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Why are some humans cruel to people who don’t even pose a threat to them ?

Why are some humans cruel to people who don’t even pose a threat to them ?

From psychopaths to ‘everyday sadists’: why do humans harm the harmless?

Why are some humans cruel to people who don’t even pose a threat to them – sometimes even their own children? Where does this behaviour come from and what purpose does it serve? Ruth, 45, London.

Humans are the glory and the scum of the universe, concluded the French philosopher, Blaise Pascal,  in 1658. Little has changed. We love and we loathe; we help and we harm; we reach out a hand and we stick in the knife.

We understand if someone lashes out in retaliation or self-defence. But when someone harms the harmless, we ask: “How could you?”

Humans typically do things to get pleasure or avoid pain. For most of us, hurting others causes us to feel their pain. And we don’t like this feeling. This suggests two reasons people may harm the harmless – either they don’t feel the others’ pain or they enjoy feeling the others’ pain.

Another reason people harm the harmless is because they nonetheless see a threat. Someone who doesn’t imperil your body or wallet can still threaten your social status. This helps explain otherwise puzzling actions, such as when people harm others who help them financially.

Liberal societies assume causing others to suffer means we have harmed them. Yet some philosophers reject this idea. In the 21st century, can we still conceive of being cruel to be kind?

Sadists and psychopaths

Someone who gets pleasure from hurting or humiliating others is a sadist. Sadists feel other’s people pain more than is normal. And they enjoy it. At least, they do until it is over, when they may feel bad.

The popular imagination associates sadism with torturers and murderers. Yet there is also the less extreme, but more widespread, phenomenon of everyday sadism.

Everyday sadists get pleasure from hurting others or watching their suffering. They are likely to enjoy gory films, find fights exciting and torture interesting. They are rare, but not rare enough. The everyday sadist may be an internet troll or a school bully.

Unlike sadists, psychopaths don’t harm the harmless simply because they get pleasure from it (though they may). Psychopaths want things. If harming others helps them get what they want, so be it.

They can act this way because they are less likely to feel pity or remorse or fear. They can also work out what others are feeling but not get infected by such feelings themselves.

This is a seriously dangerous set of skills. Over millennia, humanity has domesticated itself. This has made it difficult for many of us to harm others. Many who harm, torture or kill will be hounted by the experience. Yet psychopathy is a powerful predictor of someone inflicting unprovoked violence.

We need to know if we encounter a psychopath. We can make a good guess from simply looking at someone’s face or briefly interacting with them. Unfortunately, psychopaths know we know this. They fight back by working hard on their clothing and grooming to try and make a good first impression.

Thankfully, most people have no psychopathic traits.

But not all psychopaths are dangerous. Anti-social psychopaths may seek thrills from drugs or dangerous activities. However, prosocial psychopaths seek their thrills in the fearless pursuit of novel ideas. As innovations shape our societies prosocial psychopaths can change the world for all of us. Yet this still can be for both good and for ill.

No one really knows why some people are sadistic. Some speculate sadism is an adaptation that helped us slaughter animals when hunting. Others propose it helped people gain power.

Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli once suggested that “the times, not men, create disorder”. Consistent with this, neuroscience suggests sadism could be a survival tactic triggered by times becoming tough. When certain foods become scarce, our levels of the neurotransmitter, serotonin, fall. This fall makes us more willing to harm others because harming becomes pleasurable.

Psychopathy may also be an adaptation. Some studies have linked higher levels of psychopathy to greater fertility. Yet others have found the opposite.The reason for this may be that psychopaths have a reproductive advantage specifically in harsh environments.

Sadism and psychopathy are associated with other traits, such as narcissism and machiavellianism. Such traits, taken together, are called the “dark factor of personality” or D-factor for short.

There is a moderate to large hereditary component to these traits. So some people may just be born this way. Alternatively, high D-factor parents could pass these traits onto their children by behaving abusively towards them. Similarly, seeing others behave in high D-factor way may teach us to act this way. We all have a role to play in reducing cruelty.

Simon McCarthy-Jones , Trinity College Dublin
tcd.ie

IMAGE : pinterest.com.pin/1688918597546544/

 

 



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