Chris Williamson on Why There Are Psychopaths

the jurgen experience i learned about the adaptive reason for psychopaths being in society so you'd think like it's about one percent nor point one percent to one percent of people are psychopathic right and then you can filter that down to the ones that have got sufficient uh 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 like why do 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 [ __ ] everybody up in lindisfarne 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 you actually 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 makes sense that it would be sort of a 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 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 we're gonna do go to the next tribe maybe maybe 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 [ __ ] 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 um 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 right 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 within a city you 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 yeah it depends on how you deploy it so it's interesting psychopathy to be a clinically diagnosed psychopath you actually have to have committed criminal acts so you can't be because of the way that the the current um psychopathic checklist is called i think you have to be 28 out of 40 in the uk or 30 out of 40 in the u.s the u.s has got a higher threshold for psychopaths which is kind of funny and um there was this guy this research who's researching psychopaths and what you see is a particular area of the brain is down regulated right so you don't see as much activity when you see stuff like death or images that would cause you to have empathy so 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 commit a criminal act and then he needs a control group so the control group is going to be you're a professor you've got students use the students and he was running out of people to put in the control group i mean he even used himself as one of the people so anyways running through this control group and having a look at all of the people that run it and he notices this person's got no activation when they're going through and he goes holy [ __ ] this is the brain of a psychopath in the control group i found a psychopath in here i need to go and contact him 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 and 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 [ __ ] are all of these people in my house eating my food why are they here and they interviewed his kids they asked his kids and they said what is it like you know 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 was 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 murder in jail so what was what's the determination how do they what are they looking for when they find out that he's a whole big long checklist it might even be available online i'm not sure but 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 uh the dsm wouldn't have categorized him as a as a psychopath very interesting that is very interesting so this guy did they contact his spouse well i think he was it was him doing the study right so i guess he contacted his spouse did he ask his spouse like him what's wrong with me [ __ ] knows 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 as long as it's not uh 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 water off a duck's back yep yeah definitely grandiose narcissist right he's not 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 poked them a little bit too hard that it would really really hurt that's the vulnerable narcissist

Channel: PowerfulJRE

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Length: 7min 24sec (444 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 02 2022