Modern society probably selecting for psychopathy
Source: mangans.blogspot.com
The so-called "dark triad’ of personality traits, consisting of machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy, appears in many ways to be a sexually attractive trait, that is, when men have it and women want it. When women are allowed to choose without constraints, that is when money and (lack of) pregnancy are not objects, the bad guy often gets the girl, and the fact that women like this has a fair amount of evidence, scientific and otherwise.
Before I get to the rest of this post, a little throat-clearing. The dark triad so-called seems to me a redundant term. If you know anything about psychopathy, you know that machiavellianism and narcissism are pretty much contained in the term psychopathy. The psychopath has concern for only one person, himself (narcissism), and will do just about anything in his own service (machiavellianism).
Psychopaths are essentially cheaters. Having no conscience, they use people for their own ends, and will lie, cheat, steal, and sometimes worse before the victim even knows what happened. The point about cheating is important: the vast majority of people are totally unable to detect psychopathy, and the psychopath goes to great lengths to hide his utter lack of conscience. After he is done, the psychopath moves on to the next victim.
Our modern society is atomized. It’s very easy to fade into the crowd, to move elsewhere if found out, to start over again in a new town. Psychopaths ravage people’s lives and often are never caught. When caught, or even when they aren’t, they often move on.
In a traditional society, people know each other and have a good grasp on whether someone is to be trusted. A psychopath would have a much harder time in such a society, and in fact would probably be ostracized if not strung up before too long.
Estimates of the number of psychopaths range around 4% of people, though supposedly a lot more men than women are psychopathic. Psychopathy has a heritable component, like all of personality, and we got to that 4% figure with the society of the past.
So my contention is that now, psychopaths are much more likely to go undetected, much less punished. There’s evidence that male psychopaths have more children than others.
Ergo, modern society is probably selecting for psychopathy, and the percentage of them will increase.
Source: mangans.blogspot.com
Psychopathy is adaptive
Psychopathy has often been characterized as a form of mental illness or disorder, the psychopath being deeply disturbed, often violent, and always unscrupulous, completely lacking in empathy for others, or possibly not even having the ability to understand what empathy is. Another characterization of psychopathy is that it is adaptive, a strategy that increases one’s fitness. In this light, psychopathy is a cheating strategy, one which makes use of others’ general trust for the psychopath’s own ends. Which hypothesis is the better fit?
Some ingenious researchers found a way to test these hypotheses. Do psychopaths harm relatives? Nepotistic patterns of violent psychopathy: evidence for adaptation?.
Contrary to the mental disorder hypothesis, we show here in a sample of 289 violent offenders that variation in psychopathy predicts a decrease in the genetic relatedness of victims to offenders; that is, psychopathy predicts an increased likelihood of harming non-relatives. ... Although psychopathy was negatively associated with coresidence with kin and positively associated with the commission of sexual assault, it remained negatively associated with the genetic relatedness of victims to offenders after removing cases of offenders who had coresided with kin and cases of sexual assault from the analyses. These results stand in contrast to models positing psychopathy as a pathology, and provide support for the hypothesis that psychopathy reflects an evolutionary strategy largely favoring the exploitation of non-relatives.
Psychopathy as a cheating strategy is dependent on the trust of others. What will happen as social trust declines, as is happening now? Psychopaths ought to be less successful, as people will be more wary of potential cheaters and more distrustful overall.
Maybe psychopathy could be viewed as an extreme form of r-selection. They put great effort into achieving a robust sex life, have little thought for the morrow, put little effort into parental investment, and are completely selfish.
Also, given the recent events in Rotherham and other English cities, it occurs that the Pakistani groomers acted like psychopaths toward their victims: smooth and calm and giving when it suited their ends, violent at other times, ruthless, focused on sex. Yet one wonders how they behaved toward their own kin: nothing like that, one imagines.
For psychopaths, everyone else except blood relatives are an out-group.
Source: mangans.blogspot.com
