Psychopathy, risk‑taking, and metaphorical superhero powers – no concrete allegations

world! The flyers talk about how cool it would be to vacation anywhere in the world, zip to work or school, or have fun soaring like an eagle. The invisibility types talk about sneaking into stores and taking clothes or music they like, eavesdropping on conversations, and playing tricks on family members and friends. What is even more interesting about these particular answers is how they divide into pure hedonism — flying — and pure vice — invisibility. With invisibility you can take risks at no cost, except for the cost that soon becomes apparent to many of these newly donned superheroes: even if they don’t get caught, they still did something bad, morally bad. This ratchets up their guilt. With this realization, and a dip into the dark side, comes an about face, with some picking flying instead of invisibility. Rarely do people stick with invisibility, but see how they might deploy their power for virtuous purposes. Rarely do these superheroes realize that they can be real heroes, using their invisibility to gain covert information about terrorist organizations, elicit drug traders, pedophilic priests, or abusive parents — minus the risks. In real life, there are risks associated with every decision, some clear from the start and others only clear in hindsight. As with self-control, a growing body of evidence shows that there are individual differences in risk-taking: some are risk-averse, some risk-prone, and some seemingly risk-blind, unaware that they are taking risks at all. Some of these differences are evident early in life. Some of these differences are strongly associated with crime later in life. Some of these differences provide insights into the invisible risks that individuals and societies confront, risks that can cause great harms. Research on clinical populations with antisocial disorders, most notably those with a clinical diagnosis of psychopathy, reveals a major cause of their high risk, costly, and violent behavior: a failure to experience fear, anxiety, or stress in response to highly evocative images and sounds. In contrast with healthy populations, psychopaths are emotionally blasé about the things in the world that can cause harm or result in punishment. The problem lies in the fact that psychopaths, both adults and those identified as candidates early in childhood, fail to learn about the dangers in life. Their failure to learn is caused by a reduction in size and activity of two critical and connected brain areas: a region of the frontal cortex and the amygdala. When this system works efficiently, it allows individuals to learn about the sounds, smells, and sights that are associated with bad things in the world. When this system works well, individuals learn to avoid antisocial, immoral, and illegal acts by developing anxiety and fear over the possibility of punishment and personal injury. When this system works poorly, as is the case in psychopaths, individuals act as if there are no dangers or risks of punishment — a disposition that enables inappropriate actions. But psychopathy covers a broad spectrum, with problems that all of us confront at some point in our lives, some of us even repeatedly. This is important as it forces us to look at non-clinical populations for the causes of individual differences in risk-taking, especially our reactivity to dangerous events. Studies carried out over several decades, in a wide variety of cultures, reveal that children begin life with distinctive temperaments. Some are mellow, blasé about events that are startling to many. Hauser Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 133 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_012879