Praise for "A fascinating, important book about what 1II.t! c good and bad people bad, and how good pl ()III( themselves from those others." the next door th sociopa The Rut hless Versus the Rest of Us Martha Stout , Ph .D BR O ADWAY BO OKS NEW YO RK BROADWAY� THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR. Copyright © 2005 by Martha Stout. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information, address Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc. PRIN TED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA BROADWAY BOOKS and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal. are trademarks of Random House, Inc. Book design byEllen Cipriano ISBN 0-7394-5674-1 For Steve Stout, my brother and the person I think of first when I think of strength of character The conscience of a people is their power. -John Dryden contents Acknowledgments / xi Author's Note / xiii Introduction: Imagine / 1 ONE The Seventh Sense / 19 TWO Ice People: The Sociopaths / 36 THR When Normal Conscience Sleeps / 52 FOUR The Nicest Person in the World / 70 FIV Why Conscience Is Partially Blind / 86 SIX How to Recognize the Remorseless / 103 r SEV The Etiologyof Guiltlessness: What Causes Sociopathy? / 120 E I G H T The Sociopath Next Door / 140 NIN The Origins of Conscience / 164 TEN Bernie's Choice: Why Conscience Is Better / 181 ELEqr I Groundhog Day / 197 TWELV E Conscience in Its Purest Form: Science Votes for Morality / 209 Notes / 219 Index / 233 acknowledgments Much of the time, the absorbing task of writing a book feels less like authoring and more like channeling, through your fingers and a key­ board, the lessons and inspiration of countless other people, wise friends known over many years and teachers disguised as students, patients, and colleagues. I wish I could go back in time and thank them all, and I take delight in this chance to thank the people who most helped and supported me during the year I wrote The Sociopath Next Door. For her commentary and utter indispensability, and her patience, I thank my friend and colleague Carol Kauffman, she of the legendary creativity at solving problems, whose generositynever skipped a beat, even though she was in the middle of writing Pivot Points. Because none of this would have been possible without her mov­ ing commitment to her mission, and for her having been always a deep well of grace, comprehension, and heart in a wide desert, I thank my agent and treasured friend, Susan Lee Cohen. If I had attempted to design the world's most superb editor, I could not have done nearly so well as Kristine Puopolo at Broadway Books, and I thank her for her intelligence, her precision, and her ex­ traordinary ability to be quietly right, always, without ever being in­ trusive. I thank Diane Wemyss for her caring and her organizing, and for having suggested one of the events I write about, and Elizabeth Haymaker for her charm across the miles. - XI ACKN OWLEDGM ENTS I thank Steve Stout and Darcy Wakefield, for making me believe in love again. Once again-and always-I thank my remarkable parents, Eva Deaton Stout and Adrian Phillip Stout, for showing me just how much love and light two people of surpassing conscience can bring to the world. And with awe, and more love than I could have imagined before I knew her, I would like to thank my daughter, Amanda, my first reader and my most insightful one. She has taught me, among so many other things, that kindness and integritycome with the soul. xii author's note The descriptions in The Sociopath Next Door do not identifyindivid­ uals. At the very heart of psychotherapy is the precept of confiden­ tiality, and as usual I have taken the most exacting measures to preserve the privacy of all real persons. All names are fictitious, and all other recognizable features have been changed. Some individuals who appear in the book willingly gave their consent to be anony­ mously portrayed. In these cases, no information has been included that might in any way identify them. The story in the chapter entitled "Groundhog Day" is fiction. Otherwise, the people, events, and conversations presented here are taken from my twenty-five-yearpractice of psychology. However, be­ cause of my commitment to confidentiality, the people and circum­ stances portrayed in these pages are composite in nature; that is to say, each case represents a great many individuals whose character­ istics and experiences have been adopted conceptually, carefully altered in their specifics, and combined to form an illustrative char­ acter. Any resemblance of such a composite character to any actual person is entirely coincidental. xiii INTR ODUCTI ON ImagIne. Minds differstill more than fa ces. -Voltaire magine-if you can-not having a conscience, none at all, no feel­ ings of guilt or remorse no matter what you do, no limiting sense ofI concern for the well-being of strangers, friends, or even family members. Imagine no struggles with shame, not a single one in your whole life, no matter what kind of selfish, lazy, harmful, or immoral action you had taken. And pretend that the concept of responsibil­ ity is unknown to you, except as a burden others seem to accept without question, like gullible fools. Now add to this strange fantasy the ability to conceal from other people that your psychological. makeup is radically different from theirs. Since everyone simply as­ sumes that conscience is universal among human beings, hiding the fact that you are conscience-free is nearly effortless. You are not held back from any of your desires by guilt or shame, and you are never confronted by others for your cold-bloodedness. The ice water in your veins is so bizarre, so completely outside of their personal ex­ perience, that they seldom even guess at your condition. MART HA ST OUT In other words, you are completely free of internal restraints, and your unhampered liberty to do just as you please, with no pangs of conscience, is conveniently invisible to the world. You can do anything at all, and still your strange advantage over the majority of people, who are kept in line by their consciences, will most likely remain undiscovered. How will you live your life? What will you do with your huge and secret advantage, and with the corresponding handicap of other peo­ ple (conscience)? The answer will depend largely on just what your desires happen to be, because people are not all the same. Even the profoundly unscrupulous are not all the same. Some people­ whether they have a conscience or not-favor the ease of inertia, while others are filled with dreams and wild ambitions. Some human beings are brilliant and talented, some are dull-witted, and most, conscience or not, are somewhere in between. There are violent peo­ ple and nonviolent ones, individuals who are motivated by blood lust and those who have no such appetites. Maybe you are someone who craves money and power, and though you have no vestige of conscience, you do have a magnificent IQ. You have the driving nature and the intellectual capacity to pur­ sue tremendous wealth and influence, and you are in no way moved by the nagging voice of conscience that prevents other people from doing everything and anything they have to do to succeed. You choose business, politics, the law, banking, or international develop­ ment, or any of a broad array of other power professions, and you pursue your career with a cold passion that tolerates none of the usual moral or legal incumbrances. When it is expedient, you doctor the accounting and shred the evidence, you stab your employees and your clients (or your constituency) in the back, marryfor money, tell lethal premeditated lies to people who trust you, attempt to ruin colleagues who are powerful or eloquent, and simply steamroll over groups who are dependent and voiceless. And all of this you do with 2 THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR the exquisite freedom that results from having no conscience what­ soever. You become unimaginably, unassailably, and maybe even globally successful. Why not? With your big brain, and no conscience to rein in your schemes, you can do anything at all. Or no--let us say you are not quite such a person. You are am­ bitious, yes, and in the name of success you are willing to do all man­ ner of things that people with conscience would never consider, but you are not an intellectually gifted individual. Your intelligence is above average perhaps, and people think of you as smart, maybe even very smart. But you know in your heart of hearts that you do not have the cognitive wherewithal, or the creativity, to reach the careening heights of power you secretly dream about, and this makes you resentful of the world at large, and envious of the people around you. As this sort of person, you ensconce yourself in a niche, or maybe a series of niches, in which you can have some amount of control over small numbers of people. These situations satisfy a little of your desire for power, although you are chronically aggravated at not hav­ ing more. It chafes to be so free of the ridiculous inner voice that in­ hibits others from achieving great power, without having enough talent to pursue the ultimate successes yourself.