1 out of 25 Business Leaders is a Psychopath

[Joelcool7]

sapphi_snake said:

Joelcool7 said:

Yes I read the article a lot of those traits are found in all sorts of people I would hardly call them all psychopaths. If you follow those traits then Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are all psychopaths. In fact almost every successful business man on earth is a psychopath. Blind ambition is not something that should make you a psychopath.

About half or more of those symptoms are common. Just look at North America everyone is only looking out for themselves. Even going by what we eat and how we treat others its all psychopathic according to this article.

Also I have autism and some of those traits apply. I don't understand body language, sarcasm and while I feel emotion myself I have a very hard time understanding peoples emotions.

So that makes me a psychopath now doesn't it?

As I said just because somebody has some quirks and such. They may even have trouble with empathy and understanding emotion. That doesn't make them psychopaths. People who hurt others for fun because they can't mentally stop. Those are psychopaths, most of the traits up their describe normal people or people with slight disabilities.

Not everyone with a disability is a psychopath!

No, it makes you autistic.

And if you would've read the article properly (it's the obonly explanation I can give for your not understanding of it), you'd know that the people singled out DO HURT PEOPLE FOR FUN (check out my second link). And this article doesn't say that succesful business people are psychopaths, just that a psychopath display traits that will get him ahead in the contemporary business world. I don't see how anyone can say that lack of empathyand lack of remorse for hurting others are mere 'quirks'. The only thing separating these people from those who go out and kill people is that they didn't have a violent childhood.

I don't really know why you'd say that those 3 business men you'd mentioned would be considered psychopaths, other than you've misunderstood the article totally (granted, if the portrayal of Zuckeberg in The Social Network is accurate, then he really is a psychopath; I don't know much about Jobs, but Gates is too humanitarian to be a psychopath).

I don't understand the article if it is not insisting that people with those traits are psychopaths.

Your right and wrong. Bosses often fire people for all kinds of reasons. The reason they tell you may not be the real reason at all they just have to get rid of you. If they do fire people for fun thats sorta twisted but that wouldn't work well in a business and I doubt many businessmen do so. Their are almost always good reasons to fire somebody.

This brings us back to selfish ambition. Yah I know of bosses who laid off staff because they were getting to many raises and were to expensive. He wanted to increase profitability so staff mysteriously get fired and new staff hired. Its pretty common at many work places that the staff don't last longer then a year or two.

Would I say every greedy son of a bitch who fires without remorse is a psychopath ? No, they are selfish greedy SOB's but they are not psychopaths. To advance in business eventually your going to burn people, everyone who is in high ranking positions has burnt bridges and done things like what the article describes.

I agree the boss who got upset at the employee for having a grad and finding out her dad had cancer is a prick. He's an ass hole who is and was only thinking about himself. But we also don't know what his other reasonings are, the article says he got upset with her on other occasions as well. She also got fired so theirs some bias their.

In the end I think labelling people Psychopaths should be done very very cautiously. I don't think the majority of those symptoms or even the story about that boss equal psychopath.