Why Most People Are Not Psychopathic

The Value of Empathy, Compassion, and Selflessness

Aug 9, 2008
Jennifer Copley

Psychopaths (also known as sociopaths) don't develop a conscience because they can't experience the required emotions: anxiety, shame, guilt, and empathy.

Those with psychopathic personality disorder are found in all walks of life, from white collar criminals to petty thieves. A significant proportion of wife beaters, rapists, scam artists, organized criminals, doctors who have had their licenses taken away, unscrupulous businesspeople, terrorists, child abusers, professional gamblers, mercenaries, cult leaders, and serial killers are sociopaths.

Promiscuous, charming, and careless about birth control, psychopaths often have many children. Because they are unrestrained by conscience, they often come out on top in social interactions. So why has evolution not favoured the psychopath over those capable of guilt, empathy, and self-restraint?

Meaningless Lives

Psychopaths suffer from a profound emotional poverty that renders them unable to experience genuine love or compassion. They will never be driven by high spiritual motivations or a desire to serve humanity, and they suffer a constant, aggravating sense of boredom that can only be mitigated by taking increasingly dangerous risks. Self-obsession can lead to paranoia and hypochondria, and even those with talent are not inclined achieve anything substantial because they lack the self-discipline to sustain effort over the long term. Disconnected from others, they are adrift on a sea of meaninglessness.

Sociopaths miss out on what gives meaning to the lives of regular people. However, a life without meaning, while unappealing to most, shouldn’t be enough to knock psychopaths out of the gene pool. Rather, it is the propensity to take excessive risks and harm others that keeps their numbers low. Psychopaths often fall victim to either their own recklessness or violent retaliation from those they have mistreated.

Chronic Disasters

Because they lack the inhibitory mechanisms of fear and guilt, psychopaths take foolhardy risks and don’t plan ahead. As a result, they’re inclined to end up broke, jailed, injured, alone, or the victims of fatal violence. Many dictators and criminals have wound up suffering painful and ignoble deaths, in some cases torn apart by angry mobs of those they have wronged. Less spectacularly, the majority end up alone, bored, and miserable because they have no higher purpose to sustain them. As they get older, it gets harder and harder to manipulate others because they can’t play the role of the poor vulnerable young person who just needs a break in life.

Psychopaths suffer many misfortunes of their own making. Their lives are punctuated by disasters, flights from responsibility, stints in jail, running from the law, injuries through carelessness and risk taking, and finally, debilitating illnesses caused by poor lifestyle choices and perhaps exacerbated by the chronic anger that results from frustrated desires.

The Roots of Empathy and Compassion

Our early ancestors would not have survived the brutal conditions of cave-dwelling existence had they not cooperated and cared for one another. There is evidence that primitive humans took care of the ill and infirm among them. People looked after one another to increase their chances of survival, and they would not have done so if the majority had not been endowed with a sense of responsibility and the capacity for empathy. Those with a conscience would have taken better care of their children and other family members, and so those carrying similar genetic material would have been more likely to survive into adulthood and reproduce, thus carrying on the genetic lineage that favours a conscience.

The evolutionary roots of empathy can be seen in the behaviour of many animals, particularly among our close cousins, the bonobo monkeys. Primatologist Frans de Waal offers the touching story of a female bonobo who cared for an injured bird. The bird, having crash-landed in her enclosure, was unable to fly. The bonobo gently stretched out its wings and gave it a light toss. When this didn’t work, she carried it to the top of a tree and sent it sailing to the ground. The bird was still unable to fly, so the bonobo sat with it, comforting and protecting it until it had recovered sufficiently to fly out of the enclosure. Those who work with animals have witnessed many incidents suggestive of empathy, and among the more intelligent animals, these may cross species boundaries, indicating that compassion is part of the basic nature of most intelligent beings.

The existence of the emotions that lead to the development of a conscience—anxiety, empathy, shame, and guilt, increase the chances of both individual and group survival, as well as the survival of one’s offspring. Thus, having a conscience is useful. However, there are situations in which conscience can be overridden in all but the most psychologically strong individuals.

A Fine Line

There are certain circumstances in which non-psychopathic people will cause significant harm to innocent individuals. An experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram found that the majority of people were willing to give dangerous shocks to another person if an authoritative individual told them to do so. This gives insight as to why seemingly ordinary people commit wartime atrocities. Such studies indicate the dangers of training children to blindly obey authority figures rather than teaching them to critically analyze what is being asked of them. Appealing to patriotism is a tool used by many political leaders to ensure reflexive obedience to authority.

However, even in wartime, many people don’t want to kill. A study of World War II soldiers found that while most soldiers would fire their weapons if their commanders were present, firing dropped 15-20% as soon as leaders left the area. Soldiers who are forced to kill others often suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) later on, while soldiers in dangerous areas who are not forced to kill are no more likely to acquire PTSD than those who never leave home in the first place. Only by viewing opponents as subhuman can the non-psychopathic person kill without remorse.