Chris Williamson on Why There Are Psychopaths

I learned about the adaptive reason for psychopaths being in society. So you'd think like it's about 1% to 1% of people are psychopathic, right? And then you can filter that down to the ones that have got sufficient motivation to actually go and do something that's a bit wild. But I was asking this guy, the researcher, and I was saying, look, what is it? How do psychopaths even exist? Why did they exist? I can't understand why they're adaptive. I know that you can be effective over short periods as a psychopath, but over long periods of time, it doesn't end up being very good for society. And I thought it would have been bred out. He said, yeah, you're right. Except for the fact that over the entire size of a population, a few psychopaths actually make sense. If you're a raiding party, a Viking raiding party that needs to go over and fuck everybody up in Linda's farm, which is near to where I lived in the UK, you want some psychopaths. You don't want them to come back with PTSD. You want them to go over there, burn everything down, rape the women, pillage, come back with gold and supplies and grain and whatever else they take and not care about it. On an individual level, psychopathy might not be fantastic for the people around them, but in a tribe, it's actually quite adaptive and quite useful. It's like a weapon, like a very specific sort of weapon that you can use. Yeah. Break glass in case of war. Yes. Yes. In case of raiding party. It would be sort of a legacy thing that exists in the human population that we've had it because it was very beneficial thousands of years ago. But the difference is now that you're not going to get pulled up as much for being a psychopath because you can move from town to town. If it was a Dunbar number of 100 or 150 or something in your tribe previously, what are you going to do? Go to the next tribe? Maybe that would have happened. I don't know. Perhaps you could move from one tribe to another tribe. It seems pretty unlikely. You'd probably just get killed. But if you fuck over people one too many times, this is the reason that socially we're so careful of status. It's one of the reasons why we are concerned about public speaking because one of the few times you would have done that is when your status would have been in high focus and people might have said, if this goes badly, they're going to drop down or maybe you were defending yourself against the tribe of some kind. If you're not able to move on, that would make psychopathy more difficult to manage and more likely to be punished, I think. But now you can just go from town to town to town, within a city. You can go from suburb to suburb, change your name, not use your social media profile anymore. I think that psychopathy, people that are actively being psychopaths, are significantly easier now to hide in amongst society. That makes sense. It also makes sense that psychopathy would have been more common because it would have been more useful when you're constantly in tribal war. Correct. It depends on how you deploy it. It's interesting. Psychopathy, to be a clinically diagnosed psychopath, you actually have to have committed criminal acts. You can't be because of the way that the current psychopathic checklist is called. You have to be 28 out of 40 in the UK or 30 out of 40 in the US. The US has got a higher threshold for psychopaths, which is kind of funny. There was this guy, this researcher, who was researching psychopaths. What you see is a particular area of the brain is down regulated, so you don't see as much activity when you see stuff like death or images that would cause you to have empathy. He decides that he's going to study a bunch of psychopaths, many of whom I think are actually in prison, because you have to have committed a criminal act. Then he needs a control group. The control group is going to be ... You're a professor, you've got students, use the students. He was running out of people to put in the control group. He even used himself as one of the people. Anyway, he's running through this control group and having a look at all of the people that are in it. He notices this person's got no activation when they're going through. He goes, holy shit, this is the brain of a psychopath in the control group. I found a psychopath in here. I need to go and contact them. It turned out to be him. Turned out to be the professor himself. He discovered that he was a psychopath whilst doing a study on psychopaths. Then he said, actually, you know what? It all makes sense now, because when people come around to my house and they're eating my food, I think, who the fuck are all of these people in my house eating my food? Why are they here? They interviewed his kids, they asked his kids, and they said, what is it like? Is there anything unique about dad? He said, well, yeah, dad. He doesn't smile that much around us. And he's not very warm. He's not very loving and blah, blah, blah. But the point being that you can have the biological determinants of being a psychopath and it not manifest. This is a fully functioning guy. Wife, kids, career. Didn't smile much. Wasn't happy when people ate his food, but like broadly fine. But he had essentially the same raw materials as the person that was murdering jail. So what's the determination? What are they looking for when they find out that he's a psychopath? A whole big long checklist. It might even be available online, I'm not sure. But a big long checklist of things that you need to go through, a bunch of questions that you answer, and they go through this diagnosis. But in order to breach the threshold of clinically being diagnosed as a psychopath, you have to have used it to commit crimes. So this meant that although this particular professor had all of the raw ingredients and it looked like he was psychopathic by the, what is it, the DNS? What's that thing? The Diagnostic Statistical Manual, DSM. The DSM wouldn't have categorized him as a psychopath. Very interesting. That is very interesting. So this guy, did they contact his spouse? Well I think it was him doing the study, right? So I guess he contacted his spouse. Did he ask his spouse like, what's wrong with me? I just fucked nose. Why do you like me? Perhaps. But then you also have to think the fact that psychopaths tend to be pretty effective in the world, right? So someone that has very outgoing traits, they're super self-assured, you know, you have a narcissism as well, as long as it's not vulnerable narcissism. There's two types, grandiose narcissism and vulnerable narcissism. What's the difference? So grandiose narcissists are the ones who genuinely believe that they are better than everybody else. They are constantly proving this to everyone. Vulnerable narcissists manifest their narcissism in a similar way, but it's to try and hide the fact that deep down they don't believe that they're anything. So both types of narcissism will manifest in a similar sort of way. Both of them will be out there, but one person is desperately seeking approval and needs people to tell them that they've done well, and the other one doesn't. They're just going to continue believing no matter what reality brings to them. Now the vulnerable narcissists are actually really dangerous. And the reason for that is that if the world doesn't give to them that which they think, they're going to get very, very angry and aggressive because that taps into something that maybe they're fearful about that's deep down. That makes sense. That makes sense where a lot of people who have a distorted perception of where they should be in the world are angry at others who are doing well. And if someone takes them down, if somebody was to take the piss out of them, the grandiose narcissist, it would just be Walter Rofford-Dux back. Like Trump. Yep. Yeah, definitely grandiose narcissist, right? He's not got vulnerable narcissism in him. Someone that's a vulnerable narcissist, everybody knows that friend that just can't not bring up the most recent brilliant thing they've done. But they know that if they poke them a little bit too hard, that it would really, really hurt. That's the vulnerable narcissist. Yeah. Yeah.