Fake News and Psychopaths —Statistics Suggest A Loud Minority Are Ruining Society for Rest of Us.

Steven Parton
14 min readJul 8, 2018
Photo by Spenser on Unsplash

There are roughly 240 million adults in the United States of America, and an estimated 3–4% of them are either sociopaths or psychopaths.

Don’t write off that low percentage, though, because 4% of the American adult population is 9.6 million people. Yes, that’s right, roughly 9.6 million Americans have antisocial personality disorder, imbuing them with traits such as:

  • Lack of empathy, guilt, conscience or remorse
  • Shallow experiences of feelings or emotions
  • Impulsivity and a weak ability to defer gratification and control behavior
  • Superficial charm and glibness
  • Irresponsibility and a failure to accept responsibility for their actions
  • A grandiose sense of their own worth

Seeing so many people in America having such a list of traits and characteristics got me thinking about two things:

  1. Certainly many, if not most, of these people have access to the internet.
  2. Certainly many, if not most, of these people are aligned with a political ideology — not necessarily for the benefit of the people represented by the political group, but because of indoctrination and the fact that the success of their chosen political party would provide them with personal, selfish benefits.

This suggests that we may have as many as 10 million Americans (not to mention millions more from other countries around the world — I’m looking at you Russia) creating content on social media in favor of a political ideology, who are biology wired 1) to believe they’re better than others, 2) are physically incapable of seeing situations from the perspectives of others, and 3) don’t care if their actions hurt people.

As you can imagine, such sociopathic tendencies are a direct threat to a stable society based on cooperation and community values: cooperation coming from the latin cooperari, meaning “to work together,” and community coming from the latin communis, meaning “shared in common.” Naturally, working together for shared progress is going to be difficult when roughly 10 million people are incapable of empathy and…

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Steven Parton

Host of Singularity Radio (anchor.fm/singularity-radio) & Society in Question (anchor.fm/society-in-question) / Author / Psychology & Neuroscience researcher