Qu'est-ce que c'est?

This is an interesting New Yorker article about psychopaths, and about a man who has gotten an fMRI machine installed at a prison in Arizona. This has given him the ability to do brain scans of many more psychopaths that one can find wandering around college campuses (though there are some there too, obviously.) Not a wholly satisfactory article in that you tend to want some kind of big reveal--then he found out why people become psychopaths! But of course he didn't find anything like that. And, in fact, it seems as if he got this thing recently and won't have results for a while. There does appear to be a widely used and fairly reliable questionnaire for determining who is a psychopath, developed by the mentor of the man in the article. The main takeaway is, hey, more people should be studying psychopaths, given how they commit all these hideous crimes and all. But blah, blah, responsibility for our actions.

I don't entirely understand this worry. If we have a reliable way to diagnose and understand psychopaths, this will just amount to a better understanding of the facts we have now. I mean, in some sense we all already think that anyone who would murder his mother is, in some important sense, crazy. Whatever conclusions we currently draw about his moral culpability will still apply when we have some new, forward-looking, fMRI-backed way of determining what that craziness amounts to. "When I say, 'he's crazy and lacks empathy', I'm pointing to a specific state of affaris in his limbic system--and here's a colorful slide to prove it!" If the diagnosis were very reliable and were used to keep people locked up...this is the point at which we might have trouble. But again I feel the trouble would in large part be about the reliability of the test, not whether such a test that was perfectly reliable should be employed in parole hearings.

It also seems clear some children are obvious proto-psychopaths. Think how horrible it would be if it were your kid toruring cats and so on. Does all this freak the psych researchers out? Sounds like, yes.

Harenski recently interviewed a Western inmate who scored a 38.9. “He had killed his girlfriend because he thought she was cheating on him,” she told me. “He was so charming about telling it that I found it hard not to fall into laughing along in surprise, even when he was describing awful things.” Harenski, who is thirty, did not experience the involuntary skin-crawling sensation that, according to a survey conducted by the psychologists Reid and M. J. Meloy, one in three mental-health and criminal-justice professionals report feeling on interviewing a psychopath; in their paper on the subject, Meloy and Meloy speculate that this reaction may be an ancient intraspecies predator-response system. “I was just excited,” Harenski continued. “I was saying to myself, ‘Wow. I found a real one.’ ”

One in three...I feel like the other two were lying to themselves, if they weren't caught up in the joy of discovery like this person. Then again, there does seem to be a disconnect between the "sucessfully charming and manipulative" part of the description and the "gives me the cold robbies" part.

Comments

[The Modesto Kid]

a disconnect

Not necessarily -- wouldn't you find it really creepy to realize you were being charmed and manipulated by somebody telling you about how he killed his girlfriend?

[matt]

My friend Paul Litton at the law school at U. Missouri has a great paper coming out soon on psychopaths and moral responsibility- a great mix of philosophy, empirical psychology and moral psychology. I don't think it's available on line but maybe he'd send one a copy. On the fMRI stuff, I'm always a bit unmoved by a lot of it, especially when people act surprised that people thinking different thoughts or in different ways have brains doing different things. Wouldn't it be more of a surprise if it were otherwise? I know that's not all they do, but still.

[PG]

Then again, there does seem to be a disconnect between the "sucessfully charming and manipulative" part of the description and the "gives me the cold robbies" part.

2/3 find him charming, 1/3 get the cold robbies -- sounds like about the right proportion for people who interact with a psychopath. We just tend to be more trustful of our positive reactions to such people because they seem more rational: "He was so nice and articulate and well-mannered" vs. "I can't put my finger on it but I don't like him."

On the fMRI stuff, I'm always a bit unmoved by a lot of it, especially when people act surprised that people thinking different thoughts or in different ways have brains doing different things. Wouldn't it be more of a surprise if it were otherwise?

I think people are surprised because the mind-body split is still so prevalent in most people's thinking. Religion does give the strong impression that the soul exists independently of the various neurons firing off in the brain that stop firing off at death. People think that psychopaths must have something wrong with their souls and thus haven't thought about the possibility that they also have something wrong with their brains.

[Dr Paisley]

Keep an eye on the cold robbies, they can develop into a case of weasels in nothing flat.

[ajay]

Meloy and Meloy speculate that this reaction may be an ancient intraspecies predator-response system

Peter Watts, please call your office.

[ajay]

Stupid lack of preview.
http://www.rifters.com/blindsight/BS_main.htm

[mulberry bags]

Go for someone who makes you smile because it takes only a smile to make a dark day seem bright.