Why psychopathic brains overvalue immediate rewards
Joshua Buckholtz wants to change the way you think about psychopaths — and he’s willing to go to prison to do it. An associate professor of psychology at Harvard, Buckholtz is the senior author of a study that relies on brain scans of nearly 50 prison inmates to help explain why psychopaths make poor decisions that often lead to violence or other anti-social behavior. What they found, he said, is that psychopaths’ brains are wired in a way that leads them to overvalue immediate rewards and neglect the future consequences of potentially dangerous or immoral actions. The study is described in a July 5 paper in Neuron. “For years, we have been focused on the idea that psychopaths are people who cannot generate emotion and that’s why they do all these terrible things,” Buckholtz said. “But what we care about with psychopaths is not the feelings they have or don’t have, it’s the...