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Whenever I try to research this subject, I just give up for the vagueness, lack of consensus, and general lack of solid information. I'm sure there's some out t
Whenever I try to research this subject, I just give up for the vagueness, lack of consensus, and general lack of solid information. I'm sure there's some out there - I just can't find it on the Internet. In particular, I'm always frustrated about 'psychopaths' (empathy-lacking, narcissistic, manipulative) being wholly lumped in with violent predators (serial killers, who seem to get visceral gratification from hunting and physically destroying other humans).
That's because the terms "Psychopathy" and "Sociopathy" are criminal legal terms or shorthand and not clinical terms.
The clinical terms [1] are Dissocial Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Anti-Social Personality Disorder are most related, though many aspects of "psychopaths" can't be measured - for example how do accurately and repeatably measure "lack of empathy?"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_B_personality_disorders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_B_personality_disorder...
> I'm sure there's some out there - I just can't find it on the Internet
What makes you so sure? Given the history of these fields I would not be surprised either way.
What's your interest in the subject?
There's lots of good information, but you need some basic background information for context. It is hard to establish that because so much communication is rooted in weird attempts at signalling "I'm a good person who isn't guilty of what you are accusing me of!"
The reality is that sociopaths have very high IQs and serial killers are typically small business owners, in part because it allows them freedom and control over their schedule that a full time employee typically lacks.
But when I have tried to comment on that on HN in the past, it tends to not go over well because people feel I am saying "Businessmen are evil asshats inclined to be serial killers" which isn't what I am saying at all.
Serial killers tend to have certain traits. But that doesn't mean having certain traits is some one way non refundable ticket to serial killer land.
It's interesting to me how those traits predispose individuals towards certain paths, some positive and some not. But traits are not some Greek Tragedy style inescapable destiny. And that's a really hard thing to talk about.
It should be noted that sociopath is not a formally defined psychological term currently in use. The modern terms closest to the term are conditions like Antisocial personality disorder and Conduct disorder. And those conditions are associated with lower, not higher, IQs. The same is the case for serial killers (http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Serial%20Killer%20Information%20Center/Serial%20Killer%20IQ.htm http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Serial%20Killer%20Information... and https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/serial-murder https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/serial-murde...). One of the primary symptoms of those conditions is poor impulse control and planning ability.
I've never seen the claim that serial killers tend to be small business owners, do you have a source for that?
Everything I've read has said that sociopathy is uncorrelated with IQ. You can have genius sociopaths and dumb sociopaths. Genius sociopath is the stereotype. Dumb sociopath might be the jerk next door who calls the cops when your newborn cries in the middle of the night. Nobody thinks he might be a sociopath, even though the whole neighborhood thinks he's an insensitive, insufferable, but harmless jerk--typical sociopath behavior, even though not exclusive to sociopaths.
Sociopath is not actually a defined clinical term. It is one of the reasons I use it. It helps convey something people will tend to colloquially understand, but there is no formal definition, so its meaning is flexible.
But my understanding from an Intro to Psych class that I had years ago is that serial killers typically have six traits, including high IQ, plus other traits we would consider sociopathic, like lack of empathy.
Generally speaking, if someone has a low IQ, I just consider them to be mentally retarded and not pathological. I don't know why anyone would call someone sociopathic who lacks the mental faculty to comprehend the consequences of their actions.
It's frustrating how so many people redefine "psychopath" just to make a stronger statement about someone they don't like. When everyone is a "psychopath", no one is. If the word is supposed to mean something, it needs a narrower definition.
There are many mental disorders. Psychopathy is just one of them. Not every crazy person is a psychopath; not everyone who harms others is a psychopath. Psychopathy is a specific type of a disorder, not an umbrella term for "everything I dislike".
The best book I found on this topic is "The Psychopath Code" by Pieter Hintjens.
In real life, I met 2 people I would bet are psychopaths, in the clinical meaning of the word. I won't try to provide a short description, because short descriptions are not good enough to explain; if you didn't have the same kind of experience, you would probably just round the words to something else you are already familiar with.
A real psychopath is something like a spider in a human skin, with very good human-role-playing abilities. Your first experience is most likely going to be "this is a charming person". Only after longer interaction you will unconsciously start noticing patterns that feel somehow weird. But when you express doubt, there is always a good explanation and you will feel guilty for doubting afterwards. Only when they attack you, you will find yourself in a conflict with a non-human intelligence. And then you know that if you try to explain to someone who didn't have the same experience, they will never understand.
Psychopaths seem like masters of manipulation, so it makes sense to ask why this doesn't translate into a huge evolutionary advantage: why they don't already make 100% of the population. But it seems like an important part of their charm is being unknown. When you meet your first psychopath, they can manipulate you as they wish, because you have no idea what you are interacting with. Meet the second or the third one, however, and you have a chance to recognize the pattern. So when they exceed some fraction of the population, normies probably learn to recognize them and start killing them. But when they become rare again, they again get the advantage of being unknown.
A psychopath is simply a person who only has a certain subset of human emotions. That doesn't define what they will do; just like being a neurotypical humans does not define how one behaves. It just makes certain predatory behaviors more likely, because it removes some reasons not to do them (such as empathy) and adds some skills, such as being a better liar (humans are usually quite bad at lying, because they unconsciously display little signs of their emotions; but this does not happen when you simply do not have that kind of emotion).
I have a general interest in psychology, that I suppose is rooted in my own psychological struggles. A long time ago I was hospitalized for severe PTSD with psychotic features. I'd been in a state of unmitigated terror for a couple of days, when I felt a surge of activity and a sensation of chilliness in my head. In an instant, I felt at peace, but my most basic drives had flipped 180 degrees. Destruction and violence were very good and rewarding. The person talking to you now was reduced to a small monitor process who was witnessing this in horror. That monitor process managed to find a nurse and communicate enough to get me into isolation for the night. It passed after 10 minutes, and nothing like that ever happened again. But I'll never forget what it was like. It made me ask the question: what if killers aren't consciously transgressing at all? What if they're oblivious, because their reward pathways are telling them their behavior is fine, maybe even important? But I've never been able to find any literature about this. Most articles about "the mind of the psychopath" seem to project a lot, as if they assume the subject is "like them, but they don't care about hurting people." I suppose that Sadistic Personality Disorder might be closer to what I'm talking about? Haven't found much of interest about that either though. Haven't found anything at all about the possibility that some people have a mindset so alien, that no healthy person could come close to understanding it, without an exceptionally astute metaphor.
For a time, I ran a small private email list to discuss research related to brain wiring through the lens of the personal experiences of youth who were not neurotypical. This included my two sons. The list was set up to serve the emotional, social and psychological needs of my oldest son. I think he was about 15 or 16 at the time. When he lost interest, the list died and I ultimately disbanded it.
You might find it helpful to look into brain research rather than psychological research. A lot of psychological research is really poorly done. But brain research has a lot of interesting tidbits based on some very solid experiments.
You might also look for historical case files about individuals, plus read biographies and fiction with an eye towards getting insight into individuals and how they experience the world.
Yes, people who are not neurotypical simply operate differently, so differently that a lot of what is written on the subject is biased to the point of uselessness.
You might find the writings of Temple Grandin of interest. You might find it useful to join online parent support groups and lurk. You might get good book recommendations out of that, plus useful anecdotal information.
Best.
> There are many mental disorders. Psychopathy is just one of them. Not every crazy person is a psychopath; not everyone who harms others is a psychopath. Psychopathy is a specific type of a disorder, not an umbrella term for "everything I dislike".
Psychopathy is neither an umbrella disorder nor a specific disorder. Psychopathy is, like "insanity," a term used by laypeople. The reason why we use antisocial personality disorder, or unspecified personality disorder, or other similar clinical terms to refer to some of the qualities on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist is exactly because of the (correct) point you're making here:
> It's frustrating how so many people redefine "psychopath" just to make a stronger statement about someone they don't like. When everyone is a "psychopath", no one is. If the word is supposed to mean something, it needs a narrower definition.
Unfortunately, you're right, this nonsense precluded Hare's term from ever being useful, much like the term "heart attack" is not actually a useful medical diagnosis because it's been co-opted by the public. Which brings me to my next points:
> In real life, I met 2 people I would bet are psychopaths, in the clinical meaning of the word.
There is no clinical meaning of the word, because it's not a clinical term. Further, this description, while occupying a place in the popular zeitgeist of psychopathy, is incorrect:
> A real psychopath is something like a spider in a human skin, with very good human-role-playing abilities. Your first experience is most likely going to be "this is a charming person". Only after longer interaction you will unconsciously start noticing patterns that feel somehow weird. But when you express doubt, there is always a good explanation and you will feel guilty for doubting afterwards. Only when they attack you, you will find yourself in a conflict with a non-human intelligence. And then you know that if you try to explain to someone who didn't have the same experience, they will never understand.
Let's suppose you're referring to someone with a diagnosable disorder, such as antisocial personality disorder. The literature does not show that any such disorder uniformly presents with exceptional charisma, nor any of the other exciting qualities usually lumped in with psychopathy, like high intelligence. Popular depiction in the media and outright confirmation bias have encouraged this description, but it doesn't match with how most people meeting the bar for the diagnosable disorders closest to Hare's "psychopathy" actually are.
> Psychopaths seem like masters of manipulation, so it makes sense to ask why this doesn't translate into a huge evolutionary advantage: why they don't already make 100% of the population. But it seems like an important part of their charm is being unknown. When you meet your first psychopath, they can manipulate you as they wish, because you have no idea what you are interacting with. Meet the second or the third one, however, and you have a chance to recognize the pattern. So when they exceed some fraction of the population, normies probably learn to recognize them and start killing them. But when they become rare again, they again get the advantage of being unknown.
Again, none of this has a basis in clinical literature. Sometimes they are exceptionally good at manipulation, but in many cases their criminal behavior enjoys prolonged success because of chance circumstances, like bureaucratic incompetence in local law enforcement (e.g. not following up on reports of unsettling behavior by several neighbors).
Here's the overarching point: trying to rigorously define sociopathy or psychopathy in the clinical context is doomed to failure. It's even more doomed if you use descriptions like "a spider in a human's skin." There are two problems here:
1. Trying to formalize colloquial terminology with clinical definitions when they have been so overloaded by popular representation has the side effect of allowing ad hominem attacks that arbitrarily use the word to be somewhat legitimized, and
2. It does a disservice to people with actual diagnosable disorders people associate with sociopathy, who do not universally present with the qualities you have listed here. It also demonizes them, especially if they are socially inept and nonviolent.
But when you express doubt, there is always a good explanation and you will feel guilty for doubting afterwards.
This.
I think it's important to emphasize that those "good explanations" are usually lies, as lies are at the foundation of all the harm that psychopaths cause.
Normal people avoid lying if possible, psychopaths on the other hand are master liars and they make use of lies just whenever a lie serves them better than the truth.
The manipulation tactics that psychopaths use to reach their goals are also just based on lies. You can't be manipulated if you don't believe the lies. Of course psychopaths will primarily serve you lies that you want to believe but that doesn't make them more truthful.
Bottom line, if you want to stay safe from psychopaths, keep it like Reagan: "Trust but verify". And at the first sign of things not adding up, end the relationship and any contact.
> And at the first sign of things not adding up, end the relationship and any contact.
How about 'at the first proof of things not adding up'? Verification works both ways. If an isolated incident smells funny but checks out on investigation then maybe it was just a misinterpretation.
I don't know. When I leave my bubble of scientists and techies I regularly come across people who will lie without reason, motive or gain, and I think some of them are more emotional than the mean.
It still throws me off, you have to basically vet or ignore any factual statement they make because it might either not have any correlation with reality at all or, if it is a statement about their intentions and feelings, they will not remember what they said in the future anyway and say they always had the new opinion.
A lot of people will lie all the time. Usually for emotional reasons. (insecurity, fear, etc). Most people don't lie specifically to manipulate, but rather to protect themselves from a more uncomfortable situation.
This also happens with personality-disordered people (particularly, Narcissists, and especially the Borderline PD people I know . . . they SEEM manipulative, and they technically are, but they're manipulating for a reason that's usually ego-defensive).
Psychopaths, on the other hand, will lie for no damn reason at all that makes any sense to a sane person.
There's an excellent book called How to lie with statistics. It goes into detail about the various ways you can package the same data to support whatever point you want to make. Having read that book more than once, I like to try to dig into the guts of the data, if possible, to see if it really says what people claim it says, which is very often not the case.
The piece you link to lists the lowest IQ as Simon Pirela with an IQ of 57. I found the following two pieces about Pirela:
http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-3rd-circuit/1874807.html http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-3rd-circuit/1874807.html
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2004-05-02/news/0405020461_1_death-sentence-death-row-murderer http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2004-05-02/news/040502046...
He was apparently involved in four murders, but I am failing to find good details. From what I am reading of the one case where I can find a few details, you could conclude he was pressured into helping commit murder by other people and this occurred in part due to his low IQ. They commuted the death sentence due to his disability. So even the law doesn't hold him fully responsible.
The research you cite lists people as serial killers who killed at least two people. I don't think this is really what most people have in mind when talking about serial killers. Other research defines it differently, only including people who have killed at least three people.
Saying that someone typically has a high IQ doesn't mean they always have a high IQ. If you drop the very low figure of Simon Pirela's 57 IQ from the data, I imagine that would substantially change the means, medians, etc. cited.
My best understanding is that serial killers are typically bright. And the link you have provided is not really compelling evidence to the contrary.
I have spent part of my afternoon looking at this information because a. I did take Intro to Psych a long time ago, so perhaps what I know is outdated and b. I have a sincere interest in knowing what the truth is. That matters far more to me than winning internet arguments. I'm not here to argue with anyone anyway. That's not what motivates me.
But I'm really not finding your source compelling. So my mind has not been changed. I see no reason to believe the stated conclusion of this piece is better information than what I have previously been told. In fact, it looks pretty sketchy to me.
I'd recommend looking at the source of this information more closely: http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Serial%20Killer%20Information%20Center/Serial%20Killer%20Statistics.pdf http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Serial%20Killer%20Information... on page 12 it breaks down the statistics relating IQ and serial killers. While you might find reason to disagree with 2 murders as sufficient to warrant the serial killer title (for the record, the reason they include 2 is because that is the official FBI definition), that breakdown shows what the average IQ is for those who committed three murders, 4 murders, and 5 or more. It also breaks things down by organized vs. disorganized killers, whether or not they raped victims, and the method of killing, and the N value for each subset. The only breakdown with an average greater than a standard deviation from average is for the serial killers that killed using bombs. And that it because it's only N=3 and includes Ted Kaczynski. Also keep in mind the median IQ is 86, and removing a couple of data points like Simon Pirela will have little effect on that value.
I can also give a personal citation of my own if that might help convince you. My Dad is a clinical psychologist who gives lectures on Conduct Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder, and does work for the courts evaluating the mental competency of defendants. He's the one who first told me there is no correlation between serial killers and intelligence.
Unless I am missing something, that's 20 pages of aggregate stats on things like age, race and gender. There is very little info here about IQ. It doesn't give me the data I need to draw meaningful conclusions.
It breaks down the average IQ based on the number of victims, which is what you mentioned in your comment. You said that defining serial killer as having at least 2 victims is too low. But this data has the IQ averages for those who killed three or more, four or more, etc. And in all cases it shows the average as being between 90 and 100. All of this data is just basic aggregates from the Serial Killer Database (http://skdb.fgcu.edu/info.asp http://skdb.fgcu.edu/info.asp) by the way, if you're skeptical of the source. Is there something specific you need?
Aggregated data is part of the problem. And even in that small data set, the average IQ trends up as the number of victims trends up. It comes a lot closer to average IQ than the overall number of 86, but it does trend up.
The piece you linked to seems to have an explicit political agenda of disproving the popular image of a serial killer as a young white male. And that makes the entire database questionable because if that is the goal, then you explicitly define things as broadly as possible so as to accomplish your political agenda.
I'm aware there are legitimately different profiles of serial killers. For example, your typical female serial killer has murdered multiple relatives by poisoning for the insurance money. This is very different from your typical male serial killer.
At this point I am tired and frustrated and I don't know how to sort out the answer to this question. I know we have IQ scores for a number of high profile cases that clearly fit my understanding of what a serial killer is and those IQs are on the high side, fitting my general understanding. I don't know where to look for data that doesn't have a political agenda of explicitly rebutting popular perception. For the moment, I feel stymied. And the reality is this is not important enough for me to keep digging into the question indefinitely. It's already eaten an excess of my time.
> My best understanding is that serial killers are typically bright. And the link you have provided is not really compelling evidence to the contrary.
Your understanding is incorrect. But I read How to Lie With Statistics too, so I'm happy to help you with more sources for your perusal. Keep in mind that merely invoking How to Lie With Statistics does not refute a statistical analysis, you actually have to identify the problem.
1. This document goes into much greater depth about the statistics you're criticizing: http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Serial%20Killer%20Information%20Center/Serial%20Killer%20Statistics.pdf http://maamodt.asp.radford.edu/Serial%20Killer%20Information..., including a coverage of serial killers with 2 or more versus 3 or more victims.
2. The FBI's profile of serial killers, from their behavioral science unit, in which they explicitly call out the popular conception of high IQ serial killers as being a myth: https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/serial-murder https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/serial-murde...
3. This study conducts a meta analysis of published literature that finds no correlation between verbal intelligence and traits traditionally associated with psychopathy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28836093/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28836093/ (also on bioRxiv if you'd like to read the non-paywalled version).
4. This study finds that, for a set of intelligence metrics and psychopathy checklist traits, psychopathy and intelligence are orthogonal: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0093854807309806 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0093854807309806
5. For good measure, since you like popular media like true crime TV, I'll throw in a Scientific American article for you: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/5-myths-about-serial-killers-and-why-they-persist-excerpt/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/5-myths-about-ser...
> But I'm really not finding your source compelling. So my mind has not been changed.
I suppose I should be transparent with you: I don't debate with people online to persuade them, I debate with people online to persuade the audience. I don't particularly mind if you're convinced, but it is important to me that misinformation not be spread unchallenged. So now we're at a crossroads. I've provided empirical evidence from a variety of cited sources, and you've provided an anecdote from an undergraduate course you took years ago. My sources might be incorrect! The beauty of science is that you can challenge its findings. I welcome you to challenge the sources I've provided as well (though I'd remind you that you've continually abstained from providing any of your own). But if you don't, that's also totally fine, because I think I've sufficiently demonstrated my point either way. Considering your lukewarm dismissal of an academic dataset based on a disagreement with one particular data point out of 206, it appears true crime television and your recollection of an old psych class are better authorities than published research.
> Sociopath is a clinical term, it's just not in the DSM because it's not, per se, a disease or disorder. Being a sociopath doesn't, by itself, cause impairment as defined by the DSM. But that doesn't mean it's not a clinical term. Ask any psychiatrist or psychologist what the defining characteristics are of a sociopath and they could immediately recite the Hare Psycopathy Checklist.
Sociopathy is not a clinical term, despite Robert Hare's research into the subject. I have spoken to psychologists and psychiatrists about this, as you're recommending - they only use terminology like "sociopathy" insofar as they use terminology like "insanity." It helps them quickly invoke a set of peripherally familiar traits when they're speaking to a lay audience, like clients or law enforcement.
The entire purpose of a clinical term is to label a disease or disorder. There's no such thing as a clinical term not being documented in clinical reference material, because that's implicitly definitional. Antisocial personality disorder is the clinical label for traits which are usually bundled together under the colloquial term "sociopathy" because "sociopathy" is just that - colloquial. For the same reason the legal insanity defense doesn't qualify it as a clinical term, psychologists do not actually use sociopathy because it's far too imprecise.
> Sociopath in the vernacular does often connote a serial killer. Fair enough. But there's plenty of literature, for professionals and laymen, that discusses sociopathy in clinical, well-defined terms.
Can you cite literature intended for a professional audience that actually uses sociopathy as a clinical term? Using sociopath in popular science books or books targeted to a lay audience doesn't count. That sociopathy occupies a zeitgeist among a lay audience is exactly why it's not used in a clinical setting. It has too many associations and inconsistencies that do not lend itself to a rigorous analysis, and is often abused to refer to whatever set of qualities someone wants to attribute to another party.
This might come across as pedantry, but I find it very frustrating when words like "sociopathy" or "psychopathy" or even "insanity" are all claimed to be clinical terminology. Claiming they are dilutes the clarity of actual diagnosable disorders in discussion, and somewhat legitimizes ad hominem attacks involving these terms. The terms are fun as a popular reference or for joking incredulity, but there is a serious lack of self awareness among all of the comments in this thread which keep trying to define and redefine terms which have no clinical definition.
You make great points, but I think 1) reasonable people can disagree and 2) your definition is overly pedantic. For example, a doctor can still discuss, in clinical terms, smokers (as individuals, as a class) who suffer from no discernible impairment warranting treatment. Without actual impairment such clinical vocabulary may ultimately be more fluid and hand-wavy than it otherwise might be if anchored by concrete presentations, but it's no less clinical in the sense of 1) a professional vocabulary with well-defined denotations and connotations 2) useful in the application of and study of clinical treatment of actual impairment. So, for example, doctors and researchers may use terms like diffuse intimal thickening (DTI) or nicotine dependence. Much like "lack of empathy" they beg many questions, but even so they raise the same questions among those familiar with the subjects.
Regarding the literature,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=sociopathy https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=sociopathy
I'll let those search results speak for themselves. If we're being pedantic I think many of them make my case. But in fairness those results taken as a whole probably augur in favor of the term "sociopathy" being, at best, borderline clinical.
Also, FWIW, the last time I asked a psychiatrist about sociopaths it was a very short conversation. He immediately replied that he doesn't see many because 1) there's no real treatment and 2) they usually have no reason to seek treatment.
My sense of the conversation was that the term evoked precisely the same concepts in both our minds (even if his had more nuance and depth), and nothing at all as a muddled as "insanity". I wanted to ask more questions but I figured, what was the point. All he could do would be to confirm what I've read and reiterate the open questions and debates.
"Clinical" is not defined by the degree of accuracy or precision relative to the objective truth of a phenomenon. Depending on the state of the science a clinical term could be extremely fuzzy or perhaps even an ontological misstep--i.e. a grouping of unrelated phenomena, or an overly restrictive grouping. But it can be still be a clinical term serving a clinical role.