Unsocial / Anti-Social Behavioral Aberrations

[Anonymous]

There is something that has always troubled me.
Whilst the majority of people obeys (most) rules of society, there are always some that go against anything we call civilised.
Let me give you an example. We all have more or less tidy homes but on the program "Grimesquat" or something, there was an elderly man who had his whole house full of binbags so that it took the authorities 2 weeks to clean it out. He had tunnels going through it to go from one place to another.
Another example is the cannibalist serial killer who keeps pieces of humans in his fridge. Or what about the bloke who lived in his car?
Having a BSc in Neuroscience, I know that most of these "abnormal" behaviours come from small (or large) injuries on the brain or are a chemical imbalance. I did say most, but what about people who do something because they never had any guidelines? Like wolfchildren froe example. It still scares me, because I also know that unsocial behaviour lurks in all of us human being all around the world.
I would like to hear more about human behaviour that doesn't quite match what others expect.
Please let me know if you have heard or read anything about this subject, especially when these people look normal to the outside.


I don't like to use the word normal or unnormal because it is based on guidelines that we set in each society and may not seem that way to a paticular individual. However I don't fancy beating around the bush either...as long as you lot know what I mean.

 

[Anonymous]

I recall a programme some time ago which studied serial killers in captivity asking the obvious question "Why?"
I clearly remember a doctor asking a subject to follow several simple instructions, e.g. the doctor would tap three times on the desk, then ask the subject to follow. In each case the subject was not able to accurately follow these relatively simple instructions despite being of above average intelligence. Other experiments have shown that it's not just a case of some people being hardwired to commit such acts and that their environment/upbringing is important. Another example experiment of this was to put a hamster in a tank with another large, aggressive hamster who would continuously attack, bite and generally terrorize the smaller hamster. The smaller hamster was then removed from the tank and placed in another tank with another hamster. The bullied hamster then became the aggressor to the new hamster, showing similar behaviour to the one that 'bullied' it.
I've always thought that people who commit anti-social acts don't seem to have a grasp of cause and effect. I think if people understood and experienced the consequences of their actions for themselves then they would change their behaviour.
Finally, there was a study on 'incompetence' recently published, that showed that people who were incompetent also didn't realise that they were incompetent. Each subject had to take a test and then give themselves a mark on how well they thought they did. The people who did badly at the test consistently thought they were much better than they actually were. I've since wondered if this applies to other behaviours, i.e. whether people who are violent, anti-social .etc. really know they are.

 

[greenrd]

The example that springs to mind is psychopaths (in the clinical sense). Psychopaths have no conscience in the way we understand the word, and this is probably related to the fact that they cannot understand other people's rich emotional lives, because they only have primitive emotions like anger and happiness. A psychopathic bank robber once said "The woman behind the counter was sick all over the money. I couldn't understand why she did that." Asked what he felt like when he was afraid, he said a lot of things like "I'd want to hit the geezer who made me afraid" - but made no mention of the physical feelings we associate with fear - churning or sinking feeling in the stomach, etc. He didn't seem to feel fear in the same sense at the rest of us.

A woman who murdered her two children was, like many psychopaths, extraordinarily egocentric and hypocritical. She actually said, and I am not making this up, words to the effect of "I think the children are better off than me, because if we had all been killed that would have been worse".

I defy you to make any sense out of that remark. It is a fascinating demonstration of the way in which psychopaths do not experience most emotions first-hand and must learn to fake most of them, like learning to ride a bike.

Psychopaths are also pathological liars - sometimes even contradicting themselves in the same sentence, but they don't seem to give a damn - and becuase they lack fear in the sense we understand it, they are able to lie absolutely calmly and convincingly even in situations when most of us would crack under pressure. One might think they'd make good special forces units - except that they completely lack loyalty, a long-term sense of purpose or planning, and seem to be unafraid by the threat of negative consequences to themselves, much less to anyone else.

Also, if you flash words briefly on a screen at them, there is little difference between a psychopath's reaction (measured with sensors placed on the skin) to the word "tree" and say the word "rape" or "genocide". Not the case with non-psychopaths.

Really, really bizarre. I recommend the book "Without Conscience", which is written by one of the world's foremost experts on psychopaths, Robert D. Hare.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos...413562/sr=2-1/ref=sr_bt_1/026-3273588-9182857

He puts forward the position that psychopaths are born, not made (although it might be possible to channel psychopathy into less destructive forms of selfishness - though there is no known successful treatment program as yet). He emphasises that although environmental factors can precipitate antisocial behaviour or criminality in non-psychopaths, psychopaths are a world apart - they seem to be psyiologically incapable of empathy or altruism, key factors in the regulation of behaviour of non-psychopaths. He also claims that there are about 300,000 psychopaths in Canada alone - the majority managing to avoid contact with the law.

And the worst news, in my opinion: Because psychopaths often tend to throw away sexual partners like old newspapers, and don't particularly fret about getting pregnant or getting someone pregnant, they tend to have many children, and thus their numbers may be increasing faster than the rest of us. Especially seeing as, due to sociological changes in the past few decades, the birth rate in countries like the UK and Japan is below replacement rate. Scary stuff.

 

[Anonymous]

Studies have actually shown that there is a high possibility of a disconnection of the frontal lobes to the rest of the brain in socio- and psychopaths.
Considering it is the frontal lobes that contain all our learned social skills and emotions. Therefore a sociopath can actuall live amongst others quite normally, because he/she knows how people want them to react in a certain situation but they don't actually have feelings attached to their behaviour.
These people can be very successful in any career and they can be very charming to the opposite sex because they put on the best possible act.
However, in the midbrain where all basic emotions are "stored" like lust, anger etc. still functions in these people and therefore they can still experience these but without rational links.
I read many books about serial killers and as much as they are a pain in the backside for society, they will try and rationalise their behaviour. It seems that they are trying so desperatly to find complex emotions. But because they can only access the basics, they revert to "get the most out of those" by living out more and more extremes.

I still love to know more about other behaviors and strange lives because it could be that some live the way they do because of secluded upbringing or other outside factors.
Please, if you know about some stories you've heard let me know?