
Psychopaths have tremendous social acumen, but can be very
harmful to those closest to them. Here are the 8 signs your friend is
one.
They are everywhere. They work with you. They’re in your social
circle. They might even be a family member.
Hell, you may even be one.
Psychopaths are everywhere.
Okay, they’re not everywhere. There’s no way to know for
sure, but current estimates are that 1% of the population are
psychopaths.
And psychopaths are people, except they lack sympathy. Sympathy, not
empathy. That’s the big distinction I think needs clarification. If
they lacked empathy, they would have a very hard time fitting in with
people and manipulating them, since they’d have no idea how those
people felt. In fact, it’s more accurate to say that people on the
autism spectrum lack empathy. A common factor in autistic people is
they regularly have no clue how others feel in a conversation, and they
cannot read the most basic of social cues (which are communicated via
facial expressions, body language, voice tonality, etc.).
By lacking sympathy, however, psychopaths lack the ability to
actually be concerned about you. They lack the emotional response
necessary to think “I feel scared for him if he makes this bad
decision, so I’ll save him from it” or “He’ll be hurt if I do this to
him, so I won’t do it to him.” To conceptually understand something is
not even in the same universe as emotionally understanding
something. The latter is infinitely more clear.
They may be able to conceptually understand that you might
not like it if they bone your girlfriend, but they won’t feel the
potential of regret when they consider the possibility of you finding
out and being heartbroken.
You can see how this might be potentially dangerous to date a
psychopath or have one as a friend. They do not have Nature’s control
mechanism of sympathy that serves to prevent mass tragedies in the
human species.
Their only concern is what they can get from you, how much
it will cost them, and... that’s it, really.
They aren’t fundamentally evil or malicious, but they do have the
capacity to be more cruel and malicious than the average person. Given
the right conditions, they will strike without a second thought.
It’s imperative, then, that you learn how to spot a psychopath so
you
can make more informed decisions on what role you want them to play in
your life.