More on Mr. Icahn’s theory of how incompetent people get to be CEO .
1. Hierarchies select for Machiavellians — those who are callous and unemotional toward co-workers can succeed more rapidly than those who are empathetic toward coworkers. You get rewarded for confiscating credit and off loading blame — whereas there is no reward for allocating credit and accountability. And Machiavellians are sensitive to punishment, but not all that sensitive to reward.
2. As we have seen, Machiavellians have a bad neural network in the brain frontal cortex — leading to callous and unemotional behavior. White collar criminals have, as a core competency, Machiavellian thought.
3. Proactive aggression — that is, using aggression as a tool to get what one wants, is found in people with bad brain frontal cortex wiring, like psychopaths. Proactive aggression can be workplace bullying or lying or smearing a coworker, or whatever self-centered behavior designed to get ahead by cheating.
4. And, poseurs and fakers really dupe the organization. They get away with it easily in organizations where there is cooperation.
Yeah, that’s the ticket (abstracts after the jump)
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Aggress Behav. 2007 Nov-Dec;33(6):552-62.
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Human proactive aggression: association with personality disorders and psychopathy.
Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine, Wake Forest University Health Sciences, Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Aggressive behaviors can be divided into two categories: reactive and proactive. Reactive aggressive behaviors occur in response to a stimulus or provocation. Proactive aggressive behaviors occur without provocation and are goal directed. A number of findings have suggested that individuals displaying proactive aggression may be discerned from individuals not displaying proactive aggression on measures of personality, psychopathology and psychopathy as well as in aggressive histories and type and severity of aggressive behaviors committed. In this study, subjects were recruited from a large urban community and classified as proactive (n = 20), reactive-only (n = 20) or nonaggressive (n = 10) based on laboratory behavioral testing. Subjects were administered a battery of questionnaires and structured interviews pertaining to personality disorders and psychopathy. It was hypothesized that proactive aggressive subjects would show greater numbers of personality disorders and have greater psychopathy relative to reactive-only and nonaggressive subjects. These hypotheses were supported. These results suggest that proactive aggression may be identified in a laboratory-based task, and differences between proactive and reactive-only aggressors can be detected. Aggr. Behav. 33:552-562, 2007. (c) 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc.
PMID: 17654689 [PubMed - in process]
Neuron. 2007 Oct 4;56(1):185-96. Links
The neural signature of social norm compliance.
Spitzer M, Fischbacher U, Herrnberger B, Grön G, Fehr E.
University of Ulm, University Hospital for Psychiatry, Psychiatry III, Leimgrubenweg 1214, 89075 Ulm, Germany; Transfer Center for Neurosciences and Learning, Beim Alten Fritz 2, 89075 Ulm, Germany.
All known human societies establish social order by punishing violators of social norms. However, little is known about how the brain processes the punishment threat associated with norm violations. We use fMRI to study the neural circuitry behind social norm compliance by comparing a treatment in which norm violations can be punished with a control treatment in which punishment is impossible. Individuals’ increase in norm compliance when punishment is possible exhibits a strong positive correlation with activations in the lateral orbitofrontal cortex and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Moreover, lateral orbitofrontal cortex activity is strongly correlated with Machiavellian personality characteristics. These findings indicate a neural network involved in social norm compliance that might constitute an important basis for human sociality. Different activations of this network reveal individual differences in the behavioral response to the punishment threat and might thus provide a deeper understanding of the neurobiological sources of pathologies such as antisocial personality disorder.
PMID: 17920024 [PubMed - in process]
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Arch Kriminol. 2006 Mar-Apr;217(3-4):65-73.
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[White-collar criminals--a homogenous offender population? Reflections on typical and atypical "white-collar criminals"]
[Article in German]
Aus der Psychiatrischen Klinik Münsterlingen.
Little has been written in German scientific literature on the personality structure of white-collar criminals. Often, the relevance of this level of investigation has downright been denied. Conventional psychopathology does not seem to be an appropriate approach to these character problems since there are not only deficits but also competences to be found which are useful while making a professional career. The author points out the inhomogeneity of this offender population and presents a case report of an atypical white-collar criminal. Over and above that, he introduces two psychological concepts which are apt to better describe the peculiarities of these individuals: Machiavellian intelligence is often the core competence when it comes to rising in hierarchies, whereas the newly defined psychopathy concept according to R. D. Hare makes plausible the moral and ethical failure of these offenders in their professional settings.
PMID: 16696229 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]
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Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2007 Aug;76(2-2):026114. Epub 2007 Aug 27.
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Impact of fraud on the mean-field dynamics of cooperative social systems.
Institute of Theoretical Physics and Astrophysics, University of Kiel, Leibnizstraße 15, D-24098 Kiel, Germany.
The evolution of costly cooperation between selfish individuals seems to contradict Darwinian selection, as it reduces the fitness of a cooperating individual. However, several mechanisms such as repeated interactions or spatial structure can lead to the evolution of cooperation. One such mechanism for the evolution of cooperation, in particular among humans, is indirect reciprocity, in which individuals base their decision to cooperate on the reputation of the potential receiver, which has been established in previous interactions. Cooperation can evolve in these systems if individuals preferably cooperate with those that have shown to be cooperative in the past. We analyze the impact of fake reputations or fraud on the dynamics of reputation and on the success of the reputation system itself, using a mean-field description for evolutionary games given by the replicator equation. This allows us to classify the qualitative dynamics of our model analytically. Our results show that cooperation based on indirect reciprocity is robust with respect to fake reputations and can even be enhanced by them. We conclude that fraud per se does not necessarily have a detrimental effect on social systems.
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