From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat Aug 17 2002 - 08:35:58 MDT
I had written
>> Damien wrote
>>> I gather that sociopaths/psychopaths are often compellingly
>>> persuasive to their victims exactly because they *don't*
>>> convey that subtle blip unintentionally revealing the
>>> cognitive/affective glitch or doublespeak.
>> This instantly raises the question, Why haven't their genes
>> come to dominate? How can it be that [normal] men have
>> succeeded evolutionarily against the sociopathic?
I answered like that because it seems to me that *not*
conveying that "subtle unintentional" blip would be a
fantastic boon to liars and con-artists. It seemed to
me obvious (at the time) that this could only be a well-
designed feature (not something arising merely from damage).
And I went on in that vein:
>> Perhaps this genetic flaw (from our perspective, of course) also
>> has other repercussions besides a tendency to have lots of offspring.
>> For example, before many opportunities to mate have arisen, such
>> people have already run afoul of society's other rules, and perhaps
>> already have a criminal record or have been shunned or killed.
Then Eugen says
> You seem to imply that particular brand of psychopathology...
> has genetic origins, and does not completely nuke the
> individual's reputation if expressed and discovered.
> Both assumptions are imo not very reasonable, unless backed
> up by actual data. Anecdotally, pathologies seem to be based
> on a fluke, a frozen chance occurring during development.
Yeah, I was thinking it looked genetic because it looked like
a designed *feature*. Something giving someone such power
could hardly be an accident. But no, you're right about the
reputation angle, and the effect of *that* (like I was saying
about criminal record or shunning) maybe is why that gene
is rare.
Damien now writes
> Pulling this suggestion out of my, um, backbrain: perhaps
> psychopathy-conducive damage isn't genetically inherited but
> due to, say, developmental insult or other foetal or infant damage?
Let me think out loud about that: presumably the subtle
glitch that causes us to sometimes be able to spot liars
is that they need to perform a mental balancing act of
calculating the truth of a situation at the same time
they're weaving their web of deception, and there is either
cross-over that they cannot control, or they just run out
of processing power.
But by hypothesis here, the sociopath/psychopath *can* do it
somehow. Some great liars, like certain ex-US-presidents,
do apparently have the ability to believe their own lies
about relatively unimportant matters while yet maintaining
a masterful understanding of reality about other matters.
But it seems to me that our sociopath here doesn't do that.
Wouldn't you say instead that he really knows both the truth
of a situation while simultaneously being able to put on a
100% convincing appearance of the lie? Seems a wonderful
talent (analytically speaking) evincing more processing
power or finer balancing abilities. Wouldn't that have to
be genetic?
(Of course the main point here was *if* it's genetic, what
was the real reason it's rare---and we're perhaps all in
agreement now that it bears too many other costs, like
damaged reputation, imprisonment, shunning, etc., which
statistically interfere too strongly with high rates of
reproduction.)
Lee
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