December 20, 2014

There may be hope for our corporate and political psychopaths yet

Vox - There’s evidence that psychopaths might have more of a cognitive-processing problem — that they have difficulty paying attention to more than one thing at a time — than an emotional problem. So they focus tightly on a goal (say, stealing money) and lose the contextual information around it (it will make the victim feel sad, it's socially unacceptable, and it could lead to arrest).

If this is the case, then it might be possible to rewire psychopaths' brains to be less psychopathic. And that's what Arielle Baskin-Sommers and her colleagues are trying to do with a group of specially designed computer games. "The hope is you're training those neural pathways that will help them self-regulate better and not take advantage of people," she says.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't think this will work to correct the cultural framework created through people in the Chicago school of economics, and Ayn Rand and her libertarian followers like Greenspan.

Would these computer games somehow be required training for every member of Congress, and every corporate executive. Good luck getting these people to agree to biting their own hand.

DaTheorist

Anonymous said...

Baskin-Sommers apparently has no understanding of psychopathy at all.

Psychopaths are emotionally deficient, not unaware or forgetful. Their emotional range is very like a crocodile's, not a human's.

They know very well how we feel, and they use that knowledge to prey on us. Their goal is to control and exploit us, and they use false charm, lies, threats, and sudden violence as tools. They exploit all living creatures, including us, without hesitation or remorse.

That's the key test: no hesitation or remorse.

To see how successful psychopaths are, one need only look at the highest levels of government (political power) and business (economic power). Listen to what they say, watch what they do, apply the test.