344. Sociopathy
The Psychology of your 20s
iHeartPodcasts
4.8 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 19 October 2025
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We’ve all heard the term thrown around – in books, in TV dramas, in news articles – we’re taught to be scared of it. But rarely do we consider what it actually means. In today’s bonus episode, we take a look at sociopathy.
We explore:
- Differentiating sociopathy and psychopathy
- Common misconceptions
- Early origins of the term
- The role of self-awareness and masking in sociopathy
- Whether all sociopaths are bad
- Treatments and management for sociopathy
Listen now!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:08.4 | Hello everybody and welcome back to the psychology of your 20s, the podcast where we talk |
| 0:15.7 | through some of the big life changes and transitions of our 20s and what they mean for our psychology. |
| 0:26.5 | Hello everybody. Welcome back to the show. Welcome back to the podcast. Today, I've got another |
| 0:33.1 | little bonus episode for you guys. So these shorter episodes are a little bit different from our |
| 0:39.5 | usual deep dives. Think of them as like little coffee break chats where we tend to just |
| 0:44.8 | unpack a single term, a single theory, a single psychological concept that is probably misunderstood |
| 0:51.3 | or just thrown around pretty casually. And the goal here is just to give |
| 0:56.0 | you something that you can kind of listen to on the go, to give you like just enough clarity to be |
| 1:01.3 | a little bit more confident when you hear these terms pop up. But also just like for your commute, |
| 1:07.7 | when you don't want to listen to like a 45 minute hour long episode, |
| 1:12.9 | this is the alternative. |
| 1:21.8 | Today's topic, though, is one I get asked about all the time, sociopathy. |
| 1:30.1 | This is a term that is floating around everywhere at the moment has been for a while on TikTok when it comes to true crime content, even like in dating advice and often in ways that aren't exactly |
| 1:36.5 | accurate. So we're going to talk about it today. What is sociopathy actually mean? What does it |
| 1:43.5 | mean? And how does it different from somebody who's a |
| 1:46.9 | psychopath or a narcissist? There's so many different distinctions that we need to make. But first things |
| 1:53.0 | first, sociopathy isn't actually a clinical diagnosis in modern psychology. You will not open the DSM-5 and find sociopathy listed as a formal disorder. |
| 2:07.6 | Anyone who tells you that does not know what they're talking about. |
| 2:10.8 | What you will find, however, is antisocial personality disorder or ASPD. |
| 2:17.9 | Sociopathy calling someone a sociopath is more so a cultural term. |
| 2:23.8 | Historically, it was used at times by a psychologist to describe a particular kind of person, |
... |
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