Some psychologists and sociologists believe that psychopathy can be an asset in business and politics and that, as a result, psychopathic traits are overrepresented among successful people. This would be a puzzle if it were so. If our moral feelings evolved through natural selection, then it shouldn‘t be the case that one would ourish without them. And, in fact, the successful psychopath is probably the exception. Psychopaths have certain de cits. Some of these are subtle. The psychologist Abigail Marsh and her colleagues nd that psychopaths are markedly insensitive to the expression of fear. Normal people recognize fear and treat it as a distress cue, but 13 psychopaths have problems seeing it, let alone responding to it appropriately. Other de cits run deeper. The overall lack of moral sentiments—and speci cally, the lack of regard for others—might turn out to be the psychopath‘s downfall. We non-psychopaths are constantly assessing one another, looking for kindness and shame and the like, using this information to decide whom to trust, whom to a liate with. The psychopath has to pretend to be one of us. But this is di cult. It‘s hard to force yourself to comply with moral rules just through a rational appreciation of what you are expected to do. If you feel like strangling the cat, it‘s a struggle to hold back just because you know that it is frowned upon. Without a normal allotment of shame and guilt, psychopaths succumb to bad impulses, doing terrible things out of malice, greed, and simple boredom. And sooner or later, they get caught. While psychopaths can be successful in the short term, they tend to fail in the long term and often end up in prison or worse. Let‘s take a closer look at what separates psychopaths from the rest of us. There are many symptoms of psychopathy, including pathological lying and lack of remorse or guilt, but the core de cit is indifference toward the suffering of other people. Psychopaths lack compassion. To understand how compassion works for all of us non-psychopaths, it‘s important to distinguish it from empathy. Now, some contemporary researchers use the terms interchangeably, but there is a big difference between caring about a person (compassion) and putting yourself in the person‘s shoes (empathy).
I am too much of an adaptationist to think that a capacity as rich as empathy exists as a freak biological accident. It most likely has a function, and the most plausible candidate here is that it motivates us to care about others. Empathy exists to motivate compassion and altruism. Still, the link between empathy (in the sense of mirroring another‘s feelings) and compassion (in the sense of feeling and acting kindly toward another) is more nuanced than many people believe. First, although empathy can be automatic and unconscious—a crying person can affect your mood, even if you‘re not aware that this is happening and would rather it didn‘t—we often choose whether to empathize with another person. So when empathy is present, it may be the product of a moral choice, not the cause of it. Empathy is also in uenced by what one thinks of the other person. Second, empathy is not needed to motivate compassion. As the psychologist Steven Pinker points out, “If a child has been frightened by a barking dog and is howling in terror, my sympathetic response is not to howl in terror with her, but to comfort and protect her” Third, just as you can have compassion without empathy, you can have empathy without compassion. You might feel the person‘s pain and wish to stop feeling it—but choose to solve the problem by distancing yourself from that person instead of alleviating his or her suffering. Even otherwise good people sometimes turn away when faced with depictions of pain and suffering in faraway lands, or when passing a homeless person on a city street
From a very early age, I knew that when I grew up, I should be a writer. I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life. I wanted to write enormous naturalistic novels with unhappy endings, full of detailed descriptions and arresting similes, and also full of purple passages in which words were used partly for the sake of their sound. I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development.
His subject-matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job to discipline his temperament, but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They are: (i) Sheer egoism: Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood; (ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm: Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed (iii) Historical impulse: Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity (iv) Political purpose: Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people's idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.
[Extracted with edits from George Orwell's "Why I Write"]
Read the sentence and infer the writer's tone: "The politician's speech was filled with lofty promises and little substance, a performance repeated every election season."
A | B | C | D | Average |
---|---|---|---|---|
3 | 4 | 4 | ? | 4 |
3 | ? | 5 | ? | 4 |
? | 3 | 3 | ? | 4 |
? | ? | ? | ? | 4.25 |
4 | 4 | 4 | 4.25 |