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The subject of psychopaths comes up frequently on Soylent in many contexts, so this story caught my eye:
How do you think a psychopath can be affected despite all that has been written about the psychopath being so devious etc.? I am sure there are weaknesses which one can dig into to break him 'psychologically'. I read somewhere that they are basically people who are very insecure and they love to control people so that they feel they have a power within themselves.
I know of a psychopath who insists on people doing what he wants and anyone defying him will see his vengeful self lashing out. But I am sure there must be something that can break such a psychopath. How about belittling or bring him to shame?
The first part of the answer is to be able to distinguish a narcissist from a psychopath:
I agree with the other post that points out that the person described is a narcissist, not a psychopath. Psychopaths are very secure and they to not seek control for the sake of feeling powerful, nor are they vengeful or spiteful. You could say that psychopaths are very practical, they want pure gain for the sake of the gain (e.g. money, a sexual favor, special access to something such as convince) rather than the ego stroke or prestige. A smart psychopath would probably keep things as low key as possible, as to maximize potential gain and minimize the danger of being caught. They are cool and calm, unlike the person described who lashes out for personal reasons.
Read the rest of the article for the takeaway.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by RamiK on Tuesday November 15 2016, @03:46PM
Not to rain on your parade, but 99% of psychologically can't even be called a pseudo-science. The one useful thing they did is identify the placebo effect which ended-up invalidating the entire practice of psychologically and much of psychiatry in light of selective and falsified research results.
Psychopath... narcissist... Meaningless labels. The only thing proven with MRIs is that there's such things as obsessive behavior, psychotic breaks and chronic depression. And the only proven treatment is to lock up the patients and pump them full of sedatives until symptoms stop and they're no longer a threat to themselves and others. Everything else ranges from theoretical to the magical thinking. There's even psychiatrists saying the course treatments aren't working: It's simply that when the patients finally have an episode, they get uncooperative and stop taking medication. That is, not only they doubt the relation, they're even suggesting a reverse \ false causation.
Really, might as well ask how to treat possession with prayer.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @04:09PM
Kinda.
For the vast majority of psychology, they are labeling natural variation as aberrant. Very little takes into consideration environmental/cultural factors into makeup. Even the popular psychopath is little more than someone maybe a bit more calculating and manipulative and logical. The typical emotional appeals are less effective on them, but they perfectly understand "if x, then y" statements.
On the other hand, there are broken people who have had psychotic breaks, demented, etc. who are otherwise working on a different plane of reality. Psychology has little to offer them but sedatives and antipsychotics and repetition. At best, you can keep them from rolling around in broken glass, but I sometimes think exorcism might be a better treatment modality.
Anyhoo, psychiatry/psychology are still young sciences. They are going to fuck-up more than they get right at this point, but the study is still important. I do believe however they will be superseded by neurobiology.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @05:37PM
Psychology has little to offer them [psychotic patients] but sedatives and antipsychotics...
That's like saying "medicine has little to offer cancer patients except chemotherapy and surgery".
Antipsychotics saved my life. I thought I was literally in Hell: antipsychotics lifted me out of that.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday November 15 2016, @06:49PM
This is why I distinguished between psychology and psychiatry in my own comment. Antipsychotics are known to work for lots of things and lots of people and their effects are observable in an MRI scans.
However, that's where the buck stops. The neurosciences are still in their infancy and this leaves room for all the religious psychological mambo jumbo to fill in the gap. Some of the developmental stuff kinda makes sense and even tests out. But the VAST majority of psychology (again, not psychiatry or neuroscience) is nonsense.
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(Score: 2) by art guerrilla on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:07PM
and yet, there is an astonishingly high percentage of doctors who would personally NOT undertake a chemotherapy regimen if they had to choose between that and coasting on out... hmmmm
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday November 15 2016, @05:08PM
Are "psychopath," "narcissist," and the like really "meaningless labels?" Psychologists and psychiatrists don't seem to use them interchangeably. For those in the cognitive sciences they are distinct concepts. Loose usage among laymen, who do conflate those two things, does not invalidate them as useful labels in clinical application.
There are those of us who bristle when laymen call HTML "coding," exactly the same as "coding" with C, because those two things are not at all the same--to us. There are those who roll their eyes whenever creationists pooh-pooh evolution as merely a "theory," because "theory" means something much more rigorous to a scientist than when my friend Bob shares his "theory" about why NFL TV ratings are way down.
There is bombastic language used by psychologists and such. I can't count the times I've seen software engineers spout technobabble to fend off some feature marketroids want because they think it's stupid. But that doesn't mean that there isn't something real that underlays what happens in both fields of endeavor.
Social sciences are not the same as physical sciences, but they are a long, long way from majoring in theater.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 15 2016, @05:37PM
A sound theoretical argument. No sarcasm. Good luck on the pragmatic observational side with things like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair [wikipedia.org]
Pragmatically I think the simplest way for a layman to tell the difference between a hard or soft science is fundamentally hard sciences are dis-provable by someone with some tools like math or stats resulting in internal self policing of the group, whereas the soft sciences base all their true and false testing and therefore their internal self policing, what little exists, on authoritarianism, personal relationships real or desired, political alliances, etc.
It would be fun to think about opposites day. Imagine physicists trying to act like soft sciences, for a laugh. The response to "Feynman got some things wrong about quantum electrodynamics" is ...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @06:15PM
You are being very insulting to scientists that take on the very difficult task of measuring human cognition. It is a very difficult task and I'm glad some people keep at it despite detractors such as yourself. All of the points you made can apply to hard science as well, its just that hard sciences make it easier to spot such bias.
There may be a higher incidence of those factors in the soft sciences, but lumping every psychologist together is a terrible way of analyzing the world. I'd like to think you can do better.
(Score: 1) by The Vocal Minority on Wednesday November 16 2016, @07:06AM
Seems certain topics on SN really brings out the stupid. Your post isn't the only one but easiest to pull apart without writing a wall of text.
1. Maths and Stats is used in Psychology, much to the chagrin of many a fuzzy headed psych student. By your definition Psychology is a "hard" science.
2. Humanities Social Science. Culture Studies is not Social Science. Social Text is a Culture Studies journal, it has very little to do with Social Science in general and Psychology in particular. However your criticism of Social Science, if applied to Humanities instead, does have some merit.
TVM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @07:56PM
Not to rain on your parade, but 99% of psychologically can't even be called a pseudo-science. The one useful thing they did is identify the placebo effect which ended-up invalidating the entire practice of psychologically and much of psychiatry in light of selective and falsified research results.
Psychopath... narcissist... Meaningless labels. The only thing proven with MRIs is that there's such things as obsessive behavior, psychotic breaks and chronic depression. And the only proven treatment is to lock up the patients and pump them full of sedatives until symptoms stop and they're no longer a threat to themselves and others. Everything else ranges from theoretical to the magical thinking. There's even psychiatrists saying the course treatments aren't working: It's simply that when the patients finally have an episode, they get uncooperative and stop taking medication. That is, not only they doubt the relation, they're even suggesting a reverse \ false causation.
Really, might as well ask how to treat possession with prayer.
Even if something is not 100% consistent, not 100% explainable, or misunderstood by the general public; it can still be useful.
For example, if somebody handed me a coin and I flipped it 50 times and it landed Heads each time, I would guess that the 51st flip would be Heads as well. Even if statistics says that Heads and Tails are equally likely, I would still guess the next one would be Heads. (It could be a statistical fluke, or it could be a bias coin.)
Likewise, if a person robs a bank 10 times, I'd guess they would rob it an 11th time too if given the opportunity. If 80% of bank robbers had elevated testosterone and 10% of non-bank robbers had the same condition, I'd guess that elevated testosterone was related even if I didn't know how or why.
Psychology is muddy, has been abused in the past, and continues to be abused... but that's not to say the whole discipline is worthless. I think there is a lot of value in things like the noticing how when people are preoccupied with complicated thoughts they are more likely to make bad decisions, how most (not all) people will naturally obey authority and do bad things for the "greater good," how people can only think a certain number of things concurrently, how when people are worried about getting their next meal abstract things like "justice" are not important, and a plethory of other psychological findings which have proven the test of time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 15 2016, @08:54PM
I think its funny how the people who are least skilled at understanding others are typical first in line to declare that psychology isn't a real science. I wonder why that it is. But I guess I will never find out because that would require scientific investigation and, as we've been informed, that's impossible.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 16 2016, @08:35AM
A cunning way to get "determinism" into the discussion.
"They are not responsible for what they do".
Yes they are! A person is responsible for ALL of their actions. A person can decide to behave a certain way.
Your try to brainwash us into considering "determinism" instead of "free-will" has been found out.