his patients were. But he felt that they were just as troubled, just as deficient or wrongly equipped to live, and so should be kept apart from everyoneelse. He was concerned that dangerous sociopaths were not committed in mental institutions often enough, because an overemphasis on verbal intelligence and rationality in determining whether a person was mentally competent for the purposes of confinement weighed in favor of sociopaths.
But depriving the sociopath of freedom purely on the basis of her psychiatric diagnosis is fraught with questions of moral significance. Social scientists worry about control and maintenance—how do we deal with these strange creatures, they ask themselves, in a manner that does not make monsters of the rest of us? Can a person’s lack of conscience justify a deprivation of his freedom? Society commits the insane to confinement by reasoning that they present harm to themselves and others. I’ve heard the argument that sociopaths cannot function in the outside world, so there is nothing that society can do but take the drastic step of separating the sociopaths from the rest of the world. But sociopaths
can
function; we just function differently. It’s not like we’re biting off our own hands or jumping off of buildings in the belief that we can fly. We’re not crazy. And the truth is that we are sometimes quite successful. It is just that we live, think, and make decisions in a way that some people find loathsome and most find disturbingly amoral. What do you do to people you simply don’t like?
The role that a diagnosis of sociopathy should play in criminal sentencing is an admittedly thorny issue. The legal standard for an insanity plea is that the perpetrator must not be able to distinguish between right and wrong. Sociopaths actually know what society considers right and wrong most of the time, they just don’t feel an emotional compulsion to conform their behavior to societal standards. The debate is whether this faulty wiring makes them more culpable, less culpable, or equally culpable compared to a similarly offendingnonsociopath. Kent Kiehl, a prominent researcher who specializes in scanning the brains of sociopaths in prisons, suggested treating them the same as people with low IQs, who may know that their actions are wrong but lack sufficient “brakes” on their violent impulses.
Furthermore, there is the question of effectiveness of punishment. Cleckley asserted that treating sociopaths as ordinary criminals—and simply imprisoning them when they had committed a wrong—did not work, since punishment does little to deter them. Of course, the deterring effect of imprisonment on anyone is questionable. I doubt that empathetic people who commit crimes of passion are deterred by the thought of imprisonment, and I wonder how much it works on lifelong drug dealers born into gangs and poverty who thus have few alternatives. However, scientific research has been conducted to show that sociopaths are particularly nonresponsive to negative consequences, and I have found this to be true in my own life. The threat of punishment at home or school only served as a challenge to figure out how to circumvent the consequences when I did what I wanted to do anyway. I didn’t fear the punishment, I just saw it as an inconvenience to work around.
Cleckley’s intuition that sociopaths do not respond normally to negative consequences was validated by a famous study by Hare in which he administered mild electrical shocks to both psychopaths and a normal control group. A timer ticking down preceded the shock. Normal people would show signs of anxiety as the timer got closer to the shock, anticipating the slight pain. Psychopaths were remarkably unfazed by the shock and did not express a comparable increase in anxiety as the timer ticked down.
This blithe reaction to negative events may be due to the excessive dopamine that characterizes the sociopathic brain.Vanderbilt University researchers
But depriving the sociopath of freedom purely on the basis of her psychiatric diagnosis is fraught with questions of moral significance. Social scientists worry about control and maintenance—how do we deal with these strange creatures, they ask themselves, in a manner that does not make monsters of the rest of us? Can a person’s lack of conscience justify a deprivation of his freedom? Society commits the insane to confinement by reasoning that they present harm to themselves and others. I’ve heard the argument that sociopaths cannot function in the outside world, so there is nothing that society can do but take the drastic step of separating the sociopaths from the rest of the world. But sociopaths
can
function; we just function differently. It’s not like we’re biting off our own hands or jumping off of buildings in the belief that we can fly. We’re not crazy. And the truth is that we are sometimes quite successful. It is just that we live, think, and make decisions in a way that some people find loathsome and most find disturbingly amoral. What do you do to people you simply don’t like?
The role that a diagnosis of sociopathy should play in criminal sentencing is an admittedly thorny issue. The legal standard for an insanity plea is that the perpetrator must not be able to distinguish between right and wrong. Sociopaths actually know what society considers right and wrong most of the time, they just don’t feel an emotional compulsion to conform their behavior to societal standards. The debate is whether this faulty wiring makes them more culpable, less culpable, or equally culpable compared to a similarly offendingnonsociopath. Kent Kiehl, a prominent researcher who specializes in scanning the brains of sociopaths in prisons, suggested treating them the same as people with low IQs, who may know that their actions are wrong but lack sufficient “brakes” on their violent impulses.
Furthermore, there is the question of effectiveness of punishment. Cleckley asserted that treating sociopaths as ordinary criminals—and simply imprisoning them when they had committed a wrong—did not work, since punishment does little to deter them. Of course, the deterring effect of imprisonment on anyone is questionable. I doubt that empathetic people who commit crimes of passion are deterred by the thought of imprisonment, and I wonder how much it works on lifelong drug dealers born into gangs and poverty who thus have few alternatives. However, scientific research has been conducted to show that sociopaths are particularly nonresponsive to negative consequences, and I have found this to be true in my own life. The threat of punishment at home or school only served as a challenge to figure out how to circumvent the consequences when I did what I wanted to do anyway. I didn’t fear the punishment, I just saw it as an inconvenience to work around.
Cleckley’s intuition that sociopaths do not respond normally to negative consequences was validated by a famous study by Hare in which he administered mild electrical shocks to both psychopaths and a normal control group. A timer ticking down preceded the shock. Normal people would show signs of anxiety as the timer got closer to the shock, anticipating the slight pain. Psychopaths were remarkably unfazed by the shock and did not express a comparable increase in anxiety as the timer ticked down.
This blithe reaction to negative events may be due to the excessive dopamine that characterizes the sociopathic brain.Vanderbilt University researchers
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