Okay; so what’s the reality about the people we’re thinking of when we say psychopathic? The term seems to still be in use among some professionals, for bad or good reasons.
A garbage bin diagnosis seems like a step down if psychopathy or sociopathy was pointing to a more specific set of attitudes and tendencies.
I think Valentine gave a good description of psychopath as “people who are naturally unconstrained by social pressures and have no qualms breaking even profound taboos if they think it’ll benefit them”, where just eyeballing human nature, that seems to be a “real” category that would show up as a distinct blip in a graph of human behaviour and not just “how constrained by social pressures people are is a normally distributed property and people get called psychopaths in linear proportion to how far left they are on the bell curve”.
Okay; so what’s the reality about the people we’re thinking of when we say psychopathic? The term seems to still be in use among some professionals, for bad or good reasons.
A garbage bin diagnosis seems like a step down if psychopathy or sociopathy was pointing to a more specific set of attitudes and tendencies.
I think Valentine gave a good description of psychopath as “people who are naturally unconstrained by social pressures and have no qualms breaking even profound taboos if they think it’ll benefit them”, where just eyeballing human nature, that seems to be a “real” category that would show up as a distinct blip in a graph of human behaviour and not just “how constrained by social pressures people are is a normally distributed property and people get called psychopaths in linear proportion to how far left they are on the bell curve”.