Sara Eckel

Stout, who is also the author of “The Myth of Sanity,” an analysis of forgotten childhood trauma and dissociated mental states, spoke to Salon from her home in Rockport, Mass., about serial killers, bad boyfriends and how to know if your boss is a sociopath or just a jerk.

This idea of ordinary people with no conscience is pretty radical and kind of terrifying. Why are so few of us aware of it?

Because we aren’t looking for it. We don’t imagine that there are human beings that exist without a conscience. And when we encounter it, we reinterpret it in all kinds of ways. Because who is going to believe you when you say that your psychotherapist lied to you in order to make you end up in restraints? Or that your colleague stole your briefcase to make you look bad? Or that a high-ranking political figure broke his secretary’s arm? It’s the sort of thing that makes people feel crazy, rather than making them feel like the other person is crazy.

How did you first become aware of these people?

I’ve been a therapist for trauma survivors for 25 years. I would listen to story after story, and I began to wonder about these people who were hurting my patients. They sounded so different from the rest of humanity. We have this feeling that if one person is capable of doing something, then under certain circumstances we would all be capable of doing the same thing. I no longer think that’s true. I think that 4 percent of us can do anything at all without guilt or remorse. And I do mean anything.

How did you arrive at the 4 percent figure? Most of what I’ve read about conscienceless people puts the rate at about 1 percent.

It is confusing. It’s confusing even if you know about psychological studies and how to compare them. Most of the data that we have still has to do with incarcerated felons — usually men who have been violent. There is very little data on non-incarcerated nonviolent sociopaths, and even less data on women than men. But we are increasingly finding that sociopathy is as common among women as it is among men.

I looked at it all, and given the increasing data about women, I came to the conclusion that it was approximately 4 percent.

But if there isn’t much data, how can you feel confident about your conclusion?

The 4 percent figure involves my equalizing a certain assumption that there are probably as many female sociopaths as male sociopaths. In the beginning, people thought that it was just men. Now we’re getting to the point where most researchers will say that perhaps there are as many women as men. Their behavior is just more difficult to pinpoint. You’re not going to get everyone to agree on that, but it seems to be coming to that.

So you consider this figure an estimate?

Definitely. And I consider it a conservative estimate. And let’s say it’s half that — that’s still one in 50 people. I feel very confident about it, and many of my colleagues have told me off the record that they also think it’s a conservative estimate.

Why off the record?

Because they’re not referring to any particular research. They’re just making observations based on their own practice.

Why is women’s sociopathy more difficult to pinpoint?

In general, women are less physical and more verbal in the way they express things. For a sociopath who is a woman, one would expect more social manipulation. Of course, women can be violent, but it’s less likely.

And that’s why we don’t see them as criminals? Because beating someone is a crime, but harming them emotionally is not?

Exactly. Getting someone fired or tormenting your children is usually pretty private and not always actionable.

What makes you decide that a person is or isn’t a sociopath?

Conceptually, for the purposes of the book, I’m talking about people who have exhibited symptoms such as extreme chronic deceitfulness, lack of remorse, lack of personal responsibility, and a general desire to control people and make them jump.

Clinically speaking, if someone is suspected of sociopathy, then the therapist would consider the DSM [The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV's assessment for antisocial personality disorder] and apply the Hare inventory [the Psychopathy Checklist developed by Dr. Robert Hare]. Then we would talk to other people in the person’s family and in that person’s past and try to pin down the diagnosis.

You mention the Psychopathy Checklist. What’s the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath?

There is no completely agreed-upon difference between those two terms, but there are people who in their own studies will make a distinction. I tend to use them synonymously, and for the book I settled on “sociopathy.” People confuse “psychopathy” with “psychotic” — someone who is crazy and has hallucinations. That’s not what we’re talking about, so I think “sociopath” is clearer.

What does it mean to lack a conscience?

It’s a completely alien mindset. Most of us can imagine what it’s like to have depression or even be crazy. But not having a conscience? You can’t love anyone, even your own children? I believe that conscience, or lack of it, is a much more fundamental distinction than our moods or sense of rationality. All of us can be a little irrational. But our capacity to be emotionally linked to other people is much more fundamental, so much so that we don’t even think about it. You don’t ask yourself if you’re going to give your child lunch money. You don’t think of that as making a choice.

You said you became aware of this problem because of the things that your patients told you. What kinds of issues were they dealing with?

The people I work with were traumatized in childhood. I’m talking about moms and dads who inflicted terrible tortures on their children, stories that are very hard to hear. Kids that were seriously abused physically and sexually, kids that were abandoned.

Are the majority of sociopaths committing really heinous crimes?

No. Most sociopaths are not violent and probably never will be. They are the people we see every day: The boss who likes to ridicule people. The seduce-and-abandon lover who does this mainly for fun. The person who marries for money or prestige and no apparent other reason. These people aren’t necessarily serial killers, but they cause a lot of harm.

So how do you know if your boss is a sociopath or just a jerk?

If you have a jerk boss who’s lazy and always wants you to do things at the last minute, or asks for unreasonable things like making coffee, that’s not necessarily sociopathy. If you have a boss who likes to ridicule people and make them jump and seems to get a kick out if it, that’s more likely to be sociopathy. It’s motivation.

So how do you spot a sociopath?

This is very unscientific, but small children seem to be better than adults at being afraid of people who are not warm, people who have damaged interpersonal emotion abilities. There is an instinct in all of us to know when someone is not relating to us with a real attachment.

More scientifically, the best I can offer is the rule of three. If someone lies to you once or twice, it could be a misunderstanding. If someone lies to you three times, then chances are you’re dealing with a liar. And deceit is the central behavior of sociopathy.

You say in your book that sociopaths can be very charming. We’ve all had the experience of being around someone who is very flattering and uses that salesman’s trick of saying your name a lot. Is that what we’re talking about?

It can be that. But it can also be a quiet kind of charm — the all-American boy or girl. The shy person who needs to be rescued. People also talk about sociopathic eyes. There is a primal predatory charm that no one has been able to explain. What you hear over and over is that these charming eyes suddenly turned into empty, reptilian eyes.

Are you worried about people getting paranoid from reading the book?

I was concerned that people would begin to see sociopaths all around them, but I have not found that. What I have found, and what breaks my heart, is that I’m hearing from good people who are afraid that they are sociopaths. They are feeling disconnected from people for a variety of reasons and are questioning their own dark sides. But if you’re questioning your attachments to others and questioning your dark side, you don’t have very much of one. That is not a concern that a sociopath would have.

Do you ever see sociopaths in therapy?

Not unless the court refers them. They feel just fine about themselves.

Do they think we feel love and empathy? Or do they think we’re all just faking it?

They see that we have love and empathy. But I’ve heard them say that conscience is a sham, that it doesn’t exist. They’ll say, “That schmuck didn’t go for what he wanted because it was against his conscience. Who does he think he’s kidding?”

In your book you use composites of sociopaths and their victims. Why did you decide to tell their stories this way?

I did that way in “The Myth of Sanity” also. It’s part of my instinct as a therapist to preserve everybody’s confidentiality, even the guilty. I also have to have legal concerns about making statements about people.

You have one example of a women caught practicing psychology without a license or even a degree, and she did some pretty devastating harm to her patients. She told them that other therapists were lying to them and even sent one man to a locked ward after his therapist had recommended his discharge. How did she react when she was caught?

There was a complete lack of guilt or even embarrassment. After being seriously questioned about it, she walked out of the room as if she had been talking about the weather. She was one of the spookiest people I’ve ever met.

Do sociopaths seek out positions with a lot of authority, so they won’t be questioned?

I think there are certain professions that we understand as being humanitarian and good, and you won’t be questioned as much. And there are certain professions where you can make people jump, or the way you make them feel bad about themselves is more private. Certainly psychotherapy would be one of those. On the other side, there are the power professions where the goal is to win — politics, banking, etc. Those professions tend to be good places for sociopaths to hide and prosper, unfortunately.

Prosper because of the focus is on winning to the exclusion of other things?

Yes. It tends to excuse behavior that we might otherwise condemn. A little bit of lying might be considered clever rather than amoral. I think this particularly true in business and politics, especially in the West.

Is there the same level of sociopathy in other cultures?

No. In East Asian countries, China and Japan in particular, there is substantially less sociopathic behavior observed. It seems to me that the only explanation for that would deal with overall cultural attitudes. In the East, individual winning is not considered the appropriate goal. The culture is more group-oriented. A sociopath born in such a culture might learn to behave appropriately the way one might learn table manners. They might not have a conscience, but because sociopaths need to fit in, the behavior might be tamped down a bit.

Is a conscience something you’re born with?

About 50 percent of the variant seems to be accounted for by heredity. The other 50 percent would be shaped by something in the environment. The interesting thing is that we haven’t been able to determine what that is. Everyone’s first guess is child abuse, but it turns out that as group they haven’t been abused any more than any other group.

Can it actually be an advantage to be a sociopath?

For a while it can be an advantage. But most sociopaths end not with a bang but a whimper. There’s not much on this planet for us except our relations with other living forms. So for sociopaths, it’s a fairly barren landscape. In the end it can’t work out, but for a while it looks like it does.

This narrative largely neglected the Americans best equipped to speak to the simple life: the people who have always lived frugally. In his new book, “The Cheapskate Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of Americans Living Happily Below Their Means,” author Jeff Yeager gives voice to the sensible folks who spent the boom years quietly paying down their mortgages and making their kids earn their allowances (if they got one at all). Yeager surveyed and interviewed more than 300 fellow cheapskates — traveling the country on his bicycle and crashing on the couches of his thrifty brethren. He quickly discovered a group of people who bore little resemblance to the stereotypical tightwad. Not only do Yeager’s cheapskates donate more money to charity than the general population, they also have lower divorce rates and higher education levels. Although their politics and religious views span the spectrum — from Christian conservative to hippie freegan — they’re united in their rejection of consumer culture, excessive borrowing and waste. They also believe the cheap life is the happiest.

I talked to Yeager on the eve of his second bicycle/couch-surfing book tour about the joys of thrift, the sorrows of spending and why your grandmother is greener than you are.

How do you define a cheapskate?

A cheapskate is someone who lives almost exclusively debt-free with the possible exception of a home mortgage, and even then about 85 percent of the people I polled said they had paid off their mortgage early or planned to. These were the folks that during the heyday of the economy and real estate boom were doing the absolute unsexiest thing: paying down their mortgage. Which meant they could lose a job but not lose everything else. But it goes deeper than that: These were people who never relied on money to make them happy.

What does make them happy?

Cheapskates value experiences more than material objects. They are very self-confident and are not only unconcerned about keeping up with the Joneses but sort of thumbing their noses at the Jones.

Are cheapskates bargain hunters?

No, most of us don’t like to shop. I wanted to show there is a class of people who don’t view shopping as sport or therapy and who are living a more pre-1980s lifestyle. In the 1980s, three-quarters of household items were purchased to replace something that was broken or worn out. Today that’s less than 25 percent.

What’s the reason for the other 75 percent?

It’s either something new that we never had before but we have to have one, or we have one that works just fine but it’s last year’s color. The 1980s were not that long ago, so that’s been a huge shift in consumption.

What’s the relationship between cheapness and environmentalism?

As an environmentalist, I find this very compelling. These folks are the greenest people I’ve ever known, even though about half of them said they have no real interest in environmental issues. But arguably, the greenest thing that most Americans can do is simply consume less. It’s not about buying expensive green products. It’s about buying less.

Do you think the green movement has been hijacked by advertising and consumerism — that it’s become just another gimmick to sell us, say, eco-friendly running shoes?

I think to some extent the popularity of the green movement is being fueled by the very thing it should be against: overconsumption. Environmentalism has become popular because now there is cool, expensive green stuff that we can buy. Take the example of a hybrid vehicle for $35,000. It’s good for the environment, but it’s not as good as if you took your gas guzzler and carpooled to work. Don’t get me wrong — it would be best to carpool in your Prius, but I don’t see many people doing that.

Do you see more people starting to examine their behavior and lower their consumption, for both economic and environmental reasons?

I’ve been writing about frugality long enough to have seen it go from something that no one really talked about to now everyone is writing about saving money. I give a lot of money-saving tips, but in this economy we’re missing the golden takeaway: It shouldn’t be “how do we afford it?” but “do we even need it?”

When it comes to the prospect of living a greener life, I fear that just the opposite is happening. I’ve seen statistics that say that as the economy has gotten worse people’s lip service to living green has actually decreased. They are saying, “Boy that green stuff costs more and money is tight right now.” They didn’t take the final step to say the greenest thing I can clean with is the cheapest: baking soda and vinegar. Fixing things, recycling, doing without — those things don’t cost any money.

What about food? The conventional wisdom is that the healthiest foods — organic, free-range, etc. — are also the most expensive.

I found that cheapskates had almost the same likelihood of being a vegetarian or buying organic as the general population, about 5 percent. The people in my book believe that you don’t have to spend a lot of money to have a healthy diet and in fact some of the most unhealthy foods cost a lot — processed food, red meat and so on. They weren’t vegetarians but they ate lower on the food chain, and a lot of them said they had one or two meatless days a week at their house. They do that to save money, but it also makes them healthier. Similarly, they don’t belong to gyms but they did things like decide to not have a car and bicycle and walk places instead.

You’re painting a very different portrait from the stereotype of a cheapskate as someone who is obsessed with money.

Well, we all know people like that, but that wasn’t the type of person I set out to profile. About half the people I surveyed had very strong religious reasons for their frugality: They just didn’t feel right about using more than their share. The other half of the people hardly had any religious beliefs, including many who said they were atheists, but they cited things like environmentalism, social justice and quality-of-life issues as their reason for living more frugally.

Were there common denominators in terms of their politics?

The cheapskates I surveyed are all over the board, from conservative Republican to very, very liberal Democrat to socialist.

So if these people have fewer economic demands, are they able to work less than the rest of us?

Some of them actually carry around an index card that says, based on my current salary if this costs $100 that means I would have to work five hours of my life. I think that’s what separates them from the bargain hunter or the yard-sale enthusiast. Maybe it’s not worth running around to several different yard sales in the hope that you’ll find a pair of Size 7 boots.

As far as their ability to work fewer hours, I wasn’t able to draw any real conclusion on that. I think the reality is most jobs are 40 hours a week. But one thing that came across pretty strong was that about 40 percent are involved in jobs that they enjoyed and were very passionate about — many worked professionally for churches and other nonprofit organizations. For the cheapskates who didn’t like their jobs, about 20 to 25 percent, most said their frugality was part of what allowed them to retire early.

So what would be your advice for avoiding education debt?

It’s true that college costs more in inflation-adjusted dollars than it did 20 or 30 years ago but it doesn’t cost that much more. What has changed is our idea of what a college education should look like. Plain tuition costs are only slightly higher than inflation. My point is, consider taking an old-school approach to college education. Living at home with parents will save most college students $30,000. There is also the option of attending a community college and paying a fraction for those credit hours and then transferring to a four-year school for that final degree. There is this mind-set that education is important so don’t even think about the financial part. The cheapskate says education is very important, but they don’t take the next step to say borrow as much as you want.

What is the single most important thing that the rest of us can learn from cheapskates?

Less can be more. You need to do yourself the favor of deciding what is enough for you. We’re so conditioned to think that if we have more money, more stuff we’ll be happier, and I think that’s the overarching bond between all of these people. They have answered this question and decided, sure, we could afford to spend more, but why would we? It wouldn’t make us any happier.

It seems old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy, but there is also something radical about it.

It’s as radical as the way most of our grandparents lived.

My grandmother is 103, and when I asked her about the Depression she said they didn’t have any money but it wasn’t that bad because there was nothing to buy.

It’s almost like the stuff we can buy is driving our unhappiness.

Sara Eckel is a freelance writer whose work frequently appears in the New York Times, Working Mother, Time Out New York, Forbes.com and many other publications.