Psychopaths: 10 Myths About The Psychopathic Personality
Penetrating gaze, serious attitude, superb intelligence, neat clothing, perverse thoughts and bloodthirsty objectives. This is how movies and series always paint us psychopaths
Before continuing reading this post, I invite you to understand the topic of psychopathy in depth. I leave you a link below:
But, How real is this stereotype that Hollywood sells us with those in real life? In this article you are reading we propose to challenge ten of the most popular and widespread myths about psychopaths.
Myth 1: They lack empathy
The empathy It is the ability of human beings to understand the emotions, feelings and moods of other people. A lack of empathy is often associated with psychopathy. In this sense, we have to clarify something.
Empathy includes two spheres: cognitive area and the emotional area. The first consists of the ability to understand the feelings of others, knowing what emotion the other person is experiencing; The second includes being able to live, feel or experience what the other person feels when they express it to us.
The psychopaths They are able to understand emotions (when someone feels anger, love or fear for example) and even imitate the behavior expected of said emotions. However, they cannot feel these emotions themselves. This is probably because, as numerous neurological studies confirm, lPsychopaths have brain alterations in specific areas related to this ability
Myth 2: They can’t feel fear
To understand fear we could say that there is a real fear and a unreal fear. The first is that fear that we commonly know, the one that has real consequences, for example, suffering an accident when we speed in a car.
On the other hand, the unreal fear that we could call psychotic fear goes hand in hand with a psychotic type disorder where there is a fracture of the reality of the individual’s psyche, the subject hears voices that want to kill him or feels threatened by persecutory images.
The first fear is unknown to them, however they could experience unreal fear It should be noted that not all psychopaths present psychotic symptoms nor do psychotics have psychopathy traits, but we will talk about that later.
Myth 3: Cold gaze, serious gestures, superior intelligence
This profile already It has become a cliché for movies and series We know that there is a correlation between our mood and the facial expressions we gesture, but as we saw in the previous point, psychopaths are perfectly capable of imitating behaviors related to emotions. Some psychopaths are even usually charismatic and kind to go unnoticed. and get what they want.
Regarding intelligence, we could say that not experiencing emotions is a point in its favor, since This helps them carry out their actions with greater coldness and meticulousness , in addition to setting instinctive and intellectual objectives. However, there is no direct correlation between psychopathy and a person’s IQ.
Myth 4: They are the product of a dysfunctional family
Completely false. We will not argue that there is an important correlation between the family environment and the tendency to commit crimes. Abuse, mistreatment, abandonment, bad examples as a role model are undoubtedly very important criminogenic factors to be taken into account when explaining the criminogenesis of a criminal.
Despite this, There is no conclusive data that links the dysfunctional family as the cause of psychopathic behavior of an individual, since there are multiple examples of psychopaths who have committed terrible crimes but when analyzing their family environment, we found that this nucleus was perfectly functional and integral.
Myth 5: One sixth of people are psychopaths
Some experts estimate that the global number of psychopaths corresponds to 6% of the world’s population. Robert Hare, psychologist recognized for his studies on psychopathy, It is estimated that it is 1% of the world population and 25% corresponds to prisoners
The DSM-5 indicates its prevalence between 0.2% to 3.3% of the world population. However, all these data only collect the number of psychopaths who transgress the norm and cause harm, but as we will see in the second part of this article, Not all psychopaths have broken the law
Some simply go through life using their skills of seduction and deception to satisfy their needs or are successful businessmen who have climbed to the top using their skills, so all figures are essentially inaccurate.
Myth 6: Their crimes are savage, bloody and sadistic
It must not be denied that their lack of emotions sometimes leads them to experience the limit of what is human when they commit their violent crimes. But let’s take into account that the media (both television, movies and series) live on how many viewers always see them and describing a scoop as bloodthirsty always attracts attention, describing their perpetrators as psychopaths, a vision that is often distorted from reality
Relating psychopaths to violent crimes is sometimes distant from what really happens because They do not always commit crimes related to physical violence , murders, genocides, or rapes. There are psychopaths who are adapted to society and the upper class committing financial crimes, art theft, fraud among other white collar crimes.
Myth 7: They are unstable and feel uncontrollable needs
We must not confuse the impulsiveness with the demand for gratification of a need.
The concept of impulsivity refers to the tendency to execute an action without thinking about its consequences, while in the second case and in relation to psychopathy, we could say that by not adapting to the rules, when a need requires being gratified, the psychopath will move on to the act of satisfying it without morally debating whether the way of obtaining said gratification is right or wrong. Psychopaths have a “cold” mind, They know the consequences of their actions, impulsivity is rarely seen in them since they tend to execute their actions with a lot of premeditation
Myth 8: Psychopaths are crazy
This could depend on the conception that each one has about the term. crazybut if we take the word crazy as someone who has a disconnection from reality (without the aim of stigmatizing, let’s say for example a schizophrenic) the answer to this question of madness, in most cases corresponds to a resounding no, since they execute their actions with full awareness and fraud.
Although there could be the case of a psychopath who, in addition to suffering from psychopathy, suffers from severe psychotic episodes or even schizophrenia itself. The specific study of the subject will yield the pertinent results.
Myth 9: Psychopaths never integrate or will reintegrate into society
Let’s keep something in mind: Whether or not a psychopath adapts to society is because it has been completely his or her decision and if the majority of them transgress the law it has been because they have learned that it is the best way to satisfy their needs.
There are psychopaths who learn to accept some rules if they feel it is convenient for them or as a guideline to achieve a greater goal. Regarding reintegration, although it is true that efforts to reintegrate psychopaths into society have produced practically no results, criminology learns more and more about them and the alterations that characterize the psychopathic personality every day, something that allows to act to propose more effective treatments looking to the future
Myth 10: All psychopaths are criminals
We close this article with the most popular myth regarding psychopaths Let us clarify that the crime as defined by the law is the action or omission that penal laws punish. Understanding this concept, it is easy to understand that not all behaviors that seem bad to us are crimes if they are not sanctioned by law.
Thus, for example, if one day a friend asks us to stay in our house, claiming that life has treated him unfairly and that after a week he will help us with the rent and homework, but that after several months he does not cooperate, He eats all the reserves in our pantry, and even borrows our things, taking advantage of our kindness to the point where the situation seems unfair to us, Does this deserve to be called a crime? Not at all, then We have been the ones who have let our psychopath friend take advantage There are thousands of cases where psychopaths like this go about their business, leading a parasitic lifestyle but without necessarily transgressing what is dictated by the law.
Concluding
In conclusion, There are many myths surrounding the enigmatic psychopaths many of which have been fueled by the morbidity of urban legends, the media and of course by the entertainment industry, which frequently present them to us as perverse, twisted and bloodthirsty beings.
However, criminological sciences collaborate together to reveal hidden motivations of these beings with the hope that one day they will be given adequate treatment that will allow them to reintegrate into society.
