Sociopath: A Book Review

No guilt. No fear. Still very human.

The third Fossil, Shani, from whom you will hear any week now, talks about fear a lot.

He has encouraged me—and his patients—to try to live a life without fear.

This advice is, by and large, as useful to hear as it is difficult to follow.

Having said that, consider the hypothetical brave mouse who feels no fear when she detects signs of the presence of a cat. It might feel good to live a life without fear, but some stuff is genuinely dangerous, and that life might be a short one.

This post is a review of the book, Sociopath: A Memoir by Patric Gagne, a woman who, to some extent at least, lives a life without fear. I found it among the best books I’ve read in some time, and I thought I’d share my thoughts on it and link it up to the discussion of the function of evolved feelings that I’ve been on about using the measure and motivate framing.¹

Sociopath is a candid, gripping account of Gagne’s life navigating a world in which key social emotions—fear, guilt, shame—don’t register the way they do for most people. Written with honesty and a touch of wry humor, Gagne traces her journey from a perplexing childhood to an adulthood marked by self-discovery, rule-breaking, and eventual self-management. The memoir’s chronological structure weaves personal stories with psychological insights, offering a rare window into sociopathy from someone who lives it. For me, it’s a case study in how emotions “measure and motivate” our choices—or, in Gagne’s case, how their absence leads to very different motivations and, consequently, outcomes.

Gagne comes from a stable, resourced home with supportive parents. But early on there are signs and portents that something is amiss. One chilling childhood memory especially sets the tone for what is to come: at seven or eight, Gagne is lured by a man promising kittens in a cardboard box inside his white van. Unlike her younger sister, whose fear halts the encounter, the young Patric feels no danger and merrily follows—only turning back when her sister’s distress registers. This fearless curiosity, she later realizes, is a hallmark of her sociopathy. Other early incidents underscore her emotional differences. When she and a schoolmate get into a verbal altercation at their bus stop, Gagne impulsively stabs the girl in the head with a pencil. When her pet ferret dies, she feels neither sadness nor grief, puzzling her supportive family.

As Gagne grows older, her behavior escalates from mischievous to criminal. She sneaks out at 3 a.m. from slumber parties, breaks into houses to linger in their quiet emptiness, steals cars, and stalks adversaries—yet, as she notes, stops short of further violence. These acts, described with a matter-of-fact clarity, reflect an intriguingly practical mindset when it comes to morality: if no one’s harmed and she benefits, what’s the issue? Her college years bring a breakthrough when she self-diagnoses as a sociopath, a revelation that leads her to pursue and ultimately complete a PhD in clinical psychology, focusing on her own condition: research often really is me-search. She insightfully and precociously points out shortcomings and inconsistencies in the field, especially in the clinician’s bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychological Association. (I think Josh would enjoy her salty remarks on this topic.) Gagne’s sharp critiques add an academic edge to her narrative, while her personal struggles—navigating relationships, work, and her impulses—keep the story deeply human.

ChatGPT’s take on Sociopathy

The memoir is at its best in its exploration of Gagne’s inner world: a place where she understands emotions like fear or grief intellectually but doesn’t feel them.

Generally, the book makes for fascinating reading and I recommend it highly. People with sociopathy tend to hide the fact, making it difficult for others to understand the condition.
Gagne opens the window on the condition with welcome candor and impressive insight into her own character and motives. She traces her life from her confusing childhood to her occasionally even more confusing adulthood, navigating work, relationships and, especially, her own potentially self-destructive impulses toward illegal behavior. It’s a great read for anyone interested in normal or abnormal human behavior.

What is it Like to be a Sociopath?

To me, a few themes were particularly interesting.

The first one is how genuinely confusing the world is to Patric, both as a youth and an adult. Her mother tells her that it’s best if she confesses to her misdeeds and tells the truth. Yet she finds that when she does so, she is punished in one way or another; in contrast, when she keeps her misbehavior hidden, things work out much better. Why would her mother, who genuinely loves her, mislead her in this way? Good question.

Related, she often seems confused about what is wrong and why. To me, she comes across as something of a utilitarian. Look, if I break into a house and spend some time there in the deserted quiet while the owners are away, I’m better off and they are no worse off given they’ll never know. What’s the problem?

Generally, she says that she understands the difference between right and wrong. And she often seems to know that what she is doing is wrong and she certainly seems to get that much of what she does is illegal. So it’s not quite that she lacks the moral sense completely. At the same time, she doesn’t seem to care about avoiding immoral, unethical, or illegal behavior. Not only that, but, in line with other reports of sociopathy, getting punished for these acts doesn’t seem to have much of an effect. This fact explains why so many sociopaths wind up in prison. They know right from wrong, they don’t care about the distinction, and punishment doesn’t deter them. (I recommend the series The Jinx, about Robert Durst, for a story that has a similar resonance, though Durst crossed lines that Gagne never did or would.)

Similarly, one has the sense that while Gagne doesn’t seem to feel fear or grief, she does understand them, in at least some sense. She gets that a normal person would have felt afraid to approach the man with the alleged kittens and sadness about the loss of the pet, as her sister did in both cases. There is something deep about the idea that she can understand these complex emotions while at the same time have no experience of them.

Can we understand what it’s like to be a sociopath?

The philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay that asked, What Is It Like To Be a Bat? Bats have sonar and we don’t, so how can we feel what it is like to have the experience of sensing the physical world using reflected sound waves? Nagel concludes, in essence, we can’t. We just can’t ever really experience what it’s like to have sonar, even though we can understand how sonar works. We can’t use our senses in this way to measure something about the world. We just don’t experience that measurement.

There might be similar cases closer to our own experiences. Consider your own sexual preference, for example, whether same-sex or opposite-sex. You probably don’t feel attraction to people who don’t match your preference. You understand it, but you don’t experience it. (If you don’t like that example, consider the range of fetishes and paraphilias. Same thing. You probably understand that one might get aroused by, say, feet, even if you yourself aren’t.)

No Measurement and No Motivation

In sociopathy, a set of the feelings that measure and motivate behavior are absent, leading to predictable results. At the same time, many other feelings that measure and motivate seem to be spared, or at least spared to some degree.

As regular readers know, I have been working on a book, All the Feels, that tries to develop a way to categorize human feelings into functional categories. This system provides one way to think about what is impaired and spared in sociopathy.

Social emotions—those that guide our dance with others—are some of the most intricate tools in our mental toolkit. In Sociopath, we see what happens when parts of this toolkit are missing: no guilt, no shame, no fear, yet a surprising capacity for love and anger. To make sense of human emotions, I’ve organized social emotions into functional groups, or “Phyla,” within the Social World Kingdom. Each measures a different aspect of our social lives and motivates behaviors to keep us connected, competitive, or morally aligned.

Specifically, I take a page from Carl Linnaeus, the biologist who sorted species into a tidy hierarchy. Just as he grouped animals by shared traits, I group emotions by their evolved functions—what they measure and what they motivate. The Social World Kingdom includes emotions like love, anger, and shame, which deal with relationships and group dynamics. Within the Social World, I’ve carved out four Phyla, each tackling a distinct social challenge our ancestors faced, reflecting the evolutionary pressures that shaped how we bond, cooperate, compete, and compare ourselves to others. See the Table below for my organization and my guesses about which feelings are impaired and spared for Gagne.

Gagne breaks into houses without a twinge of guilt, a clue that the feels in “The Group” Phylum, which measures social norms and motivates conformity, isn’t firing. Yet she fiercely protects family and friends - her “Loved Ones” Phylum seems to hum along, if imperfectly.

Phyla in the Social Kingdom. Guesses of spared/impaired feels.

In short, to my eye, Gagne’s feelings to do with loved ones are somewhat intact—she seems to love her family, her partner, and so on—with one exception, grief. Similarly, her feelings that support competition all seem more or less intact. These feelings include anger, hatred, and envy. However, when it comes to the feelings for dealing with cooperation or the group, these seem nearly wholly impaired. These include empathy, compassion, embarrassment, shame, and guilt.

Further, it seems right that the competition feelings are intact but the cooperative ones are not. This pattern resonates with the game-theoretic interpretation of sociopathy as a low-frequency strategy that takes advantage of populations of broadly cooperative individuals. See especially Linda Mealey’s insightful work on this topic. Mealey argued that sociopathy is a strategy, one that chooses to exploit rather than cooperate in the context of social exchanges. This strategy can prosper in populations in which punishment is difficult or rare, especially large, relatively anonymous societies. Mealey argues that from a game theoretical point of view, exploitative strategies can persist when they are rare, but do worse as they increase in frequency, leading to increased detection and punishment. On this sort of account, sociopaths are types that defect in groups where most people are cooperative. This view, taking sociopathy to be a strategy rather than a kind of disorder is similar to how I framed depression.

The lack of these emotions explains why Gagne, and other sociopaths, behave in the ways that they do. If fear doesn’t motivate you, then you make brave—or stupid—moves even when there is great danger. If the moral sense doesn’t motivate you to avoid doing things that are wrong, then you do things that are wrong.

Stepping back, have a look at the checks and X marks in the Phyla. It sort of looks as if two Phyla are spared and two are impaired, perhaps partially vindicating the category scheme. Again, grief represents a problem, making me wonder if it belongs elsewhere. Still, if you squint at it, the scheme does pretty well. Are there other conditions that impair and spare phyla in other configurations?²

Now, sociopaths need to somehow navigate the social world without the feelings from those two Phyla to guide them.

In the case of fear, she uses other people’s measurements to inform her choices. In the case of morality, as the book progresses, she goes through phases in which she can suppress, or at least divert, her impulses to do immoral things, suggesting that you can get to the same choices even without the normal motivational feelings to get you there.

I want to pause a moment on this feeling of wrongness. I, along with my collaborator, Peter DeScioli, have argued that this feel might do double duty.

First, the feeling helps guide you away from doing things for which you will be punished. We, and Jiminy Cricket, call this conscience. This feeling, that doing X is wrong and will lead to punishment helps people avoid these behaviors and, of course, the punishment that succeeds them. The conscience deficit comes across clearly in Gagne’s accounts. She doesn’t have the feeling that motivates her to avoid stealing and stalking.

But there’s another job that this feeling does that Gagne gives less attention. The feeling is also important in rendering judgments about others’ actions. She doesn’t dwell on this fact, but one dog that doesn’t bark in the memoir is that Gagne comes across—to me, anyway—as one of the least morally judgy people around. That’s not to say that she doesn’t get angry. She does experience anger. But it doesn’t seem to be moralistic anger. She gets angry when people do things that harm her, such as try to restrict her freedom or manipulate her. Again, in this way she’s a consummate utilitarian. It’s the harm, not the wrongness, that seems to motivate her.³

I hastily add there’s a potential exception. On one occasion, a friend suspects her lover is cheating and so the friend imposes on Gagne to break into the lover’s house and read his private diary. This whole episode irritates her, but it’s a little unclear if it’s the manipulation—it turns out when people know you’re a sociopath they can get you to do illegal or unethical stuff you yourself wouldn’t do—or the fact that her friend violated her lovers’ privacy (by proxy). My read is that the manipulation—a cost, in Gagne’s mind—rather than the wrongness of the invasion of privacy, but it’s a complicated part of the narrative and I’m not certain.

The book makes me wonder if sociopaths are a helpful guide to think about a topic near and dear to my heart, what moral judgment—the moral sense—is for.

Suppose, for example, that you thought that the job of the moral sense was cooperation. The sense might measure opportunities for you to help someone or find avenues of mutual aid. What would it look like if you then lacked this sense? You wouldn’t necessarily be more inclined to harm, just less inclined to help. You would seem uncooperative, not malevolent.

Suppose, instead, the moral sense had the two jobs indicated above: conscience to keep you from acting in ways that get you punished and judgment to pick out when other people have done something they can be punished for. As I’ve indicated above, this strikes me as more or less what’s going on with Gagne in particular and sociopaths more generally.

Many years ago I was at a departmental colloquium that focused on sociopathy. The presentation was good, but what I remember most from that talk was an exchange during the question and answer period. One of my colleagues asked the presenter, who focused on sociopaths in the criminal justice system, what happened to the people who were high in sociopathology but managed to escape running afoul of the law.

“Politicians and CEOs,” she said.

1. Yes, the writing of my own book is coming along fine, thanks for asking!

2. This isn’t intended as a rhetorical question. Suggestions welcome.

3. For the philosophically inclined, I actually don’t think it’s a coincidence that someone without the moral sense comes across as a utilitarian rather than a deontologist. Indeed, one could argue that it’s exactly morality that undermines utilitarianism. Peter DeScioli and I tried to get at this in a paper that pit Hamitonian logic, which is strictly utilitarian, against Kant, the consummate deontologist. My sense is that every evolved creature except humans are relentless utilitarians (with respect to fitness). Discuss.