5 ms·

A Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath (2013)

raxxorrax 7y ago
"Oh, my brain scan shows I am a psychopath. How very useful!" While I do believe neuroscientists mostly know less than often implied, the research is very interesting. He describes himself to be competitive, wrangling with his own ego. But wouldn't it be true then to say that he is no psychopath and a brain scan is insufficient for diagnosis? And what is defined as healthy? Certainly not the absence of competitiveness or ego.
- hvidgaard 7y ago
  Did you read the article? > But when he underwent a series of genetic tests, he got more bad news. “I had all these high-risk alleles for aggression, violence and low empathy,” he says, such as a variant of the MAO-A gene that has been linked with aggressive behavior. Eventually, based on further neurological and behavioral research into psychopathy, he decided he was indeed a psychopath—just a relatively good kind, what he and others call a “pro-social psychopath,” someone who has difficulty feeling true empathy for others but still keeps his behavior roughly within socially-acceptable bounds. > It wasn’t entirely a shock to Fallon, as he’d always been aware that he was someone especially motivated by power and manipulating others, he says. Additionally, his family line included seven alleged murderers, including Lizzie Borden, infamously accused of killing her father and stepmother in 1892." ... > “I’m obnoxiously competitive. I won’t let my grandchildren win games. I’m kind of an asshole, and I do jerky things that piss people off,” he says. “But while I’m aggressive, but my aggression is sublimated. I’d rather beat someone in an argument than beat them up.”
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    I read the article, that is why I referenced being competitive for example. But the "quote" wasn't meant to be attributed to him, I just thought it funny. Just wanting to throw in the idea, that maybe he isn't a psychopath, not even in the pathological sense.
    - hvidgaard 7y ago
      My apologies then. One of the defining characteristics of a psychopath is the lack of empathy. That is not to say you cannot learn when to feel empathic, and he touches on that too. Maybe we just need to change our definition, or invent a new one. One can be a pathological psychopath, but not be "a psychopath", because they was loved and cared for properly. Essentially they learned that social connections was overwhelmingly beneficial for them.
      - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
        Psychopaths can fake empathic behaviours. In fact they're so good at this they can appear unusually friendly and caring. They do this by modelling social interactions and replaying them. It's more of a scripted response: "In this situation, act as if you feel like this." I don't think they can learn to have genuine empathic feelings, because the part of the brain that would normally have them doesn't work very well. It's not something good parenting can fix. It can maybe mitigate it to an extent, but it's not unusual for average-to-good parents to be completely baffled by a son/daughter with serious personality issues that are primarily genetic.
- gnode 7y ago
  > But wouldn't it be true then to say that he is no psychopath and a brain scan is insufficient for diagnosis? That question can't be answered without buttoning down the term. Generally diagnostic manuals don't recognise such a condition without actualized anti-social behaviour.
Beloid7man 7y ago
I think that jims aggressive arguments behaviour comes not from its genetics or frontal lobe abnormality. Its come from his past childhood. Being loved so much in childhood make people become a competitive person and egocentric. They get used to be a center of attention and think that arguments, will and other persons needs is irrelevant. They are not violent in physical things but violent in how they treat people. There were studies that said that people with higher IQ have more self control ability under alcohol influence. I think its the same in this case. Jims ability to control itself come from good education that furthermore increase his self control.
- faceplanted 7y ago
  "Being loved so much in childhood make people become a competitive person and egocentric" No it doesn't, that's a ridiculous generalisation, children are specifically taught to restrain their competitiveness by their role models reactions to it, it's not the amount of love they get, it's the priorities of parents, there are many noncompetitive people who received a lot of love as children.
tarcyanm 7y ago
I wonder how many of those who run for public office would willingly present results of such a scan... I would bet money that that particular demographic would show an interesting trend.
- boringMetrics 7y ago
  Or it's just made up bullshit. Seriously, gross deformations of the brain, visible to the naked eye, are pretty dubious and questionable in my mind. Meanwhile, the genetics that produce psychological disposition are more than hotly debated. Why? Because, think very carefully about where this story takes us. If we can say intellect is linked to genes, this puts a huge number of people in a box they cannot escape. Should the "dumb" people reproduce? Do we put laws in place so that only useful people have children? Who is useless? Are all people really created equal?
- gnode 7y ago
  I don't doubt that there may be a trend, but to me it sounds very unfair to allow people's immutable biological characteristics to enter into an adversarial debate about how they might act. Also, the mechanics of how macro-scale neurology affects a person's psychology and sociology is still poorly understood, which makes the data especially easy to abuse. More than anything, I think the researcher's findings highlight this point; he was a counterexample to the theory that a diminished prefrontal cortex implies anti-social behaviour, showing the phenomenon to be more nuanced.
  - shoes_for_thee 7y ago
    How is that unfair?
    - partlyFluked 7y ago
      I don't doubt that while some "psychopaths" will be detectable ahead of time, and maybe mitigated (whether or not that's ethical), there may be many with "correct" views read as possibly psychopathic that will get strawmanned into oblivion due to their diagnosis.
wjnc 7y ago
On a side note: Should he have been able to see whose results he was looking at? It's surely unethical in my book. Even when, or perhaps even more when, working with data from relatives the burden of ethical behavior lies with the researcher. De-anonymising shouldn't be the researchers option without safeguards imho.
- ordu 7y ago
  Yes, researcher needs to be trained on ethics specifically. It is a part of psychological education, it is a part of APA's mission[1]. Psychology takes it seriously after Little Albert Experiment[2], Ash Conformity Experiment[3], Zimbardo's Standford Prison Experiment[4], Milgram Experiment[5] and a lot of others. Now it couldn't be done, a researcher needs to approve his experimental plan with APA Ethics Committee. It means, that any competent researcher in a psychology would know ethical risks (due to education), and if he is testing his research plan on his family, he must be ready to find something unexpected, and he must inform participants on the risks. [1] https://www.apa.org/ethics/ https://www.apa.org/ethics/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment [3] https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment [5] https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html
  - turk73 7y ago
    We are missing the boat with ethics everywhere--I work with people every day that aren't even aware of the unethical actions they are taking in the healthcare realm. It's very easy to avoid ethical behavior if you have never received any training in ethical practices. Breaking the double-blind restrictions of his study was an ethical breach. He was affecting the outcome by damaging a key instrument in the study (himself). Breaking the rules and being a maverick is sometimes useful, even ethical behavior, but in scientific research, if you go through all the effort to design a study, you should uphold the plan. As far as all this psychopaths can be detected with a brain scan bs, well, it is just that--bs. I don't think there is an easy test to determine who is going to lead a life of crime and who isn't. I do think a lot of unsavory people rise to leadership roles. That is for certain. It would be nice if we could do something to control those types of people before they take such a huge toll on the rest of us. What I found most annoying was his propensity for drawing easy conclusions about how his loving upbringing somehow prevented him from being another Lizzie Borden. Again, does this guy have any scientific training? There are tens of thousands of lurking variables unacknowledged there!
appleflaxen 7y ago
prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6787092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6787092
pier25 7y ago
After reading that book a couple of years ago I've wondered if psychopaths are a lot more common than previously thought. Am I one myself? I mean, how can you know for sure? We have no way of comparing our inner workings with other people. Even brain scans are not 100% conclusive, see the link below. https://www.businessinsider.com/what-a-psychopath-brain-looks-like-2015-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/what-a-psychopath-brain-look...
- hckrnwsthrwwy 7y ago
  I believe that psychopathy encompasses many traits, which may be expressed individually to varying extremes You may get someone who is particularly aggressive and mean-spirited but who is generally honest, the opposite, and so on
gnode 7y ago
I think it's easy to draw a flawed conclusion from research like this. While it can be shown that a majority of psychopathic serial killers have the prefrontal cortex brain anomaly, it's also the case that almost all such criminals are male. Yet we have an abundance of plainly apparent counterexamples to dismiss the idea that being male implies criminality. Interestingly, there are similarities here, as one of the largest brain differences between genders is in the development of the amygdala. The brain anomaly here concerns the connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. > So the first thing I thought was that maybe my hypothesis was wrong, and that these brain areas are not reflective of psychopathy or murderous behavior. > Eventually, based on further neurological and behavioral research into psychopathy, he decided he was indeed a psychopath—just a relatively good kind ... It sounds to me as though he simply combined his finding with more research possessing the same systematic error, in order to support his conclusion, in spite of a counterexample. He then bends an established definition to suit his theory. When sampling the extremes of a population (e.g. the most prolific murderers), combinations of compounding additive factors will naturally be common. To draw a causal link about any of them would be flawed, without a thorough and unbiased analysis of the rest of the population.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  > While it can be shown that a majority of psychopathic serial killers have the prefrontal cortex brain anomaly, it's also the case that almost all such criminals are male. Yet we have an abundance of plainly apparent counterexamples to dismiss the idea that being male implies criminality That's a bloody weird argument, and AFAICS wrong: (psychopath -> male) /-> (male -> psychopath), where -> is logical implication and /-> is is 'does not imply'. You are confusing implication with equality. > with more research possessing the same systematic error ... in spite of a counterexample What systematic error? What counterexample? > without a thorough and unbiased analysis of the rest of the population Sampling not good enough? Serious question, do you have any background in either classical logic or statistics? And what is your area of research?
  - soreine 7y ago
    It seems there's a misunderstanding. According to me you are actually pointing to the same logical fallacy. The systematic error is indeed to think that correlation does imply causality. There's no more reason to think prefontal cortex anomaly causes psychopathy than being male does.
mike128 7y ago
Seems like a catch 22 situation. Should we believe a publication of a psychopath or should we assume it’s a manipulation. Matrix within Matrix.

"Oh, my brain scan shows I am a psychopath. How very useful!" While I do believe neuroscientists mostly know less than often implied, the research is very interesting. He describes himself to be competitive, wrangling with his own ego. But wouldn't it be true then to say that he is no psychopath and a brain scan is insufficient for diagnosis? And what is defined as healthy? Certainly not the absence of competitiveness or ego.

hvidgaard 7y ago
Did you read the article? > But when he underwent a series of genetic tests, he got more bad news. “I had all these high-risk alleles for aggression, violence and low empathy,” he says, such as a variant of the MAO-A gene that has been linked with aggressive behavior. Eventually, based on further neurological and behavioral research into psychopathy, he decided he was indeed a psychopath—just a relatively good kind, what he and others call a “pro-social psychopath,” someone who has difficulty feeling true empathy for others but still keeps his behavior roughly within socially-acceptable bounds. > It wasn’t entirely a shock to Fallon, as he’d always been aware that he was someone especially motivated by power and manipulating others, he says. Additionally, his family line included seven alleged murderers, including Lizzie Borden, infamously accused of killing her father and stepmother in 1892." ... > “I’m obnoxiously competitive. I won’t let my grandchildren win games. I’m kind of an asshole, and I do jerky things that piss people off,” he says. “But while I’m aggressive, but my aggression is sublimated. I’d rather beat someone in an argument than beat them up.”
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  I read the article, that is why I referenced being competitive for example. But the "quote" wasn't meant to be attributed to him, I just thought it funny. Just wanting to throw in the idea, that maybe he isn't a psychopath, not even in the pathological sense.
  - hvidgaard 7y ago
    My apologies then. One of the defining characteristics of a psychopath is the lack of empathy. That is not to say you cannot learn when to feel empathic, and he touches on that too. Maybe we just need to change our definition, or invent a new one. One can be a pathological psychopath, but not be "a psychopath", because they was loved and cared for properly. Essentially they learned that social connections was overwhelmingly beneficial for them.
    - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
      Psychopaths can fake empathic behaviours. In fact they're so good at this they can appear unusually friendly and caring. They do this by modelling social interactions and replaying them. It's more of a scripted response: "In this situation, act as if you feel like this." I don't think they can learn to have genuine empathic feelings, because the part of the brain that would normally have them doesn't work very well. It's not something good parenting can fix. It can maybe mitigate it to an extent, but it's not unusual for average-to-good parents to be completely baffled by a son/daughter with serious personality issues that are primarily genetic.
gnode 7y ago
> But wouldn't it be true then to say that he is no psychopath and a brain scan is insufficient for diagnosis? That question can't be answered without buttoning down the term. Generally diagnostic manuals don't recognise such a condition without actualized anti-social behaviour.

Beloid7man 7y ago

I think that jims aggressive arguments behaviour comes not from its genetics or frontal lobe abnormality. Its come from his past childhood. Being loved so much in childhood make people become a competitive person and egocentric. They get used to be a center of attention and think that arguments, will and other persons needs is irrelevant. They are not violent in physical things but violent in how they treat people. There were studies that said that people with higher IQ have more self control ability under alcohol influence. I think its the same in this case. Jims ability to control itself come from good education that furthermore increase his self control.

faceplanted 7y ago
"Being loved so much in childhood make people become a competitive person and egocentric" No it doesn't, that's a ridiculous generalisation, children are specifically taught to restrain their competitiveness by their role models reactions to it, it's not the amount of love they get, it's the priorities of parents, there are many noncompetitive people who received a lot of love as children.

tarcyanm 7y ago

I wonder how many of those who run for public office would willingly present results of such a scan... I would bet money that that particular demographic would show an interesting trend.

boringMetrics 7y ago
Or it's just made up bullshit. Seriously, gross deformations of the brain, visible to the naked eye, are pretty dubious and questionable in my mind. Meanwhile, the genetics that produce psychological disposition are more than hotly debated. Why? Because, think very carefully about where this story takes us. If we can say intellect is linked to genes, this puts a huge number of people in a box they cannot escape. Should the "dumb" people reproduce? Do we put laws in place so that only useful people have children? Who is useless? Are all people really created equal?
gnode 7y ago
I don't doubt that there may be a trend, but to me it sounds very unfair to allow people's immutable biological characteristics to enter into an adversarial debate about how they might act. Also, the mechanics of how macro-scale neurology affects a person's psychology and sociology is still poorly understood, which makes the data especially easy to abuse. More than anything, I think the researcher's findings highlight this point; he was a counterexample to the theory that a diminished prefrontal cortex implies anti-social behaviour, showing the phenomenon to be more nuanced.
- shoes_for_thee 7y ago
  How is that unfair?
  - partlyFluked 7y ago
    I don't doubt that while some "psychopaths" will be detectable ahead of time, and maybe mitigated (whether or not that's ethical), there may be many with "correct" views read as possibly psychopathic that will get strawmanned into oblivion due to their diagnosis.

wjnc 7y ago

On a side note: Should he have been able to see whose results he was looking at? It's surely unethical in my book. Even when, or perhaps even more when, working with data from relatives the burden of ethical behavior lies with the researcher. De-anonymising shouldn't be the researchers option without safeguards imho.

ordu 7y ago
Yes, researcher needs to be trained on ethics specifically. It is a part of psychological education, it is a part of APA's mission[1]. Psychology takes it seriously after Little Albert Experiment[2], Ash Conformity Experiment[3], Zimbardo's Standford Prison Experiment[4], Milgram Experiment[5] and a lot of others. Now it couldn't be done, a researcher needs to approve his experimental plan with APA Ethics Committee. It means, that any competent researcher in a psychology would know ethical risks (due to education), and if he is testing his research plan on his family, he must be ready to find something unexpected, and he must inform participants on the risks. [1] https://www.apa.org/ethics/ https://www.apa.org/ethics/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment [3] https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment [5] https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html
- turk73 7y ago
  We are missing the boat with ethics everywhere--I work with people every day that aren't even aware of the unethical actions they are taking in the healthcare realm. It's very easy to avoid ethical behavior if you have never received any training in ethical practices. Breaking the double-blind restrictions of his study was an ethical breach. He was affecting the outcome by damaging a key instrument in the study (himself). Breaking the rules and being a maverick is sometimes useful, even ethical behavior, but in scientific research, if you go through all the effort to design a study, you should uphold the plan. As far as all this psychopaths can be detected with a brain scan bs, well, it is just that--bs. I don't think there is an easy test to determine who is going to lead a life of crime and who isn't. I do think a lot of unsavory people rise to leadership roles. That is for certain. It would be nice if we could do something to control those types of people before they take such a huge toll on the rest of us. What I found most annoying was his propensity for drawing easy conclusions about how his loving upbringing somehow prevented him from being another Lizzie Borden. Again, does this guy have any scientific training? There are tens of thousands of lurking variables unacknowledged there!

appleflaxen 7y ago

prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6787092 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6787092

pier25 7y ago

After reading that book a couple of years ago I've wondered if psychopaths are a lot more common than previously thought. Am I one myself? I mean, how can you know for sure? We have no way of comparing our inner workings with other people. Even brain scans are not 100% conclusive, see the link below. https://www.businessinsider.com/what-a-psychopath-brain-looks-like-2015-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/what-a-psychopath-brain-look...

hckrnwsthrwwy 7y ago
I believe that psychopathy encompasses many traits, which may be expressed individually to varying extremes You may get someone who is particularly aggressive and mean-spirited but who is generally honest, the opposite, and so on

gnode 7y ago

I think it's easy to draw a flawed conclusion from research like this. While it can be shown that a majority of psychopathic serial killers have the prefrontal cortex brain anomaly, it's also the case that almost all such criminals are male. Yet we have an abundance of plainly apparent counterexamples to dismiss the idea that being male implies criminality. Interestingly, there are similarities here, as one of the largest brain differences between genders is in the development of the amygdala. The brain anomaly here concerns the connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the amygdala. > So the first thing I thought was that maybe my hypothesis was wrong, and that these brain areas are not reflective of psychopathy or murderous behavior. > Eventually, based on further neurological and behavioral research into psychopathy, he decided he was indeed a psychopath—just a relatively good kind ... It sounds to me as though he simply combined his finding with more research possessing the same systematic error, in order to support his conclusion, in spite of a counterexample. He then bends an established definition to suit his theory. When sampling the extremes of a population (e.g. the most prolific murderers), combinations of compounding additive factors will naturally be common. To draw a causal link about any of them would be flawed, without a thorough and unbiased analysis of the rest of the population.

tempguy9999 7y ago
> While it can be shown that a majority of psychopathic serial killers have the prefrontal cortex brain anomaly, it's also the case that almost all such criminals are male. Yet we have an abundance of plainly apparent counterexamples to dismiss the idea that being male implies criminality That's a bloody weird argument, and AFAICS wrong: (psychopath -> male) /-> (male -> psychopath), where -> is logical implication and /-> is is 'does not imply'. You are confusing implication with equality. > with more research possessing the same systematic error ... in spite of a counterexample What systematic error? What counterexample? > without a thorough and unbiased analysis of the rest of the population Sampling not good enough? Serious question, do you have any background in either classical logic or statistics? And what is your area of research?
- soreine 7y ago
  It seems there's a misunderstanding. According to me you are actually pointing to the same logical fallacy. The systematic error is indeed to think that correlation does imply causality. There's no more reason to think prefontal cortex anomaly causes psychopathy than being male does.

mike128 7y ago

Seems like a catch 22 situation. Should we believe a publication of a psychopath or should we assume it’s a manipulation. Matrix within Matrix.