Pieter Hintjens - The Psychopath Code - Cracking the Predators That Stalk Us

Fear of others shows in our body language [20] http://www.scribd.com/doc/35330362/Attracting-Assault-Victims-Nonverbal-Cues-Grayson-Stein#scribd . Abuse victims lift their feet higher while walking. They take longer or shorter strides than average. They twitch their hands and feet. They avoid eye contact. They use submissive and defensive body postures.

All these cues are easy to read, if you have the right mind. Studies of criminal psychopaths show how psychopaths pick-up on such cues [21] https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/take-all-prisoners/201001/vulnerability-and-other-prey-psychopaths .

I’ve no figures for how fast this happens, only anecdotal reports. I’d guess Mallory can work a hundred people in ten minutes or so.

Mallory, looking for plausible targets, strolls through the crowd. She projects her sexuality just a little louder than the other women. She is looking for solitary, prosperous males. She watches how men look at her, and sees one nervous reaction that intrigues her. She goes up and shakes her hair, breathes in, smiles to him. She watches the man’s face. He stares a little too long. She smiles to herself.

After choosing Bob out of all the potential targets, Mallory moves in. There is no visible chase, no running and screaming. The movies don’t tell the truth. Mallory slides in like a long lost friend. She seem so nice, harmless, and sincere.

She opens with a range of tactics that depends on the context. These attacks work at the instinctive level, both in the attacker and the target. She begins with broad, unfocused probing. As Bob responds instinctively, Mallory shifts, tunes, and cranks up her game.

The triggers for instinctive responses are usually simple caricatures. Evolution is lazy like that. For example, in many people a spider triggers screaming fear. That trigger sits in our genes as a dark dot with many legs. And we fear the specific way those legs move [22] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2158452/The-shape-fear—spiders-scare-Humans-hardwired-fear-angular-legs-unpredictability.html . A cartoon spider which walks the right way is as scary as a real spider. Make it walk like a daddy long legs, and it looks harmless. Exaggerate the spider walk, and the cartoon spider is scarier than a real spider.

Isolate and amplify the trigger, and you can amplify the response. There is no ceiling to this. Take our species' sweet tooth. We respond instinctively to fructose, which wild plants stuff into fruit in low doses. The sweetness hits the same areas of the brain as a drug like cocaine. In nature, this drove our primate ancestors to eat as much fruit as they could find. Then we bred ever-sweeter fruit. Then we refined sugar and began to load it into our diet. We eat hundreds of pounds of sugar a year, to the point of self-destruction.

At no point in this story did we hit a limit in our instinctive response to fructose. Instead, the more we consume, the happier it seems to make us.

This escalating response to concentrated triggering is a known phenomenon, called "supernormal stimuli."

Predators and parasites are specialists at using supernormal stimuli on their prey. They force behavior that is self-penalizing and illogical until you understand the trigger mechanism. So, a parasitic bird species may hijack the triggers young chicks use to beg for food. For example, an open red mouth. The parasite imitates and exaggerates the trigger. This makes the parent bird feed the parasitic chick before its own offspring.

In the deepest ocean waters, the angler fish dangles a bright bait that shines in the dark. This triggers prey fish to swim towards its toothy trap of a mouth.

Or, take the eggs of a tree-nesting songbird. These are often pale blue with dark-gray or brown spots. This particular color scheme triggers the female or male to sit on the eggs. Perhaps instead of sitting on random stones, or eggs of a different species. The parasitic cuckoo lays eggs that are larger, and bluer, with darker dots. This causes the songbird to prefer the cuckoo’s eggs over its own.

The arms race between parasite and host creates a natural balance. Overusing the trigger turns it against the parasite. If the cuckoo makes its eggs too attractive, vulnerable songbirds won’t reproduce at all. Songbirds that don’t react to the trigger will get an advantage, and dominate. For a parasite, killing the host is a losing strategy. It means only resistant hosts will reproduce.

Niko Tinbergen, the biologist who discovered and named supernormal stimuli, built plaster eggs. He found that birds preferred larger eggs than their own normal eggs. They preferred more saturated colors than normal. And they preferred more exaggerated markings than normal.

So instead of a small light blue gray-dappled egg, he’d offer a songbird a fake. His egg was huge and bright blue, with large black dots. The bird would try to sit on this egg, over and over, and keep falling off.

It may make you laugh, yet for the bird this is insane behavior. We see that supernormal stimuli can produce insane behavior from well-evolved instincts. It is a evolutionary loophole many predators and parasites exploit. It is one human psychopaths often use to manipulate their targets into position.

In 1989, Clark and Hatfield of Florida State University ran an infamous study [23] http://www.lehmiller.com/blog/2013/9/23/what-would-happen-if-you-asked-100-female-strangers-for-sex . Their attractive research assistants walked around campus, making hookup offers.

The results are well-known. More than half of men accepted a date, even more were willing to go home with a strange woman. Three-quarters accepted an outright offer of sex. In contrast, women generally said "no." Students are perhaps not typical of the general population. Yet others have reproduced similar results.

I’ll come to the gender difference in a second. The original study suggested women don’t have casual sex. We know that is false, at least in some contexts. My first question is, "how can so many men be so easily hooked?" You might say, the risks that casual sex exposes men to are low, and yet that is not true. There’s the obvious risk of disease and surprise parenthood. And there is the much higher risk the whole thing is a set-up for one, or other, form of mugging.

And yet most men will say "sure!" How can a woman’s charm be such an effective bait? Are men desperate, horny and foolish? Are women smarter? Well, perhaps, yet the answer is more subtle than that. It also turns out women are no more resistant than men. It is a matter of using the appropriate bait.

As we answer these questions, we see how significant gender is. It plays a key role in the psychopath’s opening moves. There are four distinct patterns: female-to-male, male-to-female, male-to-male, and female-to-female. Many of our social instincts tend towards masculine and feminine poles, like our bodies.

Our bodies and minds default to female. As a male develops, timed bursts of testosterone shift body and mind to male. Men and women differ in mind and body, driven by evolution.

So when I say "male," this includes women with male-typical instincts. And when I say "female," it includes men with female-typical instincts. These opening moves do not assume heterosexual normality. Psychopaths often have a fluid sexual identity [24] http://psychopathsandlove.com/a-hidden-fact-of-psychopaths-they-have-no-gender/ . They will be as confident and predatory as homosexuals as they are as heterosexuals.

The "anti-social" part of psychopathy does not mean "not wanting the company of others." It means "not respecting social norms and customs." Psychopaths tend to be hyper-social, and obsessed with making new friends. It goes with the territory.