Essay on psychopathy for school

Psychopathy and society, a short essay

By Aki Greus

Helsinki Open University

Persoonallisuuspsykologia I


Definition of Psychopathy


For the sake of clarity, I will refer to Psychopathy instead of Antisocial Personality Disorder or Dissocial personality disorder. Psychopathy as I see it and as I believe is commonly seen is different from APD or DPD despite the stance of the American Psychiatric Association [1]. What differentiates between Psychopathy and APD is that essentially Psychopathy is caused by a lack of empathy for others that does not necessarily cause destructive or illegal activity. I believe that APD can only successfully diagnose a portion of psychopaths and even then clumps together a great deal of other problems alongside psychopaths. The difficulty with diagnosing Psychopathy is the same as with diagnosing any psychological illness where the patient has no desire to be diagnosed. While we are relying essentially on statements by the patient as well as past records of activity it is easy to confuse various different disorders with one another. While it is true that diagnosis of Psychopathy does rely on tests of varying degree of accuracy, while these tests are publicly available there is nothing to stop the test subject from reading the tests and their proper answers and thus learn how to fool the tests. Due to the nature of open society and the nature of the psychopathic behavior which seeks to hide deviant behavior and conform to societal norms as best they can for as long as they can without truly understanding the nature of society it is possible for psychopaths to read all they can find on their own personality in an effort to increase they chance of hiding. Which is why publishing the results of studies as is necessary in an open society can be counterproductive [2]. There is nothing stopping a potential serial killer with knowledge of the testing procedure to learn how to lie and fake it as they have learned to fool the community they live in. The situation is essentially the same as with publishing police or government procedures regarding crimes or emergencies which can lead to serious problems as criminals know how the police will behave and can plan accordingly. This is already obvious in the crime streak in south Sweden or in the more distant past during the era of prohibition in Chicago. When criminal knew how the police planned to catch them they were able to form good counter measures and avoid capture for a long time. Thus the worst case scenario is that as new methods of diagnosing psychopathy are found the methods themselves become extremely quickly outdated as ways to fool them are invented.

So the problem is not with diagnosing psychopaths who commit crimes and are caught. The problem is with diagnosing psychopaths who have yet to commit any crime that will warrant enough police attention that they will be caught. If we compare the Cleckley's list for Psychopathy [3] with the DSM list for ASPD [4] or Hare's items [5] it will immediately be clear that Hare and Cleckley are talking of a disorder that differs greatly from the ASPD as described by the DSM list. It is stated in the ASPD list that since things such as lack of remorse are difficult to assess in a patient that is adept at lying they were excluded from the list for ASPD. Perhaps the greatest difference between ASPD and Psychopathy is the lack of interest in the internal mindset of a psychopath by the ASPD diagnosis criteria, focusing instead of purely external factors such as criminal history and external actions. This certainly makes diagnosis of psychopathy easier but it also increases the probability of diagnosing various other behavioral problems as ASPD and no longer focusing exclusively on psychopathy itself. The same is true for the ICD-10 diagnosis criteria for psychopathy, known in this list as Dissocial Personality Disorder or DPD. The problem with these differing diagnostic criteria is that, as stated in the wikipedia article regarding psychopathy: “A sample research finding is that between 50% and 80% of prisoners in England and Wales meet the diagnostic criteria of dissocial personality disorder, but only 15% would be predicted to be psychopathic as measured by the PCL-R.” Which leads back to the initial problem with psychopathy, the glibness, ability to lie, no remorse and no empathy make a reliable diagnostic criteria that relies mostly on past actions and at best half lies by the patient themselves will be exceptionally inaccurate.

I lack the medical expertise, funding and the research facilities to accurately study psychopathy and associated behavior patterns, so it is safe to say that I cannot possibly verify the claims of brain activity difference between psychopaths and non psychopathic criminals as described by various medical sources [6][6.1]. Perhaps most disturbing is the reported increase in the rate of criminal behavior by psychopaths after therapeutic work is done on them [7]. Psychopaths also have a markedly different reaction to stimuli when compared to non psychopathic population [8].

The behavior of psychopaths is so strikingly different that it is potentially cause for a restructuring of human society to avoid the increasing chances of psychopaths to pray on those with no psychopathic tendencies. As the world grows ever smaller and the chances for a single individual to cause harm to others increase exponentially, which leads me to the point of this article. It is obviously very difficult to diagnose psychopathy in humans as well as in animals. Due to their marked difference from non psychopathic humans psychopaths have been referred to as the other race or interspecies predators in popular culture as well as some less than reputable medical papers. The fact remains that there is little consensus in the scientific or popular culture as to what a psychopath really is. However, for the remainder of this essay I will refer to psychopaths as defined by Hare and Cleckley and not ASPD as defined by the APA.


Successful VS Unsuccessful psychopaths


The measure of success for any creature is divided into 3 subgroups, ability to survive, ability to pass on its genes and ability to adapt to new environments. Survival in the environment the creature is currently in is the most important characteristics for the short term. Ability to pass on its genes is the second most important characteristics as a great deal of the adaptive ability of a any species is dependant on its offspring and their ability genetic variances and the faster a lifecycle a species has the faster it will adapt to a new environment, thus an extremely fast lifecycle such as is present in bacteria will allow a species to outpace any environmental changes except for the cataclysmic sudden change. While the ability to pass on the genes, the ability to adapt to new environments and the ability to survive are linked they are not mutually inclusive. A species that is too adept at passing on its own genes at the expense of the environments ability to support it will quickly find itself heading for a population collapse as the environment turns unsuitable due to overuse. If we view the human species as an inherently competitive system, its own ecosphere if you will, we can start to see various interesting behavioral patterns that closely mimic that of the earth as a whole. If we split the human species into smaller subspecies divided those into smaller casts and groups and families and finally the individual, we receive a new look at what human interaction is really about.

Since the vast majority of individuals will always operate with the 3 basic ideas, eat, survive and reproduce. A more modern way of putting it, physical survival, reproduction either directly or indirectly and procuring food or things required for food. We can break down human behavior in the grand scale into a biosphere like behavior, with each subset of humanity providing a role comparable with something we would see in nature. Against this backdrop of neutral nature psychopathic behavior starts to make sense. In a system where the vast majority of people need to and do indeed work together for a common goal, be it gathering food or generating electricity a predator willing to go outside the rules has a huge market for opportunities. The very nature of society is such that group behavior for a common goal can not be enforced strongly enough that a motivated predator will be unable to take advantage of the situation. It is necessary for the function of a modern society to assume others are friendly or at worst neutral towards you, even walking down a street would become impossible if mutual neutral behavior could not be anticipated, not to even mention complex finances or sale of stocks or goods. So the very nature of society has to be neutral or society would start to collapse into smaller niches that no longer communicate with one another and the potential hunting ground for a predator would become smaller and an increased risk of capture and early death due to deviant behavior would increase. So, I propose then, that there is an imaginary tipping point in society, beyond which an increase in the number of predators would cause an adverse reaction and the ability of the biosphere to support the predators would decrease leading to a massive extinction of the predators. To put it in a more socio-psychological term, an increase in deviant illegal behavior by a separate distinguishable part of a larger group will lead to cure, expulsion or incarceration of the small group by the large group.

History is full of examples where a small group has been imprisoned, either justly or unjustly by a larger group because of perceived deviant behavior. Jews, Native Americans, Indians, Africans, Japanese Americans, Germans in the UK and various other groups too numerous to mention were all expelled from a larger group because of perceived danger or deviant behavior. In modern times when it is possible to diagnose brain disorders directly and say, this man is incapable of emotions, this man has the brain of a criminal the temptation to use the technology in mass screenings of the population is only held back by our devotion to freedom and liberty, both of which are arguably under attack by more and more stringent police measures from within and war from outside. So, where is the mathematical breaking point of the population, beyond which the acts of the predators become so outrageous that our love of liberty will lose to our love of hatred? If you can argue that a psychopath has a 95% chance of committing a crime could she be sentenced to jail as a pre-emptive measure simply because of probability? Of course it is easy to say that our justice system does not judge a person for a crime he has not committed but that is not entirely true. There are such crimes as conspiring to commit murder, planning to commit murder and with a recent court ruling there is now precedent for even talking about committing a crime. With the closure of the kotikemian foorumit website and now with the charges against Nikki, a Finnish blogger actively protesting the website blocking law which allows the Finnish police to block any website they deem fit without listing a reason with no channel for protests it is obvious that the mere thought of crime, or mere mention of crime has indeed become a crime [9]. The Finnish police do not see the inherent problem with charging a person with distributing materials when all he is doing is posting a list of websites which have already been blocked by the police and as such are inaccessible from Finland. So the crime is not that he is distributing materials, he is distributing a list of actions the police have done, which should on its own be legal in Finland. So clearly there is both theoretical and practical law and precedent for imprisonment for merely thinking of doing a crime. So can it not be argued that a person who is incapable of empathy and views others as little more than cockroaches [10] is constantly thinking of committing a crime?

If it is this easy to moralize the incarceration of psychopaths then I can only ask, how difficult would it be if there were 5% or even 10% psychopaths in a population instead of 0.5-2% as is currently claimed[11]. Would society collapse under the weight of so many predators or would it figure out a way to deal with it. Either way this is somewhat besides the issue at hand. As long as the number of psychopaths remains under the population tipping point then psychopaths have an easier time than non psychopaths to succeed as non psychopaths are cumbered by emotions that assist them in functioning in a group while psychopaths have no such burden and are indeed free to roam as they see fit. If we view the actions of a psychopath from a purely selfish reproductive standpoint what they do is smart for them, they receive a great deal of potential mates and are free to pick the ones they want because non psychopathic humans are for the most part just as unable to view the mind of a psychopath as they are the mind of a non psychopath, in the words of a prison psychiatrist, “It was like he is from another planet” [12]. So, from the 3 ways to define success a psychopath who does not get caught and does not kill their mates they are indeed very successful. Their behavior guarantees them mates, food and survival and thus a chance to pass on their genes to the next generation. It is no accident that our present societal structure has started to favor those without conscience and those without care for others[13]. When one looks back in history to the different eras of humanity it becomes obvious that every now and then a sufficiently warped mind can lead humanity in a direction of its choosing before we wake up as a whole from its grasp. I hate to make sweeping statements but it is not a great stretch to compare most governments with clinical psychopaths. It is even less of a stretch to compare most multinational corporations with psychopaths.

After the 2nd world war many of the low echelon Nazi’s expressed disbelief at how easily they were taken into a system of organized psychopathy, a system that essentially was as far remove from humanity and what they thought they were doing as black is from white[14]. This disbelief at what they did and what was done to them as a people is strikingly similar to the disbelief exhibited by victim of psychopaths after the psychopaths mask of sanity is removed. It is quite common for people to say they had no idea the man next door was a serial killer or that the nice uncle who liked being with the kids was a serial pedophile[15]. A system of government which emphasizes ruthless competition for limited resources with any means available as long as one doesn’t get caught will inevitably lead to a situation where those who reach the top are the most ruthless players. It should come as no big surprise that this same system breeds politicians who express no remorse when their policies kill millions and joke about how as a child they liked to torture animals to death [16]. So then, what I see as the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful psychopath is that a successful psychopath has the ability to remain hidden or cover up his crimes well enough not to arouse suspicion in his potential victims. Indeed the history of the western society seems filled with wonderful case examples of psychopaths and their collected crimes, from Adolf Hitler to Stalin to Emperor Nero and so on. It is pointless to try to diagnose someone who lived a thousand years ago but studying the actions of long dead people has always been a hallmark of history and a hallmark of psychology, from the names like Oedipus complex to the still present trend of naming everything in Latin. To study psychopathy is to study history as history is filled with very clear examples of psychopathic behavior that by present day moral terms would be repugnant.

If the present day society, as I believe it to be, is very favorable to the psychopaths at the expense of everyone else, I must ask how this society came into existence. Did the present societal structure form on its own and then slowly turn into one that let psychopaths come into power or did psychopaths indeed form the societal structure. To answer this it is necessary to study other species and their hierarchy and society. While it is obvious that the hierarchy of a primate or an ant is nowhere near as sophisticated as that of humans they are still a very valuable source of information. There seems to be two general styles of society in existence in the animal world. There are of course more than two styles but they generally fall under the 2 prime groups, those that are ruled jointly and those that are ruled by a single individual. Those ruled by a single individual are generally careless with a single life and are predatorial in nature, where every member has to fight or cajole other members into supporting them in the power struggles, and failure to survive this power struggle can lead to quick annihilation of the individual as survival depends on the ability to fight. The other type of society is characterized by high emphasis on individual life and a high emphasis on children and the health of the entire pack as opposed to simply care for the leader. It does not take a great deal of thought to find both these basic structures on a great many animal societies, ranging from the Ant’s to the migratory birds or butterflies. So there are clearly different kinds of animal societies, some value the life of one individual over all others and some value all individuals roughly equally. There are even cases of rape [17], murder [18], and various other supposedly human behaviors evident in animals. What separates humans from animals in this context is that humans have a great deal of different societal structures while most animals have one or at best a few different societal structures. As an example of different societal structures in the same non human species is from several monkey species that have different societies in human encroached jungles than in jungles with no human presence [19]. Evidence would indicate that the societal differences between the two previously mentioned monkey societies is so drastic that one group is dominated by violence and what we would easily term Machiavellian behavior with complex political connections and complex political structures between the various families and bloodlines of monkeys, while the other group lives in an evidently peaceful setting where violence appears to be rare [20].

It is a common understanding that violent behavior and psychopathic behavior, even though violent behavior is not always psychopathic behavior can be caused by social relations and potentially even some deep traumas, thus the name sociopath. There is a fundamental disagreement on the wording used to describe psychopathy as indicated before. Psychopathy, Sociopathy, ASD, DPD have all been used to describe, with varying accuracy, the same psychological makeup. So the difference in animal behavior based on how humans have interacted with them leads to one possible explanation for the psychological condition I refer to as psychopathy. It is potentially possible that it can be promoted if not outright caused by deep enough social traumas. So is it possible that psychopathy is similar to schizophrenia, the underlying cause can be neurological but the trigger can be social interactions, if not in all cases then at least a significant minority of cases. Before I proceed to the next topic I would like to point out that even the most abhorrent behavior makes sense to the person committing it. In my admittedly short stay on earth I’ve yet to see a madman or a sane man who would seriously admit that their behavior is not what they want to do and keep doing it. Most behavior is a way of avoiding an imagined or real danger and as such behavioral therapy can reduce or eliminate most mental disorders. However, this depends on the persons desire to change or confront their fears and as such psychopathy is theoretically either incurable or prohibitively difficult to cure as the person has no desire to change. From the standpoint of a person who suffers from OCD they have a problem and they want to change or rid themselves of the problem, even if it takes them a long time they at least have a chance. From the standpoint of survival and from the standpoint of success a psychopath is heavily in control of their lives even if they lack some of the higher emotional abilities that non psychopaths have. Higher and more developed is not necessarily always a good thing, a great many highly developed life forms have perished in the course of time while the amoeba still survives.


Biological VS Societal

To return to the point I made earlier, is psychopathy biological or societal, nature or nurture if you will. To answer that question with any accuracy I feel we must step outside the normal scope of psychology and biology and look at human society as a large scale organism onto itself as I stated earlier. To understand biology and history we must take into account the fact that all organisms are inherently selfish, granted it is possible to be selfless and act to benefit others if enough willpower is used, on the basic level however almost all actions are likely to be motivated either directly or indirectly by selfishness. So observing the actions of psychopath we must for a moment set aside our own mask of sanity and try to put on the mask of insanity. Perhaps a bit too poetic but as the psychologist I quoted earlier said, they are like from another planet so setting aside the mask of sanity the mask of humanity and putting on the mask of insanity the mask of the beast is an apt metaphor. Viewing the world from behind the goggles of the predator the world is divided squarely into 2 types of people, pray and stronger predators. As stated by a convicted criminal who also scored very highly on the psychopathy checklist revised [21], doing it is just so easy. As repugnant as the behavior of psychopaths is to non psychopaths to the psychopaths themselves there is nothing wrong, people are so deserving of what the psychopath does that it is the victims who are at fault, they were the ones who presented the psychopath with such a good opportunity, they were the ones who needed a lesson. To return to the point of Nature V Nurture, I might be so bold as to argue that psychopathy is the logical and proper behavior for those who exhibit it, they drive the wheel of evolution forward by their actions, at least as far as their DNA is concerned. If we must ask is psychopathy the proper way to proceed we need to hold a mirror to our own society and ask if war is the proper way to proceed. If it is proper to cause 2 billion people to live in near constant danger of dying from either hunger, thirst, or easily preventable disease and let the top 0.0000005% of humanity hold so much money that most of the problems relating to poverty could be solved if that money was used on humanitarian work[22]. So before we use our moral and judge the psychopaths we should keep the goggles of psychopathy on for a while longer. Instead of focusing only on the psychopaths who make their presence known by their actions should we not also focus on the actions of non psychopathic people who behave in a psychopathic fashion. It is often easy to set our sight on a single societal group, be it the Jews, Germans, Gays, Lesbians or Psychopaths and blame them for all our problems instead of looking in the mirror. It is certainly true that from a societal standpoint psychopaths cause a great deal of crime and a great many of the violent offences in particular. It is also equally true that it does not take a great deal of effort to save the lives of thousands of people, the fact that people so hate psychopaths can be partially explained by projection. It is easy to project our own failings and our own problems onto the psychopaths and use our internal guidelines to try to correct the behavior of another instead of simply removing the other from the societal context. Instead of a live and let live policy civilization exhibits a strong live and let die policy. The utter disregard that people have for the welfare of other people and the incredible lack of ethics that such thing as industrial animal farming shows is perhaps more telling of us than it is of the psychopaths. So is psychopathy an expression of the nature of humanity simply brought up for us to see and perhaps change our ways?

Viewing Psychopathy from a neurological standpoint it is clear that the brain of a psychopath is markedly different especially in the pre-frontal cortex from that of a non psychopathic human. However it is also clear that a person who is a dry drunk or a homosexual or even artistically talented has a markedly different brain. Does the brain arise as a result of the action or the action as a result of the brain, the age old question of predetermination versus freewill? There is definitely compelling evidence for both from a neurological standpoint, there are certain brain tests which would indicate that all actions are predetermined, the way the brain decides to press a button is quite striking. The areas of the brain responsible for the movement light up before parts of the brain responsible for the decision to move light up. So in essence the brain knows you are going to move your hand before you do [23]. There are a wide variety of potential explanations for this ranging from misunderstanding of the functions of the brain to time traveling electrons. For the present moment however the debate has not been answered conclusively and is unlikely to be any time soon. While the underlying biological differences between the brains of psychopaths and non psychopaths are clearly understood it is impossible to say if this is caused by nature or nurture. Long term stress exhibited by victims of sexual assault or sufferers from PTSD has shown to significantly alter the brain. As I said it is potentially true that psychopathy is caused by Nature or Nurture, both have a strong case to make and neither has been able to disprove the other. It is a point of strong speculation on how nature and nurture should be divided. It is clear that the DNA of the child is definitely an act of nature, but what genes are active and how the child acts can be both of nature and nurture. Any hormones that affect the child while in the womb can be attributed to nurture as the mental state of the pregnant mother can greatly affect the hormones and thus the mind of the child. While it is beyond the scope of this essay and beyond the scope of my knowledge and abilities to truly classify psychopathy into one or another category I can try to view it from an evolutionary standpoint.

As I stated earlier the actions of the psychopath makes sense from their point of view, equally the actions against psychopaths makes sense from non psychopathic point of view. As life is inherently a struggle between different forms of life even inside the same species it is obvious that most actions arising from this struggle are designed to further the survival of the self or those directly linked to the self. As such humanitarian aid is frowned upon by those with a narrow definition of self or whose interests are being threatened by aid to the poor. If once Business Empire depends on the ability to farm cotton or gather mineral from Africans at dismal wages and sell them for exuberant profits to their prospective markets or oil from economically and socially devastated countries that suddenly rises in value 15 times after it leaves the war zones and reaches the western markets. It is obvious that any attempt to raise the living quality of the areas needed to produce goods will meet stiff resistance even if the psychopathic mindset is not used. So the snakes in suits or psychopaths in office, is perhaps not the real problem, psychologically or otherwise. The real problem is the society that promotes and perhaps through subconscious actions even causes psychopathy. I hesitate to guess on the potential of millions upon millions of people suffering so the rich can have their private yachts on children. How the soul anathema as it is in western psychology might react to being born into a world with an organized system of suffering to feed it, would it let go of its humanity and become what we have created for it. I understand that to even mention the word soul in a western psychology essay is as unpopular as mentioning that the earth is round or that earth orbits the sun was in western intellectual circles in the 14th century.

So then I ask, how have we come to this point that, even if we exclude the existence of souls and things of that nature, that humanity considers it the best course of action for itself to sit on a proverbial pile of skulls and struggle with one another eternally for the top position. Rolling that boulder up a hill like Sisyphus eternally trying to accomplish the peace and standard of living that is ever elusive as it depends on others not having it and those that have nothing will always try to gain everything. So our very society is formed in a way that promotes ruthless competition for limited resources and the competition itself has taken on an absurd form. With the US yearly military budget now so grossly overpowered that the limited resources they are competing for are being used to keep competing for even less limited resources. Sadly this seems to only strike those who are struck by the US military budget as odd and rarely evokes more than a curious joke from the present western intellectuals. The very word, disorder, means something that does not fit into the accepted norm, if the accept norm of society is as seems likely the procurement of resources at any means available from others then psychopathy is really not a disorder. If we however view society as some form of altruistic all for one and one for all utopia then it becomes obvious that psychopathy as well as most human behavior is deviant from the norm however, realistically speaking human society is hardly any kind of altruistic utopian society.

So can it not be argued, even if psychopathy supposedly has organic causes in the brain dysfunctions that the true cause is in a society that espouses psychopathic values? Or is the charge that there might truly be something wrong with our society as repugnant as saying that the victim of rape might also have a responsibility to bare for the action? Perhaps these questions are better left to more capable hands but I must still point out that our society is truly psychopathic in more than one way as I pointed out before. That the only real difference between a psychopath who abuses randomly and a healthy man who abuses purposefully those in the distance is the randomness of the psychopath’s actions. The psychopath has no compassion even for those close to him like normal humans do. If I run a factory or a corporation and kill thousands or even millions over the course of decades to bring my products to the western markets I make the Forbes 500 lists. If I do the same with a gun I make the FBI’s most wanted lists. This irony does not escape the mind of a psychopath either.

Conclusions

The conclusions I have drawn from writing this essay and spending the last decade reading a great deal of material about psychopathy as well as other forms of disruptive behavior is simple, whatever the cause of psychopathy, Nature or Nurture we must face psychopathy as a whole far more seriously than we have now! If psychopathy is caused by our own societal choices then we must look in the mirror and see what it is that is making us as a society bring forth psychopathy in such a way that is causing billions to suffer needlessly? If Psychopathy is caused by biological factors then we should try our best to find a cure and a way to prevent psychopathy from ever surfacing, even then, I believe it is of the utmost importance that we as a society look into a mirror and see what we have become. While it is normally not the task of psychology to act as philosophy and ask these hard questions I feel compelled to do so. Why are we as a society still complacent, why can we not expand our sphere of family to cover the entire humanity, why is it that we can so easily stand by and allow billions to suffer when in reality it would only take us less than to move a finger to help them. I’m hesitant to say this but if there truly is a God out there that is looking down on us I’m certain that we would not be judged favorably. Instead of marching people into the concentration camps, two by two we march them to our mines and factories and tell them to work until they die of the poisons and the dangers we bring upon them. That it is alright to abuse by ignorance but not by design. That it is alright to kill if you know not what you are doing.

During the Nuremberg trials many tried to appeal that they were only doing their job and it did not work then and it will not work in the eyes of any moral judge. As long as psychology describes illness based on inability to fit into mainstream society and as long as main stream society is as it appears to be dominated by its lack of empathy. Psychology will always miss the big picture regarding psychopathy as well as other illness of that nature, that they are only doing openly what others do covertly and true enough, psychopathy is detected only by its outer actions and what people with psychopathy get caught doing, thus the distinction into successful and unsuccessful psychopaths, those who abuse and get caught and those who abuse and don’t get caught.

Psychopathy is right at home in our society.





Bibliography and Citations

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy#Diagnostic_criteria_and_PCL-R_assessment

[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2943160.stm

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hervey_M._Cleckley

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASPD

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Psychopathy_Checklist

[6] http://www.technologyreview.com/Biotech/18573/
[6.1] http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/full/182/1/5

[7] Psychopaths and response to treatment Rice, Harris and Cormier (1992). Text can be bought online if searched for, I have a copy from a friend in Cardiff university.

[8] http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/58/8/737?lookupType=volpage&vol=58&fp=737&view=full

[9] http://hack.fi/~muzzy/lapsiporno/

[10] Dr. Robert Hare; Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. One of the quotes from psychopaths.

[11] http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~pzapf/classes/PY761/Week%207%20Notes.htm

[12] Dr. Robert Hare; Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. One of the quotes from psychologist.

[13] http://www.hare.org/links/saturday.html

[14] http://academic.kellogg.edu/mandel/hansen_rev.htm

[15] http://books.google.fi/books?id=Pze8UEwpMVsC&pg=PA87&lpg=PA87&dq=sex+offender+charm&source=web&ots=K6GzlnJsr5&sig=Q3ywlVKjBH5OKa6YKtpc8lRdiTI&hl=fi

[16] http://prorev.com/2007/11/george-bush-has-always-liked-torture.html

[17] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_sexuality

[18] Various primates as well as wolf packs or bears can intentionally kill another after long term planning to gain something even if it risks its own long term survival. Single source difficult to acquire but reading on animal behavior will produce an acceptable source.

[19] Source is a little fuzzy here as well as, there are discovery channel documents about the different behaviors of primate groups under stress but finding an appropriate one here is difficult.

[20] Previous points are valid for this as well, I would recommend reading up on the social structures of small monkeys for an appropriate reference.

[21] Dr. Robert Hare; Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. One of the quotes from psychopaths.

[22] http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/free_forbes/2003/0317/087.html 476 billionaires total net worth is 1.7trillionUSD. http://www.globalpolicy.org/finance/index.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations With an UN yearly budget of 20 billion USD to 5 billion depending on source. That 1700 billion could be spent to fund the entire UN for 85-340 years. For example, the cost of a vaccination program for Africa and Asia that would save up to 10 million lives is 4 billion USD http://www.globalpolicy.org/socecon/develop/2006/0516iffim.htm At a cost of 0.2% of the total worth of the top 476 billionaires of the world.

[23] I apologize for not being able to provide the source for this, I’ve seen it several times in scientific magazines but can’t track them down anymore.