Friday, February 27, 2015

True Identity

Have you ever wondered if you truly know the people sitting next to you? Can you ever actually know how a person feels or what they are actually thinking? A lot of times people are astonished when they hear someone they are close to has done something “out of the norm”.  On the news, sadly, we see stories of individuals partaking in crazy and unacceptable actions: murder, domestic violence, and rape. The individuals who commit these heinous crimes are usually branded as psychopaths. The interesting thing is, when the news comes out about what certain individuals have done, the people closest to them are the most shocked.  It is cases like these that interest me, in whether we can ever truly know the people around us, and whether we can truly know if someone has psychopathic tendencies. In The Psychopath Inside, James Fallon discusses this exact same dilemma. Specifically, in the first chapter of Fallon’s book, What is a psychopath?, he discusses the obstacles and struggle to identify certain individuals as psychopaths. Fallon writes that one way to identify if a person has psychopathic tendencies is to take a PCL-R test. He also notes that, “ a person with a perfect score of 40 is full blown, categorical psychopath on this scale. Thirty is the normal cutoff for diagnosis”.  These are people who have clear psychopathic tendencies, but there is still another category of psychopaths. There are people who can have a, “score of 15 or 23… and you would think he is completely normal”. These are the types of people that shock the people closest to them.  A perfect example of this in the real world is the two brothers that committed the Boston bombing.  The community and their parents were the most shocked. Their friends at college and their parents described the two as happy and good kids. Yet, to the rest of the world, these two brothers are psychopaths. Two people who intended to harm a large number of people without remorse. The topics Fallon discusses in his book and this example bring me back to my original question. Can you ever truly know the people closest to you?  Another article that related to Fallon’s book and this question is, A neurological basis for the lack of empathy in
Psychopaths. The article mentions how the, “rate of psychopathy in prisons is around 23%, which is greater than the average population around 1%”. The article then describes a set of experiments where prison inmates were tested for psychopathic tendencies. Once again, just as mentioned in Fallon’s book, prison inmates took the PCL-R test. In addition, the inmates had scans of neural activity when they imagined pain to others. The researches found an, “increased response in the Ventral Striatum, an area known to be involved in pleasure”. The one thing this article does not address however is how certain people who would most likely pass these tests, still end up acting like a psychopath. Unlike this article, Fallon addresses this issue throughout his book. He accounts for multiple factors, one being genetics/ family history in attempt to explain why his brain scan matches one of a psychopath, although in the end Fallon comes to the understanding that the human mind is to complex for us to fully understand with science alone.

So in the end, after reading Fallon’s book, and a scientific article, I have partially found an answer to my question. We can use the common PCL-R test, genetics, and brain scans to further study people’s emotions and tendencies, but there is no sure-fire way to truly know the inner thoughts and identities of the people closest to us.

Fallon, J. (2013). The psychopath inside: A neuroscientist's personal journey into the dark side of the brain. New York: Current.


A neurological basis for the lack of empathy in psychopaths. (n.d.). Retrieved February 27, 2015, from http://esciencenews.com/articles/2013/09/24/a.neurological.basis.lack.empathy.psychopaths



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