The Sociopaths in The House

Several years ago I cam across a book by a Harvard Medical School psychologist, Martha Stout, called The Sociopath Next Door. This book really opened my eyes.

I’ve been fascinated by psychopaths (now called “sociopaths”) ever since I met one of them when I was in my twenties. He was the kind you read about and see in the movies.

He was a short, balding guy around thirty who owned a tobacco-store near the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He lured lonely students into his back room, drugged them, and then dumped chests full of their chopped-up bodies into the Schuylkill River.

When I went in his store late one night to buy something, he tried to befriend me. The instant he parted the bead curtain over his back room and came out to serve me, I was terrified of an unseen evil I sensed but couldn’t understand. I fled after buying what I came for, running in panic, and I never went back. The police arrested him two months later.

Like you, I’d grown up learning from Hollywood movies like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Frenzy and Peter Sellers’ portrayal of Dr. Strangelove that psychopaths were crazed killers. But, as Dr. Stout says, that is rarely the case.

According to Stout, sociopaths are not “crazy”. Psychologists classify them as people who have a “anti-social personality disorder”. (See the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual, PCA103.) One out of every 25 people is a sociopath. A sociopath could be your coworker, a member of your church or club, or even your neighbor next door.

The Sociopath Next Door

And indeed, I met one of those later on in my life. A neighbor of mine quite knowingly destroyed my home and damaged others nearby. Like most of my neighbors, I was stunned by this man’s power-tripping, obstructiveness, and gratuitous acts of meanness towards anyone who wasn’t in his little circle of minions willing to support the irresponsible things he did.

He and his cohorts seemed fixated in getting into my home. They used legal, and, I believe, illegal means, e.g., breaking my front door look, to do that. When he did go into my home, ostensibly to have a crew fix it, he saw that they tore apart and destroyed nearly every single thing in it, right down to each and every lightbulb.

At one point in my battle to to save my home from this man’s glee in its destruction, he and I encountered each other outside the building. It was midday. No one else in the neighborhood was around. He came around the side of my house. He stopped short when he saw me.

I was just getting in my car across the street from him. I stopped too when I saw him. The look on his face was chilling. He clearly wanted to kill me.

I stood my ground and gave him a look back. My look said, No, you will not kill me.”

After what seemed like several minutes, I won the battle. He turned and skulked back the way he came. Shaking, I got in my car and sat until my heart stopped racing. Still, it didn’t occur to me that I’d been in a contest with a sociopath until years later I read Stout’s descriptions of the sociopath’s odd eyes and their “stare”.

Behavioral economics

When I was in graduate school in economics at the University of Wisconsin, behavioral economics was just beginning, mainly in the field of microeconomics, the study of companies and households.

My advisor at the time, Dr. Martin David, was writing a book on how young newlywed couples choose new furniture. That kind of microeconomic research was cutting edge back then when economists believed in the theory of rational choice-making. I doubt that even now, years later, economists are yet studying the impact of irrational choice-making by sociopaths on the American economy.

Stout’s view of sociopaths, after years of counseling their victims, is this. Very few sociopaths are killers – or even convicted criminals. They are simply people who feel no empathy with others. They are people who have no “conscience” and feel no remorse.

After I read Stout’s book, I started thinking maybe some of those responsible for the doings on Wall Street before the financial crisis of 2008 were sociopaths. Stout even included a case study in her book about a very successful sociopathic financial wizard. Since then, I’ve seen scattered references to this idea, originally in regard to the character, “Gordon Gekko,” played by Michael Douglas, in the movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

Just recently the Financial Times; Wealth section carried a commentary that explored this idea. Published in Summer 2011, the essay by FT’s investment editor, James MacKintosh, was titled, “Hitchcock’s ‘ The Bankers’”. In it MacIntosh mentions two professors of psychology, Robert Hare and Paul Babiak, who began studying psychopaths in the workplace back in the days after the dotcom bust.

If economists ever do open themselves to the idea that some people are sociopaths, these professors will need to make huge changes in the way they study economic choice behavior. Sociopaths are very different from the rest of us when it comes to making choices. In the end, their choices often get them into trouble at work or in regard to their families.

Here is the passage from Stout’s book that resonated most with me about the one I met who destroyed so much property where I once lived.

“And yet when such a person is around us in our lives, even on a daily basis, we are often oblivious to [his or] her activities. We do not expect to see a person direct a dangerous, vicious vendetta against someone who in most cases has done nothing to hurt or offend [him or] her. We do not expect it, and so we do not see it, even when it happens to someone we know—or to us personally. The actions taken by the…sociopath are often so outlandish, and so gratuitously mean, that we refuse to believe they were intentional, or even that they happened at all.” (p. 77)

The most telling comment from the “sociopath next door” that I met came when he had clearly succeeded in frustrating yet another homeowner at one of our neighborhood meetings. He said archly, “Oh, I understand your position. You just don’t get mine.”

Indeed we didn’t. This too is what Stout points out. Sociopaths study us in order to figure out how to pass as one of us in order to have their way with us. All the while they do this, we don’t even realize that we know a sociopath. We have no clue why they do what they do, and we are often at a loss for any explanation at all for their inconceivable anti-social behaviors.

Sociopaths in the House

It is the passage from Stout’s book I quoted above that I go back to in my mind when I watch on TV what is happening in Washington DC right now.

I understand the principles of the Republican party. In the past, I’ve supported some of them. But what I also see is that a few of the players, both nationally and in some states, are displaying the same kind of lack of empathy and conscience my sociopathic neighbor exhibited. I see leaders who are rigid, but not out of conviction or principle. Instead, they contradict things they themselves previously stood for in order to take advantage of each new opportunity to thwart the victims of their hostility.

I suspect those whom Stout calls “covetous” sociopaths have gotten themselves into politics as well as other workplaces. They’ve done this by using the guise of a conservative, libertarian agenda but for their own twisted purposes. From the strikingly unusual amount of consensus within the Republican party, I suspect a handful of sociopaths are coercing, charming, and/or manipulating loyal, traditional, Republicans to go along with their hidden agendas no matter what the cost to their party.

If smart sociopaths are indeed in control of our country’s House, I can guarantee the economic damage they do will be something that frustrated economists will be grappling with for the rest of this century.

Sociopaths are masters at manipulating and bullying weaker people to get them to do both petty and outrageously cruel things to others. Sociopath’s rewards are not just the “economic” rewards most of us seek; their biggest reward is the adrenaline-filled high and pleasure that come from deceiving, one-upping, and “gaslighting,” other people.(Stout, pp. 94-98)

When I see my country happily going after “madmen” elsewhere, i.e., sociopathic dictators in the Middle East, a kind of “cognitive dissonance” makes me uneasy. It seems the ultimate irony that the US thinks it is helping to cleanse the world of those same kinds of self-serving, irresponsible risk-taking, lying, bullying, and sometimes very charming and callous manipulators whom psychologists label sociopaths.

Because right now, the same types of men (and women) appear to be right here. They can be found all across the US, at the state and federal levels, running for office and doing their best to ruin our own democratic government.

Follow Nancy Humphreys on Twitter @brucenomics