Anybody think they know the reason why? This problem is, is part of a video
you'll find on YouTube that's, that goes by the title, do you think like a
psychopath? because the notion is, if you ge, if you
can get the answer to this, you're on your way towards thinking in the way a
psychopath thinks. What's the answer?
Well, the answer's this, she wants to see the guy again.
and all she knows is that the guy was somehow connected to her mother, enough
so that when her mother died he came to the funeral.
So, maybe he's also somehow connected to her sister, connected to her family in a
way she doesn't know. So, if she simply goes and kills her
sister [LAUGH] for most of us that's not a simple act, but then she might get a
chance to meet this guy again and follow up and get to know him better.
Wow, okay, the idea is that sort of mindset, if you can imagine someone
thinking about that, what are you imagining?
Well, you're imagining this calculating nature mixed with a complete divorcing of
feelings for things horrific, like killing her sister.
If that just becomes a means to an end, and she can't really think about, you
know, the horrificness of that well that's the kind of thinking expressed
here. And in fact if we talk about psychopaths
so, you think of psychopaths. I think that's what they've talked about
in TV shows, it's a, its sort of part of, something we generally class under anti
social personality disorder. but depending on the person it could be
more or less extreme. So, the all out psychopaths are more
extreme and in terms of psychopaths, these are the kinds of traits they show,
glutinous and superficial charms. When we first meet psychopaths, we tend
to like them. Kay?
They're outgoing, they have a lot of charm, they're seemingly happy, they're
confident. their not worried about anything,
everything is going to be good, we'll make it good.
Grandiosity, they're big. Okay?
They think big they live big they seem like passionate people.
Pathological lying, this is normally where things start to go awry, you meet
one of these psychopaths you like them a lot, you start hanging around with them,
they're telling you all these amazing things.
And then over time you start to realize the things they're telling you are not
true, they don't add up. and in fact, typically if you challenge a
psychopath about that and if you really catch them in a lie, where most of us
might go, I'm really sorry, I feel bad. A psychopath would typically go, oh yeah,
I was just funny with you, man I was just trying to see how far I could push you
but whatever, no big deal. So, they'll blow off getting caught in
lies, they don't seem to be too upset by it.
they have this sort of cunning and manipulative way, they're always trying
to make something happen. They don't seem to have this remorse or
guilt. Shallow affect they're, they're not
emotionally responsive, they're just always kind of on, as it were.
this is the real, the callousness and the lack of empathy.
If they want something and getting that thing means harming others, they seem to
be able to do that without ever putting themselves in that other person's
position. So, they're manipulative and yet they,
they're not caring. They don't share that feeling.
They don't share empathy. And they never accept responsibility for,
bad things. Okay?
So, bad things happen, it's always somebody else's fault, it's always some
external cause for bad things. So, you know, these psychopaths are
obviously can be very problematic. Now there's, there's sort of a lower
level of the this that we think of as secondary psychopathy or antisocial
behavior. Now, sometimes people will show
combinations of these but you think of these a little bit, this is a less
extreme. Somebody who's impulsive, irresponsible,
proneness to boredom, they need to be stimulated somehow.
They don't ever seem to have any realistic goals, they may have some big
goals, but nothing realistic. They seem to live off of others,
parasitic lifestyle. Poor behavioral control, they do whatever
they feel like at any time. that tends to cause behavioral problems,
juvenile delinquency. yeah, they get conditional releases and
then they screw it up again and then they get right back in there.
So, if you kind of think of this, you can see why the combination of these things
can make somebody pretty criminal or drawn to criminal elements.
a few other things that tend to be common so, there's some that have more of this
and there's some that have more of this. But there, but just about all of them
have this too, which is a very impersonal sex life, having trouble with
relationships in general. In fact, sometimes, when they do have
successful relationships, it's with other psychopaths, which is kind of scary.
many short term marriages, criminal versatility, [LAUGH] that's a nice way of
saying it, it means they're do all sorts of criminal deeds, okay?
So, it, they're really freed up, you know, for most of us, we don't do
criminal acts because we're either thinking about how this will impact our
life, which they don't seem to worry about too much.
Or we think about how this will impact others.
And they don't seem to worry about that too much either.
and so they're very prone to do criminal things, especially if there's nice short
term gains ahead of it, that's what they seem to be drawn by.
So, first of all, they, they seem to have, from a scientific perspective, from
a psychological perspective, these psychopaths are very interesting in terms
of the sort of dissociation may show. They seem to have what we've called,
Theory of Mind. Remember we had a whole lecture on that,
that if, if we have a situation where we have Sally and Anne.
Sally puts a ball in the basket, which Anne sees, Sally goes away.
Anne then moves the ball to her box, and then if we ask somebody who's just seen
this play out, we said, where will Sally look for the ball?
Well, the right answer is that Sally will look in her basket, because that's where
she put it and she wasn't there when Ann moved it.
and again, at a certain point, children can figure this out, they can see the
world through Sally's eyes. Psychopaths can surely do that.
With, they're so manipulative, they can you know, surely see, and, and figure out
what other people know. in fact, sometimes when we talk about
theory of mind, we talk about this recursive nature where you know, Jack is
thinking about something, Jill might be thinking about what Jack's thinking
about. You can look at somebody and you could
kind of think about what you think they're thinking about.
in fact, Jack could think about what Jill thinks he's thinking about.
This recursive nature, we have this ability to get inside the minds of
others. And psychopaths have this ability.
But for most of us, when we get inside their mind, we get inside their emotional
state too. And so when we see it from their
perspective, we feel it from their perspective.
Psychopaths seem to be able to plan and manipulate in a way that says, they
certainly understand how others see the world, but they don't seem to care about
the feelings they hurt. So, they have theory of mind but not
empathy, which is very interesting because, usually in psychology, we see
these two things as, as you know, going hand in glove.
So, a psychopath can suggest that's not necessarily the case.
Alright. Trying to understand what causes
psychopathy, it's is tricky of course because the psychopath themselves does
not think there's anything wrong with them.
They kind of almost feel like they're better than everybody else, smarter than
everybody else, somehow more insulated, tougher, stronger.
so they don't really see they have a problem, but clearly it causes a problem
for others. So, when we've tried to figure out well
what is it that's going on? There have been some interesting
experiments and I'm going to tell you about one.
This experiment simply asks people to make decisions and figure stuff out but
they were punished for making wrong decisions.
And the question was how much would that punishment help them learn right, okay?
When the punishment was electric shock, that did not seem to help psychopaths
learn, okay? When they did something wrong and they
got a shock, it didn't seem like they worried about doing it wrong again.
They didn't try extra hard to avoid the shock.