Do Psychopaths Suffer an Empathy Deficit?

For decades now the psycho profession has been peddling the notion that psychopaths lack empathy. Or, that they lack emotional intelligence. Or, that they lack the right kinds of feelings.  Psychopaths are not, we are told, in touch with their feelings, especially those that involve empathy, sympathy and compassion.

The result has been a positive mania about using therapy to cultivate empathy. What could be a better prophylactic against psychopathic and criminal and abusive behavior than learning the art of empathy? 

Apparently, psycho professionals believe as an article of faith that their ultimate goal is not so much to promote mental health or even emotional well-being, but to cleanse the mind of all sinful, thus, abusive tendencies. They are in the business of producing people who care for each other and who love each other. In this way they imagine that they will rid the world of abuse. Studies by Yale psychologist Paul Bloom have shown that empathy is not a firewall against abusive behavior, but that at times empathy provokes abuse.

Thus, it comes as a welcome ray of light when researchers discover that psychopaths do not misbehave as they do because they suffer an empathy deficit, but because they suffer from a cognitive impairment.

Arielle Baskin-Sommers of Yale University led the study, reported in PsyPost. To shift the focus slightly, the study showed that psychopaths live in the here-and-now. You recall that some therapists want us all to live in the here and now. This means, as I have had occasion to note, that we are being told not to learn from the past and not to plan for the future. Now, as it happens, this is exactly what psychopaths do. How ironic can you get?

Psychopaths are incapable of judging their behavior against the alternatives. That is, against the counterfactuals. Since they do not see that they might have done things differently, they do not experience very much regret for what they did. Since they do not see that they have a number of options for future behavior, they free themselves to act on their compulsions. 

This suggests that psychopaths lack a developed moral sense, not in the way they feel about other people, but in the way they evaluate the options that were and that will be presented to them. They do not think that things could have happened otherwise, so they override their free will. Because, as I have defined it, free will is the possibility that you might have acted differently, that you, in taking action, have exercised a cognitive process and have made a choice between or among alternatives.

As Baskin-Summers describes the condition:

It is almost like every situation a psychopath encounters is brand-new to them…. They are not informed by history or use that new information to direct their future. It then becomes clear why they continually have encounters with the law; if you are unable to weigh the costs and benefits and integrate or remember contexts in which the similar situation has gotten you into trouble you are less likely to inhibit that behavior. Despite this difference in decision-making, these data also fit with the pattern that we cannot consider psychopathic individuals as simply deficient individuals, particularly when it comes to emotion.