Тег: Empathy

Can psychopaths experience empathy and how does it differ from the empathy of normal people

Voluntarist, Bitarch

It is a commonly held opinion that psychopathic individuals experience little empathy or do not manifest it at all. This, of course, makes them cold-blooded and callous, capable even of easily committing murder if there is a reason for it and no significant risks. But besides this, their lack of empathy has long cast doubt on the possibility of providing easy and effective therapy for their condition.

However, a study of psychopathic criminals found that they can experience empathy. Moreover, during the experiment, they exhibited the same level of activation of mirror neurons—which are responsible for the ability to learn through imitation of other people and are believed to be involved in the manifestation of empathy—as healthy individuals.

However, psychopaths have one very important difference. While empathy manifests spontaneously in normal people, regardless of whether the person wishes to experience it, psychopaths can intentionally control this process. Their normal state is switched-off empathy; they manifest it only when they want to. And within the experiment, normal activation of mirror neurons in psychopaths was observed only when the researchers explicitly asked them to show empathy.

The results of this study align with what psychopaths often claim about themselves, for example, on question-and-answer websites like Quora. If you search there for questions asked to psychopaths about whether they are capable of experiencing empathy, you will see many positive answers, but with the note that they can literally turn empathy on and off whenever they want, as if they have a switch for it. However, there are also psychopaths who claim a complete inability to feel empathy. But, given the data already known to us, it can be suggested that they simply do not know how to turn it on within themselves.

Researchers do not yet know how to turn the empathy that psychopaths can manifest intentionally into the spontaneously manifested empathy characteristic of most people. However, the fact that psychopaths can show empathy, at least under certain conditions, gives therapists something to work with.

It is also worth hypothesizing that empathy can be made spontaneous quite easily by using certain agents that activate specific serotonin receptors and favorably influence the function of the serotonin system as a whole. Pharmacological activation of serotonin 1A and 1B receptors in animal experiments often leads to them ceasing aggressive attacks on their peers, or even becoming more predisposed to help them—for example, by sharing food, even if it brings the subject no personal benefit. This effect is linked to the activation of a violence inhibition mechanism, which in humans plays an important role in the development of empathy.

The results of this study provide an answer to another important question. Someone might easily find and point to individuals who, in their ordinary social life, are normal family men, good friends and colleagues, law-abiding citizens—that is, full members of society—despite the fact that under certain conditions, for example, while serving in law enforcement or as a soldier on the battlefield, they easily committed violence and even murder without feeling the slightest repulsion. As is known from a number of studies, including military ones, the ability to easily commit violence and murder in such conditions would still be a manifestation of an individual’s high psychopathy. But there is no contradiction here. For perhaps such cases are precisely explainable by the fact that psychopathic individuals can be empathic when they intentionally want to be, for example, wishing to have a full social life. However, it should not be forgotten that such individuals can decide not to experience empathy at any moment, and this carries certain threats to society.

The critical error of dystopias about a non-violent society: there is no need to cut anything out of a human

Voluntarist, Bitarch

In a number of works demonstrating a non-violent society or the results of eradicating violent behavior in a specific person, the essence boils down to the alleged existence of some aggressive stimulus, which is precisely why a person becomes capable of hitting or killing someone, committing brutal crimes, or even starting wars. Having named it the cause of violence, the authors then describe societies in which, to eradicate it, they decided to suppress or literally cut this stimulus out of the person. The results of such a process turn out to be extremely discouraging – we get “castrated” people and a society deprived of all its creative potential.

Let’s start with Stanislaw Lem’s “Return from the Stars,” where people undergo a procedure called “betrization” – the neutralization of aggressive stimuli in the brain and the strengthening of the self-preservation instinct. According to Lem, in a peaceful society, people would become lackadaisical, unable to perform complex tasks, and would stop experiencing strong emotions. Let’s also recall Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange,” where the main character undergoes a complete brainwashing. Being a devout Catholic, Burgess is inclined to believe that man is driven to violence by original sin, however, he possesses free will and the choice of whether to commit violence, and eradicating this freedom would be sinful. One could also briefly mention the anime series “Psycho-Pass,” in whose society certain works of art were even banned for inducing aggression in people, and in one scene, people who did see violence turned out to be absolutely indifferent and emotionless toward the victim’s suffering. There is one more work in which art was also banned for the same reason, but it will be appropriate to mention it a bit later.

All these works make the same critical mistake. In reality, it is not the presence, but precisely the lack of certain stimuli that makes a person capable of violence. As research demonstrates, aggression is often not the result of a loss of self-control, but may even require self-control for the intentional commission of acts of violence. Furthermore, improving self-control in aggressive people does not always help them, and may even do the opposite – it can make them even more effective aggressors. And psychopathic individuals, who commit the vast majority of violent crimes, often experience enhanced development of self-control from adolescence.

The same position can be derived from the theory of the violence inhibition mechanism – the ability of some individuals to cause harm to other people stems from their inability to experience internal repulsion and resistance toward it. They also have reduced empathy and guilt. Moreover, the effect of the most promising means for treating aggressive behavior (agonists of certain serotonin receptors) consists in stimulating and restoring full nervous activity, rather than in suppressing and eradicating anything.

A world in which they decided to fight violence and other evil by cutting something out of a person is most realistically demonstrated in the film “Equilibrium.” Its events take place after a “Third World” war, and human emotions were named as its main cause, which they now decided to suppress using a specific drug. Only, if you look closely at the people in this work, they have become not peaceful and ideal, but unfeeling psychopaths. This is especially evident in the “clerics” – soldiers whose task is to detect people who have shown emotions, destroy works of art, and kill all those who resist the regime.

Violent people need not fewer, but more emotions. They need not suppression, but on the contrary – stimulation of nervous activity. In order not to commit violence, one must feel more strongly, not more weakly. And Lem’s “betrization” in the real world would more likely lead to total psychopathy, rather than to some peaceful but passive society. The nature of violence described in dystopian works has little in common with real violence.