Sociopaths = slightly less violent than toddlers

David Dobbs writes for the NY Times about the progression from violent toddlers (everyone), to become less violent children (most everyone) to becoming hardly violent at all adults (a lot of people):

To understand the violent criminal, says Richard E. Tremblay, imagine a 2-year-old boy doing the things that make the terrible twos terrible — grabbing, kicking, pushing, punching, biting.

Now imagine him doing all this with the body and resources of an 18-year-old.

You have just pictured both a perfectly normal toddler and a typical violent criminal as Dr. Tremblay, a developmental psychologist at University College Dublin in Ireland, sees them — the toddler as a creature who reflexively uses physical aggression to get what he wants; the criminal as the rare person who has never learned to do otherwise.

In other words, dangerous criminals don’t turn violent. They just stay that way.
***
“It’s highly reliable,” said Brad J. Bushman, a psychology professor at Ohio State University and an expert on child violence, who noted that toddlers use physical aggression even more than people in violent youth gangs do. “Thank God toddlers don’t carry weapons.”
***
The rate of violence peaks at 24 months, declines steadily through adolescence and plunges in early adulthood. But as Dr. Tremblay and Daniel S. Nagin, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University, found in a pivotal 1999 study, a troublesome few do not follow this pattern.
***
To Dr. Tremblay, the findings suggest cause for optimism: that humans more readily learn civility than they do cruelty.

We start as toddlers. We learn through conditioning, as we heed requests not to hit others but to use our words. We learn self-control. Beginning in our third year, we learn social strategies like bargaining and charm. Perhaps most vital, we use a developing brain to read situations and choose among these learned tactics and strategies.

I wonder if the non-violent sociopaths were the ones that as children started focusing more on negotiation and charm to get their way (as opposed to the violent sociopaths who remained heavy-handed in their techniques).

The rest article is interesting, especially when it discusses how Tremblay became interested in human violence only because he grew up with a father who was a professional football player and was fascinated that there were certain areas of life in which violence was not only accepted, it was praised. See also, glorification of violence in media, video games, and many other areas of our entertainment lives.