did you jut go all good will hunting all over this post or what? ha...i love it.
Haha, no, I'm just an ENTP. I've got a lot of family in Southie, though
and I think some of them might just be psychopaths. How dyou like them apples?
Also, Good Will Hunting has the best soundtrack of all films past, present, and future, in this and all possible universes. Elliott Smith, baby.
I would assume that intelligence and psychopathy are not linked in any way. There are the dumb ones and the smart ones. But I am only guessing, I don't have any data.
Sociopathy is strongly associated with extremely high or extremely low intelligence. Psychopaths regularly have high IQs, but not the 140+ levels like some sociopaths. Without going into what our own IQs are, I think that anyone here who has gotten a very high result on an IQ test can see how their brainpower could easily lend itself to sociopathic naughtiness.
Yes, this is what I was thinking. A regular person might not even WANT to be a CEO because the decisions he would have to make seem immoral and anti-human. So, if you have a job that requires people to forget about their empathy and play by the numbers, knowingly cause trouble to other people, there is a greater chance that psychopaths will be found there.
I think there's a distinction between antisocial personalities (ASD) and psychopaths that will be drawn out on brain scans. I think all of us are, at some point in our lives, total assholes, and that's really what a diagnosis of ASD means: your shrink thinks you're a total asshole.
But ASD's criteria focus on the pattern of disregard for the rights of others, the lack of empathy, and the behavioral naughtiness that winds these people up in the clink. To some extent, we all disregard the rights of others; last summer, the President suggested that judges ought to use empathy in deciding how to rule on a case, and polls suggested that most Americans thought that was retarded. Many successful men, many ordinary men, are absolutely oblivious to how others feel. Some people are assholes. Sociopaths are total assholes. But their motivations and behaviors, while we find them deplorable, we can understand because we are not perfect people.
Psychopaths are a different animal. Cleckley more or less nailed it in calling them "intraspecies predators." Their brains work differently than ours. I'm not a neurologist, so I'll try not to cite evidence that I don't really understand, but Hare says that "the consensus among researchers in this area is that psychopathy stems from a specific neurological disorder which is biological in origin and present from birth." I don't know if I'd call psychopathy a genetic disorder, per se; the psychopathic genotype has obviously been selected for in our species. Lykken identifies impulsivity, cortical underarousal, and fearlessness as temperamental phenotypes present at birth in psychopaths. I suspect that most researchers, if you asked them, would agree that psychopathy involves a defective Theory of Mind, but I'm unaware of any research to that effect. ToM is more of an autism thing.