Tautology

A reader asked me if there is any definitive way to tell whether somebody isn't a sociopath. I took the opportunity to preach:

The diagnosis of sociopathy is useful, but only to the extent that people understand it's limitations. The main limitation is that we cannot identify it by its root source, we know it only by its symptoms/characteristics.

I like to use the analogy of determining someone's religion. How might we determine that someone we met at a cocktail party is Catholic. Let's say they have an Irish last name. We know (or think we know) that Catholicism is a very common religion in Ireland. Let's say that the guest is married. We think that marriage is valued in that religion, culturally and doctrinally. This man starts talking about his 5 children. We have met other Catholic people who have a lot of children and think we remember something about the Pope being anti contraception. Some of our new acquaintance's children are named things like Mary and Joseph, not just biblical names but particularly Catholic sounding names to our ears. He makes mention of being involved in various charities. Catholics seem to be charitable people because they have all sorts of relief organizations and hospitals.

This is the sort of datamining and coming to conclusions that we do everyday (sociopaths more fluently than empaths). After we have concluded that there is a decent likelihood of our new acquaintance being Catholic, we can bring up things to which he might respond well (family, purity, etc.) and avoid topics that he might find offensive or incendiary (child molesting priest scandals or abortion).

What have we actually done? We have taken a list of characteristics and put our new friend in a particular category based on those characteristics: Irish last name, married, 5 children, Catholic names, charitable. We wouldn't be that surprised if he turned out not to be Catholic -- it's certainly possible for people to be all of those things and not be Catholic. Nor would we expect every Catholic person to manifest any or all of these traits.

These traits are not definitive. Catholic does not equal Irish, big family, bible names, and charitable. But some of them get at traits that we would consider definitive, such as the doctrinal belief of procreative sex or the importance of love for fellowman--they are the manifestation of beliefs that are definitively Catholic.

If we had to, how could we conclusively prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this man is Catholic? Perhaps if he were baptized, but what if he lapsed or converted to another religion? Would that count? What if he had the exact beliefs but was never baptized. What if he was baptized, attends mass with his family, but doesn't believe?

It is so difficult to define what it means to be "Catholic," and the definition might expand or contract for certain contexts. For instance, we might use a broad definition when we are examining the influence of Catholicism in a community, narrow when considering who could be appointed to high positions of church leadership. But for most purposes we are content to accept people's subjective self-identification.

Like the label "Catholic," the list of sociopathic characteristics literally come from researchers' collective observations about what traits tend to be shared by sociopaths. Recent brain scans and other studies suggest a link between these characteristics and something more "definitive" and unique about a sociopath's brain. But it would be a mistake to conflate the list of characteristics of a sociopath with the definition of sociopath, just as it would be a mistake to assume that all Catholics would share the exact same traits -- or that having a certain list of traits is what makes people Catholic.