Rob Kall: I would
imagine it would be extremely difficult to identify and collect a collection of
subjects who were corporate CEOs who were also sociopaths.
Donald Black: Well, I
don't think it would be that difficult.
For example, a researcher named Adrian Raine who studies anti-social
personality disorder, I was at dinner with him once, and I said, "Well, how do
you recruit these people? Because you
don't put an ad in the paper saying you want anti-socials!" He said, "Well, what we do is we go to
temporary work agencies, and just ask if we can interview all the people
seeking work. A very high percentage
actually meet criteria for anti-social personality disorder, and they're just
being recruited for a study that look s at brain function, so they don't know
necessarily that they're being recruited because they have anti-social
personality disorder." That's the sort
of strategy that you would use. Ideally
you could go into prisons, because the have such a high prevalence of
anti-social personality. But the
government has /
Rob Kall:
(interjecting) But what you just described, you're really only going to
be getting the ones who are the low functioning ones, the ones who aren't
getting caught.
Donald Black: That's
true. So you'd have to get people at the
other end of the income spectrum. You'd
have to use some clever recruiting tool; and I'm not quite sure what that would
be, but you couldn't just say, "I want people who have hurt their spouses, or
lied in the workplace, or been arrested," or things of that nature, because no
one would volunteer.
Rob Kall: That's
right. All right, a couple more
questions. What about leaders? What about a leader who just sends out orders
to kill people without any laws or any judges getting involved? Does that make somebody a sociopath?
Donald Black: That
person could be, and certainly around the world there have been a lot of
dictators who essentially do that. They
order the murder or elimination of large groups of - Stalin killed millions,
had millions killed, Mao had millions killed, either directly or indirectly
because of their policies. Are these
people anti-social? It's hard to tell,
but most of them,probably not. They're
just in power, maybe they're highly narcissistic, maybe they're inherently bad
people, or even evil people (we talked about that word earlier,) but I'm not
sure they fit the definition of anti-social personality disorder. It's certainly bad behavior, something that
you and I can't endorse, but unfortunately it happens all the time. We see it all the time around the world.
Rob Kall: You just
brought up "narcissistic." I had asked
about related disorders before, and you didn't really cover that one. What's the story with narcissism and
narcissistic?
Donald Black: Well
narcissistic people are extremely self-centered and entitled. That is, they believe that everyone owes them
a living, basically, and they deserve it.
So this strong sense of entitlement.
You see that in a lot of leaders and people in various industries; I
think you see that a lot in the financial world, for example. People who just have this strong sense that
they deserve it all, they're better than other people, they're smarter than
other people.
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