SL: Yes, it's an interesting idea. I think I've not heard people talk about that explicitly. I've certainly heard people talk about the need to pour more money into psychopathy. I think, have people have talked about that in terms of a massive effort...no, I've not heard people talk about that and I think it would be a great idea although I think it would have to be really done thoughtfully and carefully.
I think one thing that...the one impediment to that -- I don't see it as insurmountable though and I think it could be in principle done -- the one impediment there is, I think, there's still a lot of disagreement in the field about what psychopathy is, what it isn't, how to measure it; there's a lot of controversy about what the boundaries are, so one thing I would do if I were....if I could wave a magic wand and have a huge pool of money, I would first invest a lot of money into better understanding what psychopathy is, even just finding agreement on what the boundaries are, and I suspect that...and I think some of your questions sort of hint at this...I suspect what we're talking about here is...there is definitely a...there definitely are people who have these traits, but I also suspect that we're probably talking about something that's a little bit heterogeneous or that's not just one type of person -- we may be talking about slightly different blends of people who all share a kind of family resemblance with each other. So that would be, I think, one first important thing to nail down is who are we actually measuring here? Who are we actually talking about? And once we've done that, then to better nail down what the causes are...and we might have to be willing to recognize that we might need to look, not at the causes of psychopathy itself, but to look at the underlying traits individually that give rise to psychopathy. We might need to break down and deconstruct psychopathy first into its constituent dimensions first before we can understand the full picture. But I think there's a real need for that.
Rob: I think that's pretty much what you've been doing. I think that the part that I'm hearing is not being studied enough is the hurt and the damage, which is the kind of thing that is a bottom line issue that I think that could take it to the place where there's a lot of money invested in it. Because, you know, if the military realize that the psychopaths that they bring in and unidenify cause them billions of dollars of damage and...
SL: That's right.
Rob: ...deaths, and things like that, that could change things. If businesses...and they're starting to come up with stats on that one. I talked to Clive Boddy about it, who wrote the book on corporate psychopaths, you know, they're starting to see that there are costs to having psychopaths involved in managing businesses.
SL: Sure.
Rob: And I'm going all over the place with this, you know. And people accuse me of wanting to round them up and put them in camps. I don't want to do that, but I think we need to start asking questions about...what do we know, like you say....what do we know who they are, what do we know about what they do, what do we know about the damage and the pain, and what can we do to protect the people who are hurt. See...
SL: And also I think it's important to recognize that some of these traits, at least in moderate doses, could be adaptive. So we, I think, one really important question also is...Why is it that some children who are risk-taking, some children who are adventurous, some children who are fearless/socially dominant, why do some of them become successful politicians, some of them become adventurers, some of them become successful philanthropists...whereas others end up behind prison bars? We don't understand why that is and that's actually an extremely important question. And are there some interventions that one could implement in childhood, for example, that could harness these traits? Because after all being dominant, being fearless, being risk-taking, even being somewhat impulsive from time to time...may not always be a bad thing. Even to some extent being able to be emotionally detached may not always be bad for some professions. So it's not so much the traits themselves are the problem, it's more their manifestations and their expressions....and if we can find some way, that's where I put my money, find some way of channeling those traits into things that are socially adaptive rather than destructive, that could have an enormous impact at the societal level.
Rob: So what you're saying is that there are characteristics and traits of psychopaths that in healthy doses and used appropriately are good and powerful and effective in making good things happen.
SL: That's my hypothesis, and that's been my hypothesis that's driven our research. So there are people who disagree with us on that, but that I think is, in our view, a very important hypothesis to pursue. And I think that one possibility would be that there could be interventions, therapeutic interventions, maybe even vocational interventions, which is...I think a fascinating area that no one has talked about or very few people since the 1970s have talked about in psychopathy literature. Maybe you could actually channel some of these traits through vocational training, giving some people skills where they could learn to channel some of these...the risk-taking traits into healthy professions like military combat and so on, rather than getting in trouble with the law. Because after all, if I want someone on frontline combat, I don't want a full-blown psychopath of course, but I do want someone who is somewhat fearless, who is willing to take risks...who has some of those traits. And being able to find ways of constructively channeling those traits to things are important for us as a society and are socially constructive, I think is a really important development.
Rob: That sounds...actually that's a very exciting additional reason to do this...to invest a lot of money in this research.
SL: Oh I agree. I very much agree. I think, again, I think that everything we know from the child literature in general suggests that -- and this a broad brush conclusion but it seems to hold up across a number of conditions -- is that in general, all things equal, the earlier you intervene the better the effects. And that makes sense developmentally because once we get older we start to seek out our own environments, we start to create our own environments, we start to seek out friends,other people who reinforce those environments; our paths become more and more solidified as we get older. So if one could find some way of identifying these traits somewhat early, and there's some progress on that front...and find some way maybe of changing people's life patterns through perhaps better parenting or more effective or targeted parenting towards psychotherapy -- maybe vocational training or other interventions -- that could potentially have a big impact.
I think that my goal is, and again some would disagree with me on this...my goal would not be to eradicate these personality traits. I don't know about you but I want to have fearless people in society; I want to...I think a certain amount of fearlessness is good among some people; I want to have risk takers; I want to have people who are dominant. So I think the goal should not be to eradicate the traits, I think the goal should be to find some way of channeling those traits into avenues that are more socially helpful and constructive. And that's where I'd put my money if I had some kind of magic wish to make.
Rob: Maybe the idea of taming or civilizing the traits?
SL: Yeah, I think that's right. I think -- and that's part of what civilization does, right? What civilization does is civilizing forces don't necessarily change people's underlying dispositions, but what they do is they hopefully get people to channel those dispositions into avenues that are more effective, more helpful, more socially adaptive. And I thought about what wisdom is all about. What wisdom is -- I would argue and other people like Bob Sternberg would argue this too -- wisdom is channeling intelligence into a socially adaptive domain. When you're making people wise, you're not making them smarter. What you do is you're taking their intelligence and trying to get them to use their intelligence toward something that helps others. There are plenty of very smart people like Adolf Hitler, who used their intelligence toward something that was dreadful and social destructive. But what we want to do is get people to turn their intelligence toward something that is helpful. Similarly here, fearlessness itself can be quite helpful for many professions, and can be quite helpful for society at large. So what we want to do is not get people to become less fearless in general, what we want people is to be able to use their fearlessness toward something that would be helpful to other people.
Rob: Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Another question I've been wondering is...is there such a thing as psychopathic contagion or community where a psychopath can kind of take over a community or a group or a culture and taint it so it becomes...so that people who are not by nature psychopathic start living in a more psychopathic way?
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