Are Psychopaths Judgmental

Or is this a purely emotional state?

The answer is an easy yes, but there is a caveat. When the term “judgment” is spoken about in the neurotypical world it is apparent that it comes with emotional components that are absent with me, but that doesn’t change the fact that I can be a judgy bitch when there is cause for it.

When I say “bitch” I don’t mean with disdain or with hatred, but rather my absolute coldness tends to be present when I am judgmental and that can make people very uncomfortable. I think what causes psychopaths to be judgmental is similar to what often causes it in neurotypicals, but many of the reasons that NTs are judgmental are totally missing for us.

For instance, I won’t be judgmental due to jealousy. That makes no sense to me because I cannot experience jealousy. However, not understanding someone’s circumstances or their internal experience and placing my assumptions of a situation over their reaction to it definitely leads to me drawing judgmental conclusions.

One of the best examples that I can provide would be giving the benefit of the doubt. I bet you all are sick to your skin hearing me lecture about not doing this. Seriously, stop it. Stop it right now. I will continue to judge you if you do this. However, and it is a big however, I did not, for the longest time, understand that trust is not something that you willingly give in most circumstances, but rather it is an automatic response in your emotional circuitry. There was a very bright lightbulb moment when I found the trust-oxytocin connection.

However, as much as I might understand that this isn’t a choice, I would think that cause-and-effect lessons would be taking place. What I mean by that is, you trust someone, they screw you over, and you realize that you shouldn’t have trusted them, You then, therefore, carry that lesson forward into your next interaction and are a bit more cautious. I would especially think this as trust violations seem to cause deep emotional harm, and humans are harm adverse, but even with that being true, it seems to be a lesson that a lot of people refuse to learn.

When I watch people trip over the same pitfall again and again, it causes me to question the sanity of that individual, especially when we have had talks about it. I don’t initiate these conversations, people come to me for advice. I offer it, they often refuse to listen, and the cycle repeats. It causes me to be judgy.

Humans use their world experience to respond to those around them. What you go through is how you are going to judge what someone else goes through that is similar. We are superimposing ourselves and our own experience onto that other person, and many times we’re wrong. Psychopaths are no different in this regard. In my case, you would think that I would stop being surprised, but this is my own version of the trust loop. I know that my experience is very different, but there are a lot of things that I have yet to encounter that will bring to light once again that I do not think like others, and often my opinion on their situation is misplaced.

I think this is a stumbling block for most people. It is pretty well impossible to have cognitive empathy for every person and every situation, but you would think at this point I would be very aware that when it comes to neurotypicals I have a great deal of continued learning that I will have to partake in and even then, that will be a small scratch on the surface.

I try to logic out why people do what they do. I evaluate their life circumstances, their emotional state, the hardwiring of humans in general, their emotional makeup, their intelligence level, and many other aspects when trying to figure out where they are coming from. Oftentimes I am successful, but there are many times I am not.

My opinion is just that. It’s mine, and I am a very fallible individual. We all are. I operate with the information that I have available to me, but as life continues it becomes more and more clear how little we have time to learn in our short lifespans. There is that saying:

The older I get the less I know.

I don’t think that is quite true. It isn’t that you know less, you simply become aware that there is so much that you don’t know that what you do know is often a guess based on a snippet of information. That amuses me because humans tend to be so certain of our certainty. As you age you learn more about how humans operate and how that tendency affects aspects of our lives that we never considered questioning.

When I started researching psychopathy I found so many issues with how studies are created and conducted, the assumptions about the motivations of psychopaths that are constructed through an emotional lens that psychopaths lack, the willingness to create the construct of psychopathy with aspects that should easily be discarded such as criminality, as well as many other failings that I have found in my reading. Once you see it in one place, you will question how common it is in others. From there, you begin to see it in many places and understand that the limitations of the human mind will taint our understanding of the world in which we live.

Our own minds are no different than this. I am more likely to take my opinion on something to be the correct one. I know that I tend to be logical and try to suss out things in the most reasoned way possible. Here is an example:

At the end of that land bridge is a place in Blandings, Utah called The Citadel. There was a guy who saw it while tooling around on Google Earth (mind you, he didn’t discover it, it was known, Google Earth is just how he himself came across it) and decided to take a trip out to see it. He captured some awesome drone images of this place and hiked across to explore the ruins.

His take on the Citadel was that it was a place that Native Americans would use as a place of defense. He thinks that it appears to be a heavily fortified position that a tribe could take against enemies. He explored it with that notion in his mind and described what he was seeing with the mentality that was what they were built for. It sets a tone, and I suppose one could arrive at that decision because of its isolation and its hardened exterior, but it seems totally illogical to arrive at that conclusion.

Perhaps it is due to constantly playing devil’s advocate in many places in my life. Being the devil’s advocate is basically the practice of building cognitive empathy, and it is how I tend to see all things in my life. I want to see other angles. When I consider the Citadel from the perspective of the enemy that it apparently was built to defend against, it would be a very poor design from the perspective of a tribe wanting to survive a war. There is no way to leave that place except the one road out. No food, no water source, no ability to flank the enemy.

If I was the advancing army and wanted to deal with a tribe that holed up at the Citadel, starving them out would take no effort on my part, and I would risk nothing by doing so. Those stuck in the Citadel would be at my mercy, and I cannot imagine going through the effort of building something like that and not one person stopped and said, “You know… one road in and out means we’re sitting ducks, and this will be our grave”. Someone would have said something. So, in my opinion, the Citadel was not built for that purpose, and yes, I am judging the guy who thinks that it was. It makes no logical sense, and it seems that he would struggle with surviving outside of the modern world.

Am I correct about my assumptions regarding the Citadel? I have no idea, but I am confident that my opinion regarding it is better informed than the YouTube guy’s. It seems to me to be obvious that if you tried standing against a warring faction at that location, you would not be long for this world.

I judge people based on what I think to be true, but what I think to be true may be no better informed than his opinion about the Citadel. It’s important to remember that I don’t know what I don’t know, and I don’t know a lot. I do my best to not become rigid in my opinions, especially those about other people’s experiences, because I only have my own life to base those opinions on. Being psychopathic means that I lack a great deal of information that neurotypicals rely on in their decision-making process and their emotional well-being. Expecting them to arrive at the same conclusions that I do when I lack many of those things entirely, but that doesn’t really change the fact that we are inclined to apply our own understandings to others and expect them to conform.

Psychopaths aren’t different in this regard. Because our inner workings are so different we are just as apt to arrive at incorrect conclusions, and without having exceptional cognitive empathy and an open mind to see how our perspective is flawed, we can be judgy when we otherwise shouldn’t be.