I have watched this documentary, and after watching fishead and other good works one can say this is one is just plain disinformation. What was I expecting from BBC.
The documentary starts with a few experiments that tells us what is moral behaviour. The first one is a simulation to see how people react in stressful conditions, and I failed to see its connection to psychopathy. Perhaps they just filled the time to avoid more important topics. Second experiment was interesting because it involved babies about 1-2 years old.
The setup is: Three stuffed animals perform a show in front of each kid. The one in the middle gives the ball to animal 1, and animal 1 gives it back. After that, it gives the ball to animal 2 and animal 2 doesn't give it back. Then the babies are to choose either one of these animals and %70 of them choose animal 1. I don't know how to interpret the data and researchers say %20 of the remaining %30 can be noise but for the rest of the group, researcher seem to think these babies are more identified with immoral action. Yet again, not a direct relation to psychopathy, and I am not exactly convinced on the interpretation of the researchers.
After that, another research show the importance of Oxytocin on bonding behaviour in team work. While watching all of this, I failed to see the connection between psychopathy and data presented. For a while, Robert Hare talked a little as well as some other scientists on psychopathy, but overall the documentary was about "psychopath the serial killer" rather than everyday psychopaths. The subjects and research was done on serial killers and only toward the end of the documentary Babiak and Hare talked about corporate psychopathy which lasted for 5 minutes as opposed to other unnecessary information along the way.
I am rather disappointed that the science behind this documentary is very bad. They associate psychopathy with MAO-A gene allele, which of course is suited if you only talk about serial killers, but we know that MAO-A gene is associated with reactive aggression which is a typical trait of failed psychopaths, not successful ones at the top.
One interesting piece was this neuroscientist Jim Fallon who was also discussed in the forum, but here is another link:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125745788725531839.html
Basically the guy has all the brain activity and the genes to be qualified as a psychopath, but he is not a violent serial killer. I wonder what he is then. ;) According to his family, this is not a big shock, they knew that there is something wrong with him, and how he responds to this? He says something similar to: "I know that it is bad not to go a funeral and go to a party instead, but I don't care."
I usually can't understand things like editing, quality of videos or musics, but from the first scene, I get the impression that this documentary forces you to not like it. I hated the colors, images and music. I guess considering the disinfo they created, this is a good thing.
