If you don't have a conscience, what is your behavior like? Apparently, if you don't have a conscience, if you don't really . . . love, then the only thing that's left for you is the game - it's about controlling things.

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.

The ultimate manipulation is to kill someone, and sociopathy is murderous in a psychological sense - there's a kind of soul-murder going on.

I think con man is the usual term. When somebody comes on television to tell a lot of needy people that God will send them to heaven if they send him $200, if that's not downright sociopathic, it's close.

An intelligent sociopath can learn the rules about what's good and what's bad, what people see as good and bad. But they don't get that intervening sense of guilt, that pang of conscience, on account of it. So they tend to know what's wrong or right, they just don't care. That's another thing that they can use against us: that we do care. We're predictable in that.

Sociopaths are often extremely charming. They are people who are better than you and me at charming people, at being charismatic. I've heard this more often than I can count: "He was the most charming man I ever met," or, "She was the sexiest woman I ever met," or, "The most interesting person I ever met . . ."

I was once doing a book signing and a man came up to me and said that he gave classes to people who'd been convicted of drunken driving twice. He said he felt that nearly all of those people were what I was describing as sociopathic. Which makes a great deal of sense to me. We always talk about how could you possibly, knowing that you're drunk, get behind the wheel of a car again and do that? Well, you could if you didn't give a half a damn what happened.