picture someone who is socially domineering, highly emotionally resilient, and adventurous. That person will be loud, brash, dominant in every situation, willing to take lots of risks, and he won’t give a fuck. That’s a psychopath.

Psychopaths are amoral (they have no moral compass). Sociopaths are immoral (they have a reasonable understanding between right and wrong, and they choose to be wrong).

there is a strong link between genes and psychopathy. There is also a strong link between a negative environment and psychopathy. And, when the two are combined, it can get ugly.

the environmental risk factors associated with psychopathy more often lead to issues with depression, anxiety and PTSD than they do to psychopathy. It’s not that those risk factors never lead to psychopathy—it’s just that they tend to lead to other mental illnesses instead.

When people are antisocial, they are against other people—they don’t like people and do terrible things to them.

They feel they are entitled to whatever they want, and they either ignore the feelings of others or are unable to comprehend them.

key difference between psychopaths and so-called normal people, or even criminals who are not psychopaths, is guilt or shame.

first wrote about and coined the term theory of mind in a 1978 article about chimpanzees. They stated, “An individual has a theory of mind if he imputes mental states to himself and others.” Impute is a fancy word for “attribute,” by the way.

Sociopaths also experience no guilt or shame, although they are able to fake it.