On May 27, Beijing time, according to foreign media reports, you may have met such people in your life: they are psychopathic, but smart, charming and successful. When you meet them for the first time, you never think that the other party will be good at using this routine to deceive others and use others to achieve their own desires. When you do so, you feel no guilt but complacent.
But do such people really have psychological problems
Leslie Pullman and colleagues recently evaluated a hypothesis. This hypothesis suggests that psychopathy may not be a mental disorder, but an effective life strategy. To this end, they analyzed an unexpected feature of people with mental disorders - left handedness.
Psychopathy and mental disorders
Psychopathy is characterized by defects in emotion and interpersonal communication, such as apathy, arrogance, lack of empathy and self reproach, and sometimes making abnormal behaviors such as aggression and violence. It is generally diagnosed through interviews or questionnaires, including assessing a person's self-esteem, whether he will use others without guilt, and lifestyle.
Although this word is often used to describe bad guys and assholes, less than 5% (or even 1%) of people can really be selfish and ruthless to the level of "abnormal".
Pullman and his colleagues analyzed the elements of mental disorders from an evolutionary perspective and stated that only harmful disorders can be counted as mental disorders. In other words, a patient's behavior must not only be abnormal, but must also be prevented from performing the functions that humans have evolved that are beneficial to them. This means that if we want to treat psychopathy as a mental disorder, psychopathy must damage someone's normal function or well-being.
The harm of psychopathy seems obvious. Psychopaths are difficult to maintain interpersonal relationships, easy to die early, and have a high probability of being imprisoned. In addition, considering the negative impact on society, psychopathy is probably the public health problem second only to schizophrenia.
Moreover, the characteristics of psychopathy also meet the criteria for mental disorders confirmed by the American Psychiatric Association and who. However, antisocial personality disorder and social disorder personality disorder have a greater impact on obvious antisocial behaviors such as law breaking and violence. Both of them are characterized by difficulty in empathy, lack of guilt, and lying.
Why psychopathy may be an adaptive life strategy
However, we have certain reasons to believe that psychopathy may be a more reasonable evolutionary adaptation.
Suppose it is 6000 BC. In your tribe, most people are honest, trustworthy and considerate, but the food is not enough for everyone. In this case, if you are willing to cheat some food from others, your chances of survival will be greater, and the probability of passing on this deceptive gene to future generations will also be greater.
Even today, the characteristics of psychopathy may still be common in environments such as Wall Street, and even helpful to people. This is especially true if these people can disguise their violent or criminal acts well.
What causes mental disorders
In order to assess whether a behavior is a mental disorder, we must first understand the causes of mental disorders.
Scientists are still looking for possible causes, but disturbances encountered during neural development may have an impact. These disturbances may occur before or after birth, and for a variety of reasons. It may be related to the mother's infection or stress during pregnancy, or it may be due to childhood malnutrition, head injury, or emotional trauma. Neurodevelopmental disturbance is related to a variety of mental disorders, including depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, schizophrenia and so on.
It is very difficult to directly evaluate the neurodevelopmental interference. Generally, it is necessary to use special equipment for brain scanning, or collect detailed data on someone's childhood experiences and maternal experiences.
However, neurodevelopmental disturbance has a typical feature - left handedness, commonly known as left handedness. This phenomenon is often associated with maternal stress during pregnancy, birth complications, and low body weight. Compared with right-handed people, left-handed people are more likely to suffer from a series of mental diseases such as depression and schizophrenia. And the difference is not small: about 11% of the population is left-handed, but it is estimated that about 40% of psychiatric patients are left-handed. (but on the positive side, lefties may be more creative.)
The reason why left handedness and "right handedness" (i.e. both hands are equally flexible) are associated with mental disorders may be that they are caused by the failure of effective lateralization of brain function during development. Brain functional lateralization has many advantages, such as avoiding repetition, clarifying the division of labor in different brain regions, and so on.
Research conclusion
To test his hypothesis, Pullman and his team integrated the data collected from the previous 16 studies, involving 1818 subjects from different races. They assessed their left handedness and the degree of psychosis, and calculated the proportion of left handedness or left handedness among psychopaths.
The results showed that the correlation between psychopathy and left handedness was not significant. Although there is a certain difference between this proportion and non psychopaths, it is not conclusive.
If there are all kinds of subjects, people with a high degree of psychopathy have a slightly higher probability of being left-handed. However, in the group of psychotic patients, the proportion of left handedness was slightly lower than that of non psychopathic patients. In short, these differences are too small, it is likely that it is only a matter of probability.
Read carefully
This large-scale analysis failed to establish a link between psychopathy and left handedness. This also supports the hypothesis of Pullman et al., that psychopathy is an adaptive survival strategy, which is passed down from generation to generation with genes in the process of evolution, rather than a mental disorder caused by neurodevelopmental interference.
However, the persuasiveness of these findings is limited for several reasons. First of all, the research data do show a certain rule, indicating that people with a higher degree of psychopathy have a higher probability of being left-handed. However, the sample size of this study may not be large enough to show the real difference.
In addition, the proportion of psychopaths who are not right-handed is similar to that of criminals and mental patients. However, if psychosis is not a mental disorder, the probability of non right handedness among psychopaths should be lower (after all, the latter two groups may have more mental health disorders, so the probability of non right handedness should also be higher than that of the general population).
Broaden your horizons
There is also an interesting possibility: psychopathy may be useful, but it can be better used only when people control their violence and criminal behavior. This is also supported by the findings of Pullman's team - people with more obvious psychopathic characteristics (such as numbness and no sense of guilt) have a slightly lower probability of being left-handed or right-handed, while people with more obvious behavioral abnormal characteristics (such as violence or crime) have a higher probability. Although these results are also not statistically significant, this conclusion seems to be quite reasonable.
Although this study alone is not enough to prove that psychopathy is an adaptive and evolution based life strategy, more and more studies show that this possibility does exist. For example, some data pointed out that people with a high degree of psychopathy are more likely to carry out targeted planned crimes rather than on a whim. They usually put their own interests and the interests of their children first, and the number of children is often large.
So, people like the one we described at the beginning may not be mentally handicapped at all, but selfish bastards.