Hacker News Reader

Comment by metamemetics | Hacker News Reader

What a loaded sensationalist witch hunt. Someone either is an axe murderer or they aren't.

There is no physical thing known as Psychopathy, it is an arbitrary descriptive label known as a category used to group similar behavior together. It is not a scientific discovery but a classification.

This psychology professor is just asserting the classification he's devoted his life's work to is now bigger and applies to more people. He is simply coming up with an excuse to inflate his self-worth and sell more books, even though he is not making any discoveries and doing research.

He's not even making the genetics argument, and if he was I would post articles citing nutritional deficiencies as causes of aggression or how gene expression changes due to epigenetics.

I just want to insist that anyone interested in reading up on psychology stick to the scientific research, specifically cognitive- psychology\neuroscience\computing\science

View on HN

First, "this psychology professor" is trying to get people not to misuse his work, as reading the article would have told you. He is, in fact, "the scientific research". The reason he's not doing research now, as you seem to be asserting, is that he is retired. From doing research, you see.

Secondly, if you don't believe in psychopathy, you clearly haven't met my mother-in-law. (And I only wish I were joking.)

Behaviors are caused by physical things, namely brain states, so it's perfectly reasonable to attribute a category of behavior to a physical characteristic of the brain. If people who behave fundamentally differently than others aren't physically different then what accounts for their behavior?

Your making what's known in social psychology as the Fundamental Attribution Error: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

Can you enlighten us as to how he is making this error?

We are always biased to overestimate the component of behavior attributable to some intrinsic quality of the person.

The classic example is Nazi Germany\The Holocaust. Everyone started asking how could the Germans commit so many horrible atrocities, it must be something intrinsic and Freudian about their personality maybe they have a strong need for discipline, etc.

Then along comes Milgram and his famous electroshock study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment , showing that Americans will perform actions even if they directly violate their internal beliefs, returning the primacy of behavior to the situation. It has been reproduced cross-culturally\many different times and variations. Another influential study is the Stanford Prison Experiments.

Personally I still agree with the poster (samd) that everything is physical including brain states, and dualism is bonkers. But if we take that step, there is no longer a metaphysical ego holding personality. There is no distinction between individual and environment and the causality between the two is bidirectional, rendering the question moot.

There is no distinction between individual and environment and the causality between the two is bidirectional, rendering the question moot.

You are definitely on to something.

You could just as well make the argument that such "violating internal beliefs" is actually the exposed core and that such beliefs are the veneer furnished by upbringing.

Afaik, adoption studies support that psychopathy is inherited (to a large part) genetically.

Ah yes, I see your point metamemetics, thanks. Which is the more leading cause of violent criminal behavior: circumstance or the person themselves? though, the rate of re offending seems to point towards the people themselves somewhat.

I don't think so, I haven't really made any claims about how much of their behavior is situational versus dispositional. I'm just saying that disposition plays some role.

I agree that behaviors are caused by physical states. However, stating that people who behave in a fundamentally different way aren't physically different is misguided. Every person is physically different. The difficulty is that unless there are gross brain lesions, it's very hard to see what makes people with psychopathy different. It might be a slight difference in the sensitivity of key neurons to one of twenty neurotransmitters, for example, or a slightly different pattern of connections in one region.

Psychology (like many sciences) is all about developing reliable abstractions for these complex physical states. The surprising thing is that it works: you can change the neurotransmitter balance of the brain in many cases just by sitting down and talking to people for a year.

Where on earth are you getting this from? The guy has done excellent hard research, psychopathy is fairly well established at this point:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy

Further, there should be nothing outrageous in the claim that some people have radically different emotions from "normal people," especially considering the fact that you can take a pill and instantly change the sort of consciousness and emotions that you experience.

I think there's a fair point to make that calling one person a psychopath and another person not a psychopath is a purely arbitrary line drawn in the sand. Hare's test measures various responses and draws an arbitrary line (30 of 40 points) between which someone is or is not a psychopath.

It's a classical false dichotomy that the article promotes in sensationalist terms.

It may be arbitrary in the same sense the question, "Is that a fast car?" is arbitrary, but in exactly the same sense you can compare and make statements regarding the degree to which someone exhibits psychopathic traits, and as his research shows, this isn't something that's simply caused by a bad upbringing.

The fact that it's not a black & white issue doesn't mean that there aren't concrete physical differences between the brains of the general population and the 1% of the population labeled as psychopaths. It's the same situation for any mental "disorder", i.e. Asperger Syndrome, etc.

Psychopathy is a label that's not even widely used anymore. It's not a diagnostic in the DSM. This guy is a super old-timer who mainly works with police. 'Psychopathy' was a catch-all category that he is making increasingly more catch-all. We make categories because they are useful, but this categorization wasn't specific enough to be useful which is why it isn't used anymore.

"According to Hare, 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[10] although this was not what was reported by a 2008 review which instead indicated multiple causes and variation between individuals"

I am obviously not arguing that antisocial behavior doesn't exist, murder obviously is an action that has happened at least once before. What I am arguing strongly against is the idea that people are born intrinsically evil. Also the point he hammers in is all about "empathy", but empathy is also absent in autism... his category is too broad to be usable at helping people.

Treating an individual as an individual rather than a category allows you to take off the blinders and address there specific situation better to promote more positive change. The methodology of categorizing someone as having an intrinsic psychological disorder is extremely pessimistic and hinders resocialization. It has also been out the door with the advent of positive psychology, here is a speech by a president of the american psychological association: http://www.ted.com/talks/martin_seligman_on_the_state_of_psy...

http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/10773.html

The above is a completely different approach to looking at antisocial behavior. It is also one that leads to positive outcomes. It is also quantifiable.

> The above is a completely different approach to looking at antisocial behavior. It is also one that leads to positive outcomes. It is also quantifiable.

That's ridiculous, it's an article about how early malnutrition can cause antisocial behavior, that in no way disproves any of Hare's research.

> What I am arguing strongly against is the idea that people are born intrinsically evil. Also the point he hammers in is all about "empathy", but empathy is also absent in autism... his category is too broad to be usable at helping people.

You're splitting hairs at this point. The term 'evil' is totally subjective. Hare himself doesn't use it, and if you read the article, you'd know that he too is fully aware of the potential for misuse of labels and his own research by people who lack any training in this field. No surprise, he doesn't approve of that.

Some people are _born_ with mental disorders. Some people get mental disorders from environmental factors such as childhood malnutrition. Hare is fully aware of this, and none of that detracts from his research, or the existence of psychopaths and its worth as a label in describing a mental condition.

The last link wasn't a refutation or response to Hare's research, it was a different METHODOLOGY of doing research. I wanted to contrast the _methodology_.

And no, people are NOT born with mental disorders due to environmental factors, they are born with NEUROLOGICAL disorders: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurological_disorders

The two musn't be confused.

And no, people are NOT born with mental disorders due to environmental factors, they are born with NEUROLOGICAL disorders

What is the difference? At some level, all "mental" (i.e, psychological) disorders are neurological.

That's my point of view, and why I think we should look at interesting _neuroscience_ research (which I consider the true science).

As it stands now, they are considered to be fundamentally different (thanks to Descartes and dualism), which is why you have psychiatrists\diagnostic-psychologists as a completely separate field from neurology.

which I consider the true science

That there is a dangerous, dogmatic attitude that I suggest you lose. And I say this as a neuroscience buff myself.

You wouldn't agree there that some fields are more scientific than others? Is physics not more of a science than mechanical engineering? Is linguistics not more of a science than english? Is logic\mathematical analysis not more of a science than philosophy?

Abstracted fields are useful because they can be practical and an application of knowledge. That doesn't make them natural science. I say this not as a "buff" but as someone whose primary in university was cognitive science and has done their fair share of hooking people up to EEGs.

No, a surprising number of psychologists (dating back to B.F. Skinner, who you might like) reject the idea of the mind and view psychology as some kind of black-box experimental science focusing on animal behavior.

B.F. Skinner still holds on to a dualist framework. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AepqpTtKbwo (3:00m)

In this video you can see him still using internal and external seperate. Behaviorism to him means the direction of causality is external to internal and it contrasts it to the notion of free-will, where the direction is internal to external. He doesn't completely reject the notion of the metaphysical, just the importance of it, otherwise there would be no black box in his black-box experimental science. Behaviorism gets pretty boring when you can't study thoughts or ideas.

Non-dualism posits that what we associate with the mind does exist, and it exists in the same manner or plane of existence as everything else. Basically, a thought or idea or emotion physically exists in the same sense that a rock, river, or black hole does. Studying the brain and neurons is the study of thoughts and ideas. Evidence in neuroscience heavily supports non-dualism, and there is a lot of awesome information you can read. I submitted a John Searle video from the IBM Cognitive Computing lecture series, it didn't get picked up but a link is here:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3295448672203577230...

There are actually two forms of non-dualism: materalism and idealism. One is that everything lives in the material world and the other is that everything lives within the world of thought. For various reasons, materialism is the only non-dualism scientists give credence to.

Skinner's a materialist, too. He may reject emotions, thoughts, and free will as fiction, but that's because there was, at his time, no scientific evidence for them. Neurology may have changed that, and so in fact may have continued behavioral research. (I suspect there are behavioral studies which would have shown a consistent "internal state" factor to animal behavior, for instance.)

Curious. My psychopathology course always emphasized a diathesis-stress model. Their position was that "mental disorders" are functionally defined behaviors involving biological, emotional, and social factors in varying degrees.

> 'Psychopathy' was a catch-all category that he is making increasingly more catch-all.

I don't understand this. How is he making a term 'more catch-all' by defining a peer-reviewed checklist that defines what 'psychopathy' actually is? Prior to that it was a term that had no exact or standard meaning. By creating a formal definition, debate can happen as to which parts of the definition are right or wrong, but prior to that serious debate was meaningless since everyone had a different definition.

Seconded. As I recall, the PCL-R matches far fewer people than DSM-IV's ASPD criteria.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com