Sociopaths are not inhibited by the notion that it's wrong to be addicted, or wrong to buy illegal drugs. Also, drinking or taking drugs can be a lot of fun, and even if it's not, it can dull that painful boredom for a while. So can certain other things, like taking risks, and particularly if you take a risk-averse person and you can manipulate him or her into taking risks, that's really fun.

When you were a child, where boredom could actually get to be painful. Sociopaths experience that kind of pain in boredom. And so to be alone, to have nobody to play the game with, can be painful. It's not exactly fear, it's a kind of pain.

I would hesitate to tell people to stop being kind or sympathetic to sociopath. But just like loyalty, some things that can be taken advantage of are empathy, sympathy, and our tendency to pity somebody when something has gone wrong in their life.

The physical basis for sociopathy is approximately 50 percent inheritable, which sounds more dramatic than it probably is, because most personality characteristics that psychologists test for and study the genetics of are about 50 percent inheritable. Introversion, extroversion, it turns out that they're about 50 percent inheritable, which means that somehow sociopathy is physical, it's organic.

Sociopaths are not afraid of very much, except for physical harm and dying - really primitive, basic kinds of fears. The problem with being alone for a sociopath is boredom.

Being sociopath is not what most people would consider to be winning. Most of us have some kind of positive goal in mind when we think of winning. A sociopath thinks in terms of successfully manipulating someone into doing something that he or she would not have done otherwise. That can be a small thing or a tremendous thing, but the point for the sociopath is to win, to make sure that this person does what they're trying to coerce him or her into doing. It can be as disgusting and as simple as making a child cry. Or it can be as complex as making your wife feel bad about herself.

Sociopathy is the inability to process emotional experience, including love and caring, except when such experience can be calculated as a coldly intellectual task.