Name: Chris Williamson on Why There Are Psychopaths
Uploaded: 2022-08-02T17:36:55.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Chris Williamson on Why There Are Psychopaths' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-02. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Chris Williamson on Why There Are Psychopaths' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-02. Transcript available.

the Joe Rogan experience. I learned about the adaptive reason for psychopaths
being in society
so you'd think like it's about 1% 0.1% to 1% of people are psychopathic right
and then you can
filter that down to the ones that have got sufficient motivation to actually go
and do
something that's a bit wild but I was asking this guy the researcher and I was
saying look
what is it how do psychopaths even exist like why do they exist I can't
understand why they're
adaptive I know that you can be effective over short periods as a psychopath
but over long
periods of time it doesn't end up being very good for society and I thought it
would have been bred
out he said yeah you're right except for the fact that over the entire size of
a population a few
psychopaths actually make sense if you're a raiding party a viking raiding
party that needs to go over
and fuck everybody up in Lindisfarne which is near to where I lived in the UK
you want some psychopaths
you don't want them to come back with PTSD you want them to go over there burn
everything down
rape the women pillage come back with gold and supplies and grain and whatever
else they take
and not care about it you actually on an individual level psychopathy might not
be fantastic for the
people around them but in a tribe it's actually quite adaptive and quite useful
it's like a weapon
like a very specific sort of weapon that you can use yeah break glass in case
of war yes yes in case
of raiding party it makes sense that it would be sort of a legacy thing that
exists in the human population
but we've had it because it was very beneficial thousands of years ago but the
difference is
the difference is now that you're not going to get pulled up as much for being
a psychopath because
you can move from town to town if it was a Dunbar number of 100 or 150 or
something in your tribe
previously what are you going to do go to the next tribe maybe maybe maybe that
would have happened I
don't know perhaps you could move from one tribe to another tribe it seems
pretty unlikely you'd probably
just get killed but if you fuck over people one too many times this is the
reason that socially we're so
careful of status it's one of the reasons why we are concerned about public
speaking because one of the
few times you would have done that is when your status would have been in high
focus and people
might have said if this goes badly they're going to drop down or maybe you were
defending yourself
against the tribe of some kind right if you're not able to move on that would
make psychopathy
more difficult to manage and more likely to be punished I think but now you can
just go from
town to town to town within a city you can go from suburb to suburb change your
name not use your social
media profile anymore I think that psychopathy people that are actively being
psychopaths are
significantly easier now to hide in amongst society mmm that makes sense it
also makes sense that
psychopathy would have been more common because it would have been more useful
when you're constantly
in tribal war correct yeah it depends on how you deploy it so it's interesting
psychopathy to be a
clinically diagnosed psychopath you actually have to have committed criminal
acts so you can't be because
of the way that the the current um psychopathic checklist it's called i think
you have to be 28
out of 40 in the uk or 30 out of 40 in the us the us has got a higher threshold
for psychopaths which
is kind of funny and um there was this guy this researcher who's researching
psychopaths and what
you see is a particular area of the brain is down regulated right so you don't
see as much activity
when you see stuff like death or images that would cause you to have empathy so
he decides that he's
going to study a bunch of psychopaths many of whom i think are actually in
prison because you have to
commit a criminal act and then he needs a control group so the control group is
going to be you're
a professor you've got students use the students and he was running out of
people to put in the
control group i mean he even used himself as one of the people so anyways
running through this control
group and having a look at all of the people that are in it and he notices this
person's got no
activation when they're going through and he goes holy shit this is the brain
of a psychopath in the
control group i found a psychopath in here i need to go and contact them it
turned out to be him
turned out to be the professor himself he discovered that he was a psychopath
whilst doing a study on
psychopaths and then he said actually you know what it all makes sense now
because when people come
around to my house and they're eating my food i think who the fuck are all of
these people in my
house eating my food why are they here and they interviewed his kids they asked
his kids and they
said what is it like you know is there anything unique about dad and he said
well yeah dad
he didn't smile that much around us and he's not very warm he's not very loving
and blah blah blah
but the point being that you can have the biological determinants of being a
psychopath
and it not manifest this is a fully functioning guy wife kids career didn't
smile much wasn't happy
when people ate his food but like broadly fine but he had essentially the same
raw materials
as the person that was murdering jail so what was what's the determination how
do they what are they
looking for when they find out that he's a whole big long checklist might even
be available online i'm
not sure but big long checklist of things that you need to go through a bunch
of questions that you
answer and they go through this diagnosis but in order to breach the threshold
of clinically being
diagnosed as a psychopath you have to have used it to commit crimes so this
meant that although this
particular professor had all of the raw ingredients and it looked like he was
psychopathic by the what
is it the dns what's that thing the diagnostic statistical manual dsm uh the dsm
wouldn't have
categorized him as a as a psychopath very interesting that is very interesting
so this guy did they
contact his spouse well i think he was it was him doing the study right so i
guess he contacted his
spouse did he ask his spouse like him what's wrong with me what the fuck knows
but why do you like me
perhaps but then you also have to think the fact that psychopaths tend to be
pretty effective
in the world right so someone that has very outgoing traits they're super self-assured
you know
you have a narcissism as well as long as it's not uh vulnerable narcissism
there's two types grandiose
narcissism and vulnerable narcissism what's the difference so grandiose narcissists
are the ones
who genuinely believe that they are better than everybody else they are
constantly proving this
to everyone vulnerable narcissists manifest their narcissism in a similar way
but it's to try and
hide the fact that deep down they don't believe that they're anything so both
types of narcissism
will manifest in a similar sort of way both of them will be out there but one
person is desperately
seeking approval and needs people to tell them that they've done well and the
other one doesn't
they're just going to continue believing no matter what reality brings to them
now the vulnerable
narcissists are actually really dangerous and the reason for that is that if
the world doesn't give
to them that which they think they're going to get very very angry and
aggressive because that taps into
something that maybe they're fearful about that's deep down that makes sense
that makes sense where a lot
of people who have a distorted perception of where they should be in the world
are angry at others
yep who are doing well and if someone takes them down if somebody was to take
the piss out of them
the grandiose narcissist it would just be water off a duck's back like trump
yep yeah definitely
grandiose narcissist right he's not he's not got vulnerable narcissism in him
someone that's a
vulnerable narcissist everybody knows that friend that just can't not bring up
the most recent
brilliant thing they've done but they know that if they poke them a little bit
too hard that it
would really really hurt that's the vulnerable narcissist yeah yeah
Thank you.