• Are you or someone you know a sociopath?
Probably not!
Antisocial personality disorder is a fairly rare mental illness that is frequently misdiagnosed.
So this definitely isn’t medical advice.
But even still, here are 10 of the most common signs of a sociopath.
10 – Narcissistic behavior • Narcissists think only of their own wants
and needs, and believe that other people basically exist to serve them.
• Sociopaths don’t care about the feelings of the people around them.
• Combine the two, and you have a sociopathic narcissist, someone who believes they deserve
to exploit people until they get tired of it.
• This type of person tends to overstate their accomplishments and demand praise and
admiration at all times.
They also tend to lash out and assign blame to others whenever they’re criticized.
9 – Quick to anger • Some people like to say that sociopaths
have no emotions.
But that’s not really true • Sociopaths are easy to anger for a variety
of reasons.
Sociopaths feel angry when they feel a lack of control around the people around them.
• In some cases, sociopaths might just get angry because they’re bored.
• It’s not so much that sociopaths don’t feel anything at all.
It’s that their emotions don’t really match up with their situation – like laughing
at a funeral, or getting angry about seeing a litter of puppies.
8 – No sense of duty or responsibility • Boredom is Public Enemy Number 1 when
it comes to sociopaths.
• Sociopaths live for the moment – what they want to do is whatever seems the most
entertaining to them at that exact moment.
• That means they don’t have a whole lot of use for long-term commitments or responsibilities.
• Some people worry about things like homework or bills or doing your job well.
If you’re a sociopath, you don’t really care about anything like that.
7 – Using charm to manipulate others • Because sociopaths are easily bored, they
can’t exactly curl up with a good book or binge-watch Netflix.
• They generally get their kicks from manipulating other people.
It doesn’t really matter what they’re getting those people to do.
• For them, the whole point is just the thrill they get out of being able to control
another human being with their words and actions.
• Which brings us to a related point… 6 – Lying for fun or for a thrill
• Most of the time when people lie to you, they have a good reason for it.
They’re trying to hide something, or they’re preparing a surprise.
• But for sociopaths, lying is just for the sake of lying.
• Frequently, there’s no real purpose behind it.
It’s just to see if they can get away with it.
• If there is a purpose, it’s probably related to that whole, “trying to manipulate
people” thing.
5 – Sex is purely physical • Sociopaths don’t really form meaningful
connections with other humans.
They have a difficult time seeing people as having emotions.
• But they’ll still have sex.
They just don’t make any sort of connection with whoever they’re having sex with.
• It’s a purely physical exchange – pleasure in the moment, just because it’s what they
feel like doing at that moment.
More than likely, it doesn’t really matter who they’re having sex with.
• That means you’re unlikely to get any sort of intimacy or romance out of sex with
a sociopath – and you can pretty much forget about foreplay.
• It’s not that they don’t WANT you to enjoy yourself – it’s just that they
don’t care.
• Of course, there are plenty of people who are bad lovers and not sociopaths.
They’re just bad at sex.
4 – Not learning from mistakes • Sociopaths tend to exhibit the same types
of behaviors over and over, never learning from their mistakes.
• But it isn’t so much that they’re not learning from their mistakes.
It’s more than they’re not even really recognizing that what they’re doing is,
in fact, a “mistake.”
• Sociopaths don’t generally see what they do as mistakes – even when most people
would.
• Both positive and negative outcomes to a situation are pretty much the same to a
sociopath.
They just want to see how it plays out.
• So if they make the same mistakes over and over, even when something bad happened
last time, it’s probably because they see the outcome as “interesting,” more than
they see it as “bad.”
3 - Impulsivity • If you’ve been paying attention up to
this point, it shouldn’t surprise you that sociopaths are impulsive.
• Because consequences aren’t particularly important to them, sociopaths sort of just
do whatever comes to them.
• Staving off boredom is the most important thing in this case, so if they feel like they
want to go out, they’ll go out.
• That impulsivity also applies to conversation.
They’ll always say exactly what’s on their mind – even if it’s rude, mean, or untimely.
2 – Friends are easy to make, hard to keep • Antisocial personality disorder is a mental
illness, and someone being a sociopath doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t want to
make friends.
• In fact, they often have a fairly easy time with the early parts of friendship – when
it’s just about spontaneously interacting with people.
• But friendships with sociopaths generally don’t last long, especially once they start
growing and developing emotional depth.
1 – Feeling no empathy • This is really the biggest sign of a sociopath
– the inability to empathize.
• Feeling empathy means you have a good feel for the emotions of others.
If you can empathize, you know which of your actions will make people happy, sad, angry,
and so on.
• More importantly, you actually care.
And generally, you go for more of the positive-emotion things than the negative things.
• Unless you have no empathy.
And then you don’t really differentiate between other peoples’ good and bad emotions,
and you don’t really care which one you cause – you’re just curious about reactions.