Absence of a Conscience and a Sense of Responsibility to Others
THE SOURCES OF SOCIOPATHY & Antisocial Personality
The absence of shame or remorse for past misdeeds, of any sense of humiliation
for egregious ones, is one of the most common characteristics of sociopaths.
They lack conscience, and with it, any deep capacity to care about
other people. Their relationships, therefore, tend to be Quite shallow and exploitative.
They lack a capacity for love and sustained attachment and are
unresponsive to trust, kindness, or affection. They lie shamelessly and can
mercilessly abuse those who have trusted them. Gary Gilmore did not have
a serious relationship until several weeks before he committed the two
murders. He was then thirty-six years old. Describing the affair, he said that
it was "probably the first close relationship that I ever had with anyone. I
just didn't know how to respond to her for any length of time. I was very insensitive
to her ... I was thoughtless in the way I treated her. ... [H]er two
children bugged me and sometimes I would get angry at them and slap them
because they were so noisy."
Emotional Poverty
One of the major differences between the normal person who is a criminal
and the sociopath lies in the depth of experienced emotion. Ordinary criminals
presumably experience the same emotions as other normal people.
But sociopaths experience very shallow emotions. They seem to lack the capacity
for sustained love, anger, grief, joy, or despair. During a psychiatric interview,
Gilmore observed that "I don't remember any real emotional event
in all my life..... When you're in the joint, you stay pretty even all the
time ...I'm not really excitable you know. I don't get emotional." Indeed,
their incapacity to experience emotion may be significantly related to their
lack of conscience and to the ease with which they violate the expectations
of others.
THE SOURCES OF SOCIOPATHY
Personality disorders are long-lived. The antisocial personality disorder
originates in childhood or early adolescence as a conduct disorder (see
Chapter 18), <lind then continues into adulthood. Once again, Gary Gilmore
is a case in point. Examining his childhood, we find that he had been suspended
from school on several occasions for truancy and for alleged thefts
from his classmates. When he was fourteen, he was sent to a correctional
youth facility for auto theft. By the time ofhis last arrest, Gilmore had spent
fifteen of his sixteen adult years behind bars.
What factors give rise to such continuously antisocial behavior? Four potential
sources have been given considerable attention: (1) the family and
social context, (2) defects in learning, (3) genetics, and (4) physiological
dysfunctions in the central nervous system.
The Family and Social Context
Because the sociopath seems not to have internalized the moral standards of
the larger society, it is natural to examine the agents of socialization, particularly
the family and social context, for clues about sociopathy. There is evidence,
for example, that sociopaths who grew up in the lower social classes
experienced more difficult childhoods than other people from those same
social strata. A number of studies indicate that losing a parent through desertion,
divorce, or separation (rather than through death or chronic hospitalization)
is highly correlated with the later development of sociopathic
behavior I'Gregcry, 1958; Greer, 1964; Oltman and Friedman, 1967).Moreover,
the more severe the sociopathic behavior, the more likely it is that the
sociopath experienced parental deprivation. Most writers believe, however,
that it is not the parental deprivation per se that promotes sociopathyotherwise
the findings would include deprivation through death and hospitalization.
Rather it is the emotional climate that precedes the divorce-the
arguments and violent fights, the blatant promiscuity, alcoholism, parental
instability, the neglectful father-which is implicated in socialization for
sociopathy (Smith, 1978).
Similar, but substantially enlarged, findings emerged from a study of a
large group of people who had been seen at a child guidance clinic between
1924 and 1929 (Robins, 1966). Fortunately, the clinic had maintained careful
psychological and sociological records on the presenting problems and
family circumstances ofits clients. When these children grew up, they were
carefully interviewed, along with a control group that had never been seen at
the clinic.
About 22 percent of the clinic referrals qualified for the adult diagnosis of sociopathic personality, while only 2 percent of the control group received that diagnosis.
What early experiences were correlated with the diagnosis of antisocial
personality disorder in adulthood? First, as children, these sociopaths had
been referred to that child guidance clinic for antisocial behaviors: theft, truancy,
and school discipline problems dot their clinic records. Second, they
tended more often than the control group to come from impoverished
homes and from homes that were broken by divorce or separation. Their fathers
themselves were often antisocial persons who may well have served as
sociopathic models for their children (Bandura and Walters, 1963), while simultaneously
creating the marital discord that may spawn sociopathic development
(Robins, 1966).
Again taking Gary Gilmore's life as an example,
we find that although Gilmore's parents were never formally separated,
his father spent so much of his time away from home that Gilmore
considered himselfto have been raised by "a single parent." During some of
that time, hilifather was in prison, serving eighteen months on a bad check
charge. His mother was simultaneously overindulgent and neglectful: Gilmore
was often left to fend for himself. Reflecting on his family, he described
it as "typical" and noted that "there wasn't much closeness in it."
The children who later became sociopaths were referred to juvenile court
and were subsequently sent to correctional institutions much more often
than other children. In such institutions, they very likely picked up some of
the habits of their antisocial peers. These findings, however, should not be
interpreted to mean that all punishment for juvenile offenses is necessarily
harmful to the child. Indeed, one study revealed that children who were apprehended
and moderatelypunished for juvenile crimes have a lower recidivism
rate than those who were apprehended and released without
punishment (McCord, 1980).
In order for children to be deterred from further
crime, they must be given a clear message that what they did was wrong.
The message is clearest when it comes as punishment. Too clear a message
-one that results in sending children to penal institutions-may teach that
crime is wrong, but it may also put them in an environment where they can
learn from their peers how to pursue a criminal career successfully.
Other longitudinal studies underscore the relationship of the home environment
and subsequent criminality in delinquent boys. Once again,
whether the father was absent or present was not a key determinant of subsequent
criminality. The factors that did influence whether delinquent boys
became criminal adults were maternal affection and self-esteem, parental
supervision, harmony within the household, and the father's deviance. Indeed,
separation and divorce do not lead to criminal behavior so long as the
mother is affectionate and self-confident, the child is supervised, the level of
discord between the parents is minimal, and the father is nondeviant
(McCord, 1979).
Defects in Learning
Many clinicians have been struck by the seeming inability of the sociopath
to learn from experience. Prichard (1837) called them "moral imbeciles."
Cleckley (1964) observed that they failed especially to learn from punishing
experiences, and as a result, had poor judgment. But sociopaths are often "savvy" and intelligent.
If they suffer a defect in learning, it must be a fairly
subtle one. What form might such a defect take?
DEFICIENCIES IN AVOIDANCE LEARNING
Cleckley's observations, in particular, suggested that sociopaths were especially
deficient in avoidance learning. Ordinary people rapidly learn to anticipate and avoid punitive situations.
But sociopaths, perhaps because they are under-aroused and
under-anxious, fail to do so. To examine this possibility, sociopaths and
normal people were taken into the laboratory to test their ability to master a
certain task (Lykken, 1957). The task involved learning to press a "correct"
lever, but the idea was to find out which group learned to avoid punishment.
Participants sat in front of a panel that had four levers. Immediately
above each lever was a red light and a green light.
The subject's task was to find and press the lever that turned On the green light On
each of a series oftwenty trials. Since the correct lever changed on each trial,
the subjects had to remember their sequence of responses, from the first trial
to the one they were NOW working On. A certain pattern had to be learned,
and it was quite a complicated task, a veritable mental maze.
On each trial, the subject had four choices, only one of which turned on
the green light. Two of the levers turned Ona red light-clearly a wrong response-
s-while the third delivered electric shock. Having two kinds ofwrong
responses, one that simply says "wrong" and the other that delivers physical
punishment, enabled the investigator to answer a telling question. Is it that
sociopaths cannot learn from negative experience, or are there particular
negative experiences, namely avoidance experiences, from which they cannot
learn?
As expected, there were no differences in the total number of mistakes
made by sociopaths and nonsociopaths. But whereas nonsociopaths quickly
learned to avoid the electrified levers, the sociopaths made the most errors
that led to shock, suggesting that their particular learning defect was an inability
to learn from painful experiences (Lykken, 1957). In effect, punishment
or threat of punishment does not seem to influence a sociopath's
behavior.
Why should sociopaths be deficient in avoidance learning? One possibility
is that sociopaths do not avoid shock because they do not find shock as
noxious as do normal people.
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