Like Machs, psychopaths can be adept at social cognition, learning to get inside someone’s head to surmise their thoughts and feelings so they can “push all the right buttons.” They can be socially smooth, believing that “even when others are upset with me, I can usually win them over with my charm.” Some criminal psychopaths make a point of reading self-help books to better learn how to manipulate their targets—something like a “paint-by-numbers” approach to getting what they want.
Some people now use the term “successful psychopaths” for those who have been involved in theft, drug dealing, violent crimes, and the like but have never been convicted or arrested for those acts. Their criminality, in combination with that classic pattern of glib superficial charm, pathological lying, and a history of impulsivity, earns them the status of psychopath. They are “successful,” this theory holds, because although they have the same reckless tendencies as other psychopaths, they react more anxiously to anticipated threats. Their greater apprehension leads to a bit of caution, which makes them less likely to end up in prison.25
Even as children, many psychopaths displayed coldheartedness; at an early age the tender, caring emotional range seems to have been missing altogether from their inner world. For most children, seeing another child get angry, scared, or sad disturbs them too, so they try to help them feel better. But budding psychopaths fail to perceive others’ emotional pain and so do not apply any inner brakes on their own meanness or cruelty. Torture of animals is a childhood precursor of psychopathy in adults. Other warning signs include bullying and intimidation, picking fights, forcing sex, setting fires, and other crimes against property and people.
If we regard someone as merely an object, then we can more easily mistreat them, abuse them, or worse. Such callousness finds an apex in criminal psychopaths like the serial killer, or habitual victimizers like child molesters. Their cold-bloodedness signals how morbidly confused they are when it comes to empathizing with their victim’s distress. One jailed serial rapist even said of his victims’ terror: “I don’t really understand it. I’ve been frightened myself, and it wasn’t unpleasant.”26
MORAL PRODS
It was the final minutes of a close game that would decide which college’s basketball team got to the playoffs. In the heat of the moment Temple University coach John Chaney resorted to desperate measures.
Chaney sent in a six-foot-three, 250-pound giant with orders to commit “hard fouls”—hurt players on the other team. One of those fouls sent an opposition player to the hospital with a broken arm, sidelining him for the rest of the season.
That’s when Chaney himself committed a singular act: he suspended himself from coaching.
Then he called the injured player and his parents to apologize, offering to pay the hospital bills.27 As Chaney told one reporter, “I feel very contrite,” and another, “I’m very, very remorseful.”
Remorse like Chaney’s is the key distinction between the Dark Triad and others who commit reprehensible acts. Remorse and shame—and their close cousins embarrassment, guilt, and pride—are “social” or “moral” emotions. Members of the Dark Triad experience these prods to ethical action in only stunted ways if at all.
Social emotions presuppose the presence of empathy to sense how our behavior will be experienced by others. They act as inner police, keeping what we do and say in line with the interpersonal harmony of a given situation. Pride is a social emotion because it encourages us to do what others will laud, while shame and guilt keep us in line by serving as internal punishments for social misdemeanors.
Embarrassment, of course, is triggered when we violate some social convention, whether by being too intimate, by lacking poise, or by doing or saying the “wrong” thing. Thus the mortification of a gentleman who gave an unsparing critique of an actress’s performance to a man he’d just met at a party, only to learn that the actress was the man’s wife.
Social emotions can also serve to repair such missteps. When someone shows signs of embarrassment like blushing, others can perceive that she regrets her misstep; they may interpret her embarrassment as indicating a desire to make amends. One study found that when someone who knocks over a supermarket display seems mortified, the people nearby feel far more forgiving than when the culprit appears to be indifferent.28
The brain basis of social emotions has been studied in neurological patients prone to faux pas, inappropriate self-revelations, and other violations of interpersonal codes. These patients, who turn out to have lesions in the orbitofrontal area, are legendary for their social recklessness and gaffes.29 Some neurologists theorize these patients are no longer able to detect expressions of disapproval or dismay and so miss how others are reacting to them. Others see their social lapses as due to the lack of inner emotional signals that would keep their behavior on track.
The basic emotions of anger, fear, and joy are all hardwired into the brain at birth or soon afterward, but social emotions require self-consciousness, a capacity that begins to emerge in the second year of life as a child’s orbitofrontal region grows more mature. At around fourteen months babies start recognizing themselves in a mirror. This recognition of oneself as a unique entity brings the reciprocal understanding that other people are separate too—and the ability to feel mortified about what others may think of us.
Before age two, a toddler remains blessedly oblivious to how others might judge her and so feels no embarrassment about, say, dirtying her diapers. But as the realization dawns that she is a separate person, someone others can notice, she has all the ingredients for feeling embarrassed—typically a child’s first social emotion. It requires her to be aware not only of how others feel about her, but of how she ought to feel in turn. This heightened social consciousness signals not just her emerging empathy but also her emerging abilities for comparisons, categorizing, and grasping social niceties.
Another kind of social emotion moves us to punish others who do wrong, even when there is a risk or cost to us. In “altruistic anger” one person punishes another’s violation of a social norm, such as abusing trust, even when they are not the victim. This righteous anger seems to activate a reward center in the brain, so that enforcing norms by punishing violators (How dare he cut in line!) gives us a satisfying feeling.30
Social emotions operate as a de facto moral compass. We feel shame, for instance, when others become aware of a wrong we have done. When we feel guilt, on the other hand, it stays private, arising as the feeling of remorse when we realize we have done something amiss. Guilty feelings can sometimes spur people to rectify their wrongs, while shame more often leads to defensiveness. Shame anticipates social rejection, while guilt may lead to atonement. Shame and guilt together ordinarily operate to constrain immoral activities.
But with the Dark Triad these emotions lose their moral power. Narcissists are driven by pride and fear of shame, but they feel little guilt for their self-centered acts. Machs, too, fail to develop a sense of guilt. Guilt requires empathy, which the Mach’s emotionally distant relationships lack. And shame stirs for Machs only in a stunted form.
The psychopath’s backwardness in moral development stems from a slightly different set of lapses in social emotions. In the absence of both guilt and apprehension, potential punishments lose their power to deter—an explosively dangerous situation in combination with the psychopath’s utter lack of empathy with another person’s distress. Worse, even if their own actions are the cause of that distress, they feel neither remorse nor shame.
Even a psychopath may excel at social cognition: that purely intellectual grasp of people’s reactions and social proprieties may guide a psychopath in setting up victims. A sound test for social intelligence should be able to identify and exclude members of the Dark Triad. We need a measure that cannot be aced by a well-prepped Mach. One solution is to include an evaluation for concern, empathy in action.
9
Mindblind
For Richard Borcherds, having friends over for a v
isit is just too confusing. As people get to chattering away, he has trouble following the back-and-forth, the interplay of glances and smiles, the subtleties of innuendo and double entendre, the sea of words—all moving at too high velocity.
He is oblivious to the bluffs and deft feints of the social world. Later, if someone takes the time to explain to him the punch line of a joke, or why one guest stalked out in a huff or another blushed with embarrassment, it can make sense to him. But in the moment all this social haze just goes over his head. So when guests come over, he often just reads a book or withdraws to his study.
Yet Borcherds is a genius, winner of the Fields Medal, the equivalent in mathematics of the Nobel Prize. His fellow mathematicians at Cambridge University hold him in awe, and most of them barely understand the specifics of his theories, so rarified is his field. Despite his social inabilities, Borcherds has found success.
When Borcherds commented in a newspaper interview that he suspected he might have Asperger’s syndrome—the subclinical version of autism—Simon Baron-Cohen, head of the Autism Research Centre right there at Cambridge, contacted him. Baron-Cohen then described in great detail the hallmarks of the syndrome to Borcherds, whose matter-of-fact response was: “That’s me.” The math prodigy has offered himself up as Exhibit A in research on Asperger’s.1
For Borcherds, communication is purely functional: find out what you need from someone and forget the small talk, let alone telling them what you’re feeling or finding out how they’re doing. Borcherds shuns the telephone—though he can explain the physics of how it works, the social bit confuses him. He restricts his e-mail to the bare basics of work-related information. When he goes from place to place, he runs, even when someone else has been walking along with him. Though he realizes other people sometimes think him rude, he sees nothing odd in his social habits.
All of this, for Baron-Cohen, bespeaks a classic case of Asperger’s, and when Borcherds took standard tests for the syndrome, he fit the profile well. The medal-winning whiz had a low score on being able to read people’s feelings from their eyes, on empathy, and on intimacy in friendships. But he scored in the very highest tiers on his understanding of physical causality and on being able to systematize complex information.
That picture—low on empathy, high on systematizing—is the underlying neural pattern in Asperger’s, according to years of research by Baron-Cohen and many others. Despite his mathematical brilliance, Borcherds lacks empathic accuracy: he cannot sense what’s going on in someone else’s mind.
MEAN MONKEY
A cartoon shows a young boy and his father in a living room; a scary-looking creature from outer space crawls down the stairs out of sight of the father but visible to the son. In the caption, the father says, “I give up, Robert. What has two horns, one eye, and creeps?”
To get the joke we must be able to infer things that are unsaid. For one, we need to be familiar with the English language structure of a riddle, so we can deduce that the boy has asked his father, “What has two horns, one eye, and creeps?”
More to the point, we need to be able to read two minds, the boy’s and the father’s, to understand what the boy knows and contrast that with what the father does not yet realize, and so anticipate the shock he will soon feel. Freud proposed that all jokes juxtapose two different frames on reality: here, one frame is the alien on the stairs, and the other is the father’s assumption his son is merely asking a riddle.
This ability to apprehend what seems to be going through someone else’s mind is one of our most invaluable human skills. Neuroscientists call it “mindsight.”
Mindsight amounts to peering into the mind of a person to sense their feelings and deduce their thoughts—the fundamental ability of empathic accuracy. While we can’t actually read another person’s mind, we do pick up enough clues from their face, voice, and eyes—reading between the lines of what they say and do—to make remarkably accurate inferences.
If we lack this simple sense, we are at a loss in loving, caring, cooperating—not to mention competing or negotiating—and awkward in even the least taxing social encounter. Without mindsight our relationships would be hollow; we would relate to other people as though they were objects, without feelings or thoughts of their own—the predicament of people with Asperger’s syndrome or autism. We would be “mindblind.”
Mindsight develops steadily over the first several years of a child’s life. Each landmark in the development of empathy moves a child closer to understanding how other people are feeling or thinking or what their intentions might be. Mindsight dawns in stages as a child matures, starting with the simplest self-recognition and developing into sophisticated social awareness (“I know that you know that she likes him”). Consider the following well-established tests, used in experiments on mindsight to chart a child’s progress:2
• At about eighteen months, place a large mark on a baby’s forehead, then have her look in a mirror. Typically those younger than eighteen months will touch the mark on the image in the mirror; those older will touch their own forehead. The younger babies have not yet learned to recognize themselves. Social awareness requires we have a sense of self, distinguishing us from others.
• Offer a child around eighteen months old two different snacks, such as crackers or apple slices. Watch which one the child prefers. Let the child observe you taste each of the snacks, as you exhibit clear disgust at the child’s choice and show a strong preference for the opposite choice. Then place the child’s hand between the two snacks and ask, “Can you give me one?” Children younger than eighteen months will generally offer the snack they liked; older ones will offer the snack you preferred. The older toddlers have recognized that their own likes and dislikes can differ from other people’s, and that others may think differently than they.
• For three- and four-year-olds, hide a treat somewhere in a room while this child and an older child watch. Have the older child leave the room. Then make sure the younger child sees you move the treat to a new hiding place. Ask the younger child where the older child will look for the treat when he comes back into the room. Four-year-olds will usually say he will look in the original hiding place; three-year-olds will guess the new place. Four-year-olds have realized that someone else’s understanding can be different from their own, a lesson the younger ones have not yet grasped.
• The last experiment involves three- and four-year-olds and a hand puppet called Mean Monkey. You show children successively several pairs of stickers, and for each pair Mean Monkey asks which sticker the child wants. On every round Mean Monkey chooses for himself the child’s preferred sticker, leaving the other for the child. (That’s why he’s called Mean Monkey.) By around age four, children “get” Mean Monkey’s game and quickly learn to tell him the opposite of what they really want—and so end up with their desired sticker. Younger children typically don’t understand the puppet’s mean intention and so innocently continue telling the truth, never getting the sticker they want.3
Having mindsight demands these basic skills: distinguishing oneself from others, understanding that someone else can think differently from oneself and perceive situations from another perspective, and realizing that their aims may not be in one’s own best interests.
As growing children master these social lessons—typically in their fourth year—their empathy approaches that of an adult. With this maturity, part of innocence ends: children become clear about the difference between what they merely imagine and what actually happens. Four-year-olds have attained the basics in empathy that they will draw on throughout life—albeit later on with higher levels of psychological and cognitive complexity.4
This maturation of intellect makes them far more adept at piloting themselves through the world they inhabit, from negotiating with siblings to thriving on the playground. These small worlds, in turn, are schools for life. The same lessons will become refined at new levels over the years as children expand their cognitive sophistication, their socia
l networks, and their range of contacts.
Mindsight stands as a prerequisite for younger children’s ability to joke, or to get a joke. Teasing, tricks, lying, and being mean all demand this same sense of the other’s inner world. Deficiency in these capacities sets autistic children apart from those who develop a normal social repertoire.
Mirror neurons may be crucial for mindsight. Even among normal children, the ability to imagine another person’s perspective and to empathize correlates with mirror neuron activity. And fMRI imaging of young teens reveals that, compared to normal children, an autistic group showed a deficiency in prefrontal cortex mirror neuron activity while reading and imitating facial expressions.5
Mindsight can go awry even in normal adults. Consider what some women students at Amherst College call “tray gazing.” As they file into Valentine Dining Hall for a meal, their eyes gravitate to other women—not to see whom they are eating with or what they are wearing, but instead to study what foods they have on their trays. This helps them abstain from what they otherwise might want to eat but feel they should not.
Catherine Sanderson, the psychologist who discovered tray gazing, pinpointed the distortion in mindsight behind it: each woman saw the others as much thinner, as exercising more, and as more obsessed with how their body looked than they were themselves—when in fact there were no objective differences.
This distorted set of assumptions led the women who held them to diet and, for about a third of them, to engage in induced vomiting or purges—a habit that can evolve into a life-threatening eating disorder.6 The more erroneous the women’s assumptions were about the other women’s attitudes, the more extreme their own dieting.
Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships Page 16
