[nostrademons]

Usually the defining characteristic of a psychopath is an inability to feel shame, remorse, or empathy. If you catch someone with narcissistic personality disorder in a lie or situation where they've hurt someone and call them out on it, the response is usually bluster, a frantic attempt to shore up ego. If you catch someone with borderline personality disorder or just plain deep insecurity, they'll often deflate and get downcast. Catch a secure person and they'll apologize and try to make things right. Catch a psychopath and they'll react rationally to further their own interests - they completely lack an emotional response to hurting people.

[gohrt]

hmm.. In some sense, a psychopath is someone who is perfectly cool under (social) pressure.

When a normal person gets into a dispute, they worry about saving face and moral obligations, instinctively comfort (or maybe attack) the other person, etc, in an "I-Thou" situation. But a psychopath just sees a dispute as an "I-It" situation, like seeing a puddle on the sidewalk, something to casually (or carefully) navigate around, or (in the worst case) plow through and brush off.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Buber

[tfb]

Thanks for that explanation. That's a really effective way to look at it, I think.