sometimes the personalities at the helm of the madness industry are, with their drives and obsessions, as mad in their own way as those they study. And that relatively ordinary people are, more and mo...
When I became a vegetarian. I missed the steak, although not as much as I’d anticipated, but I could no longer ignore the slaughterhouse. I
There is no evidence that we've been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fash...
The sad thing was that Lindsey had incurred the Internet’s wrath because she was impudent and playful and foolhardy and outspoken. And now here she was, working with Farukh to reduce herself to safe b...
The common assumption is that public punishments died out in the new great metropolises because they’d been judged useless. Everyone was too busy being industrious to bother to trail some transgressor...
So you faked it to give Zimbardo a better study? I asked. It was completely deliberate on my part, he replied. I planned it. I mapped it out. I carried it through. It was all done for a purpose. I tho...
She paused. But 4chan aims to degrade the target, right? And one of the highest degradations for women in our culture is rape. We don’t talk about rape of men, so I think it doesn’t occur to most peop...
Psychiatric diagnoses are getting closer and closer to the boundary of normal, said Allen Frances.
It may be somewhat paradoxical to refer to shame as a ‘feeling’, for while shame is initially painful, constant shaming leads to a deadening of feeling. Shame, like cold, is, in essence, the absence o...
If I had a spouse and two kids to support I certainly would not be telling ‘jokes’ like he was doing at a conference.
I would also say you can never reduce any person to a diagnostic label.
I vaguely remembered hearing psychologists say there was a preponderance of psychopaths at the top—in the corporate and political worlds—a clinical absence of empathy being a benefit in those environm...
I had to remind myself that it’s good for journalists to feel demeaned. It means we’re onto a story.
I couldn't see where the collection of Burger King figurines fit in, but I supposed there was no reason why psychopaths shouldn't have unrelated hobbies.
Goebbels thinks that no one since the Frenchman LeBon has understood the mind of the masses as well as he, wrote Goebbels’s aide Rudolf Semmler in his wartime diary.
For the first hundred years, as far as I could tell, all that happened in America was that various people named Nathaniel had purchased land near rivers.
But with social media, we’ve created a stage for constant artificial high drama. Every day a new person emerges as a magnificent hero or a sickening villain.
But at the core of psychopathy is a lack of moral restraint.
According to Google’s own research into our eye movements, 53 percent of us don’t go beyond the first two search results, and 89 percent don’t look down past the first page.
If a person was overcome by a violent madness he’d involuntarily start to sound like someone from Louisiana.