The Sociopath Next Door (17 page)

“So I started asking him to leave. Now, if I were over at somebody else's house and they asked me to leave, I'd leave—wouldn't you?—if only for my own dignity. Not Luke. He acted like he hadn't even heard me, which was fairly creepy all by itself, or he'd leave for a while, and then he'd come back just like nothing had happened. So I'd get really angry, and instead of just asking him to leave, I'd scream at him to get out, or I'd threaten to call the police. And do you know what he did?”

“He used Jonathan,” I said.

“That's right. How did you know? He used Jonathan. For example, we were out by the pool, all three of us, and Luke started to cry. Actual
tears
came out of the man's eyes. Then I remember he picked up the net we used to skim the pool and started skimming, like he was a suffering martyr who only wanted to help, and then Jon got tearful, too, and he said—and I'll remember this for the rest of my life—Jonathan said, ‘Oh no. Poor Daddy. Do we have to make him leave?'

“And then Luke looked at me, looked me right in the eyes, and it was as if I'd never met him before in my life. He looked that different. Those were the creepiest eyes I've ever seen, like beams of ice—it's really hard to explain. And I realized, all of a sudden, that in Luke's mind this was all some kind of a control game. It was some kind of a game, and I had lost, big-time. I was stunned.”

Within a year after this scene by the pool, Sydney left Florida and her university position there and moved with Jonathan to the Boston area to be closer to her sister, and fifteen hundred miles away from Luke. A few months later, she started a brief therapy with me. She needed to work through some of the issues left over from her marriage, especially her self-blame that she had married Luke in the first place. She was an extremely resilient person, and I have every reason to think her life is happier now. She would sometimes joke that, in the case of her problem with Luke, the famous “geographic cure” just might work, although she knew that the longer journey of self-forgiveness would be more complicated.

Sydney was able to gain a certain understanding of her ex-husband's lack of conscience, and this new perspective was helpful to her. Her greatest remaining concern was the emotional vulnerability of her eight-year-old son, Jonathan. The last time I saw Sydney, she told me that she and Jonathan were still having tearful discussions about Florida and how much he felt sorry for Daddy.

SEVEN

the etiology of guiltlessness: what
causes sociopathy?

Since adolescence I have wondered why so many people take pleasure in humiliating others. Clearly the fact that some are sensitive to the suffering of others proves that the destructive urge to hurt is not a universal aspect of human nature.

—Alice Miller

I
n many ways, Luke, Doreen, and Skip are very different from one another. Luke favors inertia. He likes to lounge, and to let responsible “friends” and family members take care of everything else. Doreen is envious, and a chronic malcontent. She exerts a great deal of energy trying to make other people look smaller so that she can feel bigger. And Skip would like to run the world, for his own benefit, of course, and as a grandiose form of entertainment. But what these three diversely motivated human beings have in common is that, in the interest of their individual ambitions,
they can do anything at all
without the slenderest glimmer of guilt. Each of them desires something different, but they all get what they want in exactly the same fashion, which is to say, completely without shame. Skip breaks the law and ruins careers and lives, and he feels nothing. Doreen makes her whole life into a lie, and torments the helpless for the thrill of making her colleagues look bad, and all without the slightest blip of embarrassment or accountability. For someone to take care of him, a rent-free house, and a swimming pool, Luke lovelessly marries a decent woman who wants to have a family, and then steals some of the joy from his son's childhood in an attempt to retain his own childlike dependency. And he makes such decisions without thinking twice, let alone being assailed by guilt.

None of these people has an intervening seventh sense of obligation based in emotional attachments. While, sadly, this commonality among them does not make them extremely rare, it does make them profoundly different from all people who do have conscience. All three are members of a group apart, a human category in which the distinguishing feature—the absence of conscience—cuts across all other personality features and even gender in terms of how individuals perceive their surroundings and go about their lives. Doreen is more like Luke and Skip than she is like any woman in the world who has conscience, and laconic Luke and driven Skip are more like each other than any conscience-bound man or woman of any temperament whatsoever.

What carves this deep and yet strangely invisible dividing line across the human race? Why do some people not have a conscience? What causes sociopathy?

Like so many human characteristics, both physical and psychological, the primary question is that of nature versus nurture. Is the characteristic born in the blood, or is it created by the environment? For most complex psychological features, the answer is, very probably, both. In other words, a predisposition for the characteristic is present at conception, but the environment regulates how it is expressed. This is true both for traits we consider negative and for those we think of as positive. For example, level of intelligence would appear to be strongly determined by genetic makeup but partly shaped by an elaborate toolbox of environmental factors as well, such as prenatal care, early stimulation, nutrition, and even birth order. Sociopathic deviance, a decidedly more negative characteristic, is probably no exception to this some-of-each paradigm. Research indicates that both nature and nurture are involved.

Psychologists have long known that many aspects of personality, such as extraversion and neuroticism, are influenced to some degree by genetic factors. Much of the scientific evidence for this is provided by studies comparing monozygotic (identical) and dizygotic (fraternal) twins. The underlying premise in such research is that identical twins share an environment and all of their genes, whereas fraternal twins share an environment but only about half of their genes. For any given trait, scientists assume that if the correlation (or likeness) for genetically identical twins is significantly greater than the correlation for genetically dissimilar twins, there is at least some genetic influence for that trait.

Researchers use a number that is double the difference between the identical twin correlation and the fraternal twin correlation to indicate the amount of variation thought to be accounted for by genetic factors. This number is referred to as the trait's “heritability,” and studies on twins have shown that personality features determined by questionnaires (such as extraversion, neuroticism, authoritarianism, empathy, and so forth) have a heritability of between 35 and 50 percent. In other words, twin studies indicate that most measurable aspects of our personalities are 35 to 50 percent innate.

Heritability studies contain important information about sociopathy. A number of such studies have included the “Psychopathic Deviate” (Pd) scale of the
Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
(the
MMPI
). The Pd scale of the
MMPI
consists of multiple-choice questions that have been statistically formulated to sort out people with sociopathic personality traits from other groups of people. The inventory includes several validity measures as well, including a “Lie Scale” to expose attempts to beat the test. Overall in these studies, identical twins are twice or more as likely to have similar scores on the Pd scale as are fraternal twins, strongly suggesting at least some genetic role in the “Psychopathic Deviate” pattern.

In 1995, a major longitudinal study was published that investigated sociopathic traits and their absence in 3,226 pairs of male twins located through a register of people who had served in the United States armed services during the Vietnam War. By the same mathematical model, eight sociopathic symptoms and their absence were found to be significantly heritable. They are, in descending order of theoretical heritability: “fails to conform to social norms,” “aggressive,” “reckless,” “impulsive,” “fails to honor financial obligations,” “inconsistent work,” “never monogamous,” and “lacks remorse.” Still other studies have found that sociopaths have low “agreeableness,” low “conscientiousness,” and low “harm avoidance,” all of which personality dimensions have a genetic component.

The Texas Adoption Project, which has now been in progress for over thirty years, is a highly regarded longitudinal study of more than five hundred adopted children. The study looks at the acquisition of intelligence and various personality features, including the “Psychopathic Deviate” pattern, by comparing adopted children, now grown, with both their biological and adoptive parents. The Texas Adoption Project reports that, where scores on the Pd scale are concerned, individuals resemble their birth mothers, whom they have never met, significantly more than they do the adoptive parents who raised them. From this research, a heritability estimate of 54 percent can be derived, and interestingly, this “Psychopathic Deviate” figure is consistent with the heritability estimates—35 to 50 percent—generally found in studies of other, more neutral personality characteristics (extraversion, empathy, and so forth).

Over and again, heritability studies come up with a statistical finding that has emotionally charged social and political implications—that indeed a person's tendency to possess certain sociopathic characteristics is partially born in the blood, perhaps as much as 50 percent so. To bring home the provocative nature of this research—it would indicate, for example, that before they were even born, at the very moment of conception, people such as Doreen, Luke, and Skip were already somewhat predisposed to become deceitful, reckless, faithless, and remorseless. When we make heritability statements about athletic ability or introversion, or even bipolar disorders or schizophrenia, somehow the information does not seem so shocking. But to say so about antisocial tendencies feels especially grim, though the same statistical approaches are used.

It is important to point out that such extremely complex characteristics are unlikely to be determined by a single gene, but are almost certainly oligogenic, meaning caused by multiple genes acting together. And the exact way in which these genes go about shaping brain function and then behavior is currently unknown. Getting from a person's DNA to a many-layered behavioral concept such as “fails to honor financial obligations” is a long, labyrinthine biochemical, neurological, and psychological trip, and is correspondingly daunting to study.

But research has already provided us with a few pointed hints. One important link in the neurobiological-behavioral segment of the chain may consist of altered functioning in the cerebral cortex of the sociopath. Some of the most interesting information about cortical functioning in sociopathy comes to us through studies of how human beings process language. As it turns out, even at the level of electrical activity in the brain, normal people react to emotional words (such as
love, hate, cozy, pain, happy, mother
) more rapidly and more intensely than to relatively neutral words (
table, chair, fifteen, later,
etc.) If I am given the task of deciding between words and nonwords, I will recognize
terror
over
lister
much faster, in terms of microseconds, than I will choose between
window
and
endock,
and my enhanced reaction to the emotional word
terror
can be measured by recording a tiny electrical reaction, called an “evoked potential,” in my cerebral cortex. Such studies indicate that the brains of normal people attend to, remember, and recognize words that refer to emotional experiences preferentially to emotion-neutral words.
Love
will be recognized as a word faster than
look
will be, and a greater evoked potential will result in the brain, very much as if
love
were a more primal and meaningful piece of information than
look.

Not so for sociopathic subjects who have been tested using language-processing tasks. In terms of reaction time and evoked potentials in the cortex, sociopathic subjects in these experiments respond to emotionally charged words no differently from neutral words. In sociopaths, the evoked potential for
sob
or
kiss
is no larger than the one for
sat
or
list,
very much as if emotional words were no more meaningful, or deeply coded by their brains, than any other words.

In related research using single-photon emission-computed tomography (brain-imaging technology), sociopathic subjects showed increased blood flow to the temporal lobes, relative to other subjects, when they were given a decision task that involved emotional words. To enable our concentration, you or I might exhibit such an increased cerebral blood flow if we were asked to solve a mildly challenging intellectual problem. In other words, sociopaths trying to complete an assignment based on emotional words, a task that would be almost neurologically instantaneous for normal people, reacted physiologically more or less as if they had been asked to work out an algebra problem.

Taken together, such studies indicate that sociopathy involves an altered processing of emotional stimuli at the level of the cerebral cortex. Why this altered processing occurs is not yet known, but it is likely to be the result of a heritable neurodevelopmental difference that can be either slightly compensated for, or made much worse, by child-rearing or cultural factors. This neurodevelopmental distinction is at least partially responsible for the still-unfathomed psychological difference between sociopaths and all other people, and its implications are startling. Sociopathy is more than just the absence of conscience, which alone would be tragic enough. Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task.