A neuroscientist who wants us to be nicer to psychopaths

Think of a psychopath and you probably think of someone dangerous, someone whose reckless self-interest leads to great harm to others and considerable success to themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, while just around 1 percent of people in the general population suffer from psychopathy, roughly 1 in 5 men in prison show signs of this and research has also found a link between corporate leadership and psychopathic traits.

But as painful as it is to know a psychopath, it’s not necessarily fun to be one. Abigail Marsha professor of psychology and neuroscience at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, studies people with psychopathic traits, most of whom lead ordinary lives among us. She revealed something surprising: many people don’t want to be psychopaths at all.

Researchers are still refining the exact definition, but psychopathy is characterized callousness, lack of empathy, reckless social charm and impulsiveness. Checklist screening tools assess behaviors including pathological lying, grandiosity, manipulative tendencies, and constant need for stimulation.

Studies they found psychopaths are hyper-focused on their goals and don’t automatically recognize others’ points of view like most people. And scientists including Marsh found that the brains of psychopaths are physically different.

Marsh examines the roots of psychopathy by selecting people with very high scores from the general population, rather than prisons. Last year, her team published a studies in which they were able to quantify for the first time how people with psychopathy value the well-being of others. talk to The new scientistMarsh reflects on the surprising findings and what it’s like to feel compassion for people with psychopathy.

Sabrina Weiss: How do psychopaths tend to experience life?
Abigail Marsh: They generally report not feeling strong emotions such as fear, guilt, remorse, and love. Some believe that the lack of these emotions makes their lives easier. But otherwise their lives are harder. Many spend their lives “masking” their true selves – sometimes to manipulate others, sometimes just to make social interactions smoother.

They experience a lot of stigma. Psychopathy is seen as a permanent moral stain rather than a psychological disorder that has similar roots to any other psychological disorder, namely a mixture of genetics and life experiences that change the way one’s brain develops and behaves. These are not mysterious processes caused by supernatural forces. They are biological processes that can be treated.

What do we know about the brains of people with psychopathy?
It is not possible to “diagnose” psychopathy or any other mental disorder from a brain scan. However, when we look at groups of people with psychopathy versus those without, we see differences on average. The former are quite consistent differences in an area of ​​the brain called amygdala. In both children and adults with psychopathy, it is less than average.

Research in my lab has found that children with smaller amygdalae tend to show worsening traits and behaviors associated with psychopathy over time. The amygdala is also less active in response to information that other people are scared or in danger, which may help explain why people with psychopathy are more likely to threaten and harm others. Other studies have found that people with psychopathy have anatomical or functional differences in other areas of the brain, such as striatumwhich coordinates our response to expected rewards, and parts from the front barkwhich use emotional information to make decisions and regulate behavior.

How can we treat psychopathy?
One study found that three years of therapy can help people with psychopathy moderate their emotions, but there are very few public health resources that go into treating personality disorders, especially those characterized by antisocial behavior. Most people don’t care what happens to people with psychopathy because they don’t evoke sympathy. But we have a moral obligation to provide care, just as we do for people with any other disorder they did not choose. It is tragic to think that there are people out there who are struggling to find someone who can heal them. But we talked to a few people who managed to figure out ways to improve themselves.

How can psychopaths change?
We have found several people who have hacked into long-term behavior change. In some cases, it was because of a relationship they didn’t want to lose. One very memorable person told us that he was just faking it until he made it. He acted like he thought he was going to act like a nice person. After about a year and a half, it started to feel natural and even comfortable. I found it very encouraging. This is exactly what clinical psychologists recommend: practice the behavior you want to adopt until it becomes a habit. Several people we spoke to also created their own moral codes, not out of regret or shame, but because they wanted to become a certain type of person.

What moral codes did they create?
One really interesting example was a person who had very aggressive desires but decided that it was acceptable to act on them only in support of social justice causes. Sometimes he would go out and look for people who had said or done offensive things, such as a sexist comment, or even lunge at them to do so. But for the most part he was able to effectively regulate his behavior by using the rules he made for himself.

How common is it for psychopaths to want to change?
It’s hard to put a number on it. In interviews, many people say they are unhappy with the way their lives are going and acknowledge that they are engaging in persistent maladaptive behaviors. They would like to change but are struggling to find a cure.

I should add that most of these people approached us after taking a screening test on the website of the organization I co-founded, so they already had some insight. We do not yet have formal data on what proportion of people with psychopathy recognize that there is something different about them. Research into other neurological and personality disorders suggests that many lack this insight—a phenomenon known as anosognosia.

I notice you don’t use the word “psychopath”. You say “people with psychopathy”.
I used to be, just like everyone else. But clinical psychology has moved toward a more person-centered approach, where we avoid defining people by their disorder. Now we say a person with depression or a person with schizophrenia rather than depressed and schizophrenic. But many people do not apply this logic to personality disorders. Labeling people as psychopaths or narcissists is unfortunately still quite common.

What led you to study psychopathy?
It started with my curiosity about what drives people to care about the well-being of others. Part of my research focuses on very altruistic people, and my interest was sparked by a personal experience I had when a stranger rescued me after a car accident. I was driving late at night to my hometown of Tacoma, Washington—also, incidentally, the hometown of Ted Bundy, the Green River Killer, and one or two other very famous serial killers. As I was crossing the overpass and swerving to avoid him, a dog ran in front of my car causing my car to spin until I ended up in the fast lane with nowhere to go and the car’s engine died.

I almost certainly would have been hit and killed by another car, except that a stranger appeared out of nowhere. I later found out that he had stopped at the exit ramp on the opposite side of the freeway and ran to help me. He jumped into my car, restarted it and drove me to safety. It was one of those experiences that will profoundly change your perspective on human beings.

So this incredible experience sparked your interest in studying the good in people—and ultimately sparked your interest in the bad as well?
Yes. About four years later, while I was with friends on New Year’s in Las Vegas, I had another accident. A stranger groped me, and when I slapped him, he punched me in the face and broke my nose. It was a profoundly shocking moment that changed my appreciation of what humans are capable of.

How do you find participants for your study, other than a screening test?
My most recent study looked at just over 700 people, 288 of whom had very high psychopathy scores and participated in an experiment after taking a screening test through Society for the Prevention of Aggressive Disorders. The website helps people with aggression disorders and their families, and those who score very high will receive a pop-up asking them to participate in the research.

For studies that require people to come to the lab for brain imaging, we use flyers with phrases like “Are you adventurous?”. This type of language was first used in newspaper ads in the 1970s recruitment of people with psychopathy. We used it and actually had pretty good success with it.

IN your new studyyou measured how people with psychopathic traits value the well-being of others. Why focus on it?
Antisocial behavior involves gaining something at someone else’s expense. These include theft, assault, even risky driving behaviour, which was the most common form of antisocial behavior we observed in participants with high psychopathy. People do it because it’s fun, they’re in a hurry, and they don’t care about the potential risks and costs to other people. But the difference in how much people with psychopathy value what happens to others versus themselves has not really been explicitly measured before.

Did any of the results surprise you?
The pattern of results was more extreme than expected. A “social discounting task” assesses how much someone values ​​rewards depending on who receives them. For most people, a reward doesn’t lose much value if someone close to them receives it; it’s almost as good if a loved one gets $50 as if they did.

In our task, we asked people to choose between keeping the entire amount for themselves and sharing a slightly larger amount with someone else. In general, we find that people value the well-being of the people they love, but when it comes to a complete stranger, most people are not willing to sacrifice much. The social discounting curve, which shows how the value of the well-being of others declines, continues to decline. When we looked at people with psychopathy, I was quite amazed at how quickly the slope went down. They value the well-being of people in their close circle as much as most people do complete strangers. In other words, he seems to have no regard for anyone’s well-being.

How does psychopathy affect the lives of the rest of us?
We all know someone with psychopathy. If the average person has a social network of 150 people and about 1 in 100 people has clinically significant psychopathy… well, you can do the math. But people don’t always recognize psychopathy. They may be aware that they have a certain neighbor, colleague, or family member that people don’t trust very much, who often manipulates or takes advantage of people, or whose behavior scares people.

If someone in your circle is like this, especially someone close to you, you may have been cheated, threatened or abused. If it’s your child, sibling or partner, you may be living in fear for them every day. It’s not everyone’s experience, but it’s pretty common.

What you should do if you believe that you or someone you know he has psychopathy?
Know that psychopathy is a real mental disorder and it can be treated. People with psychopathy are less healthy, have worse relationships, worse job performance, make less money, and even die younger than people without psychopathy, in large part because their behavior causes so many problems in their lives. But these behavior patterns can be changed with treatment from an experienced therapist. The Society for Aggression Disorders website provides information and resources for people affected by aggression disorders, including screeners and information about the types of therapies that work and how to find them.

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