I don’t think I’ve ever lectured about psychopathy without having someone ask if a sociopath is the same thing. The answer, it happens, is “kind of”.
The term “sociopathy” was popularised by George Partridge, an American psychologist, in the late 1920s and early 1930s. At a time when people were arguing over what the term “psychopath” should mean, Partridge’s point was to emphasise that the thing that made psychopaths who they are is their willingness to ignore social norms and conventions to harm others.
Partridge’s posthumous legacy was the inclusion of Sociopathic Personality Disturbance in the very first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The label was relatively short-lived, however, as the next edition refined it to Antisocial Personality. To this day you won’t find “psychopathy” or “sociopathy” in the DSM.
Psychopathy is a constellation of callous and unemotional personality characteristics, often in conjunction with an impulsive and disorganised pattern of relationships and lifestyle. Psychopaths are responsible for a disproportionate share of our crime rate. They are unlikely to be fixed by measures such as boot camps – they are generally considered to be less attentive to things like punishments and rewards for good behaviour. It’s relatively rare in the general population, but more common in some parts of the world than others. Some studies suggest it’s more common in the US, with something like 4% of men and 1% of women meeting the criteria. It’s probably at least partly genetic.
But the crossnational variation is intriguing. I’ll come back to that.
In the 1980s, a bloke called Robert Smith, not to be confused with the Cure’s lead singer, wrote several articles and a book about psychopathy. The Psychopath in Society included a recommendation to find ways to take advantage of psychopathic traits in ways that benefit the person and those around them.
For example, we should find occupational niches where a psychopath can get the goodies without harming anybody and benefit the organisation they work for. Sounds like a plan.
In fact, this is kind of what happens naturally, with at least some psychopaths charming their way into roles that get them the goodies, though they tend to cause chaos as they do. Think Gordon Gekko in Wall Street: “Greed is, for lack of a better word, good.”
Smith also makes an intriguing argument that perhaps at least a bit of the variance in the psychopathic make-up isn’t so much antisocial and super-social, but an internalisation of social values around individualism and things like the American dream. Hmmm, and the US has a higher-than-average proportion of psychopaths … If that’s the case, then we’d expect to find that people who are more individualistic than others will also endorse psychopathic traits more.
New Zealand is generally considered a relatively individualistic culture in which we’re loosely connected and generally look after ourselves; job-related success is the product of proving what you can do. Take a look at Hofstede Insights’ Country Comparison Tool, and you’ll find we score 79 for culture-level individualism. Australia weighs in at 90, just behind the US at 91. Japan comes in at 46, and Fiji scores a collectivist 14.
But in a book chapter I co-wrote with then-honours student Samantha Hartley, we found that individual-level individualism is associated with psychopathic traits. That’s to say although New Zealand is considered an individualistic culture, we vary internally as to how much we define ourselves in terms of our characteristics as opposed to connections with others and our social roles.
While Smith wasn’t right about getting psychopaths to intern at Enron, he may have been right about the extra-social nature of psychopathy.
