Hey Deservo River listeners, today I'm going to answer patron emails.

This first email is from Torin, they write,

in the new trailer from The Invisible Man movie,

there is a line where they describe the villain. They say he is a sociopath. I'm not sure if you

already talked about this or not, but why is the word sociopath still being used?

From my understanding it is not in the DSM. If possible

could you talk about what people mean when they use the term sociopath? In my

undergraduate degree we were taught that essentially there was a difference between

Psychopaths and sociopaths, and that sociopaths were created by society and psychopaths were more

nature than nurture.

End of email.

Yeah, the term sociopathy goes way back.

The thing to know is that in my field, it's different from our other fields, like when chemists talk

about hydrogen or oxygen or carbon, it refers to a very specific thing and no one has a confusion about

what carbon is. There's no you know of other authors don't come out and say, well I define carbon as lithium, you know,

or I define hydrogen as having two protons or something.

No one does that. There's an agreement of language that is extremely

precise and anyone who steps outside of that is probably ashamed or ridiculed or run out of the

whole system. In psychology it's different because our quote-unquote science is imprecise.

What do we mean by psychopathy? What do we mean by sociopathy? What do we mean by anything we're referring to?

Well, we're usually talking about like a set of,

you know, behaviors that are observed by a subjective observer who will, according to their opinion, apply some label.

...