The Bad Seed

Just to name a few, There's Damien from the Omen bad Kid, not really his fault. He's the anti Christ, right, it can't be helped. They are the kids from the Village of the Damned. I seem to remember they were aliens or something. Spoilers all around here. Sorry, there's the bad Seed personal favorite. As a little about this one. Okay, so this is I guess maybe did start as the stage play, but I have seen the movie and it is set up stage play, and it's very kitchy, and

it centers around this little girl. I don't know, maybe she's seven years old. I don't remember the details. I can't remember her name. But she's terrifying because here is this little blonde, perky girl with long braids. You know, she's got the checked dress on and kind of like a dream child. The dream child. Yeah, I mean she talks to adults and she smiles and she's so sweet.

But then you began to see that this child is like cold and calculating, and she wants some of their kids pin like the pen lapel pin, and she murders for it. It is very convincing, even though it's you know, at the time, it's very kitchy. But what I think it's fascinating about that movie is that it definitely captures an era in which society was starting to look more inward and really looking at the dark side of the

human nature. You've got the Betty Page going on. You begin to see more images of what people are thinking

about that's not some nineteen fifties. Yeah, you know, the shades of Santa Masochism coming out, or at least people beginning to say like, well, this is an interesting part of our experience or what we're thinking anyway, there's this sort of delving into the human mind, into the psyche, and all of a sudden, people start to consider children as not necessarily these innocent butterflies of our human nature, but possibly you know, containing the seeds of well, in

this case, the bad seed of psychopathy. Yeah, and this idea too, that the child is the seed of a bad person to come, that all the things that are immoral are corrupt in the eventual adult, are present in the child. Other examples from fiction that are kind of fun. There's the good Son I believe that was Macaulay Culkin. Yes, psychopath. There's The Ring where the character in the ring video

is a ghost of a rather troubled child. There's Peter Wiggan and orson Scott Cards Game, who likes to torture animals to death and physically and mentally torment his siblings highly recommended his game. By the way, if you haven't read that, Ray Bradberry had a couple of short stories Small Assassin personifies concept I've read. If we look to Harry Potter, there's good old Tom Riddle and pretty much most of the Slytherin Gang. I guess, yeah, varying shades

of bad seededness. In the doone universe, there's Aaliyah and Stephen King's The Dark Tower series there's Mordred at least early on when you've seen as a kid, and then on Family Guy, they're Stewiet Griffin, kind of a comedic take on the idea of the nefarious, uber intelligent and uber manipulative youngster. You forgot the Full House twins? Oh yes, those girls that grew up to be actresses right right, right? Or actually they just billionaires, that's where they grew up

to be. We want to look into this idea, this idea of nature versus nurture, about whether or not this is something that's hardwired in individuals. And this came to our attention recently because we read an article from New York Times called Can You Call a nine year old a Psychopath? Yeah? By Jennifer con Nice, long in depth

article excellent reading. Will include a link to it in the blog post that accompanies this podcast, and it raised a lot of questions, like I saw spinoff blog post spinoff stories about this in other in US because it really examines the idea, is it possible that a child that has various emotional and behavioral problems is in fact not just an eventual psychopath, that they already have the psychopathic qualities, right, and we'll talk about that a little

bit more and why that's actually problematic to even ask the question. But let's discuss psychopathy and the fact that on some level we are all psychopaths. Right, not all the time, because that would actually make us true psychopath but all of us are guilty of lying at one time or another, or manipulating someone, or feeling a lack of empathy in a situation. But these are usually fleeting moments for most of us. It's not a constant state. Well, the more you look at psychopathy, it it kind of

feels like like we're on a board game. Like society is this board game, and they are rules, they're hard and fast rules about what you can do, and then there's this layer of honor code on top of it. There's very much in tune with what we're ethically capable

of doing and willing to do. And so to a certain extent, psychopathic sociopathic individuals are just sort of free of this top level of honor system, right right, Like they're free of the constraints in a way, you know, in a certain way, they are more free in society to exploit the lower level of rules and ignore the higher honor system level of rules. Well, that's what happens, right, if you don't react to shame, if you're not interested

in how someone perceives you, if you don't have any empathy. Yeah, no impulse control, No impulse control, although you can still be calculating and have a measure of impulse control if if the reward is there, you just don't care about getting caught. Yeah, right, that's what you're saying. That's the sort of alternate game here. Like to put this in like twinkie terms, you would have no shame about eating six twinkies. Yeah, there would be no impulse control to

kick in and say I shouldn't eat six twinkies. You would lie to get that fifth and six twinkie. You would steal the fifth and six twinkie from a friend, a co worker I supposed loved one, and then if confronted about it, you'd be like, yeah, I ate six twinkies, what are wow? So all we need really is such twin commater to see where we fall on this spectrum. You would charm somebody for the twinkie. You would kill for a twinkie because you're a getting removed from that

top layer of rules concerning twinkie acquisition. All right, Okay, I think this this has legs that we need to explore later. But let's talk a little bit more about the cost of psychopathy. Recent estimate by the neuroscientists can't keep placed the national costs of psychopathy at four hundred and sixty billion dollars a year. It's about ten times the cost of depression. And in part that is because psychopaths tend to be arrested repeatedly. Again, lack of shame,

lack of concern for getting caught. These tend to be elements that land people into jail, right, Yeah, because it comes down to there are things I want in life. I don't feel held back from doing what I need to do to get them, and then confronted by it. Yeah,

I did this, so I did this horrible thing. Also, it's worth pointing out psychopaths for estimated to make up one percent of the population the general population general population going to prison, however, the offenders, and that's a disproportionate the number of the brutal crimes and violent offenses and murders. Yeah, and let's unpack the definition of this. Broadly speaking, there are people who use manipulation, violence, and intimidation to control

others and satisfy selfish needs. They can be intelligent and highly charismatic narcissistic, but they display a chronic inability to feel guilt, as we said, remorse or anxiety, and this is important anxiety. We'll talk about that about their actions. And as a result, they tend to why much of the time and sometimes for no reason at all. Yeah, I mean, it's not like all psychopaths are gonna be murders, and many of them are going to lead train wrecked,

self absorbed lives. Or they may be in the financial world exactly. There may be in a in a world where all of the things that are quote unquote wrong with them line up perfectly with the values of that given institution, right well, And there are some people who say that Bernie made Off, for example, is a good example of someone who is a psychopath just kind of cruising around in the financial world, certainly building people o

their money, not feeling any shame. And it made me think about this documentary called The Corporation, and it talks about, well, if you were to take a corporation and run it through as a person through a battery and our personality according to them. According to the law, if you're to run them through a battery personality test, a corporation will come out as a just steal cold psychopath. There's no if,

ands or buts about it. So it is interesting to know that there are some psychopathic personalities that do gravitate toward the financial world. That is not to say that people in the financial world, which is a vast widespread that everybody in it is a psychopath. That's far from what we're saying. We're just saying that, you know, it does line up a bit. Yeah, the quick aside, You know, we should really come back and do an episode on personhood at some point. There are number of different areas

to explore there. So let us know if you're interested in that, Let's look at the brain. Let's look at the brain and psychopathy. What exactly do we think is going on in the mind that causes this rule breaking system of behavior to surface. Well, if we look at m r I scans on the brain and brains of adult psychopaths, we can see significant anatomical differences in certain areas. For instance, there's a smaller subgenual cortex and a five to ten percent reduction in brain density in portions of

the paralympics system. These are regions of the brain associated with empathy and social values. So again very much that top level of honor system rules. Yeah, and really those are the parts that are active in moral decision making. According to James Blair, a cognitive neuroscientists at the National Institute of Mental Health, two of these areas, the orbitofrontal cortex and the caudate are critical for reinforcing positive outcomes

and discouraging negative ones and callous, unemotional children. And we'll talk about this, that's the term for what you would maybe say pre psychopathic children. Blair says that connection may be defective, with negative feedback not registering the way that it would in a normal brain. And that's an interesting way to look at this. You know, the operating system is a bit off. Researchers have also linked coblad behaviors to low levels of cortisol and below normal functionings of

the amigola. Always talked about the amigola before. This is a portion of the brain that processes fear and other aversive social emotions such as shame. We discussed there's a lack of shame six no shame, right, And we know that cortisol is there are hormone that is related to stress, right, So if you're fearful of something, if you have anxiety,

of course your cortisol levels would shoot up. And that is what I think is so interesting about this is that these are below level, these kids and adults who will kids that maybe I should say psychopaths or pre psychopaths, and adults that have the profile, they actually have sort of insensitivity to this anxiety. There is one study that compared the criminal records of twenty three year olds with

their sensitivity to unpleasant stimula at age three. And that study, the three year olds were played a simple tone and then exposed to a brief blast of unpleasant white noise. And though all the children developed the ability to anticipate this going on um, most of the toddlers who went on to become criminals as adults didn't show the same signs of a version. And we're talking about tensing or

sweating when the advanced tone was played. So again here's this idea that it's physiological, that it is something in the brain that's just not processing fear, and in fact, we know too that in psychopath that it's harder for

them to recognize fear and others as well. So there also is this idea that psychopathy might be a learning disability, which again is a different way to come at this subject, and I think it's really interesting to come in it this way because the consensus really is is that there's no treatment for psychopathy. Right, it's a dead end road. There's nothing that someone can do, behavioral or pharmaceutical, and

that's really depressing, right. But Joseph Newman believes that it is a type of learning disability or informational processing deficit that makes individuals oblivious to the implications of their actions, but just when their focus on task that promised instant reward. So what we're saying here is that when there isn't that instant reward, they can sometimes engage in empathy or have a little bit more of an understanding of the situation. But if there is that instant reward, all bets are off.

In a study he repeated in different prison populations, Newman observed how quickly psychopathic and non psychopathic individuals responded to a series of mislabeled images. So he'd have a drawing of a pig with a word dog on it super imposed on it, and then researchers would flash each image and then they would time how long it took for

subjects to name what they saw. So the really interesting thing here is that non psychopathic subjects subconsciously stumbled on the mislabeled images and they took longer to name the images. But the psychopathic subdors barely noticed. The discrepancy wasn't important to them, and they consistently answered more quickly. So what's really cool about this cool interesting about the study is that it doesn't have anything to do with fear or anxiety, and this is what people have been for gusing on

in the past. So the idea is that it supports this notion that a psychological deficit could be at play, and this is what Newman says. He says, people think psychopaths are just callous and without fear, but there is definitely something more going on. When emotions are their primary focus, we see that psychopathic individuals show a normal emotional response, but when they're focused on something else, they become insensitive to emotions entirely. So a lot of it is just

what happens to be their focus. So again there's this idea that you could get in, you could intervene, you could change the hard wiring, especially if you get in there early enough. So we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to really get into the idea of callous and unemotional children and the idea that we could potentially find psychopaths while their children and actually do something about it while their minds are

still forming. All Right, we're back. One thing that my mind kept coming back to is we were looking at this podcast was the show Madness, which I know you've seen a few episo as of um and I remained pretty current on it. Great television show, very deep, very into its characters. But the producer, Michael Winer has said in a few different interviews that his approach to the children on the show, the child characters on the show, is to approach them as creatures capable of the full

range of human emotion. Their children. Yes, But and even if they're treated as this kind of second class creature, this unfinished person, uh, they're they're still there are things in life. They want their things in life. They're afraid of that. They're anxious about that, they're scared of that, they're trying to figure out, and so they're processing this adult world around them. They're trying to understand it, but they don't necessarily have all the tools, um all the

emotional tools to deal with it that adults have. So I think it's important to really go into any examination of how children are thinking with that in mind, that there is a lot going on and and a lot more going on than just the surface level of childhood simplicity. It's easy to look back on our childhoods and just see it in the simple terms. Well, and a lot

of child psychologists will say to that. The reason why it's so important to have a strong foundation for a child is that by age five, a lot of the way that they perceive the world and understand the world is already established really strongly. And it makes sense because just as you said, like you know, all that stimula is still going to bombard them, they're still going to have all the same abilities that the adults do in terms of Okay, I perceive this, I see this, but

not a context and not the tools for it. So that is really why there is this level of flexibility to change your destiny right before this age five, and why it is so important that we create these positive blueprints. And that's why repetition is so important at that age too. And I see that in my own daughter. She's constantly playing out all these different scenarios because she's trying to

get a hold on what reality is. So what happens when you have a kid and the idea hears that callous unemotional children again, this is the term for what you could say is pre psychopath that you can actually sort of identify them as young as five years old right now. One of the problems with any of this identification is of course that again children are capable of

all these human emotions. They are very complex individuals. It is very easy to diagnose some of their actions as psychotic or psychopathic because they are going to have issues with anger and issues with testing their boundaries, and a lot of this just falls under the normal parameters of what it is to be a child. So you get into questions were like, all right, is this child truly a psychopath? I mean, are these actual callous unemotional traits in this child or are they simply lashing out an

acceptable fashion? For instance, when you act out as a child and you're getting a rise out of people say you're angering your mom or your dad. You're exercising a certain amount of control in a universe that you may not feel that in control of. Again, it's a repetition to what if I do this over and over again,

what's going to happen? It's testing the boundaries and you right, this like some of this is such a great area because kids are naturally narcissists and impulsive, So you can't look at a kid and say, oh, that's a psychopath right there. Yeah, but I mean up to a certain age,

children are not really capable of empathy. They would fail that Blade Runner Android tests New play Runner coming out, by the way, really I just read that the other really Scott miss thinking about it anyway, Well, let's see

how Prometheist does first. Yeah, Okay, here's the deal. There is no standard test for psychopathy and children, which probably isn't a surprise because this isn't really all that well studied and hasn't been studied long enough as well, because with any of these topics, you need to be able to look at a child's development over time or an individuals development over time, to actually accurately evaluate what's happening. But the psychologist do think it is a distinct neurological condition.

The psychologist Dan Washbush, He's is the person in the article. Actually that's the main focus here. In terms of treatment. He uses a combination of psychological exams and teacher and family rating scales, including the Inventory of callous unimentional traits, the Child Psychopathy Scale, and a modified version of the Antisocial Process Screening Device. And these are all tools that are designed to measure the cold predatory conduct most closely

associated with adult psychopathy. That is from the article that we talked about. And a lot of this is measuring some of these things we discussed earlier, for instance, so what extent are they manipulating people? And again you look at children, manipulation is part of it. It's testing, it's testing boundaries. And in some cases, take children who have

spent any time in institutionalized care in an orphanage. There in a situation where you're having to employ survival tactics in this environment because you're dealing with in many cases with a certain amount of stimuli deprivation, be that emotional deprivation or sensory deprivation. So one may act out either in a manipulative fashion, so in a charming fashion and overly charming fashion to get some sort of an adult attention, or may act out in an adverse way because negative

attention is still preferred. You no attention. It's endlessly complex. When you start looking at the behaviors of children in the formation of the childhood mind, you're absolutely right because, as you said, if you're in a situation you're a child and you don't, like say, an orphanage, and you don't ever have a deep connection with an adult that you can trust, that you feel like you can trust, then that's something to see if narcissism. Right there, we

already know that. We know that if kids don't make that connection, they start to turn inward, and that's really what happens with budding narcissists. That's different from a psychopath, right, So again it muddies the waters. How do you really

determine whether or not a child is pretty psychopathic. Let's have a couple of examples of what we're talking about, and these are both from that article, and the first one is talking about this woman Anne and her husband and their child, Michael and he is nine years old now, but at age five she began to see a very like, cold, calculating part of his personality emerge. And this is a

good example. She says that she recalled one argument over homework assignment when her son, Michael, shrieked and wept a she tried to reason with him. Quote, I said, Michael, remember the brainstorming we did yesterday. All you have to do is take your thoughts from that and turn them into sences and you're done. He's still screaming bloody murder. So I say, Michael, I thought he brings from this

so we could avoid all this drama today. He stopped dead in the middle of screaming, turned to me and said, in this flat adult voice, Well, you didn't think that through very clearly than did you. Okay, that's creepy, right, Well, I mean, but how many times has your child said something creepy? I mean, well inadvertently, But she's never turned to me said, mother, did you really think I'd eat

the cream corn? You really think that through? I mean, you know, there's there's and I think what she's saying is that here's this child screaming completely out of control, right this is that impulse control thing, but then snaps to this other personality and is really attacking her parenting skills.

So there's like this level of manipulation that's going on at a very young child that is a little bit odd, yes, now, And it's also important to its stress here that this is not like, oh, the kids started acting up one day and the next thing, it's this article in the New York Times. Exactly. They hadn't seen a number of therapists. They had gone to a number of different sources. They read book after book on the topic. So and the jury is still out. They're not saying that this kid

is you know, they're saying he's callous, unemotional. But there's this idea because his father, and we'll talk about this heredity in this, that his father had some anti social leanings as a child too, So there's this hope that he can sort of change his course with some intervention. The second example is a nine year old boy named Jeffrey Bailey who pushed a toddler into the deep end of a motel swimming pool in Florida. As the boy struggled and sank to the bottom, Bailey pulled up a

chair to watch. Questioned by the police afterward, Bailey explained that he was just curious to see someone drowned, and when he was taken into custody, he seemed untroubled by the prospect of jail, but was pleased to be the center of attention. Again, we're not trying to scare anybody, but we're just saying, like this, it's really hard to crack jokes in an episode like this. Yeah, you really want to say something funny, but what can you say about that? Yeah, this just I mean, you know that

that's unsettling, that's chilling. But those are the markers of what we you would say, a kid who was really sort of off the charts in terms of callous, unemotional behavior. Here's the deal, though, Normally, when you have someone acting like that, they are going to respond to shame. Right the parent can say, don't do that, don't push your brother in the pool. That makes him feel awful, and the empathy kicks in, right, But we don't have that at play. Again, those rules of the game don't apply.

And another thing that complicates this is again the hereditary aspect of it. If one parent has these genes, it's about likelihood that they will pass these on. And again that's why they were looking at this case study sort of in the article of um the father who again very anti special to child, but turned a new leaf. I guess he was probably about a teenager if I remember correctly. Again, it's controversial to even say to point to a child and say, you know what, you could

be a psychopath? Why? Because that's just certainly is a societal death sentence, right, I mean, how can you navigate the world if you're labeled as such? Yeah, I mean we have to. The terminology is just so weighted down, especially currently, because on one level, psychopath it's a scary terminology. I mean, this is the horror movie stuff psychopath. Right. No child should have to go through life with that kind of a word attached to them. Like you said,

it's a self fulfilling prophecy. You enter this scenario thinking, oh, my child has something deep wrong with them and there's no fixing it. To what extend are you're gonna try? And you can end up pulling away from that child And some of these days have shown, I mean, that's where they really want to focus on, and that's where you can actually work on treatment, especially in the early ages, to try and build that relationship between parent and child,

not pull back and just give up. Yeah, you're right, there's an early study, but maybe a strong choice of words, but still the ideas you want to pull closer, yes, not pull apart. And there's some results from early stories that say that when kids who very least have behavioral problems most are callous, unemotional children. If they do get the care and loving, really strong baland from a parent as much as they possibly can, that there is some hope there and some results that show that the kids

kind of change a little bit. Again, this is this is problematic in a sense because parents of those children who are sort of getting pummeled by them emotionally and sometimes physically, it's really hard to be like, hey, come over here and cuddle when you don't know how that kid is react to you. And in fact, I remember that the mother in this and this article said, you know, every time I go to talk to my child, I have to gird my loins because I know that at

some level I'm about to be attacked. So definitely there's a lot of intervention that needs to happen. It's not something that parents could just go alone on they definitely need help. There's a summer treatment program that psychologist Dan Washbosh runs and this is his attempt to try to actually study this in earnest. I think he had about twelve kids last summer and he's doubling it this summer.

But the idea is that you can really look at the behavior of callous, unemotional children and begin to pinpoint ways to effectively intervene. Here's this attempt, though, to really study it, because again, this is something that there's not a lot of money to say, Hey, let's study kids who may be psychopathic, especially if the stigma is that it's not treatable exactly. Here's the crux of it. Here's

the question, can you teach empathy? Some people say that you can, but there is a famous study of an inmate therapy group that have the recidivism rate in violent prisoners. Recidivism meaning that you know their returned to prison. But it increased the rate of successful crimes in psychopaths because it improve their ability to mimic regret and self reflection.

So on one level, it's making them easier to be around and uh and more a part of our world less of an obstruction, less of an obvious obstruction, but maybe more of a subversive obstruction in some cases. Yeah, and they have found that as these children have matured, they do develop the ability to simulate interest in other people's feelings, and that's what they call cognitive empathy. They can say what other people feel, they just don't care

or really feel about it. But most researchers who study callous and emotional children hope to teach a kind of intellectual morality that's sort of hinged on this idea of cognitive empathy. So you know, even if they do have a decreased ability to process emotion, the end goal here is to avoid violence, right, the outcome that is usually present with a psychopath if a child does go in that path. So again the thought is that if treatment has begun early enough, you could rewire the brain to

develop greater empathy. It's also worth noting that we've mentioned psychopaths in prison, a psychopath that live lives that are rather disorganized or self centered. But then there are also psychopaths or people that are diagnosed as psychopaths who do go on to live very successful and meaningful lives, one of which I encountered last year at the World Science Festival in New York. There's a neurobiologist by the name of James Fallon, and he gave an excellent talk at

the Moth event last year. He was discussing his own investigation a genetic analysis of known psychopaths, and he ended up discovering all these markers in his own personal genetic history and really had to confront the fact that, well, yeah, actually I do line up very well with most of these markers for psychopathic behavior. And he's done a lot

of great work. But even he himself points out, I'm a great guy to run into it a party, but maybe the closer you are to me in life, more problematic the relationship is, right, So you don't have to be a psychopath to Actually what I'm saying is that some unsomable we're all sorts of sociopath or psychopaths right there. There are levels that we can be close to other

human beings. And I feel like sociopath is a term that everyone's a little more comfortable with throwing around in everyday conversation at someone who displays the slightest bit of selfishness. I feel like I've done that before myself, where I'll encounter somebody and they're guilty of at least one incidence of selfishness or some sort of callous behavior, and I'll be like, oh, that person is a clearly a sociopath. Yeah, I'm glad that you mentioned the World Science Festival, because

it is more like a spectrum disorder. This is not something that you say that you're just labeled. And also he has the mark of Cain. He is going to

go on to exactly exactly. Pediatric psycho pharmacologist Dr Allen Ravitt says that we should be really slow to diagnose sociopathy because sometimes it's just a stand in for our frustration at not being able to treat somebody, which I thought was interesting, right, because this happens with parents a lot when they're having problems with their kids, Like you just want to say what is it so I can

treat it or go on the boundaries of it. And I think just in medicine in general, this is what we want to do, to say, label it so we can try to figure it out. But he's saying you should be really slow in trying to diagnosis, and he's also saying that we're just beginning to appreciate the genetic and neuro physiological aspects of the problem, and until we do more investigation, we're not really going to figure out what lever to pull. So I thought that was really

interesting perspective on it. You have any more psychopathic thoughts, um No? I would close that with just a quick quote. I really love in the way it relates to how we grow into the people, into the adults that we eventually become. And it's from playwright Peter Brooks adaptation of the Hindu epic the Maha Barita. It goes like this birth is obscure and men are like rivers whose origins

are often unknown. Well, let's crack open the mail back and speaking of the World Science Festival, by the time this episode airs, you will have returned from this year's World Science Festival. It's true. That'll be exciting. Got exit planets on the menu? Uh, some Internet related stuff, all

sorts of good stuff. All right, Well, here is a little listener mail from James James rode in in response to our Summer Reading podcast, and he wanted to share his enthusiasm for a book titled Two Planets by Curd Loss fits getting a copy that should probably have to go through some used copies from Amazon. And uh, of course who knows. It's the kind of thing that might come out on kindle any day if it's not already.

But this was a German science fiction book from and it in hired Verne von Braun to get into rocketry and uh and also apparently was looked at Walt Disney. It was rather keen on as well, of course, an acquaintance of Verne von Braun. As we've discussed, it sounds really cool, like it's you know, early dreams of space travel, early dreams of futuristic technology. And according to James, the story starts out with scientists traveling to the North Pole

and discovering a Martian colony there. So all right, pretty cool. If you have anything you would like to share, if you would like to discuss psychopathy in adults or children, or if you have any thoughts in general about the mysteries of child and and the science of childhood development, early childhood development especially, let us know. You can reach us on our Facebook account where we are Stuff to Blow your Mind, and on Twitter our handle is blow

the Mind. Then you can send us an email to blow the mind at discovery dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it, How stuff works dot Com