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are isis terrorists sociopaths/psychopaths ?
I don’t think the majority has antisocial personality disorder but I had one self-declared psychopath who added me on fb 1 or 2 years ago who said that he was thinking about joining isis , on his profile he published some execution videos too.
What I think is the case of most is the same phenomenon that happened with nazis .. from normal people to cold blooded bastards due to isis media influence and the need to do “something important” even if it means sacrificing someone’s life or his own.
Furthermore isis impose a strict set of rules which would be hard to follow for a psychopathic individual and psychopaths , being less emotional, tend to be more realistic in some aspects of life which leads them to be often non-religious.
Many might commit atrocities for the same “phenomenon” happened during the milgram experiment . Extract from the wikipedia article : “The subject is led to believe that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual electric shocks, though in reality there were no such punishments.” Milgram experiment - Wikipedia . I think this can be the case of some recruits especially the youngest ones , in particular the children that murder innocent men in front of the camera.
Here I found a long more detailed explaination :
. In 1996, The Lancet carried an editorial pointing out that no one was addressing evil from a biological point of view. Neurosurgeon Itzhak Fried, at the University of California, Los Angeles, decided to rise to the challenge.
In a paper published in 1997, he argued that the transformation of non-violent individuals into repetitive killers is characterised by a set of symptoms that suggests a common condition, which he called Syndrome E (see “Seven symptoms of evil“). He suggested that this is the result of “cognitive fracture”, which occurs when a higher brain region, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) – involved in rational thought and decision-making – stops paying attention to signals from more primitive brain regions and goes into overdrive.
Fried’s theory starts with the assumption that people normally have a natural aversion to harming others. If he is correct, the higher brain overrides this instinct in people with Syndrome E. How might that occur?
Etienne Koechlin was able to throw some empirical light on the matter by looking at people obeying rules that conflict with their own preferences. He put volunteers inside a brain scanner and let them choose between two simple tasks, guided by their past experience of which would be the more financially rewarding (paying 6 euros versus 4). After a while he randomly inserted rule-based trials: now there was a colour code indicating which of the two tasks to choose, and volunteers were told that if they disobeyed they would get no money.
Not surprisingly, they followed the rule, even when it meant that choosing the task they had learned would earn them a lower pay-off in the free-choice trials. But something unexpected happened. Although rule-following should have led to a simpler decision, they took longer over it, as if conflicted. In the brain scans, both the lateral and the medial regions of the PFC lit up. The former is known to be sensitive to rules; the latter receives information from the limbic system, an ancient part of the brain that processes emotional states, so is sensitive to our innate preferences. In other words, when following the rule, people still considered their personal preference, but activity in the lateral PFC overrode it.
Of course, playing for a few euros is far removed from choosing to kill fellow humans. However, Koechlin believes his results show that our instinctive values endure even when the game changes. “Rules do not change values, just behaviours,” he says. He interprets this as showing that it is normal, not pathological, for the higher brain to override signals coming from the primitive brain. If Fried’s idea is correct, this process goes into overdrive in Syndrome E, helping to explain how an ordinary person overcomes their squeamishness to kill.
Fried suggests that people experience a visceral reaction when they kill for the first time, but some rapidly become desensitised. And the primary instinct not to harm may be more easily overcome when people are “just following orders”.
“The old idea that the cognitive brain doesn’t have evaluative access to that habitual behaviour, that it’s beyond its reach, is false,” says Graybiel. “It has moment-to-moment evaluative control.” That’s exciting, she says, because it suggests a way to treat people with maladaptive habits such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, or even, potentially, Syndrome E.
Graybiel believes it might even be possible to stop people deciding to kill in the first place by steering them away from the kind of cost-benefit analysis that led them to, say, blow themselves up on a crowded bus. In separate experiments with risk-taking rats, her team found that optogenetically decreasing activity in another part of the limbic system that communicates with the PFC, the striatum, made the rats more risk-averse: “We can just turn a knob and radically alter their behaviour,” she says
Both Reicher and Atran believe that future research should focus less on why people decide to perform extreme acts, and more on what draws them to extreme organisations in the first place. Speaking at the UN, Atran argued that young people need a dream. Appeals for moderation will never be attractive to “youth, yearning for adventure, for glory, for significance”, he said.
But Fried is encouraged that neuroscience has bolstered the idea of Syndrome E, and still believes we can benefit from thinking in terms of what is going on inside the brain of a killer. What’s more, group dynamics might help explain why the PFC is at the root of evil.
Fried is not a proponent of using drugs to treat Syndrome E. Instead, he thinks we should use our growing neuroscientific knowledge to identify radicalisation early, isolate those affected and help them change. “The signs and symptoms should be made widely known, so that people can spot them,” he says. When it comes to prevention, he thinks education is probably the key. And in that, at least, he agrees with his detractors.
Seven symptoms of evil
The idea that evil is a disease is predicated on the observation that mass killers share some common traits:
Compulsive repetitive violence
Obsessive beliefs
Rapid desensitisation to violence
Flat emotional state
Separation of violence from everyday activities
Obedience to an authority
Perceiving group members as virtuous
Is evil a disease? ISIS and the neuroscience of brutality
Originally Posted by al-Bosni
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