The Pity Play - Tipoff Play of Sociopath

[Alanzo]

no offense, but totally missing the point... dear homina-homina... this place is the absolute waste-bucket of mis-assigning logical fallacies. and I don't think you meant it with malice, but omfg... No, that's not what is going on if people look at it rationally; if they go into the psycho "name the SP" of the cult, yeah, then that will probably happen.

The idiotic vehemence that I have seen on this board that couches itself behind claiming use of logical fallacies against the 'defense', just pisses me off. No, I haven't kept records, but... I've seen it happen. I've said before, that I forwarded stuff onto a professor with whom I was studying the Trivium, and he pretty much went WTF? There's a chance some of this crap might wind up in his future curriculum. You guys made it public record... so... ??

Name the instance, name your complaint. I have a got a lot out of what a lot of you have posted here in the past Alanzo, but maybe I'm old and itching for a fight. Name the logical fallacy and the instance... and if it's there, I promise I will note it. It does happen, but I'm so freaking sick of people naming logical fallacy when none existed, that I guess I'm willing to finally put on the armor... and dang-it, the poster who I will not name, knows who he is and drove me to this... aargh. I seriously was trying to sleep, but you tugged on my conscious... dang.

I don't want to get you mad, but it's like this.

Ralph was hungover one day, and decided to order a large pizza from Pizza World. The pizza came with a 2 liter of Coke, and it was exactly what Ralph needed. Ralph sat on his couch watching football and eating the pizza.

Soon Ralph looked down, and he saw that he had eaten the whole large pizza by himself.

This is where the logical fallacy would be, from this one instance, to call Ralph an "OVEREATER". And from now on we would treat Ralph as an OVEREATER. Because that's what we would call him and think about him whenever we saw him.

OVEREATER

Next, Donna had been broken up from her boyfriend for 3 months. She'd arrived home from work on a Friday afternoon, after a long and very productive week. She feels pretty good and wants to go out. She calls some of her friends while she reaches into the refrigerator and opens a beer. After about 5 calls, Donna has no friends to go out with, they are all doing something else tonight.

So Donna, bummed, opens another beer and sits down to watch TV. She doesn't want to be here. She wants to go out. She takes another beer from the refrigerator and says, "fuck it. I'm going to the corner bar by myself tonight."

She takes a shower and gets dressed. She decides to walk to the bar, since it is only a few blocks. She walks in and sits at the bar and orders a beer. A guy sits next to her and starts talking to her. He is funny and she thinks he's cute, and they drink 3 or 4 more beers together with non stop laughing and delightful conversation. It turns out the guy knew Donna's little sister from a college athletics team. He was an assistant coach there. She remembers her little sister talking very favorably about him.

He asks her if she wants to leave with him and go somewhere else. They get some tacos and take them back to his house to eat them.

Donna spends the night with him.

Donna is a SLUT.

Calling Donna a SLUT is the logical fallacy which using these forms of manipulation to find out whether a person is a SOCIOPATH also is.

What's the name of that logical fallacy?

Alanzo

 

[Free Being Me]

I just look at what people are doing and saying. I can find the red flags, purple flags, whatever color ones. By the fruits of their labors shall ye know them.

I already left a cult that tried so very hard to quantify others that they ended up labeling people, and, in effect, branding them. Lots of labels there.

I guess that some diagnoses are a good idea, but I just think there are some pitfalls.

My posts are directed at identifying manipulation as self help tools to recognize manipulative abuse, hence the repeated and repeated stress for context and clarity. That's the odd thing about manipulation, if one doesn't understand it, one loses clarity and all their flags.

 

[TG1]

What's the name of that logical fallacy?

Alanzo

Straw man?

Judgmental language?

Appeal to motive?

Appeal to emotion?

Appeal to consequences?

Two wrongs make a right?

Others?

 

[Alanzo]

Straw man?

Judgmental language?

Appeal to motive?

Appeal to emotion?

Appeal to consequences?

Two wrongs make a right?

Others?

Maybe it's two different cognitive distortions of

Jumping to Conclusions

and

Labeling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_distortions#Main_cognitive_distortions

TG1 - Did you start this thread because you saw me posting about personal stuff to Free to Shine and to Bardol Thodal, and wanted to warn the board that I had just exhibited the "Pity Play", the Tipoff Play of the Sociopath?

It would be easy for you to deny it..But will you answer my question truthfully?

Do you see me as a sociopath?

Answer truthfully, and non-manipulatively, please.

Alanzo

 

[Gib]

I don't want to get you mad, but it's like this.

Ralph was hungover one day, and decided to order a large pizza from Pizza World. The pizza came with a 2 liter of Coke, and it was exactly what Ralph needed. Ralph sat on his couch watching football and eating the pizza.

Soon Ralph looked down, and he saw that he had eaten the whole large pizza by himself.

This is where the logical fallacy would be, from this one instance, to call Ralph an "OVEREATER". And from now on we would treat Ralph as an OVEREATER. Because that's what we would call him and think about him whenever we saw him.

OVEREATER

Next, Donna had been broken up from her boyfriend for 3 months. She'd arrived home from work on a Friday afternoon, after a long and very productive week. She feels pretty good and wants to go out. She calls some of her friends while she reaches into the refrigerator and opens a beer. After about 5 calls, Donna has no friends to go out with, they are all doing something else tonight.

So Donna, bummed, opens another beer and sits down to watch TV. She doesn't want to be here. She wants to go out. She takes another beer from the refrigerator and says, "fuck it. I'm going to the corner bar by myself tonight."

She takes a shower and gets dressed. She decides to walk to the bar, since it is only a few blocks. She walks in and sits at the bar and orders a beer. A guy sits next to her and starts talking to her. He is funny and she thinks he's cute, and they drink 3 or 4 more beers together with non stop laughing and delightful conversation. It turns out the guy knew Donna's little sister from a college athletics team. He was an assistant coach there. She remembers her little sister talking very favorably about him.

He asks her if she wants to leave with him and go somewhere else. They get some tacos and take them back to his house to eat them.

Donna spends the night with him.

Donna is a SLUT.

Calling Donna a SLUT is the logical fallacy which using these forms of manipulation to find out whether a person is a SOCIOPATH also is.

What's the name of that logical fallacy?

Alanzo

so A=A

which is what hubbard did in his construct of the reactive mind and book dianetics.

he got people to believe in his "logical fallacy" ?

 

[Caroline]

I don't want to get you mad, but it's like this.

Ralph was hungover one day, and decided to order a large pizza from Pizza World. The pizza came with a 2 liter of Coke, and it was exactly what Ralph needed. Ralph sat on his couch watching football and eating the pizza.

Soon Ralph looked down, and he saw that he had eaten the whole large pizza by himself.

This is where the logical fallacy would be, from this one instance, to call Ralph an "OVEREATER". And from now on we would treat Ralph as an OVEREATER. Because that's what we would call him and think about him whenever we saw him.

OVEREATER

Next, Donna had been broken up from her boyfriend for 3 months. She'd arrived home from work on a Friday afternoon, after a long and very productive week. She feels pretty good and wants to go out. She calls some of her friends while she reaches into the refrigerator and opens a beer. After about 5 calls, Donna has no friends to go out with, they are all doing something else tonight.

So Donna, bummed, opens another beer and sits down to watch TV. She doesn't want to be here. She wants to go out. She takes another beer from the refrigerator and says, "fuck it. I'm going to the corner bar by myself tonight."

She takes a shower and gets dressed. She decides to walk to the bar, since it is only a few blocks. She walks in and sits at the bar and orders a beer. A guy sits next to her and starts talking to her. He is funny and she thinks he's cute, and they drink 3 or 4 more beers together with non stop laughing and delightful conversation. It turns out the guy knew Donna's little sister from a college athletics team. He was an assistant coach there. She remembers her little sister talking very favorably about him.

He asks her if she wants to leave with him and go somewhere else. They get some tacos and take them back to his house to eat them.

Donna spends the night with him.

Donna is a SLUT.

Calling Donna a SLUT is the logical fallacy which using these forms of manipulation to find out whether a person is a SOCIOPATH also is.

What's the name of that logical fallacy?

Alanzo

I think it'd be a value judgment. amirite?

 

[Free Being Me]

Are You Being Manipulated by a Social Puppeteer? (Full article at link)
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/spycatcher/201301/are-you-being-manipulated-social-puppeteer

At some point in our lives we have all been taken advantage of emotionally, physically, psychologically, or perhaps even financially. These events are painful, even devastating, and fortunately, for most of us, these encounters are infrequent. Sometimes there are relationships that unfortunately last far too long for our own well being, where we are repeatedly taken advantage of and made to feel as if we are merely puppets – controlled and manipulated.

 

[Alanzo]

so A=A

which is what hubbard did in his construct of the reactive mind and book dianetics.

he got people to believe in his "logical fallacy" ?

It's taking the whole of a human being, all the wildly variable situations and pressures that they have responded to, picking out one or two of them and without wanting or feeling they need any understanding of the inner motivations of that person and what was going on inside him to prompt his behaviors - and summing up all the many things the person is with one word - SOCIOPATH.

Another very important and very fundamental psychological concept could be at work here:

The Fundamental Attribution Error, or what is also called the Observer/Actor Bias:

In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) is the tendency to overestimate the effect of disposition or personality and underestimate the effect of the situation in explaining social behavior. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain the behavior of others. It does not explain interpretations of one's own behavior — where situational factors are more easily recognized and can thus be taken into consideration. This discrepancy between attributions for one's own behavior and for that of others is known as the actor–observer bias.

As a simple example, consider a situation where Alice, a driver, is about to pass through an intersection. Her light turns green, and she begins to accelerate when another car drives through the red light and crosses in front of her. The fundamental attribution error may lead her to think that the driver of the other car was an unskilled or reckless driver. This will be an error if the other driver had a good reason for running the light, such as rushing a patient to the hospital. If Alice had been driving the other car, she would have understood that the situation called for speed at the cost of safety, but when seeing it from the outside she was inclined to believe that the behavior of the other driver reflected their fundamental nature (having poor driving skills or a reckless attitude).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

Alanzo

 

[Purple Rain]

Maybe it's two different cognitive distortions of

Jumping to Conclusions

and

Labeling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_distortions#Main_cognitive_distortions

TG1 - Did you start this thread because you saw me posting about personal stuff to Free to Shine and to Bardol Thodal, and wanted to warn the board that I had just exhibited the "Pity Play", the Tipoff Play of the Sociopath?

It would be easy for you to deny it..But will you answer my question truthfully?

Do you see me as a sociopath?

Answer truthfully, and non-manipulatively, please.

Alanzo

I don't see you as a sociopath, Alanzo, from how I have seen you interact with others on other boards and the posts I have read there.

I do consider you unwise to come into a group of friends and start criticising someone they care about, especially when that person owns and runs that particular piece of internet real estate.

I don't know the history of the terrible feud between you and Emma, and nor do I want to. I think if you are truly here to be with your friends, then the ignore button is your friend. Seriously, I use it quite a bit. You and Emma don't need to keep hurting each other. I even suspect that it hurts you both so much because you once really cared for each other. Nevertheless, that is just speculation on my part.

I feel, if you want to be here with your friends, there is every bit of possibility for you to do that if you can let go of the bitterness and the past. There might even be wonderful new friendships here for you to make that you never would have suspected. This could be a wonderful time and place for you in your life. You didn't make many thousands of posts because you disliked it here.

If you are willing to risk the happiness of others here just to "win" then maybe that is a bit sociopathic - but it would not be the first time I've seen that kind of behaviour here and that episode has been mostly forgiven if not forgotten with those posters making (usually) very valuable contributions to the board these days.

You need to realise that everyone here is not against you personally, but remember that we already have an established relationship with Emma, who we love frankly. I do wish you well, no matter how things end up for you here on the board.

I could write more, but that will do for now.

 

[Alanzo]

I don't see you as a sociopath, Alanzo, from how I have seen you interact with others on other boards and the posts I have read there.

I do consider you unwise to come into a group of friends and start criticising someone they care about, especially when that person owns and runs that particular piece of internet real estate.

I don't know the history of the terrible feud between you and Emma, and nor do I want to. I think if you are truly here to be with your friends, then the ignore button is your friend. Seriously, I use it quite a bit. You and Emma don't need to keep hurting each other. I even suspect that it hurts you both so much because you once really cared for each other. Nevertheless, that is just speculation on my part.

I feel, if you want to be here with your friends, there is every bit of possibility for you to do that if you can let go of the bitterness and the past. There might even be wonderful new friendships here for you to make that you never would have suspected. This could be a wonderful time and place for you in your life. You didn't make many thousands of posts because you disliked it here.

If you are willing to risk the happiness of others here just to "win" then maybe that is a bit sociopathic - but it would not be the first time I've seen that kind of behaviour here and that episode has been mostly forgiven if not forgotten with those posters making (usually) very valuable contributions to the board these days.

You need to realise that everyone here is not against you personally, but remember that we already have an established relationship with Emma, who we love frankly. I do wish you well, no matter how things end up for you here on the board.

I could write more, but that will do for now.

Yes, that episode with Emma is very much in the past and has nothing to do with my question to TG1.

And yes, I have been unwise in the past, as well. For sure. As we all have.

But this thread is right here and right now.

If you have ever been obliquely or hinted at being called a "sociopath", then you would understand why I would just want it to come out in the open right here and right now and be done with it. If you go into yourself and see how it would feel if it were done to you, then you would have a good grasp on what it feels like to me to have it done to me. Human beings are really not that different from each other - especially in the ways that we suffer - and these ideas of SOCIOPATHS tend to try to teach people that we are different.

That's why I asked TG1 this question.

Alanzo

Edit: Purple - what do you think of the fundamental attribution error? Have you ever heard of it? I think it is one of the most civilizing concepts that any branch of psychology has ever produced. When you really study it and think about it, it really produces a "walk a mile in another man's sandals" kind of viewpoint.

That's really really missing in this concept of SOCIOPATH.

 

[TG1]

Alanzo, never having met you before, I don't know if you're a sociopath. I don't know how anyone could tell that on a message board.

Unlike you, I think sociopaths exist. They don't all commit capital crimes. They're leaders in communities, companies, schools, online communities, government, hospitals, law firms, construction crews, police forces, and bars. They're also seconds-in-command and powers behind the throne. They're not that rare.

And they're not that ridiculous thing we used to call "suppressive persons."

One of my bosses was a sociopath. I hired one once as my personal assistant. I hired a gardener last summer who was one.

I've had a lot of psychological training. So has my husband, who retired as a homicide detective after having had all the other cop jobs a person has to have to become one. He worked vice, child abuse, domestic abuse, and was a street cop in one of the toughest areas of a major U.S. city. He has seen more horror than most people on this board could imagine. After retiring as a police officer, he was a case worker on "murderers' row" in a large prison.

Since I posted the OP on this thread, he and I have been talking about it at dinnertime. He says a lot of people who get in trouble with the law or wind up in prison have just had a lot of bad luck in their lives or were on drugs or drunk when they did things that had terrible results. But he also has met his share of severe sociopaths and psychopaths in real life and in prison. He says prisoners can recognize the really bad ones faster than anyone.

When I posted this OP it never occurred to me that anyone would take from the OP that a single or even a few of those traits or even most of them exhibited rarely (not regularly) by a person would nominate them as possible sociopaths. If your "logical fallacy" post was meant to suggest that that's what the OP meant, then you have misread the OP, misunderstood it, you're being disingenuous, or you have some other reason to mischaracterize it.

I'm really glad I started this thread. It's turned into something I never expected it would. I have really enjoyed everyone's perspective, the additional information others have contributed here, and the often heartfelt debating. I don't think about sociopaths very much, but I think it's smart to think about them sometimes. They can cause a terrific amount of damage.

TG1

P.S. I don't even remember your interactions with Free to Shine or Bardol.

 

[Gib]

It's taking the whole of a human being, all the wildly variable situations and pressures that they have responded to, picking out one or two of them and without wanting or feeling they need any understanding of the inner motivations of that person and what was going on inside him to prompt his behaviors - and summing up all the many things the person is with one word - SOCIOPATH.

Another very important and very fundamental psychological concept could be at work here:

The Fundamental Attribution Error, or what is also called the Observer/Actor Bias:

In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect) is the tendency to overestimate the effect of disposition or personality and underestimate the effect of the situation in explaining social behavior. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain the behavior of others. It does not explain interpretations of one's own behavior — where situational factors are more easily recognized and can thus be taken into consideration. This discrepancy between attributions for one's own behavior and for that of others is known as the actor–observer bias.

As a simple example, consider a situation where Alice, a driver, is about to pass through an intersection. Her light turns green, and she begins to accelerate when another car drives through the red light and crosses in front of her. The fundamental attribution error may lead her to think that the driver of the other car was an unskilled or reckless driver. This will be an error if the other driver had a good reason for running the light, such as rushing a patient to the hospital. If Alice had been driving the other car, she would have understood that the situation called for speed at the cost of safety, but when seeing it from the outside she was inclined to believe that the behavior of the other driver reflected their fundamental nature (having poor driving skills or a reckless attitude).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

Alanzo

Thanks and I understand.

But could you answer my question?

A simple yes or no or maybe will suffice.

 

[Alanzo]

Alanzo, never having met you before, I don't know if you're a sociopath. I don't know how anyone could tell that on a message board.

TG1

All right, But you said that "the pity play" was the "tell" and later you said that we were handling sociopaths right here on this board.

If you did not know, as you say above, how anyone could tell if someone was a sociopath on a message board, why did you start this thread about "the Pity Play" as the way to tell if someone was a sociopath, and say that we were handling sociopaths on this board?

Alanzo

 

[Alanzo]

so A=A

which is what hubbard did in his construct of the reactive mind and book dianetics.

he got people to believe in his "logical fallacy" ?

I don't see what was done to Donna or Ralph as "A=A".

By the way, in logic A DOES EQUAL A.

A DOES NOT EQUAL B.

So Hubbard didn't really get what he was trying to communicate with "A=A". It was a very sloppy way to describe illogical thinking.

No this is more like taking one attribute of a personality and making it into the WHOLE PERSON.

If it were an object, then it would be the logical fallacy of Composition:

The fallacy of composition arises when one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole (or even of every proper part). For example: "This fragment of metal cannot be fractured with a hammer, therefore the machine of which it is a part cannot be fractured with a hammer." This is clearly fallacious, because many machines can be broken apart, without any of those parts being fracturable.
This fallacy is often confused with the fallacy of hasty generalization, in which an unwarranted inference is made from a statement about a sample to a statement about the population from which it is drawn.
The fallacy of composition is the converse of the fallacy of division. The fallacy of composition is also known as the "unecological fallacy."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition

But this is doing this with a person, which to my mind, is even worse.

Alanzo

 

[Free Being Me]

<snip>what do you think of the fundamental attribution error? Have you ever heard of it? I think it is one of the most civilizing concepts that any branch of psychology has ever produced. When you really study it and think about it, it really produces a "walk a mile in another man's sandals" kind of viewpoint.

That's really really missing in this concept of SOCIOPATH.

Speaking for myself, I don't see anyone suggesting otherwise nor do I see anyone handing out diagnoses, maybe taking this up with the American Psychological Association and/or the American Psychiatric Association would be helpful. I see posts about narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths, manipulators, and abuse, et al, being posted that's freely available on the internet pertaining to this thread without any agenda. Hopefully helpful information to anyone that's interested.

 

[TG1]

All right, But you said that "the pity play" was the "tell" and later you said that we were handling sociopaths right here on this board.

If you did not know, as you say above, how anyone could tell if someone was a sociopath on a message board, why did you start this thread about "the Pity Play" as the way to tell if someone was a sociopath, and say that we were handling sociopaths on this board?

Alanzo

First, I was quoting Martha Stout who said the pity play was the tell of a sociopath.

Second, I made the "handling sociopaths right here on this board" comment right after Lone Star's funny quip about Super Power handling sociopaths. LS and I have a lot of fun together. If you're looking for evidence of how LS and I play off of each other and enjoy ourselves when you're not around, you've got a whole two years worth of threads to plow through.

 

[Purple Rain]

Speaking for myself, I don't see anyone suggesting otherwise nor do I see anyone handing out diagnoses, maybe taking this up with the American Psychological Association and/or the American Psychiatric Association would be helpful. I see posts about narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths, manipulators, and abuse, et al, being posted that's freely available on the internet pertaining to this thread without any agenda. Hopefully helpful information to anyone that's interested.

Just like medical information it's helpful in a really general sense, but a huge mistake for most people to try and diagnose something themselves. A psychological label misapplied by self or others can be really destructive. It's bad enough when a professional gets it wrong. Where are the lists of all the rightnesses? Where are the lists that you can go through something good and recognise yourself or others in them? If you are just looking for the bad then that is what you will find. There is no balance to these "symptoms" and no context.

It's like giving a two-year-old a loaded gun because it's a useful tool. Yes, it is, but in the wrong hands it can be worse than what it seeks to protect from.

Edit: And to give you some context to this - I've had someone go through the sex addict questionnaire with me and find that I meet nearly all the criteria for a sex addiction. I can't tell you how ashamed and dirty that made me feel. Then I've had my friend Denise come in with another perspective and go, "You know, if you're a slut, you're really crappy at it!" and I laughed and laughed, and it's seriously the best thing that someone ever said to me.

 

[Alanzo]

First, I was quoting Martha Stout who said the pity play was the tell of a sociopath.

Second, I made the "handling sociopaths right here on this board" comment right after Lone Star's funny quip about Super Power handling sociopaths. LS and I have a lot of fun together. If you're looking for evidence of how LS and I play off of each other and enjoy ourselves when you're not around, you've got a whole two years worth of threads to plow through.

So you just thought this up out of nowhere, apropos of nothing at all.

And you decided that it would be a good thread here on ESMB.

All right. Thank you very much for your answers.

Alanzo

 

[TG1]

You're welcome.

EDIT: It wasn't apropos of nothing, that I posted the OP. It was because a friend had forwarded the article to me just a few moments before. As I said in the OP.

TG1

 

[Alanzo]

Speaking for myself, I don't see anyone suggesting otherwise nor do I see anyone handing out diagnoses, maybe taking this up with the American Psychological Association and/or the American Psychiatric Association would be helpful. I see posts about narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths, manipulators, and abuse, et al, being posted that's freely available on the internet pertaining to this thread without any agenda. Hopefully helpful information to anyone that's interested.

Yes, I'll head right up to the APA and file a formal complaint.

Thanks.

Alanzo