The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton

Author:Kevin Dutton [Dutton, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-385-67719-6
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2012-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

Generation Me

I put it to Pinker, over lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, that we’ve got a bit of a conundrum on our hands. On the one hand we have evidence that society is becoming less violent, while on the other there’s evidence that it’s getting more psychopathic.

He raises a good point. “Okay. Let’s say that society is becoming more psychopathic,” he counters. “That doesn’t necessarily entail that there’s going to be an upsurge in violence. The majority of psychopaths, as far as I understand it, are actually nonviolent. They inflict predominantly emotional, rather than physical, pain …

“Of course, if psychopathy really starts getting a toehold, then we might see a minimal increase in violence compared to what we would have seen, say, forty or fifty years ago. But what’s probably more likely is that we’ll start to detect a difference in the pattern of that violence. It might, for example, become more random. Or more instrumental.

“I think that society is going to have to get very psychopathic indeed for us to start living up to how we were, say, back in the Middle Ages. And, from a purely practical point of view, that level of manifestation is simply not attainable.

“It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to find that subtle fluctuations in personality or interpersonal style have been occurring over the past few decades. But the mores and etiquette of modern civilization are far too deeply ingrained in us, far too embedded within our better natures, to be subverted by a swing, or what’s probably more likely, a nudge, toward the dark side.”

Pinker’s right about psychopathy not being sustainable over the long term. As we saw with the aid of game theory in the previous chapter, it’s a biological nonstarter. He’s also right about changes in the motivation for violence. In a recent study by the Crime and Justice Centre at King’s College, London, 120 convicted street robbers were asked, quite simply, why they did it. Their answers revealed a great deal about modern British street life. Kicks. Spur-of-the-moment impulses. Status. And financial gain. In precisely that order of importance. Exactly the kind of casual, callous behavior patterns one often sees in psychopaths.

So are we witnessing the rise of a sub-psychopathic minority for whom society doesn’t exist? A new breed of individual with little or no conception of social norms, no respect for the feelings of others, and scant regard for the consequences of their actions? Might Pinker be right about those subtle fluctuations in modern personality structure—and a nefarious nudge to the dark side? If the results of a recent study by Sara Konrath and her team at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research are anything to go by, then the answer to these questions is yes.

In a survey that has so far tested fourteen thousand volunteers, Konrath has found that college students’ self-reported empathy levels (as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index1) have actually been in steady decline over the previous three decades—since the inauguration of

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