The Sociopath Next Door: A psychologist's thoughts on the nature of evil

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I don't remember if I ever mentioned it, but I have a psychology baccalaureate. At the time I chose my major, I thought it would be useful for a doctor to know as much as possible. And I also found the subject inherently interesting, though even back in the dark ages of 2007, people were warning my that a psychology baccalaureate would only prepare me to work as a cashier at Rite Aid.

I don't much use my psychology degree these days, unless you count the times I tell myself to be patient at work because we're all under a lot of stress. Mostly, I like to tell myself that I use what I learned about psychology in my writing hobby to help me with characterization. It's how I justified buying The Sociopath Next Door instead of putting an extra $12 towards my student loans payment, anyway.

Someday, if I become the next JK Rowling, I will have this book to thank for helping me write the most compelling sociopath imaginable. After all, Dr. Stout herself states that:

Conventional wisdom has it that dangerous people are attractive, and when we are drawn to sociopaths, we tend to prove out this cliché.

That being said, I very much doubt that any realistic fictional sociopath would be all that popular, at least not if they're realistic in the way this book describes. Not just because the chances of me becoming the next JK Rowling are astronomically low, but because Dr. Martha Stout writes about real people with Antisocial Personality Disorder, not the idealized Hannibal Lecters of the fictional world.
The Sociopath Next Door a handful of stories about possible sociopaths pieced together from stories of Dr. Stout's psychotherapy patients. Dr. Stout discusses a CEO who used to mutilate and kill frogs during childhood, a petty woman who falsifies the credentials needed to work as a clinical psychiatrist, a man who marries and has a child with a woman because he wants access to her outdoor pool, and an old woman who suddenly sells a house below market price because she wants to keep her move a secret. . . just to surprise her neighbors with her departure.

Dr. Stout's ultimate point is that these people can do severe harm for absurd reasons because they have no conscience, which she argues is the psychological definition of "evil". Though she acknowledges that the depth of a person's conscience varies depending on things like mood, hunger, stress, physical illness, and personal biases, she seems pretty adamant that the presence of conscience, or lack thereof, is a zero-sum game. You either have conscience, or you don't. And whether or not you have one determines whether you can ever comprehend a sociopath's thought process or not. For example, most people might understand why a desperate drug addict might assault an elderly person, but they would not comprehend how a healthy person could assault an old man because of a petty insult.

The book also has a short section about the history of humanity's conception of "evil", which Dr. Stout argue is merely the absence of a conscience or, more to the point, sociopathy. It starts with a summary of the age-old theological question of "why are there evil people, if people are made in God's image and God is perfect?" The answer boils down to "free will", but to be fair to stout, I read the whole thing without getting bored.

All in all, I recommend this book, though not because I think it could arm anyone against the sociopaths lurking among us. I do think it was interesting, and I learned a little bit of history and modern psychology. I do wish that the book had focused more on stories rather than the author's philosophical musings, but that might be because I like fiction. It might not be the case for every reader.