Something to understand about Sociopathy/Psychopathy/ASPD is that your mental model has been effected by selection bias (also availability bias). The only ASPD people you hear about are those with problems. The ones you hear about do not just have ASPD. ASPD magnifies other problems, be they biological, social, or circumstantial.
ASPD + Conduct Disorder causes the type of psychopathic serial killers popular culture is familiar with. ASPD + a brilliant mind and educational opportunity means you’d make a great lawyer or CEO. A guy with ASPD who gets addicted to drugs is more likely to rob or steal to get a fix. A guy with ASPD who sells used cars is more likely to be a great salesman because he pushes for the sale even when it’s against the interest of his customers. A gang member with ASPD is more willing to use violence or kill for the gang. etc.
People can go their entire lives without finding out that they’ve got ASPD, let alone others finding out. The problem with Psych statistics is that they can’t get a cross section of the population; they can only infer from the subset of people who need psychological help. It’s textbook selection bias.
To go into analogy mode, think of humans as web browsers. A normal, functioning human is Internet Explorer 9; it receives the information and acts on it the way you’d expect. An autistic human would be an out of spec browser from 1992; it tries it’s best but it can’t render everything right and doesn’t quite know what’s going on, even though it would like to. A human with ASPD is like Firefox with the Adblock addon; it knows exactly what the website wants it to do and exactly what’s expected of it, but it refuses to render or be effected by advertisements. If you’ve got other addons (mental disorders) though, the interaction between the two will make the browser more likely to catastrophically fail.
A normal, functioning human is Internet Explorer 9; it receives the information and acts on it the way you’d expect.
I was going to say this is a bad example, since IE9 still doesn’t handle a lot of things the way it ought to, but humans are crazy the world is insane so whatevs.
Something to understand about Sociopathy/Psychopathy/ASPD is that your mental model has been effected by selection bias (also availability bias). The only ASPD people you hear about are those with problems. The ones you hear about do not just have ASPD. ASPD magnifies other problems, be they biological, social, or circumstantial.
ASPD + Conduct Disorder causes the type of psychopathic serial killers popular culture is familiar with. ASPD + a brilliant mind and educational opportunity means you’d make a great lawyer or CEO. A guy with ASPD who gets addicted to drugs is more likely to rob or steal to get a fix. A guy with ASPD who sells used cars is more likely to be a great salesman because he pushes for the sale even when it’s against the interest of his customers. A gang member with ASPD is more willing to use violence or kill for the gang. etc.
People can go their entire lives without finding out that they’ve got ASPD, let alone others finding out. The problem with Psych statistics is that they can’t get a cross section of the population; they can only infer from the subset of people who need psychological help. It’s textbook selection bias.
To go into analogy mode, think of humans as web browsers. A normal, functioning human is Internet Explorer 9; it receives the information and acts on it the way you’d expect. An autistic human would be an out of spec browser from 1992; it tries it’s best but it can’t render everything right and doesn’t quite know what’s going on, even though it would like to. A human with ASPD is like Firefox with the Adblock addon; it knows exactly what the website wants it to do and exactly what’s expected of it, but it refuses to render or be effected by advertisements. If you’ve got other addons (mental disorders) though, the interaction between the two will make the browser more likely to catastrophically fail.
I was going to say this is a bad example, since IE9 still doesn’t handle a lot of things the way it ought to, but humans are crazy the world is insane so whatevs.