So according to this essay, everything we believe and assume about 'psychopaths' and Psychopathology, is flat-out wrong.
In short, the idea of the psychopath--someone who has little or no empathy, no sense of right or wrong, someone who is emotionally dead---is just how people decided to answer the question, 'Why do we have monsters among us?'
I especially enjoyed the explanation of 'Zombie' ideas in science..especially the soft sciences.
A few snippets from a long and well-written essay:
Psychopathic personality disorder – or psychopathy as it is commonly called – is one of the oldest and most researched mental health diagnoses.
...across hundreds of empirical studies – especially since the explosion of research in the late-1990s – there is still remarkably little evidence that corroborates popularized claims about the diagnosis. Despite enthusiasm among researchers in the 1990s and 2000s, when a few studies seemed to validate theories about psychopathy, the past two decades have been sobering. Today, virtually every single claim about psychopathy has been either thoroughly refuted or failed to find empirical support in experimental settings. Psychopathy may not exist at all.
Consider one of the most repeated tropes about psychopaths, that they are incapable of mirroring or reading other peoples’ emotions: they lack empathy. The problem with this view is that science tells a radically different story. When people diagnosed with psychopathy participate in empathy experiments, their performance is entirely indistinguishable from normal controls.
The most compelling evidence comes from a recent systematic review of empathy research my team conducted, which included a total of 66 studies involving 5,711 persons clinically assessed for psychopathy. We found that the results were ‘overwhelmingly null findings’ (89.11 per cent of all tests). That is, statistical analyses cannot tell the difference in performance between psychopathic vs non-psychopathic persons. We also found that high-quality studies – those using more rigid statistical methods – had an even higher null-ratio of a whopping 94.77 per cent. In behavioural scientific experiments, where datasets are presumed to be rife with false positives, this is arguably as close as you get to proving a negative: people diagnosed with psychopathy do not have empathy deficits.
An alternative answer to this question that has so far received little attention is the possibility that psychopathy may be an instance of what scientists colloquially refer to as a zombie idea: ideas that have the quality of being intuitively appealing, but the idea itself is essentially a fallacious misconception of reality. Just like zombies, when these ideas have been falsified – shown to be dead ideas – they somehow still manage to stubbornly stick around in the halls of prestigious universities, only to once again infect another generation of young scientists.
There are many historic examples of zombie ideas, such as phrenology, race theory, or the geocentric view of the Universe. What these ideas have in common is that they were all widely accepted by scientists, even for decades after they were thoroughly refuted by scientific research. And this gets to the core of a zombie idea: those who are infected always fail in the strangest ways to realise that the idea is dead. As such, zombie ideas appear to be upheld by strong biases where the idea itself is rarely questioned, even when the scientist who believes in them is faced with obvious evidence that suggests the idea is wrong. Fortunately, zombie ideas are relatively rare in the sciences, but they truly are a peculiar phenomenon.
In short, the idea of the psychopath--someone who has little or no empathy, no sense of right or wrong, someone who is emotionally dead---is just how people decided to answer the question, 'Why do we have monsters among us?'
I especially enjoyed the explanation of 'Zombie' ideas in science..especially the soft sciences.
A few snippets from a long and well-written essay:
Psychopathic personality disorder – or psychopathy as it is commonly called – is one of the oldest and most researched mental health diagnoses.
...across hundreds of empirical studies – especially since the explosion of research in the late-1990s – there is still remarkably little evidence that corroborates popularized claims about the diagnosis. Despite enthusiasm among researchers in the 1990s and 2000s, when a few studies seemed to validate theories about psychopathy, the past two decades have been sobering. Today, virtually every single claim about psychopathy has been either thoroughly refuted or failed to find empirical support in experimental settings. Psychopathy may not exist at all.
Consider one of the most repeated tropes about psychopaths, that they are incapable of mirroring or reading other peoples’ emotions: they lack empathy. The problem with this view is that science tells a radically different story. When people diagnosed with psychopathy participate in empathy experiments, their performance is entirely indistinguishable from normal controls.
The most compelling evidence comes from a recent systematic review of empathy research my team conducted, which included a total of 66 studies involving 5,711 persons clinically assessed for psychopathy. We found that the results were ‘overwhelmingly null findings’ (89.11 per cent of all tests). That is, statistical analyses cannot tell the difference in performance between psychopathic vs non-psychopathic persons. We also found that high-quality studies – those using more rigid statistical methods – had an even higher null-ratio of a whopping 94.77 per cent. In behavioural scientific experiments, where datasets are presumed to be rife with false positives, this is arguably as close as you get to proving a negative: people diagnosed with psychopathy do not have empathy deficits.
An alternative answer to this question that has so far received little attention is the possibility that psychopathy may be an instance of what scientists colloquially refer to as a zombie idea: ideas that have the quality of being intuitively appealing, but the idea itself is essentially a fallacious misconception of reality. Just like zombies, when these ideas have been falsified – shown to be dead ideas – they somehow still manage to stubbornly stick around in the halls of prestigious universities, only to once again infect another generation of young scientists.
There are many historic examples of zombie ideas, such as phrenology, race theory, or the geocentric view of the Universe. What these ideas have in common is that they were all widely accepted by scientists, even for decades after they were thoroughly refuted by scientific research. And this gets to the core of a zombie idea: those who are infected always fail in the strangest ways to realise that the idea is dead. As such, zombie ideas appear to be upheld by strong biases where the idea itself is rarely questioned, even when the scientist who believes in them is faced with obvious evidence that suggests the idea is wrong. Fortunately, zombie ideas are relatively rare in the sciences, but they truly are a peculiar phenomenon.
