit of all.

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PostSubject: Re: The Psychopathic Personality   The Psychopathic Personality EmptySun 21 Feb 2010, 6:16 pm

C1 wrote:
So, I think sabotage of the project is more probably, typically leaving before the impact of that sabotage is known.

Unless the project is the source of their own well-being (financially), and the manifestation of their own creative process (thereby increasing social admiration and reinforcing the ego).

Sabotage is more likely when the project is not their own or when their future success does not depend on it.

C1 wrote:
... I imagine if those around them are highly moral they will attempt to behave within those parameters.

This is likely to be the case.
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