Dr. Coltan Scrivner

And that tends to influence how we think about and measure psychopathy.

And what I found is that, you know, there have been some measures developed that you can use on non-forensic or non-imprisoned populations.

And what I seem to find with that is that the results are even more mixed.

So there is this idea that psychopaths must lack empathy, right?

They have no empathy for other people.

And it's not clear how well that actually works outside of a forensic or prison population.

So if you look at a lot of the studies I've done, I use subclinical psychopathy measures oftentimes.

And I find that, for example, horror fans score high in those measures, but they also score high in empathy, which is sort of counterintuitive and doesn't really fit with the psychopathy literature very well.

And yeah, I have this, I have, so I've sort of developed this theory that, or am developing this theory that what we call psychopathy is probably really just an extreme form of antisocial, some sort of antisocial disorder, like antisocial personality disorder.

But it's really just a, we're only looking at the extreme version and not what maybe the underlying cognitive mechanisms are.

We're not looking at what the

the syndrome itself might be.

And I think when we look at that, what we find is that most people have the capacity under the right circumstances to develop behaviors that we would call psychopathic.

Right.

Uh, you know, the Holocaust is an excellent example because it took, certainly there were some, some people involved in the Holocaust who I think almost everyone would agree were evil if there's such a thing as evil.

Right.

But there were millions of people who were just average German citizens up until the late 1930s, early 1940s.

And so the question, and this is something that after World War II, psychology research really started leaning heavy into trying to answer how that happened.

How was it the case that millions of average Germans became part of this sort of psychopathic machine that was going on?

And that's how you got experiments like this, like the Milgram shock experiments, you know, where they had people shock participants to see how far they would go.