The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus The Rest Of Us

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of mental illness and emotional abuse.

Stout explores the precarious nature of the conscience in those who do not have ASPD. She points out that even for people who have a conscience, their conscience is vulnerable to all sorts of internal and external influences that might weaken it. Some of these are physiological, such as illness or hormonal imbalance; others are social, such as the habit of moral exclusion, in which certain groups of people are conceptualized as subhuman and thus deserving of abuse. 

Authority and obedience also have a profound effect on the conscience, particularly when the authority figure is perceived as credible and “above” the person doing the obeying. In the famous Stanley Milgram obedience experiment, participants were instructed to “teach” another participant by shocking them with increasing levels of intensity. The shocks were not real, but the participant would hear fake cries and calls for help that imitated suffering in the other.

Through all these experiments, Milgram found that on average, six of 10 participants were willing to shock the other participant to full intensity, and those who resisted were more likely to do so if they perceived themselves as equal to the authority figure.