As discussed in chapter 1, we have used a score of 27 on the APSD as our cut-off point for a classification of psychopathic tendencies in many of our studies.
I've noticed this elsewhere (looking into ADHD), Psychiatrists seem interested in developing a criteria which seems naturally continuous, and then using a cutoff without arguing for why that's a good idea. I can easily imagine that some conditions are discrete, but many of them must be pretty continuous. It seems like they would lose a lot of statistical power with a cutoff approach.
Is this purely a historical accident? Is it because discrete judgments seem more authoritative? Is there an actual good reason that I can't see? What's going on here? This sort of thing makes me suspicious of the quality of psychiatry research.
A lot easier to work with? Is running a linear regression that hard?
Yep. Remember, every step of statistical sophistication is a filter. Some people who understand means will not understand correlations; some people who understand correlations will not understand standard deviations; some people who understand deviations will not understand t-tests; and everyone won't understand p-values judging by how often I see the '5% odds this was due to chance' fallacy even here on LessWrong. Linear regression is another step on top of that, etc.
The courts thing makes more sense, though I'd be surprised if courts couldn't understand percentiles fairly well ("more psychopathic than 94 percent of the population").
What does that even mean for the court, though? They aren't judging the overall population; heck, criminal defendants aren't even a sample from the overall population but are heavily biased towards particular places, races, IQs, and annual incomes etc etc.
...Another theory is that, the first success stories of identifying things in psychiatry and treating them came from things which are discrete so there's a tradition of treating things that way, and the contrary evide
Deviant but not necessarily diseased or dysfunctional minds can demonstrate resistance to all treatment and attempts to change their mind
Maybe they need better treatments. Has anyone asked psychopaths - "How would you convince a psychopath like you to stop doing X?" Has anyone let psychopaths try? Aren't they the master manipulators? They even have a readily available model of a psychopath to test out the theory on. How convenient! Sufficiently motivating a psychopath with rewards for changing the mind of another psychopath might be an effective treatment for the first psychopath. Did they try that treatment?
I don't mean to be pissy, but "resistance to all treatments and attempts to change their mind" strikes me as a huge claim. Ruling out the "it's something I didn't think of" theory is one of the worst cognitive biases.
Maybe they need better treatments. Has anyone asked psychopaths - "How would you convince a psychopath like you to stop doing X?" Has anyone let psychopaths try? Aren't they the master manipulators? They even have a readily available model of a psychopath to test out the theory on. How convenient! Sufficiently motivating a psychopath with rewards for changing the mind of another psychopath might be an effective treatment for the first psychopath. Did they try that treatment?
Something like it was tried in Canada, in the sixties, with LSD, in a four year experiment where a group of 30 psychopaths were, at least apparently, temporarily reformed through unconventional means.
This strange and unique program was obliquely referenced in the top post:
......operated for over a decade in a maximum security psychiatric hospital and drew worldwide attention for its novelty. The program was described at length by Barker and colleagues…The results of a follow-up conducted an average of 10.5 years after completion of treatment showed that, compared to no program (in most cases, untreated offenders went to prison), treatment was associated with lower violent recidivism for non-psychopa
The thing is, you are invoking the evolution demon as soon as you do that. You may end up with a more dangerous monster.
"On the trail of the elusive successful psychopath", Francis et al 2014
......Do successful psychopaths – people who possess the core traits of psychopathic personality but who achieve marked societal success in one or more domains – really exist? Indeed, some scholars have argued that the very concept of successful psychopathy is an ‘oxymoron’ because ‘by definition, to be afflicted with a personality disorder (e.g. psychopathy) one must have pathological symptoms that cause impairment in multiple domains of one’s life’ (Kiehl & Lushing, 2014)
Could this have anything to do with our culture's fascination with cunning, charming, arrogant characters without much of a moral compass? (Wait, is that actually culture-specific, or are tricksters typically sympathetic?)
Given the evidence for psychopaths’ dominant response styles and differing response thresholds, increasing the salience and consistency of punishments would be important elements in these interventions.
I would say the exact opposite! Drop the punishments since those don't work well, and reward desired behaviors instead.
Holy moly, frea...
Questions for both you and Tenoke:
How do you reward/reinforce desired behaviors in cases when the desired behavior is normal rather than exceptional? If I give my child a reward every time they're not hitting their sibling, isn't this isomorphic to taking away their expected reward every time they do hit their sibling (a punishment)? Worse, if I only started this "reward basic lack of misbehavior" scheme when I noticed that a child was prone to misbehavior, isn't that just going to be perceived as "[I/my sibling] got a new nearly-continuous reward for misbehaving enough to trigger parental notice"?
Then, since it's significantly harder to apply reinforcements than punishments to badly-behaved children, wouldn't we expect to see a strong correlation between reinforcement and good results (or between punishment and bad results) regardless of how effective each was at changing behavior?
Fascinating stuff. You seem well read in the subject and I'm not, so let me ask a couple of questions my psychiatry professors weren't for some reason interested in answering in the course a couple of weeks ago. So no blame on you if you can't answer.
Why is psychopathy not even mentioned in the DSM? How does this affect the research and is it taken seriously in mainstream psychiatry? I understand ASPD is in the DSM, but it's not even nearly the same construct and has comorbidities atypical for psychopathy.
Psychopaths are supposed to be expert liars. How do...
"What can we learn about emotion by studying psychopathy?", Marsh 2013:
...Psychopathy affects both children and adults. Markers of psychopathy may emerge early in childhood (Glenn et al., 2007; Wang et al., 2012), are moderately reliable predictors of adult psychopathy (Lynam et al., 2008), and the core affective features of psychopathy appear to be highly heritable (Larsson et al., 2006). The heritability coefficient of the core callous and unemotional features has been estimated to be at least 0.43 (Larsson et al., 2006) and as high as 0.71 (Vid
Huh, I always assumed I was a psychopath, but now that seems like giving myself way too much credit for being mildly odd. Is there any test online to check?
Deviant but not necessarily diseased or dysfunctional minds can demonstrate resistance to all treatment and attempts to change their mind (think No Universally Compelling Arguments; the premier example are probably psychopaths - no drug treatments are at all useful nor are there any therapies with solid evidence of even marginal effectiveness (one widely cited chapter, “Treatment of psychopathy: A review of empirical findings”, concludes that some attempted therapies merely made them more effective manipulators! We’ll look at that later.) While some psychopath traits bear resemblance to general characteristic of the powerful, they’re still a pretty unique group and worth looking at.
The main focus of my excerpts is on whether they are treatable, their effectiveness, possible evolutionary bases, and what other issues they have or don’t have which might lead one to not simply write them off as “broken” and of no relevance to AI.
(For example, if we were to discover that psychopaths were healthy human beings who were not universally mentally retarded or ineffective in gaining wealth/power and were destructive and amoral, despite being completely human and often socialized normally, then what does this say about the fragility of human values and how likely an AI will just be nice to us?)
As usual in my 'notes' articles, the following is a series of excerpts and citations; if any interest you, leave a comment and I will try to jailbreak a copy for you or failing that, post a request on the research help page.
1 Psychopathy
The Psychopath: Emotion and the brain, Blair et al 2005:
Long section summary:
More on the ADHD correlation:
A possible overall picture:
Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work, Babiak & Hare 2006:
“A Genetic Factor Explains Most of the Variation in the Psychopathic Personality”, Larsson et al 2006:
Handbook of Psychopathy, ed. Christopher Patrick 2005
This is interesting since out of 500, the usual American base rates would predict not 1 but >10 psychopaths. Is this all due to the tribal and closely knit nature of more aboriginal societies, or could Eskimo society really have been selecting against psychopaths while big modern societies give scope for their talents & render them more evolutionarily fit? This may be unanswerable until the relevant genes are identified and samples of gene pools examined for the frequencies.
“Treatment of Psychopathy: A Review of Empirical Findings”, Harris & Rice 2006; from Handbook of Psychopathy 2005:
The later Handbook paper, “Risk for Criminal Recidivism: The Role of Psychopathy” (Douglas et al), also has useful critical comments on meta-analyses including the Salekin meta-analysis.
Conclusion:
The evolutionary hypothesis of psychopathy is striking (eg. it’s partially hereditable; or, sex offenders who target post-pubertal women have the highest PCL-R scores compared to any other subdivision of sex offenders), but not immediately relevant. It’s discussed a little skeptically in the chapter “Theoretical and Empirical Foundations” in the Handbook.
“Psychopathy and Personality”, Lynam & Derefinko, Handbook:
“Psychopathy and DSM-IV Psychopathology”, Handbook:
“Neuroanatomical Bases of Psychopathy”, Handbook; summary:
“Understanding Psychopathy: The Cognitive Side”
[Irrational, or just higher valuing of rewards/lower fearing of injury?]
“The”Successful" Psychopath: Adaptive and Subclinical Manifestations of Psychopathy in the General Population", Hall & Benning, Handbook
“Psychopathy and Aggression”, Porter & Woodworth; Handbook
“Toward the Future: Translating Basic Research into Prevention and Treatment Strategies”, Seto & Quinsey: