Reddit reviews The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success

Really it's both!

I'm usually not much of a fan of "pop-psych" books, but "The Wisdom of Psychopaths" is a very well written and scientifically grounded work dealing with just this: www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Psychopaths-Killers-Success/dp/0374291357

tl;dr psychopathy is no longer thought of as a black and white thing that separates serial killers from normal people, it's a spectrum we all fall on and it influences how we deal with difficult situations (both good and bad), the less disturbing stuff phases you the more psychopathic you likely are, but probably not violent or impulsive

10 Professions That Attract the Most Sociopaths



>7 - Policeman


>The power of life and death on your hip, a badge of authority on your chest, a uniform of distinction, and a really loud siren! Everyone’s familiar with the stereotype of a bad cop — those officers who readily abuse their power, resent the people they are meant to protect, and use cold-hearted superiority to justify their viciousness. It's an unfortunate reality that some of the biggest criminals lurk among those who've sworn to uphold the law.


-psychologist Kevin Dutton

Well, forbes basically copied a report by this guy who based his report on this book which lists police officers as #7 from 1-10 of the professions that attract the most "psychopaths" which is defined as:

>a personality disorder that has been variously described as characterized by shallow emotions (in particular reduced fear), stress tolerance, lacking empathy, coldheartedness, lacking guilt, egocentricity, superficial character, manipulativeness, irresponsibility, impulsivity and antisocial behaviors such as parasitic lifestyle and criminality.

Haven't read the book so I can't comment, but I mean... that took 5 minutes of googling. Skepticism is fine, but an unwillingness to do a little research isn't ideal :)

https://www.ncjrs.gov/App/publications/abstract.aspx?ID=181019

Also, for psychopathy: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374291357/ref=as_li_ss_tl

> You cannot just generalize thousands of people due to the actions of a few.

...I'm not. I'm pointing out a statistic.

But is there someone who said that? If you prefer a logic guy, the one you're defending, like you, misread "probably" as "always" to make his case.

This book, though, would tell you that there are more psychopaths working as CEOs than in any other profession, another placing an estimate of psychopathy in CEOs at four times the average (at 4%). Here's a study I haven't actually read echoing those findings.

While neither are exactly terms happily used by medical psychology, let's put down a bit of vague bullshit and say psychopaths are rarer, overclocked versions of a sociopaths. Logic would then dictate that in professions you'll find psychopaths involved in, you'll find even more sociopaths. By a reasonable, subjective definition of the unreasonable, totally subjective word, say, 20% prevalence of sociopathic behavior in business CEOs would sound like a very low estimate. With big companies in particular, I'd guess we're dealing with much higher numbers, which would lead to a logical formula of either highly successful CEO-ship implying sociopathic behavior, or vice versa.

The very concept of a working-as-intended corporation is often likened to psychopathy, one of the primary cases made by a documentary called The Corporation.

Because he's capable of functioning perfectly well as a sociopath and is proof that the disease is not a perfect indicator of whether someone should be removed from society.

I only brought it up because of the way you stated your portion on why they should be killed:

> I qualified my statement in a way that is unrealistic anyway, namely that we could have perfect or near perfect knowledge of a person's sociopathy. In any case, I think the costs to society of are such that the financial costs are something we should bear. The danger of having manipulative violent killers that do not feel remorse in our society is worth spending the extra money to ensure that said people are not able to threaten anyone ever again.

The way it was worded seemed to me like you were making the claim that all sociopaths are "manipulative violent killers" and if we had perfect knowledge of a person's sociopathy, we could remove all sociopaths from society by killing them.

When really what you would need is perfect knowledge of a person's life, as their formative experiences are what determine whether a sociopath is violent or not.

Because the simple fact is that there are lots of sociopaths in society, and the vast majority of them do not do harm to others (and arguably contribute a lot in certain fields).

Apparently Some guy named Kevin Dutton wrote a book that says CEO are the most psychopathic.
http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2012/11/ceos-psychopaths/
the book says some study found that there were more traits of psychopathy in business than criminals and all those traits are camouflaged as traits of a leader. the lack of evidence of said study makes me doubt it but that's where the source of this idea came from.
It might have some truth to it but not much if at all.:www.forbes.com/sites/jeffbercovici/2011/06/14/why-some-psychopaths-make-great-ceos

Psychopaths (sociopath is not used anymore, clinically) seem to show signs that their amygdala (a center of the brain important to emotional response and thus empathy) is damaged, possibly from birth, meaning that no matter what they do they will never care about other people truly as we wish they could.

LSD has been given to psychopaths and murderers since the 70s as part of psychological research and if I remember correctly it didn't work at all.

Source: Recently read The Wisdom of Psychopaths
and The Psychopath Test

EDIT: Also see this from a few weeks ago Sociopath seeking advice to achieve enlightenment.

> It has almost nothing to do with the brain, and almost everything to do with socialization

Not true. I can't speak to Ailenus1997's diagnosis, but there's a lot of research on sociopaths showing that their brains are different. Source: The Wisdom of Psychopaths

It isn't the same people, but it's the same attitude in different people: PUNISH, wrapped up in the blanket "Justice".

When really the approach that works is "Lock up fewer, Imprison lightly as a deterrent, Put tight safeguards on the warden and staff to prevent abuse, Add programs and research to drop recidivism". Look at prison pops and recidivism in countries that do that.

As to psychopaths, http://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Psychopaths-Killers-Success/dp/0374291357 has some really interesting thing to talk about the different types. They may require institutional living for the rest of their lives or not.

thanks for sharing the link. even if it helps one soilder overcome PMO addiction, you have done a great deed. I learned about mindfulness from wisdom of a psychopath. It pretty much the same things as why be worried about things that MIGHT happen in the next 5 minutes,5 hours, or even 5 days. You are stuck in the present NOW. So be proud that you made it to the 4th day, not that you might relapse in the future, because for all you know, you could klast the whole war and than some.

Thanks for the link once again. BLUA

Police are two to four times as likely to be abusing in the home environment in comparison to the national average.

According to Kevin Dutton, law enforcement is among one of the leading professions to appeal to sociopathic behavior.

Police work attracts more individuals generally inclined to violence and racism than most any other Government job.

It does sound like you could have psychopathic traits, although like others said it sounds harsh to say because of the negative association that word has. Not all psychopaths are serial killers of course, in fact there was an interesting book written not too long ago called "The Wisdom of Psychopaths" http://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Psychopaths-Killers-Success/dp/0374291357

Since it sounds like this trait does bother you, you know it's not normal and want to fix it, then first realize that reflects well on you. Secondly, therapy would be a good place to start. Good luck on your journey of self discovery. I hope you can get the help you need.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Psychopaths-Killers-Success/dp/0374291357

If you're interested in more on the subject, this is a fantastic book.

you should all read a book called The Wisdom of Psychopaths

http://www.amazon.com/The-Wisdom-Psychopaths-Killers-Success/dp/0374291357

Not exactly. There aren't a lot of Fortune 500 CEO's willing to under go MRIs or publicly release their psychological profile results, but have been several studies in several countries that indicate that corporate executives are more likely to be psychopaths than the general population.

That problem is mentioned in this abstract :
We know much less about corporate psychopathy and its implications, in large part because of the difficulty in obtaining the active cooperation of business organizations. This has left us with only a few small-sample studies, anecdotes, and speculation.

Source: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20422644


An arctile in the Journal of Public Affairs :
Since this prediction of dire consequences was made the
Global Financial Crisis has come about. Research by
Babiak and Hare in the USA, Board and Fritzon in
the UK and in Australia has shown that psychopaths
are indeed to be found at greater levels of incidence
at senior levels of organisations than they are at
junior levels (Boddy et al., 2010a). There is also
some evidence that they may tend to join some types
of organisations rather than others and that, for
example, large financial organisations may be
attractive to them because of the potential rewards
on offer in these organizations (Boddy, 2010a).

Whole article available @ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pa.352/abstract


The bibliography of this students paper has a bunch of decent looking references:
Yet, in spite of poor reviews, managers seemed to view the psychopathic population as having leadership potential. Most of those with high psychopathic traits were high-ranking executives. Indeed Boddy, Ladyshewsky, and Galvin (2010) found that significantly more senior level managers portray psychopathic traits compared to their lower level employees. Babiak et al. concluded that charismatic and manipulative traits have allowed the corporate psychopaths to “talk the walk” and that this charisma, manipulativeness, aggressive selfpromotion, and single minded determination (Babiak & Hare, 2006) may put these individuals at an advantage to climb the corporate ladder.

http://digitalcommons.wou.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=pure


CEO is listed as the most desired job of psychopaths in
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374291357.