Why do psychopaths kill people?

Answer 1

because since were all influencing each other subconsiously and evolve so interconnectedly and switch places in communicating to experience similar things so interconnedly- the better we influence others evangelize even at best, the better that benefit can come back to later effect us.

IT HAS BEEN SAID:

Robert Hare, PhD., an expert on psychopaths, made an intriguing discovery by observing the hand gestures (called beats)people make while speaking.

Research has shown that such gestures domore than add visual emphasis to our words (many people gesture whilethey're on the telephone, for example); it seems they actually help ourbrains find words. That's why the frequency of beats increases whensomeone is having trouble finding words, or is speaking a secondlanguage instead of his or her mother tongue. In a 1991 paper, Hare andhis colleagues reported that psychopaths, especially when talking aboutthings they should find emotional, such as their families, produce ahigher frequency of beats than normal people. It's as if emotionallanguage is a second language -- a foreign language, in effect -- tothe psychopath.

Threedecades of these studies, by Hare and others, has confirmed thatpsychopaths' brains work differently from ours, especially whenprocessing emotion and language. Hare once illustrated this for NicoleKidman, who had invited him to Hollywood to help her prepare for a roleas a psychopath in Malice. How, she wondered, could she show theaudience there was something fundamentally wrong with her character?

"I said,'Here's a scene that you can use,' " Hare says. " 'You're walking downa street and there's an accident. A car has hit a child in thecrosswalk. A crowd of people gather round. You walk up, the child'slying on the ground and there's blood running all over the place. Youget a little blood on your shoes and you look down and say, "Oh shoot."You look over at the child, kind of interested, but you're not repelledor horrified. You're just interested. Then you look at the mother, andyou're really fascinated by the mother, who's emoting, crying out,doing all these different things. After a few minutes you turn away andgo back to your house. You go into the bathroom and practice mimickingthe facial expressions of the mother.' " He then pauses and says,"That's the psychopath: somebody who doesn't understand what's going onemotionally, but understands that something important has happened."

Hare'sresearch upset a lot of people. Until the psychopath came into focus,it was possible to believe that bad people were just good people withbad parents or childhood trauma and that, with care, you could talkthem back into being good. Hare's research suggested that some peoplebehaved badly even when there had been no early trauma. Moreover, sincepsychopaths' brains were in fundamental ways different from ours,talking them into being like us might not be easy. Indeed, to this day,no one has found a way to do so.

"Some ofthe things he was saying about these individuals, it was unheard of,"says Dr. Steven Stein, a psychologist and CEO of Multi-Health Systemsin Toronto, the publisher of the Psychopathy Checklist. "Nobodybelieved him thirty years ago, but Bob hasn't wavered, and noweveryone's where he is. Everyone's come full circle, except a smallgroup who believe it's bad upbringing, family poverty, those kinds offactors, even though scientific evidence has shown that's not the case.There are wealthy psychopaths who've done horrendous things, and theywere brought up in wonderful families."

"There'sstill a lot of opposition -- some criminologists, sociologists, andpsychologists don't like psychopathy at all," Hare says. "I can spendthe entire day going through the literature -- it's overwhelming, andunless you're semi-brain-dead you're stunned by it -- but a lot ofpeople come out of there and say, 'So what? Psychopathy is amythological construct.' They have political and social agendas:'People are inherently good,' they say. 'Just give them a hug, a puppydog, and a musical instrument and they're all going to be okay.' "

If Haresounds a little bitter, it's because a decade ago, Correctional Serviceof Canada asked him to design a treatment program for psychopaths, butjust after he submitted the plan in 1992, there were personnel changesat the top of CSC. The new team had a different agenda, which Haresummarizes as, "We don't believe in the badness of people." His plansank without a trace.

By thelate 1970s, after fifteen years in the business, Bob Hare knew what hewas looking for when it came to psychopaths. They exhibit a cluster ofdistinctive personality traits, the most significant of which is anutter lack of conscience. They also have huge egos, short tempers, andan appetite for excitement -- a dangerous mix. In a typical prisonpopulation, about 20 percent of the inmates satisfy the Hare definitionof a psychopath, but they are responsible for over half of all violentcrime.

Theresearch community, Hare realized, lacked a standard definition. "Ifound that we were all talking a different language, we were ondifferent diagnostic pages, and I decided that we had to have somecommon instrument," he says. "The PCL-R was really designed to make iteasier to publish articles and to let journal editors and reviewersknow what I meant by psychopathy."

ThePsychopathy Checklist consists of a set of forms and a manual thatdescribes in detail how to score a subject in twenty categories thatdefine psychopathy. Is he (or, more rarely, she) glib and superficiallycharming, callous and without empathy? Does he have a grandiose senseof self worth, shallow emotions, a lack of remorse or guilt? Is heimpulsive, irresponsible, promiscuous? Did he have behavioral problemsearly in life? The information for each category must be carefullydrawn from documents such as court transcripts, police reports,psychologists' reports, and victim-impact statements, and not solelyfrom an interview, since psychopaths are superb liars ("pathologicallying" and "conning/manipulative" are PCL-R categories). A prisoner mayclaim to love his family, for example, while his records show no visitsor phone calls.

For eachitem, assessors -- psychologists or psychiatrists -- assign a score ofzero (the item doesn't apply), one (the item applies in some respects),or two (the item applies in most respects). The maximum possible scoreis forty, and the boundary for clinical psychopathy hovers aroundthirty. Last year, the average score for all incarcerated maleoffenders in North America was 23.3. Hare guesses his own score wouldbe about four or five.

In 1980,Hare's initial checklist began circulating in the research community,and it quickly became the standard.

At last count nearly 500 papers and150 doctoral dissertations had been based on it.

Answer

The fact that some scientists know as muchas they now do about the brain of a sociopath means that solving the problem is nolonger an impossible and obscure wish -- it's moving toward the realmof concrete possibility.

As soon as large numbers of sociopaths begin to be treated in a waythat actually helps them, that corrects as much as possible the chaosof misdirected signals in their confused and disorganized brains, andthen a form of therapy that in addition to that, by necessity, teachesthem to cope with the resulting maelstrom of emotion and impressionthat was formerly impossible, so that they can put it in order andstart to develop the heretofore dormant and silent segments of theirbrains and better use those formerly mixed-up areas where norecognizable order ruled, THEN THE OTHERS MAY BEGIN TO NOTICE WHAT ISGOING ON...and they will know at least this much: instead of "the kissof death," a diagnosis of ASPD (the DSM-IV way of saying sociopathy orpsychopathy) will lead someplace; that there will be things done thatactually make a difference.

Crippled as they are neurologically, sociopaths are yet shrewd, andthey're always looking out for themselves in a way similar to that of aloner predator. Seeing others like them actually benefitting fromtreatment will have to start persuading them that there's something togain in going for help after all. Not being rejected or met with "Wecan't help you; you're evil incarnate," or the equivalent thinlydisguised in euphemistic psychology jargon; NOT being met with asituation where they'd have to substitute symptoms of an "acceptable"illness in place of those they bear in secret -- that would almostcertainly, if gradually, have an effect: if a sociopath can clearly seea benefit coming from admitting his or her real situation, there'snothing to stop him or her from doing just that.

It's already started to happen, if in a tiny, barely perceptible trickle.

Right now, all science has at the ready for them is to use varioustypes of preexisting medication given in attempts to counteract thechaotic way the brain of a sociopath functions. That and types of talktherapy carefully altered to avoid the pitfalls that have in the pastcaused regular therapies to make sociopaths worse instead of better.But the more that scientists such as Robert Hare and his colleaguesdelve into and experiment with the new types of brain scans andlearning what makes sociopaths tick like human bombs, the more likelythat it becomes with each passing year that a means will soon beisolated to defuse those bombs.

The primary source of a sociopath's infamous rage is frustration,of a sort so alien and so extreme that almost no one else canunderstand what it means.

As if all that isn't bad enough, a true psychopath has an extremelypeculiar brainwave pattern: while awake, their brain waves mostresemble a hybrid of normal waking brain waves and alpha-level sleepwaves.

They seem incapable of producing true beta waves.

And they often tend to sleep deeply, although there are also documented cases of severe insomnia in psychopaths.

Emotionally, they are cold, detached, distant, and yet deeplyresentful of normal people.

They know they're missing something, andoften spend most of their typically short, tragic lives avengingthemselves on others for what they cannot ever enjoy.

So they are nottruly emotionless, but they do not love, do not ever know true joy, and arehostile and destructive.

This ISN'T the work of the Devil; it's Nature gone horribly awry.

Once they start getting taken seriously, thatfrustration, and the wild rage it provokes, will lessen, and since itis a primary source of the constant distrust that makes regular therapyfail sociopaths, the defusing of that rage and its maddening causeswill be a huge step in the right direction.

Sociopaths don't always behave as though they're invulnerable. Somehave said, "You don't know this, but it hurts to be me." Peoplesneeringly say to this, "Another of your miserable lies!" But it is infact a miserable truth.

Being angry at them is understandable, but why do people insist onjustifying their anger by dehumanizing the object of their rage?

Sociopaths may seem like aliens, but they aren't.

Perhaps what reallygalls the others is that when they look at sociopaths, in certain tinyways they see aspects of themselves, for everyone has some antisocialthoughts.

Also, sociopaths hurt a lot of people. What seems to hurt most is the idea that the sociopath is breezing happily through life having ablast while a trail of wounded victims struggle to put their shatteredlives back together.

No sociopath breezes through life. They just know how to make itlook like they do. It's part of the sick game they play because theycan't do much of anything else, as they are.

If sociopathy is treated instead of ignored and shunned, this won't have to happen.

Answer 2

Most psychopaths do not kill people. Psychopathy is antisocial personality disorder, characterized by a lack of empathy, guilt and inhibition.

Answer 3

Because it's the only way they can connect with them.