The Order of Presentation: Primacy Versus Recency

Manipulation and brainwashing. This shows just how manipulative psychopathic people can be. Psychopaths are masters of reading people. They know how to size you up to look for an opening, a weakness to exploit. Even if you are just meeting them for the first time, they are ever ready to exploit any sign of vulnerability that you show to them. I think it is only fair to know if one is dying. Must we rely on the physician to tell them? A patient has the right to be told how seriously ill he is and I believe that the family also has to be notified of the seriousness of an illness. It is the physician who has to relay this news to them. If the physician is unable to do so, the patient or the family should then approach other members of a helping profession and ask them. This is usually the chaplain, the priest, the rabbi, or the nurse. If another member of the helping profession is asked directly by the family or the patient, it is his duty to inform the physician of these needs, and, if necessary, ask that the job be delegated. DIFFICULTIES IN COMMUNICATION Do you suggest that doctors talk to a patient's family outside the sick room rather than when standing beside the bed of a comatose patient? I try to teach my medical students, externs and interns, early that comatose patients are often able to hear and are quite aware of what is going on in the room. What appeared to have been a deliberate move on the president's part was particularly remarkable given that the White House press corps has traditionally been dominated by men. Helen Thomas, the first woman to cover the president of the United States, was only admitted to their ranks in 1960. Whether or not Obama was familiar with the relevant research, members of his administration certainly were. Victoria Budson of the Women and Public Policy Program had briefed the White House Council on Women and Girls on several occasions. One point she made more than once was that ever-increasing data show that women shy away from negotiation, do not speak up as often as their male colleagues do, and are less likely to be called upon.

Certainly, Google was aware of the evidence, as Laszlo Bock, head of People Operations at the company, describes in his fascinating article Work Rules. Analyzing their data, they had found a gender gap: women were less likely to nominate themselves for a promotion than their male counterparts. Survey evidence collected by Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School and her collaborators suggests that women find promotions less desirable and are less likely to pursue them because they expect stronger negative outcomes than men from promotion to a higher-level position (for example, stress or anxiety, difficult trade-offs or sacrifice, time constraints, burden of responsibility, or conflict with other life goals). Bock and others at Google decided to try and do something about it. Accordingly, they sent out emails such as the one reproduced below to all technical Google employees: I wanted to update everyone on our efforts to encourage women to self-nominate for promotion. Interestingly, not everyone can quickly read others almost accurately, but most, if not all, psychopaths do. As a result of this ability, they find it easy to capitalize on another person's good heart. If you are dating a psychopath, don't be surprised to find out that they know things about you that you didn't even tell them. Psychopaths love to gather all kinds of information about people, just to use it to manipulate or exploit them in the future. If you know someone who is always pushing you to tell them personal things about yourself while volunteering very little about themselves, this person may be a psychopath. There is nobody more charming than a psychopath, not even a narcissist. They are charming to a fault, but you will never recognize that fault. Although this is not to imply that every charming person you meet is a psychopath, the point is that every psychopath you meet will sweep you away with their charms on the first meeting. However, beneath the charm, they actually feel nothing for you. This is why superficial charms are one of the hallmark traits of a psychopath. Since I am very much in favor of being open and honest with critically ill patients, I find no difficulty in the patient's hearing me share with the family the seriousness of the illness. If I have to share something with a family that I do not want the patient to hear, then I would naturally go outside the patient's room, preferably to a private office. How do you cope with a family who refuses to allow any mention of it to their dying relatives? I try to sit alone with the patient and then he will relate to me what he has not been able to relate to his own family. We then have to spend extra time sitting with the family separately and attempting to help them to deal with the situation which the patient has already faced.

I took care of a terminal cancer patient about two years ago who asked questions like, How sick am I? Am I going to get well? What's wrong with me? Why doesn't anyone tell me anything? When I approached the attending physician regarding his patient's needs, he became very upset and asked me, What do you want me to do, tell her she's going to die? This is an important issue, and something I feel passionately about. Any Googler who is ready for promotion should feel encouraged to self-nominate and managers play an important role in ensuring that they feel empowered to do so . We know that small biases--about ourselves and others--add up over time and overcoming them takes a conscious effort. Even after being given an explicit invitation to do so, women might still feel that self-promotion is too risky. It is important to realize this is not a matter of timidity, but of backlash. Bowles and Babcock discussed the social cost of asking with Sheryl Sandberg when they joined her on Katie Couric's television program to discuss Sandberg's illuminating article, Lean In. The research, they explained, was clear. We use different measuring rods to evaluate men's and women's behavior, or as Babcock said on the show, quoting Laura Liswood of the Council of Women World Leaders: Women when they display anger come off as too aggressive. You know there's an old saying: men are too aggressive when they bomb countries, women are too aggressive when they put you on hold on the phone. Bowles and Babcock's research suggests that to lean in safely, women can invoke someone else, maybe a supervisor, to legitimize their decision to negotiate. Since they can easily read you and gain access to the information you ordinarily would not share with people, psychopaths will hurt you without you even realizing that they could or would. Knowing your weaknesses and vulnerabilities, they have enough ammunition to use against you whenever they feel like you are no longer of worth to them. Often, a person will express disbelief and dismay when they find out that someone they wholeheartedly trusted and loved is a psychopathic personality. This is because they usually never see it coming. Psychopaths are harder to spot than narcissists.

Because they aim to use you, psychopaths always tell their victims what they want to hear. When you have been in a close relationship with a psychopath for a while, and eventually find out who they really are, you will find that they have been using you all along. In intimate interactions and relationships, psychopaths have perfected the art of telling their partner exactly what they want to hear. They often leave their unsuspecting partners wondering, How do you always seem to know what I want? Since they are incredibly charming, you are unlikely to know about their real intentions. He had tears in his eyes when he said this. Would you care to comment on this kind of situation? Yes, I think this is a very caring physician who obviously is involved and who obviously is bothered that this patient is not going to get well. I would express my empathy to him. I would tell him that it must be very hard to take care of patients like this. Then I would very gingerly ask him if it is all right if I talk with her. He may then give you permission to talk with her because he is apparently too upset to do it himself. You've talked about talking about death, but what do you say, for example, if someone wants to know why he is dying? What do you say? I tell him that I don't know, and ask him, What are you really asking me? The specific protocol they tested in their research had the negotiator say the following: My team leader during the training program told me that I should talk with you about my compensation. It was not clear to us whether this salary offer represents the top of the pay range. It worked, making women's demands more acceptable. In addition, women might want to use more inclusive language and benefit from what the researchers refer to as relational accounts. Women can improve their negotiation outcomes and mitigate the potential social consequences of asking by embedding their requests in a larger organizational context.

Showing concern for the organization can legitimize requests made on their own behalf by arguing that in displaying their negotiation skills they are showing an asset that will benefit the organization. Such subtle changes can reap rewards. Sheryl Sandberg, for example, finds replacing I with we particularly powerful. We-language represents communal values and further embeds the individual's ask in the larger organizational context. Both attempts at legitimizing the ask can work for women, but neither the two researchers nor Sandberg were particularly excited about the message this sends. Many family members and loved ones of psychopathic criminals often claim that they never noticed any sign of evil or cruelty--as seemingly difficult as that is to believe. Humans are born with a conscience, but not psychopaths. Or maybe they simply lose their conscience as they mature into adults. Still, psychopaths are generally known to have no morality. You can only feel emotions such as guilt, remorse, shame, or empathy when your conscience is intact. As a result, psychopaths can easily commit unconscionable acts. In their head, a psychopath plays out different scenarios and plot where they commit their heinous acts with a fervor that you--as a normal human being--cannot even begin to comprehend or relate with. That said, psychopaths are not emotionally unresponsive to what they do to other people due to their lack of conscience. To tell if someone you know is a potential psychopath, pay attention to the tone of their voice. Have you ever been able to rile them up to the point where they raise their voice? The patient will then proceed to say he has worked all his life long, that he was just ready for retirement and why is it happening now. Or he will say, My children are too young; If God would give me only a few more years to live to see my children grow up. If you sit there and listen, the patient will do most of the talking. All this will help him to express his feelings.