I recently read a fascinating article entitled Can You Call A Nine Year Old A Psychopath? and I thought I would share my thoughts about it.

It tells of a nine year old boy named Michael who shows all the signs of what in an adult would be called sociopathic behaviour. He’s impulsive, he’s manipulative, he flies into uncontrollable violent rages for seemingly no reason, he shows no signs of empathy or regret.

He is a little monster, by most people’s estimation. An evil child, a bad seed, a demon in disguise.

But what of his parents? They did nothing wrong. They are not neglectful or abusive. By any measure, they are good parents. And they have two younger children who are perfectly normal. These children are being raised by the same parents an Michael in the same environment.

This would seem to rule out both environment and genetics. Or does it?

Michael’s father, Miguel, admits that he was an extremely difficult child who was always getting into trouble and flying into rages. He was not nearly as extreme as Michael, but it is still something to think about when examining this question.

According to Miguel, at one point, he just “grew up” and learned to behave.

That is a highly intriguing notion, especially since there is strong evidence that children like Michale have a very distinct deficit in brain function in key areas involving empathy and recognizing emotions in others. Is it possible to grow out of a brain defect?

The brain is pretty good at routing around damage and restoring function. Perhaps in Miguel’s case, his brain eventually figure out how to connect those parts of the brain that were not working via other means.

The article says that half of the children who test positive for sociopathic tendencies do not go on to become sociopathic adults.

Could it be that they, too, “grow out” of their problems?

Maybe at some point, the sociopath’s drive to better mimic normal behaviour can actually end up activating the parts of our brain that we use to model the behaviour of others and create the little versions of others in our minds that we use to predict their behaviour.

And this is the precursor to true empathy. So maybe they never quite entirely develop true emotional empathy, but they develop their intellectual empathy to the point where it is so tightly integrated into their psyche that it is practically the same thing.

Also in the article, they speak of a researcher who specializes in these kinds of children, whom he calls Callous Unresponsives, or CU kids.

Dedicating yourself to studying these kids is brave enough. Unlike their parents, who love them no matter how evilly they behave, most people find these kids intolerable.

Not only that, but the ethical challenges are profound. Repeatedly, the article states how dangerous it would be to label a child a sociopath. It is considered untreatable, for one, and so you would be basically saying “this child is incurably bad and the only thing we can do is lock this child up for the rest of their life to keep them from harming others.

And that flies in the face of entire societal notion of children. We have strong beliefs in both the innocence and the plasticity of children. The idea that some children are just plain evil and there is nothing you can do for them but take them from their parents forever and lock them away is simply intolerable in light of these beliefs.

But not only is this man willing to study these children and face these issues, he actually organized a summer camp for these children!

And even though there was only 12 children versus 6 counselors, they were still a nightmare to handle.

Hardly surprising. These are the ultimate behavioral hard cases. One child even came up with a signal for them all to run away at the same time but in different directions. A girl smuggled in some small toys to use to bribe other kids to do bad things at her command.

It was worth it, however, because a lot of good field research was done. I was particularly interested in how these children related to one another.

I supposed that perhaps they would recognize a certain kinship in one another. Not a warm kinship, obviously, but at least a chilly recognition of similarity.

No sign of that, really. But what I would really love to see done with this children is to videotape their behaviour and then get them to watch the videos, and explain their own behaviour.

Thus, you would be using the technology of video to give them the self-reflective capacity they lack.

And no doubt, at first they would resist quite angrily. They would declare it “stupid” or “boring” and not know what this has to do with anything.

But my prediction would be that this exercise would make them extremely uncomfortable, perhaps even cause them pain, at least at first.

It would be stimulating that very part of the brain that is broken in them, and this would cause them distress. But if you kept it up, and asked important questions like “Why does this bother you so much?”, you might be able to engage their intellectual curiosity about their own motivations.

This would be especially effective if you can show the child examples of where their behaviour went directly against their own self-interest.

You would show them an example of them not getting what they wanted because of their impulsive anger, and then say “Well, that was pretty stupid, wasn’t it? Why would you do something like that?”

And in making them answer this question, you might just start them on the road to the sort of understanding of their own reasons and motivations that might in turn lead to understanding others.

Or you might just train them to be more effective manipulators.

But I think the experiment would be worth a try.

Get them to connect with the one person they care about… themselves.