Psychopaths Are Among Us

Here is a bit from an excellent article by William D. Cohan in Bloomberg News:

Did Psychopaths Take Over Wall Street Asylum?: William D. Cohan

It took a relatively obscure former British academic to propagate a theory of the financial crisis that would confirm what many people suspected all along: The “corporate psychopaths” at the helm of our financial institutions are to blame.

Clive R. Boddy, most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1 percent of “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry” lack a “conscience, have few emotions and display an inability to have any feelings, sympathy or empathy for other people.”

As a result, Boddy argues in a recent issue of the Journal of Business Ethics, such people are “extraordinarily cold, much more calculating and ruthless towards others than most people are and therefore a menace to the companies they work for and to society.”

How do people with such obvious personality flaws make it to the top of seemingly successful corporations? Boddy says psychopaths take advantage of the “relative chaotic nature of the modern corporation,” including “rapid change, constant renewal” and high turnover of “key personnel.” Such circumstances allow them to ascend through a combination of “charm” and “charisma,” which makes “their behaviour invisible” and “makes them appear normal and even to be ideal leaders.”

Go read the whole article because the reporter includes a great deal more detail about Brody's thesis.

I found the book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work to be useful in exposing this problem with modern corporations. This book has Robert D. Hare as co-author. It is Hare who developed the Psychopath Check List - Revised (PCL-R) which is the standard instrument for identifying psychopaths.

Bottom line is that these monsters create havoc and ruin many, many lives:

Then, according to Boddy’s “Corporate Psychopaths Theory of the Global Financial Crisis,” these men were “able to influence the moral climate of the whole organization” to wield “considerable power.”

They “largely caused the crisis” because their “single- minded pursuit of their own self-enrichment and self- aggrandizement to the exclusion of all other considerations has led to an abandonment of the old-fashioned concept of noblesse oblige, equality, fairness, or of any real notion of corporate social responsibility.”

Boddy doesn’t name names, but the type of personality he describes is recognizable to all from the financial crisis.

He says the unnamed “they” seem “to be unaffected” by the corporate collapses they cause. These psychopaths “present themselves as glibly unbothered by the chaos around them, unconcerned about those who have lost their jobs, savings and investments, and as lacking any regrets about what they have done. They cheerfully lie about their involvement in events, are very convincing in blaming others for what has happened and have no doubts about their own worth and value. They are happy to walk away from the economic disaster that they have managed to bring about, with huge payoffs and with new roles advising governments how to prevent such economic disasters.”

And if you need more scare put into you. Here is a bit from an article in The Los Angeles Times by Andrew Malcolm:

Using his law enforcement experience and data drawn from the FBI's behavioral analysis unit, Jim Kouri has collected a series of personality traits common to a couple of professions.

Kouri, who's a vice president of the National Assn. of Chiefs of Police, has assembled traits such as superficial charm, an exaggerated sense of self-worth, glibness, lying, lack of remorse and manipulation of others.

These traits, Kouri points out in his analysis, are common to psychopathic serial killers.

But -- and here's the part that may spark some controversy and defensive discussion -- these traits are also common to American politicians. (Maybe you already suspected.)

Yup. Violent homicide aside, our elected officials often show many of the exact same character traits as criminal nut-jobs, who run from police but not for office.

Kouri notes that these criminals are psychologically capable of committing their dirty deeds free of any concern for social, moral or legal consequences and with absolutely no remorse.

"This allCapitol Hill Domeows them to do what they want, whenever they want," he wrote. "Ironically, these same traits exist in men and women who are drawn to high-profile and powerful positions in society including political officeholders."

Good grief! And we not only voted for these people, we're paying their salaries and entrusting them to spend our national treasure in wise ways.

Interesting Article on Young Love Between Autistics

Here is a bit from a very interesting NY Times article that looks at two young autistic people negotiating the strange world of love and intimacy. You need to be aware of the basics of ASD to appreciate this article:

Jack, Kirsten noticed, bit his lips, a habit he told her came from not knowing how he was supposed to arrange his face to show his emotions. Kirsten, Jack noticed, cracked her knuckles, which she later told him was her public version of the hand-flapping she reserved for when she was alone, a common autistic behavior thought to ease stress.

Their difficulty discerning unspoken cues might have made it harder to know if the attraction was mutual. Kirsten stalked Jack on Facebook, she later told him, but he rarely posted. In one phone conversation, Jack wondered, “Is she flirting with me?” But he could not be sure.

But Jack, who had never known how to hide his feelings, wrote Kirsten an e-mail laying them out. And when Kirsten’s boyfriend pleaded with her to tell him what was wrong, she did, sobbing. She could not explain, she said. She knew only that she felt as if she had found her soul mate.

From the beginning, their physical relationship was governed by the peculiar ways their respective brains processed sensory messages. Like many people with autism, each had uncomfortable sensitivities to types of touch or texture, and they came in different combinations.

Jack recoiled when Kirsten tried to give him a back massage, pushing deeply with her palms.

“Pet me,” he said, showing her, his fingers grazing her skin. But Kirsten, who had always hated the feeling of light touch, shrank from his caress.

“Only deep pressure,” she showed him, hugging herself.

He tried to kiss her, but it was hard for her to enjoy it, so obvious was his aversion. To him, kissing felt like what it was, he told her: mashing your face against someone else’s. Neither did he like the sweaty feeling of hand-holding, a sensation that seemed to dominate all others whenever they tried it.

“I’m sorry,” he said helplessly.

They found ways to negotiate sex, none of them perfect. They kept trying.

What mattered more to Kirsten was how comfortable she felt for the first time in a relationship. Even if she did something wrong, she believed, Jack would not leave her. When he remarked on her obliviousness after she chattered on one day about vertebrate anatomy to their neighbor — “Matson was totally bored,” he informed her — there was no judgment, only pride that he had managed to notice. “Is that why he was yawning?” she asked, laughing with him.

...

She tolerated his discomfort with public displays of affection, though she pushed for more in private. When he explained that his lack of expression did not mean a lack of warmth for her — he often simply forgot — she devised a straightforward strategy to help him.

“When I put my hand on your leg,” she said, “you put your arm on my back.”

...

Looking for clues to fix her new relationship, Kirsten began frequenting autism Web sites like WrongPlanet.net, where hundreds of messages a day are posted. “Eligible Odd-Bods,” read one. Another, “Are relationships harder for Aspies?”

In the library, she paged through autism guidebooks, few of which contained any information about relationships, not to mention sex. But as she read about the manifestations of the condition, she recognized them — and not only in Jack.

A passage about the difficulty that people with autism have reading facial expressions reminded her of being mocked by a friend at age 5 with whom she had agreed to draw “angry ghosts.” The friend’s ghost had zigzag lines for scowling lips and a knitted brow. Kirsten, unsure how to depict anger, had drawn a blank-faced ghost with a dialogue box above its head that read “Grrr.”

I love the odd connections this article brought up in me:

• The Jack Robison in the article is the son of John Elder Robison who has written a very interesting book on the autistic experience Look Me in the Eye.


• The brother of John Elder Robison is also a writer, Augusten Burroughs, who has written two books about his bizarre upbringing caused by the fact that his father was autistic and his mother suicidal. The first book was Running with Scissors which was made into a move. And the second was A Wolf at the Table which looked more deeply into his relatioship with his autistic father.


• These connections remind me of the "small world" phenomenon that was first researched by Stanley Milgram who is famous for his early 1960s experiments in authority.


• And these connections of course remind me of the famous science historian James Burke who had a very popular TV series called "Connections" and who wrote many books on the deep connections through scientific history.

The world is fascinating because it is all tied together by multiple connections. This wondrous fact makes learning so very satisfying. Not only do you get to discover the hidden connections, you find that these connections make a framework which makes learning new facts and connections so much easier.

I get utterly disgusted by religious fanatics who claim that "all knowledge" is captured in some millennia old "sacred text" that records the sketchy, ill-informed, and stuffed with magical thinking "explanation" of the world. The real world is much more fascinating. But religious bigots refuse to open their eyes and look. Very much like the famous scholastics of the Middle Ages who could interminably "debate" over how many teeth in a horse's head based on the various writing of ancient "sages" when in fact the solution lay at hand: go out on the street, open a horse's mouth, and count the teeth!

The Mechanics of Class Warfare

First, a bit of humour:

“Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world.”

Next, here is a bit from an article on how right wing political "consultant" Frank Luntz is advising his clients with techniques to deflect the Occupy Wall Street crowd's message of the 99% versus the 1%:

... here’s how Luntz’s 10-strategy playbook should be annotated for the Super Rich who are the real powers behind Luntz’s political clients.

We began with what Yahoo News reporter Chris Moody heard Luntz tell the 29 governors about how to “fight back by changing the way they discuss the movement.” My re-edits shift the focus to the real problem, the growing economic class war between the Super Rich and the 99%. Hopefully to improve the dialogue. Listen:

1. Capitalism is a bad word, don’t say it

Luntz admits: “I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market’.” He admits the public “prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral.” But don’t mention “capitalism?” Impossible: Capitalism is in the genes of these conservative governors. Has been since Adam Smith, the “Wealth of Nations” and 1776.

Deny capitalism exists? They’ll sound hypocritical to both occupiers and their base.

2. Taxing the rich is bad. Say government’s taking from the rich

Clever, say “taking” not “taxing.” This word play will backfire: Luntz admits “If you talk about raising taxes on the rich,” polls show most voters want to tax millionaires. So shift the focus: Say government’s “taking the money from hard-working Americans?”

Luntz is too clever with his Words That Work. He’s also ignoring the fact that billionaires like Buffett, the new Patriotic Millionaires and others see a need for new tax revenues to feed the recovery.

3. Never say middle class: Call them hard-working taxpayers

Luntz admits that most Americans know the governors are not defending the middle class. He also knows polls show most Americans don’t trust the Republicans to fight for the middle class. But the advantage shifts when the buzzwords become “defending hard-working taxpayers.”

Warning: New buzzwords without new policies will ring hollow to many occupiers who are unemployed, lost benefits, lack job prospects or can’t find a new job for their training.

4. Stop talking about jobs, instead talk about careers

Luntz apparently has a very low opinion of the intelligence of occupiers. Folks, the word jobs just is not going away because of our 16% rate of underemployment. And yet Luntz asked his audience: “Everyone in this room talks about jobs,” but who wants a job? Raise your hands, he asked. “Few hands went up.”

But then “he asked ‘who wants a career?’ Almost every hand was raised. So why are we talking about jobs?” I wonder how many of the 99% laughed at that cruel joke. It really is “the economy stupid.” We really need jobs.

5. Never say government spending, it’s government waste

Luntz’s polling apparently tells him that most Americans are not against government spending, on them. But call it government waste, because that “makes people angry.”

6. Compromise is bad. Never admit you’re willing to compromise

The “no-new-taxes” pledge is a must for these 29 governors. Luntz warns: “If you talk about ‘compromise,’ they’ll say you’re selling out.” Your base “doesn’t want you to ‘compromise … replace it with ‘cooperation.’ It means the same thing. But cooperation means you stick to your principles but still get the job done. Compromise says that you’re selling out those principles.”

Unfortunately, the public, especially the 99%, see past the jargon into today’s economic reality, and an “unprincipled” failure to “cooperate.”

7. Tell occupiers, ‘I get it, you’re angry, we’ll fix it.’ Sound sincere

Luntz definitely has chutzpa: “Here are three words for you all: ‘I get it.’ … ‘I get that you’re angry. I get that you’ve seen inequality. I get that you want to fix the system.’” Then, he instructed, “offer Republican solutions to the problem.” What, more solutions? Better ones? Different from the solutions the 99-percenters believe are the problem?

Warning: America’s problem is not about politics. Not Republican political solutions. Nor Democrat. Too self-destructive. No, this is not about politics. This is a class war, a new American Revolution. Luntz’s sweet talk won’t convince governors. Nor their base. Nor the OWS who’ve been conned too often. So please get it. The 99% will smell the insincerity.

8. Entrepreneur or innovator are bad words, say job creator

From a purely behavioral economic standpoint this one is guaranteed to have unintended consequences and backfire. America’s global competitive thrust is driven by innovators and entrepreneurs. Imagine telling Silicon Valley they’re now just “small-business owners” and “job creators.” That’s guaranteed to make them wonder if these 29 states actually support America’s desperately needed “innovation” and “entrepreneurship.”

9. Never ask anyone to sacrifice, especially not millionaires

Luntz admits that “there isn’t an American today … who doesn’t think they’ve already sacrificed. If you tell them you want them to ‘sacrifice,’ they’re going to be pretty angry at you.” Solution? Luntz says “talk about how ‘we’re all in this together.’ We either succeed together or we fail together.”

Afterwards? Once back home in their states, see who still gets the tax breaks … who’s forced to make concessions … who’s still “sacrificing” in a world of politicians who signed that “no-new-taxes-for-the-rich” pledge.

10. Blame Washington, and never take responsibility

No, Luntz does not get the OWS movement yet. These guys are natural enemies. Governors are also in a class war with occupiers. Yet Luntz tells them to tell the 99-Percenters: “You shouldn’t be occupying Wall Street, you should be occupying Washington … occupy the White House because it’s the policies over the past few years that have created this problem.”

Warning, the 99% have long memories, they recall the Bush years, the massive war spending. They remember the 2008 meltdown. They see Wall Street greed unabated, their spending hundreds of millions fighting reforms. They know this is not about politics.

America is in a class war, the Super Rich versus the 99%. And the occupiers are not going away, vanishing into the cold winter nights. They’re already planning their version of an Arab Spring in 2012.

Finally, a little bonus … never, never say bonus!

Luntz also warned his state governors not to use the word bonus if they give staffers any extra money this holiday season. Why? The rest of America is sacrificing. “If you give out a bonus at a time of financial hardship, you’re going to make people angry.” Reframe your bonuses, call them “pay for performance.”

Yes, Luntz remains one of the greatest behavioral economists ever. He could rewire, debug and reprogram individual and collective brains with just a few verbal flip-flops.

Here is the Wikipedia background on Frank Luntz.

Sadly rhetoric can sway. Demagogues use words to bend people to their will. Without an awareness of the cynical lies used to manipulate people, democracy can be crushed. Think 1933 with the ascension of Hitler, the crushing of democracy, and the unleashing of the horrors of the Nazis.

If you don't believe, then seeing is believing. Here is a picture of the rising Jobbik party in Hungary (more info here in a Der Spiegel article):

Click to Enlarge
The maxim of George Santayana still applies:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Similarly, those who fail to understand demagogues and "political spin" are condemned to destroy democracy.

Financial Magic

Magic can work. Here is a bit from Paul Krugman on the strategy of "inflating your way to prosperity". From his NY Times blog:

One thing I often see in comments is people attributing to me, or to others, the notion that you can inflate your way to prosperity — which is presented as self-evidently absurd.

Well, if you think that it’s self-evidently absurd, you’ve been listening to the wrong people.

Nobody thinks that an economy operating somewhere near full employment can inflate its way to higher output. But under depression conditions — which is what we have now — inflation is very much a positive thing.

Here’s a quick example from Eichengreen and Sachs showing changes in the gold value of currencies 1929-35 versus changes in industrial production; the devaluation of currencies against gold was closely related to the changes in their overall price level:

Click to Enlarge
Yep, countries were able to inflate their way to prosperity. And you get an immediate failing grade if you start ranting about Zimbabwe or Weimar.

If you have ever seen a magician do sleight of hand, it looks impossible. But the magic works. He does a real illusion by manipulating weaknesses in our psychology. To ignore the power of placebos or magic by being an economic "fundamentalist" is as nutty as being a religious fundamentalist. In the real world you should seize and use whatever real effects that are out there. Even if they are "magic" and depend on strange attributes of humans and their psychological make-up.

The Psychology of Successful Begging

Here is a quick lesson from a psychology prof, Dan Ariely, about the techniques for successful begging:

One day a few years ago I passed a street teeming with panhandlers, begging for change. And it made me wonder what causes people to stop for beggars and what causes them to walk on by. So I hung out for a while, engaging in a bit of discreet peoplewatching. Many people passed the beggars without giving anything, but there were a few who stopped. What was it that separated those who paused and gave money from those who didn’t? And what separated the more successful beggars from those who were less successful? Was it something specific about their situation, or their presentation? Was it the beggar’s strategy?

To look into this question, I called on Daniel Berger Jones, an acting student at Boston University who had just finished hiking around Europe. Not having shaved in months and already looking pretty scruffy, he was ready for the job (plus as part of his training to be an actor I figured it would be good for him to learn how to beg for money – at the time he did not see that particular benefit). So I found a street corner and placed him there to take on the panhandling trade. I asked Daniel to try a few different approaches to begging and to keep track of the approaches that made him more or less money. (Of course, after the experiment was over we donated all the money that he made to charity). The general setup was what we call a 2×2 design: When people walked by, Daniel would either be sitting down (the passive approach) or standing up (the active approach) and he would either look them in the eyes or not. So there were times when he was 1) sitting down and looking people in the eyes, 2) sitting down and not looking people in the eyes, 3) standing up and looking people in the eyes, or 4) standing up and not looking people in the eyes.

Daniel got to work, scrounging for money. He stayed on his corner for a while, trying the different approaches. And it turned out that both his position and his eye contact did, in fact, make a difference. He made more money when he was standing and when he looked people in the eyes. It seemed that the most lucrative strategy was to put in more effort, to get people to notice him, and to look them in the eyes so that they could not pretend to not see him.

Interestingly, while the eye contact approach was working in general, it was clear that some of the passersby had a counterstrategy: they were actively shifting their gaze in what seemed to be an attempt to pretend that he wasn’t there. They simply acted as if there was a dark hole in front of them rather than a person, and they were quite successful at averting their gaze.

At some point, something very interesting happened. There was another beggar on the street – a professional beggar – who approached young Daniel and said, “Look kid, you don’t know what you’re doing. Let me teach you.” And so he did. This beggar took our concept of effort and human contact to the next level, walking right up to people and offering his hand up for them to shake. With this dramatic gesture, people had a very hard time refusing him or pretending that they did not seen him. Apparently, the social forces of a handshake are simply too strong and too deeply engrained to resist – and many people gave in and shook his hand. Of course, once they shook his hand, they would also look him in the eyes; the beggar succeeded at breaking the social barrier and was able to get many people to give him money. Once he became a real flesh and blood person with eyes, a smile and needs, people gave in and opened their wallets. When the beggar left his new pupil, he felt so sorry for poor Daniel –and his panhandling ineptitude– that he actually gave him some money. Of course Daniel tried to refuse, but the beggar insisted.

I think there are two main lessons here. The first is to realize how much of our lives are structured by social norms. We do what we think is right, and if someone gives us a hand, there’s a good chance we will shake it, make eye contact, and act very differently than we would otherwise.

The second lesson is to confront the tendency to avert our eyes when we know that someone is in need. We realize that if we face the problem, we’ll feel compelled to do something about it, and so we avoid looking and thereby avoid the temptation to give in and help. We know that if we stop for a beggar on the street, we will have a very hard time refusing his plea for help, so we try hard to ignore the hardship in front of us: we want to see, hear, and speak no evil. And if we can pretend that it isn’t there, we can trick ourselves into believing –at least for that moment– that it doesn’t exist. The good news is that, while it is difficult to stop ignoring the sad things, if we actively chose to pay attention there is a good chance that we will take an action and help a person in need.

After reading this and thinking about it, I've decided to take responsibility for my actions. I now plan to actively greet beggars, wish them a good day, but not give in to the urge to hand over money. I don't like being manipulated. Private charity is effectively a strategy for "hiring beggars" to populate the streets.

I prefer a rational system where the government assures a basic level of income security. Otherwise, the crafty beggars can use "technique" to get the money leaving the inept to quietly starve. That bugs me. Life is unfair, and it doesn't help if the needy become manipulative so that that the more brazen beggars "succeed" at the expense of the inept beggars. I want justice and fairness in my charity. This calls for a rational system of spotting need and ensuring a basic level of comfort and care to the needy.

There are studies that show that Republicans give more to charity than Democrats. But I think the Republicans are hypocrites. They give to co-religionists. A lot of those gala "charity balls" count as charity when in fact they are really a social event with a ticket price that hives off money to a "charity" such as helping the needy opera in town or the down-and-out art centre where the needy gather to get a little "culture".

I think the Democrats are more like me: they want charity run rationally by the government so that the cheats and frauds don't get it all.

The Essence of Being Human

Researcher Robert Sapolsky has nailed it. We are dopamine junkies...



Those of us who are flops in life can't handle time delay of more than a day or week. But as Sapolsky points out, the typical successful middle class dopamine junkie can hold out for the reward of "getting into the best nursing home". The truly long distance and heroic dopamine junkies are the ones who can delay gratification into the hereafter, waiting for the reward that Saint Peter offers them.

Who says that reductive science can't take the measure of man? This talk is an excellent example of reducing a human to a single neurochemical.

If you are dopamine-driven and still haven't had enough Sapolsky, click here, here, here. And repeat that for 100,000 times!

Psychopath as a Neurobiologist

This is fascinating. Here is James Fallon, a neurobiologist, how has all the markings of a psychopath. But he isn't. He is a reputable scientist. And he "discovered" through his research into brain scans that he is psychopath. Not a hardened killer psychopath, but a "pro-social psychopath".

Here is a TED talk he has given:



And here is another interesting, more recent talk by James Fallon.

And here is an NPR profile of James Fallon.

Fallon has many ancestors who were mad killers, including the notorious Lizzie Bordon:

Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks.
When she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one.

From Reason TV:



And here is a talk by James Fallon at the Oslo Freedom Forum 2011:



In this video James Fallon talks of Robert Hare's famous PCL-R (Psychopathy Checklist)

The Psychology of Pain

Here is Dan Ariely talking about how people who have had severe injuries can adapt to pain, i.e. learn to tolerate it better:

Through the Language Glass Redux

I had previously posted on Guy Deutscher's book Through the Language Glass" which discusses how language can help shape reality. The book rejects the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but presents a broader slice of language science to show early roots of the concept and the latest thinking which reaffirms the early findings that language does shape our cognition.

Here is a video that shows research into this area:



I especially enjoy the bit at at 3:00 into the video where selecting colour "differences" are shown. Since I'm red-green colour blind and "see" differences from what other see and have difficulties on standard colour blindness tests, I enjoy this bit showing this tribe being able to spot differences that Westerners can't while struggling to spot differences which are trivial for Westerners to see. Colour is a strange mixture of physiology and language. It is physically real and socially real with language overlapping differently and physiology overlapping differently in this one world that we share.

At 7:40 into the video when the experimenter asks "do we all see the same colours?" which is quite silly. It is well known that colour blind people see something different because their retina contains aberrant colour pigments in the cone cells. As a colour blind person I have to see something different but I conform to the colour language of the larger linguistic community and simply have to throw up my hands when tested closely and find I fail to meet their standards. I see "all the colours" but a careful test shows I can't make the distinctions normal people make.

And for more discussion of language, here is a previous post on language and reality I included a bloggingheads.tv video of Yale philosophy professor Joshua Knobe and the Stanford psychology professor, Lera Boroditsky, discussing language and thought.

It is wonderful to see progress in this field. And it is fascinating to think how our "inner selves" are shaped by the outer world. This ties back to the wonderful private language argument by Ludwig Wittgenstein:

... all language is essentially public: that language is at its core a social phenomenon. This would have profound implications for other areas of philosophical study. For instance, if one cannot have a private language, it might not make any sense to talk of private sensations such as qualia; nor might it make sense to talk of a word as referring to a concept, where a concept is understood to be a private mental state.

Fascinating stuff to think about.

Jon Ronson's "The Psychopath Test"

This is another book about crazies by Jon Ronson. His interests and his writing style are unique. He loves to delve into borderline crazy people. His previous books on extremists and psychological warfare were fun reads and this one is as well. Purists will complain that there is too much Ronson in the story, but that is part of the charm of his writing style. He puts his enthusiasms and wacko personality into the storyline.

Part of the charm of Ronson is that he can present "the human side" of craziness. He can make eccentrics, or this case, psychopaths seem charming. That is important because we label people and loose the humanity once we pigeon-hole them. In reality, everybody is unique and even in the monsters there is some humanity. A book like this gives you a chance to both broaden and deepen your understanding of the extremes of humanity.

Here's a sample from the book:

Another [psychopath], Joseph Fredricks, was released from Oak Ridge in 1983 and withint weeks attacked a teenage girl with a knife and sodomized a ten-year-old boy. He was released again a year later and attacked an eleven-year-old boy. After being released four years after that, he headed to a mall called Shoppers World, where he abducted and raped an eleven-year-old boy,Cristoperh Stephenson. The boy wrote a note to his parents:

“Dear Mom and Dad, I am writing you this note.”

And then the note stopped.

When the police caught Fredericks, he showed them the boy’s body and said, “He was such a nice boy. Why did he have to die?”

He goes on to document how the penal system's misunderstandings of psychopaths meant they could manipulate the system, be back out on the street, and wreak more havoc. Since Robert Hare's research and his guidelines with the PCL-R, penal systems have been holding psychopaths indefinitely. That is good, but as this book points out, sometimes that means that people get caught in the bureaucratic system and are held even though they are borderline (no diagnostic is 100% and there is no clear demarcation between mad and sane).

Robert Hare's work is important because he's prodded researchers to find a fundamental physical distinction between psychopaths and normal people: they fail to have empathy, react to horror/pain, and have no ability to remember horror/pain. So they end up indifferent to others and see them as "robots" that can be played with. They are repeat offenders because they don't connect the punishment part with crime-and-punishment. Of all criminals, they have the highest recidivism rate.

Here's another bit from the book which I found to be funny, striking, and unnerving:

In the third office I saw a woman with a Little Miss Brainy book on her shelf. She seemed cheerful and breezy and good-looking.

“Who’s that?” I asked James.

“Essi Viding,” he said.

“What does she study?” I asked.

“Psychopaths,” said James.

I peered in at Essi. She spotted us, smiled and waved.

“That must be dangerous,” I said.

“I heard a story about her once,” said James. “She was intereviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn’t know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.”

Yep. That's the problem with psychopaths. They just don't relate to normal human emotion. They can kill and feel no horror or fear. It just becomes an exercise in dominance and sadistic "play". People like Ted Bundy and Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo are truly dangerous predators. Getting them off the street and behind bars is very important. Understanding psychopaths can prevent people like Karla Homolka from manipulating the criminal system to her advantage.

I don't want to leave the impression that this book is all dark and gruesome. It isn't. It is mostly quirky and fun but with a serious theme running through it and Jon Ronson tries to give fair play to all viewpoints.

Work and Identity

Here is Dan Ariely talking about work and identity from his new book The Upside of Irrationality:



Surprise! Ariely discovered "alienation" in the workplace demotivates people. His solution, industry should be sensitive to including motivation for the workers to counter this alienation.

My comment: it won't work. I never saw industry as being sufficient self-aware to notice alienation. Even if they saw it, they viewed workers as "tools" and if you exhausted one you simply got rid of that one and hired another. No need to cater to "human needs".

The first ten years of my career in the high tech industry had me watching others who moaned about the projects they were working on coming to nothing while I quietly felt self-satisfied that everything I had been involved in resulted in systems delivered to customers that actually were being used. But after that first ten years I graduated into the "big software" side of high tech, i.e. the billion dollar projects, and suddenly I too was seeing my efforts go for naught. Worse, these big projects would late 5 years or more. You were throwing away a significant chunk of your life. Needless to say, I found myself deeply alienated. So I moved into R&D which was small projects, fast turnaround, lots of learning. Sadly, most of what I worked on in R&D over 12 years was never used. But at least I was having fun and I was learning stuff. Even in R&D there was a nagging sense of alienation, the curse of modern enterprise.

The only efforts on the part of the company to "motivate" their employees was to give out "awards". But I saw the award process as seriously skewed by the fact that upper management only had visibility into lower management, not workers on the shop floor. So the "awards" invariably went to managers for "a job well done" and not to the actual people who did the work. Now that was seriously demotivating!

Barry Schwartz & Kenneth Sharpe's "Practical Wisdom"

This is a book I'm ambivalent about. It is an entertaining enough read. It carries an important message. But I was left feeling like I had eaten "empty calories". Maybe it is me. I'm stubborn, headstrong, independent, and deeply committed to learning and ideas, so giving me a message that people's lives would be better if their work were not focused on money, status, or rewards makes me shrug my shoulders. Big deal. I've known that all my life.

The only charm for me in this book is the bit of ancient Greek philosophy. I studied philosophy and I remember that at a key moment in my life I felt kind of stupid falling back on Greek Stoicism as the "guide" to my life. I was surprised at that time, but as I look back 40+ years later, I realize I had instinctively fallen back on the one bit of philosophy that was indeed practical, the ethics of the ancients.

This book lays out Aristotle's idea of "happiness" and shows why this can only be truly achieved by "practical wisdom". Not by money, fame, glory, or power. It is written focused on modern America looking at how "rules" and "incentives", supposedly tools to allow managers and moral leaders of society to guide people to better lives is in fact undermining them. The book is very good at looking at explicit examples of teachers, lawyers, doctors, and even a janitor to show how modern America is being hollowed out. For this reason, the book deserves being read. It is in fact a message that most people need.

But for those who aren't swept up in the hoopla of greed, sex, power, and adulation, this book doesn't really carry any shocking revelation or even any really useful guidance. It is entertaining. And I hope the message is embraced by the 95% who need the message, but I sincerely doubt that this book will change more than a very modest number of minds.

Besides some "case studies", the following excerpt gives you an idea of the level of "advice" this book offers:

The work of Martin Seligman, a distinguished psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania ... launched a whole new discipline -- dubbed "positive" psychology -- in the 1990s, when he was president of the American Psychological Association. ... He kick-started positive psychology with his book Authentic Happiness.

The word authentic is there to distinguish what Seligman is talking about from what many of us sometimes casually take happiness to be -- feeling good. Feeling good -- experiencing positive emotion -- is certainly important. But just as important are engagement and meaning. Engagement is about throwing yourself into the activities of your life. And meaning is about connecting what you do to the livs of others -- knowing that what you do makes the lives of others better. Authentic happiness, says Seligman, is a combination of engagement, meaning, and positive emotion. ...

The twenty-four character strengths Seligman identified include things like curiosity, open-mindedness, perspective, kindness and generosity, loyalty, duty, fairness, leadership, self-control, caution, humility, bravery, perseverance, honesty, gratitude, optimism, and zest. He organized these strengths into virtues: courage, humanity and love, justice, temperance, transcendence, and wisdom and knowledge. Aristotle would have recognized many of these strengths as the kind of "excellences" or virtues he considered necessary for eudaimonia, a flourishing or happy life.

Like Aristotle, we consider wisdom to be the "master virtue." Without moral skill, many of the other character strengths and virtues that Seligman identifies as essential to happiness would not do the job. Without such know-how, these strengths would be more like unruly children, leading to well-meaning actions that leave disaster in their wake -- recklessness, not courage; indecisiveness, not patience; blind loyalty, not commitment; cruel confrontation, not helpful honesty. Practical wisdom is the maestro. It's what conducts the whole symphony.

Seligman suggests that "authentic happiness" may only be achievable indirectly, as a by-product of living an engaged and meaningful life. And the two spheres of life Seligman singles out as most likely to provide such positive emotion, engagement and meaning are the same two Ed Diener's research turned up: close social relations with others and participation in meaningful work.

And this bit is the fundamental critique which this book offers to modern managers and intellectuals who are pushing rules and incentives as the "fix" for what ails the modern world:

We need to see how the current reliance on strict rules and regulations and clever incentives to improve practices like medicine, education, and law risks undermining the very wisdom of practitioners that is needed to make these practices better. Well-meaning reformers are often engaged in a kind of unintended stealth war on wisdom.

We absolutely must understand that the corrosion of wisdom is not inevitable. It can be resisted. ...

And finally, again, relying on research in psychology, we need to appreciate that cultivating wisdom is not only good for society but is, as Aristotle thought, a key to our own happiness. Wisdom isn't just something we "ought" to have. It's something we want to have to flourish.

I fear that the 2% who read this book are the 2% who don't need the message of this book. It is the 98% who are seduced by money, power, status, and fame who won't read this book who would benefit from the message in this book. But sadly, that is the way of the world. The 2% who actively try to understand their world and build a better place will read this book looking for more helpful suggestions, but won't uncover any stunning new knowledge. But the 98% who need this book will never read it and even if they stumble on it, they will disdain it because it isn't a "how to" book with "5 quick steps" to achieve their goals of dominance, wealth, social position, and instant stardom. Sic transit gloria mundi.

Guy Deutscher's "Through the Language Glass"

This was a very well written, very entertaining, very informative book. It walks you through 150 years theorizing by linguists starting with the puzzle of why the Greeks wrote their classic with such few colour words and misapplied them so badly, e.g. sailing through a "wine-dark" sea, sheep are violet, the honey is green, and the sky is never blue.

The book looks at early claims by politician-scientist William Gladstone, that primitive tribes had under-developed visual systems that can be traced as developing in a clear progression from

black & white > red > yellow > green > blue

He shows that early anthropologists, psychologists, and linguists ruled out this theory, but confirmed that languages around the world showed this peculiar "progression" from limited colour vocabularies to increasingly larger ones using the above progression.

He then introduces the Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language defines your mental universe. George Steiner presents this as:

The use of the future tense has momentous consequences for the human soul and mind, as it shapes our concept of time and rationality, even the very essence of our humanity. "We can be defined as the mammal that uses the future of the verb 'to be,'" he explains. The future tense is what gives us hope for the future and without it we are all condemned to end "in Hell, that is to say, in a grammar without futures."

Whose overstatement of the case ended up being rejected by linguists by mid-20th century as the Boas-Jakobson assumption that all languages are equally expressive: "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey." This was an assumption of essential identity among languages.

But Guy Deutscher spends the last half of his book pointing out that linguists are coming back to the original 1858 insights of Gladstone. Yes, there is a progression from limited and simple colour terms (misapplied from our perspective) to the fuller spectrum of large book-based cultures, but it isn't because your visual systems changed, it is because we are constrained by our environment and the limited need for colour sophistication. And, yes, language does shape your conception and understanding of the world, but not in the over-heated and over-sold Sapir-Whorf view, but in more subtle ways. Here is the best summary:

In the light of the experiments reported in this chapter, color may be the area that comes closest in reality to the metaphor of language as a physical lens and does not affect the photons that reach the eye. But the sensation of color is produced in the brain, not the eye, and the brain does not take the signals from the retina at face value, as it is constantly engaged in a highly complex process of normalization, which creates an illusion of stable colors under different lighting conditions. The brain achieves this "instant fix" effect by shifting and stretching the signals from the retina, by exaggerating some differences while playing down others. No one knows how the brain does all this, but what is clear is that it relies on past memories and on stored impressions. It has been shown, for instance, that a perfectly gray picture of a banana can appear slightly yellow to us,because the brain remembers bananas as yellow and so normalizes the sensation toward what it expects to see. ...

It is likely that the involvement of language with the perception of color takes place on this level of normalization and compensation, where the brain relies on its store of past memories and established distinctions in order to decide how similar certain colors are. And although no one knows yet what exactly goes on between the linguistic and the visual circuits, the evidence gathered so far amounts to a compelling argument that language does affect our visual sensation.

...

More generally, the explanation of cognitive differences between ethnic groups has shifted over the last two centuries, from anatomy to culture. In the nineteenth century, it was generally assumed that there were significant inequalities between the hereditary mental faculties of different races, and that these biological inequalities were the main reason for their varying accomplishments. On e of the jewels in the crown of the twentieth century was the recognition of the fundamental unity of mankind in all that concerns its cognitive endowment. So nowadays we no longer look primarily to the genes to explain variations in mental characteristics among ethnic groups. But in the twenty-first century, we are beginning to appreciate the differences in thinking that are imprinted by cultural conventions and, in particular, by speaking in different tongues.

This is a delightful, entertaining, historical, and scientifically sophisticated book that will open your eyes to many new things. It is well worth a read.

Previous postings on this topic include:

• What is a Neo-Whorfian Cognitive Scientist?


• Language and Thought


• Language and Our Construction of Reality, Whorf Revisited

Failed Prophecy

Here is a good article by Vaughan Bell in Slate magazine looking at how groups like last week's Harold Camping followers who expected the end of the world on Saturday May 21, 2011 deal with the failure of "prophecy". Here is a bit about the classic case:

The most famous study into doomsday mix-ups was published in a 1956 book by renowned psychologist Leon Festinger and his colleagues called When Prophecy Fails. A fringe religious group called the Seekers had made the papers by predicting that a flood was coming to destroy the West Coast. The group was led by an eccentric but earnest lady called Dorothy Martin, given the pseudonym Marian Keech in the book, who believed that superior beings from the planet Clarion were communicating to her through automatic writing. They told her they had been monitoring Earth and would arrive to rescue the Seekers in a flying saucer before the cataclysm struck.

Festinger was fascinated by how we deal with information that fails to match up to our beliefs, and suspected that we are strongly motivated to resolve the conflict—a state of mind he called "cognitive dissonance." He wanted a clear-cut case with which to test his fledgling ideas, so decided to follow Martin's group as the much vaunted date came and went. Would they give up their closely held beliefs, or would they work to justify them even in the face of the most brutal contradiction?

I truly love this "acid" test of whether a prophecy is "from the Lord":

For those who draw their inspiration from the Bible, there is some small print in Deuteronomy 18:21-22 which wonderfully illustrates why a failed prophecy may not shake the foundations of a believer's faith, or cause him any uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.

You may say to yourselves, "How can we know when a message has not been spoken by the LORD?"

If what a prophet proclaims in the name of the LORD does not take place or come true, that is a message the LORD has not spoken. That prophet has spoken presumptuously, so do not be alarmed.

Only predictions that come true are from God, you see, while failed prophecies are just down to human slip-ups—a truly divine response to anyone who would condemn either a prophet or a whole belief system on the minor matter of a failed apocalypse.

That is perfect. That's a "heads I win, tails you lose" set up!

Dan Ariely Talks About his Book

Here is material from Chapter 0 from Dan Ariely's book The Upside of Irrationality. Here he talks about the trick of "reward substitution" to fool ourselves into doing the right thing even if we don't like it and are tempted with short term fun stuff:



And here is another version of the same story but with more details:

Psychopaths

Here is a bit from an article by Jon Ronson in the UK's Guardian newspaper entitled "How to Spot a Psychopath". Ronson has just written a book about psychopaths entitled The Psychopath Test. I would guess that this article is excerpted from the book:

...how could psychopaths be cured?

In the late 1960s, a young Canadian psychiatrist believed he had the answer. His name was Elliott Barker and he had visited radical therapeutic communities around the world, including nude psychotherapy sessions occurring under the tutelage of an American psychotherapist named Paul Bindrim. Clients, mostly California free-thinkers and movie stars, would sit naked in a circle and dive headlong into a 24-hour emotional and mystical rollercoaster during which participants would scream and yell and sob and confess their innermost fears. Barker worked at a unit for psychopaths inside the Oak Ridge hospital for the criminally insane in Ontario. Although the inmates were undoubtedly insane, they seemed perfectly ordinary. This, Barker deduced, was because they were burying their insanity deep beneath a facade of normality. If the madness could only, somehow, be brought to the surface, maybe it would work itself through and they could be reborn as empathetic human beings.

And so he successfully sought permission from the Canadian government to obtain a large batch of LSD, hand-picked a group of psychopaths, led them into what he named the "total encounter capsule", a small room painted bright green, and asked them to remove their clothes. This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world's first ever marathon nude LSD-fuelled psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths.

Barker's sessions lasted for epic 11-day stretches. There were no distractions – no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least 100 hours every week) of their feelings. Much like Bindrim's sessions, the psychopaths were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for each other, even if they were, in the words of an internal Oak Ridge report of the time, "in a state of arousal while doing so".

My guess is that this would have been a more enjoyable experience within the context of a Palm Springs resort hotel than in a secure facility for psychopathic murderers.

Barker watched it all from behind a one-way mirror and his early reports were gloomy. The atmosphere inside the capsule was tense. Psychopaths would stare angrily at each other. Days would go by when nobody would exchange a word. But then, as the weeks turned into months, something unexpected began to happen.

The transformation was captured in an incredibly moving film. These tough young prisoners are, before our eyes, changing. They are learning to care for one another inside the capsule.

We see Barker in his office, and the look of delight on his face is quite heartbreaking. His psychopaths have become gentle. Some are even telling their parole boards not to consider them for release until after they've completed their therapy. The authorities are astonished.

Back home in London, I felt terribly sorry for Tony. So many psychopathic murderers – fortunate to have been under Barker's radical tutelage – had been declared cured and freed. Why couldn't Broadmoor adopt some of his ideas? Of course, they seemed dated and naive and perhaps overly reliant on hallucinogenics, but they were surely preferable to locking someone up for ever because he happened to score badly on some personality checklist.

Then I learned that two researchers had in the early 90s undertaken a detailed study of the long-term recidivism rates of psychopaths who'd been through Barker's programme and let out into society. In regular circumstances, 60% of criminal psychopaths released into the outside world go on to reoffend. What percentage of their psychopaths had? As it turned out: 80%.

The capsule had made the psychopaths worse.

I very much agree with Hare that you can't "rehabilitate" a psychopath and that they are very different from normal humans. They are a variant. I'm a variant in that I have red-green colour-blindness. You can't "rehabilitate" me to remove that abnormality. There is no prison program or psychological therapy that is going to turn a psychopath into a normal person. They are different. They need to be designated "dangerous offenders" and be kept locked up even with their prison sentence comes to an end. This may mean transferring them to a psychiatric facility. But they need to be segregated from the rest of society.

And after reading Hare's book Snakes in Suits it is clear to me that corporations need to test their management and weed out the psychopaths. I very much believe that the 2008 financial crisis could have been avoided if the psychopaths on Wall Street and the big banks could be weeded out.

Forget Exercising, Learn to Smile

The secret to long life isn't heart healthy foods or extreme marathons. It is smiling...

How to Get a Really Good Education

Frameworks! In a marketing course, you get the best education through a "marketing framework"...

And here is the behavioural economist Dan Ariely explaining how his MIT MBA students pressured him for half a semester to force him to give up the secret of frameworks for their marketing course:



This insight that frameworks are the key to a really good education reminds me of the scene in the film The Graduate where Dustin Hoffman gets the inside scoop on post-graduation employment:



I find it funny that people want to reduce complexities down to a single word or a "framework". Sure, as an educational crutch it is OK to simplify, but at the same time you have to remember that you are using a simplification.

Another Confirmation of Future Babble

Here's material from a post by Barry Ritholtz on his The Big Picture blog that:

1. Tears Greg Mankiw apart for his inconsistency and false premises for economics


2. Adds another data point to the thesis of the book Future Babble by Dan Gardner regarding the public's desire for certainty over accuracy in prognostication

The following is Ritholtz's post but I encourage you to read the original because it has embedded links that are well worth following:

This week’s Sunday NYT Business section has an interesting column from Greg Mankiw: If You Have The Answers, Tell Me.

Well, Professor Mankiw, you asked. Rather than just give you the answers, I want to start by suggesting you are looking in the wrong places. That wrong place, is the field of economics.

Let’s put aside the fundamental error of classical economics — that Humans are rational, self-interested, profit maximizing creatures. They are clearly not; Humans are actually irrational social animals with flawed cognitive apparatus. Frequently emotional, occasionally self-destructive, often times erratic, humans only rarely exhibit the traits that economics ascribe to them. If the study of economics begins with such a shaky foundation, is it any wonder they get so much wrong?

Back to the questions Prof Mankiw asked about: Let’s see if we can’t give you a shove in the right direction (I have to warn you, I doubt you are going to like the answers):

1) How long will it take for the economy’s wounds to heal?

Most economists seem to focus on the post WWII economic cycles. This is the wrong approach. The most recent contraction was quantitatively different than the typical recession/recovery cycles. To get a better grasp as to what to expect, turn to history and statistical analysis instead of economics.

That is essentially what Reinhart & Rogoff did. In their December 19, 2008 paper, they showed historically, “the aftermath of banking crises is associated with profound declines in output and employment.” They had identified this phenomena 3 years ago, while the collapse was still unfolding. Their book, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly, expanded their prior paper on credit-crisis recessions.

2) How long will inflation expectations remain anchored?

Like the premature New York Journal obituary for Mark Twain, reports of inflation expectations have been greatly exaggerated. Human beings cannot forecast their own behaviors, let alone act on their expectations for inflation. Indeed, the only time most people even notice inflation is AFTER prices have skyrocketed — not before. The Recency Effect, the tendency to over-emphasize a single data point of what has just occurred rather than focus on long term series or trends –THAT is what drives behavior.

Friedman’s belief that people were engaging in immediate behavior based upon their momentary consideration of long term inflation reveal he hadn’t a clue as to how actual human beings operated in the real world. No wonder he foolishly believed we could get rid of the FDA — who needed Food inspections anyway? And the marketplace will help determine what Drugs will and should sell.

As Prof Mankiw writes, this “theory is now textbook economics, and is at the heart of Federal Reserve policy.” Which perhaps goes a long way in explaining why the Fed gets so much wrong in terms of recognizing inflation on a timely basis.

3) How long will the bond market trust the United States?

This is the most revealing question, because it reveals some biases that Professor Mankiw labors under.

He writes: “A remarkable feature of current financial markets is their willingness to lend to the federal government on favorable terms.” This must be a change of heart for the professor, given his role as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors from 2003-05. He never said much — at least publicly — about this “unsustainable fiscal trajectory” when his boss was busy turning a surplus into a “huge budget deficit.”

From the CBO to the GAO, every honest broker who has analyzed the situation has observed that the Bush tax cuts, the war of choice in Iraq, the prescription drug entitlement were the biggest factors pre-2008 in the runaway budget. Add to that the collapse of revenues brought about by the financial crisis, and you have the makings of a awful balance sheet.

Ironically, this is the one question Prof Mankiw asked that COULD be solved by economics. I do not know why he chose to ignore the answer. Perhaps it might be because he did not care for the answer economics gave.

~~~

One last comment: Prof Mankiw noted that “It is easier to attract with certainties than with equivocation.” Do not overlook a key underlying issue: The causal factor here is that the public wants certitude, regardless of how erroneous. Study after study has revealed that a “Frequently wrong, never in doubt” commentator is much preferred by the majority of viewers/readers over an intelligent commentator honestly discussing the unknowable future in terms of what is unknown and unknowable.

Probabilistic nuance versus strongly confident (but wrong)? The public chooses the latter almost every time.

You can see this not only in the ratings for various shows, but in the public’s investing performance. Its about as good as their favorite pundits are.

Which is to say, not very . . .

Economics with its beautiful math building models from its ludicrous simplifying assumptions has completely failed. As Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong and others point out: you are better off reading the century old literature of economics than to read contemporary publications.

Sadly Obama listened to those seriously compromised by their involvement with the "excesses" of the previous decades (Summers, Geithner, Bernanke) and was unable or unwilling to learn the lessons of history: recovery from a credit crisis is much, much harder than recovering from a Fed-caused economic slowdown. Many millions of people are paying the price for this mistake.

Now... let's look at how good Barry Ritholtz is as a prognosticator. I would claim he isn't a "frequently wrong, never in doubt" commentator. I find he pretty honest. But he does show he has learned the art of prognostication. He will never give you a target and a date. He will give you one or the other, but not both. You can pin a prediction down if they give both...

On Being Wrong

There are some useful thoughts in this talk. Being open to our own limited views and appreciating other viewpoints is the main message I take away.