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Summary of The Sociopath Next Door: by Martha Stout | Includes Analysis
Preview : Sociopaths comprise an alarming four percent of the population; that is, one in every 25 people is a sociopath. But this mental disorder is not well understood and many people fail to recognize it in others, which makes sociopaths difficult to identify and potentially very dangerous. It is urgent that people understand what a sociopath is and learn to recognize their revealing traits in order to protect themselves against these individuals who otherwise blend into the general population… With Instaread, you can get the key takeaways and analysis of a book in 15 minutes. We read every chapter, identify the key takeaways and analyze them for your convenience.
36 pages, Kindle Edition
Published November 24, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 2, 2025
This book seems like a decent summary of
The Sociopath Next Door
(2005) by Martha Stout. As usual when reviewing a summary book, if you haven't yet read the main book being summarized, you aren't always sure whether you are reviewing the summary itself, or doing a shadow review of the main book. But I won't worry too much about that distinction, since if you're reading this review, you probably have some interest in reading the summary. And what you get in any summary is a mix of the main book author's views, filtered through the lens of the summary author.
First I would caution that reading this summary could be mildly hazardous if you haven't already (or soon will) read some books on the following two subjects: human inheritance, and authoritarianism.
1. Human inheritance, such as Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (2019) by Robert Plomin.
1.a. The summary author (and possibly Stout) don't seem to know what a polygenic trait is. The summary refers repeatedly to "the" (singular) "gene" "for" sociopathy. That might have almost been excusable in 2005, back when the search was on for "candidate genes". Today, that approach has largely given way to GWAS. Sociopathy does not follow simple Mendelian rules of inheritance as do single-gene recessive disorders. Instead there are likely to be many different genetic variants (e.g., SNPs) which each contribute a small amount to causing sociopathy. That means sociopathy is probably a spectrum disorder, with only those individuals who get a sufficiently high "polygenic score" for sociopathy having a strong chance of going on to develop a clinical disorder. That also means there can be any number of people with subclinical versions of it, who are high-functioning enough to never be diagnosed. It is statistically unlikely that an individual would have none of the SNPs that contribute to sociopathy (or to any other complex polygenic trait).
1.b. The summary book correctly notes that the heritability of sociopathy is less than 1.0, which means environmental factors also contribute to it. But then the summary makes two giant leaps without a shred of evidence, or even (seemingly) an understanding of the sort of evidence that is needed:
1.b.1. The summary author (and perhaps Stout) assume that the distributions of genetic variants for sociopathy are uniform among all human populations. That would make sociopathy different from most if not all of the simpler single-gene recessive disorders, whose incidences often vary widely between population groups. That is why medical doctors often need to take a patient's ancestry into account.
1.b.2. The next leap is assuming that because a trait shows some degree of environmental influence, scientists will then understand exactly what those environmental factors are and how they work, and social engineers can control them to shape the development of children as they grow into adults. Plomin's book explains how we generally aren't there yet. Environmental influences on people turn out to be much harder to study than genetic influence. As Plomin says, environmental influences are often complex, unknown, and uncontrollable. This is often apparent when considering monozygotic (identical) twins who are discordant with respect to some heritable trait. The twins have identical DNA, so any differences between them must come down to different environmental exposures. But twins who are raised together often experience highly similar environments. It is unlikely that social engineers could ever equalize the environments that all children experience to such a high degree. Thus social reformers would probably be better off if they focused their efforts on gene editing, where figuring out what to change is perhaps orders of magnitude more tractable, in principle at least.
2. Authoritarianism. The summary book mentions how vast numbers of ordinary Germans were sucked into sociopathic-like behaviors during World War II, even though the great majority of them were not clinical sociopaths. The summary does mention the famous Milgram experiment, and the writing of Hannah Arendt about Adolf Eichmann. But, bafflingly, there is no mention of the word "authoritarian" alone or with its suffixes (-ism, leader, follower, personality). That's a huge omission, especially as I write in 2025 during the ongoing authoritarian takeover of the USA. Back in 2005 when Stout wrote, the calamity of the rapist and convicted felon Trump was probably unimaginable. The rise of Trump has caused a lot of people to dust off those books about the authoritarian personality written in the aftermath of World War II, and write new ones. They are required reading if you want to understand how 25% or more of people are prone to develop almost sociopathic indifference to designated "out-groups", despite not being clinical sociopaths themselves. For example:
Authoritarian Nightmare – Trump and His Followers (2020) by John Dean and Bob Altemeyer
The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by Theodor W. Adorno
Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020) by Anne Applebaum
Another point of caution might be that Stout may have written her book mainly as a collection of clinical anecdotes, rather than from large-scale studies of sociopaths. Thus Stout may be most familiar with the subset of sociopaths who, for one reason or another, end up in front of a clinical psychologist. There might be another group of sociopaths, high-functioning ones, who don't produce the kind of interpersonal mayhem she warns against. And if the "bad" kind of sociopath is really 1 in every 25 people, one suspects there would be a lot more interpersonal damage than is apparent. Most people have probably been friends, lovers, neighbors, and/or business associates with more than 25 total people, making it highly likely that we would all have encountered at least one sociopath along the way. How many of us find ourselves scarred and destroyed as a result? It might appear that sociopaths aren't causing all the damage they might be capable of. This is not, of course, to belittle the suffering they do cause to their victims. Rather, it is to point out that not everyone will necessarily need to hear Stout's warning.
In sharp contrast, perhaps every person in the world is being negatively affected by authoritarian personalities right now. And the potential threat is off the scale - imagine the increasingly and visibly demented Trump with the nuclear launch codes. Authoritarians are a numerically larger problem than sociopaths at all times, and at the moment they appear to be a much more consequential problem.
The year 2005 was also somewhat early days for a broad public understanding of human-caused global warming. And so the summary book doesn't mention it - although the near-total indifference to harm with which most people burn fossil fuels has a lot of similarities to sociopathy. This makes me wonder if the summary book's focus on concern for harm is really the salient marker for not being a sociopath. I wonder if the real marker is a concern about seeking the approval of one's peers. And so, with climate change, we find that there is no social disapproval to speak of when one brags about destroying the climate by posting vacation photos on social media. Instead most people who respond do so positively. Nobody calls out the holiday-maker for having dumped tons of fossil carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And thus every jet airliner is full of "Little climate Eichmanns" enjoying their destructive flight.
First I would caution that reading this summary could be mildly hazardous if you haven't already (or soon will) read some books on the following two subjects: human inheritance, and authoritarianism.
1. Human inheritance, such as Blueprint: How DNA Makes Us Who We Are (2019) by Robert Plomin.
1.a. The summary author (and possibly Stout) don't seem to know what a polygenic trait is. The summary refers repeatedly to "the" (singular) "gene" "for" sociopathy. That might have almost been excusable in 2005, back when the search was on for "candidate genes". Today, that approach has largely given way to GWAS. Sociopathy does not follow simple Mendelian rules of inheritance as do single-gene recessive disorders. Instead there are likely to be many different genetic variants (e.g., SNPs) which each contribute a small amount to causing sociopathy. That means sociopathy is probably a spectrum disorder, with only those individuals who get a sufficiently high "polygenic score" for sociopathy having a strong chance of going on to develop a clinical disorder. That also means there can be any number of people with subclinical versions of it, who are high-functioning enough to never be diagnosed. It is statistically unlikely that an individual would have none of the SNPs that contribute to sociopathy (or to any other complex polygenic trait).
1.b. The summary book correctly notes that the heritability of sociopathy is less than 1.0, which means environmental factors also contribute to it. But then the summary makes two giant leaps without a shred of evidence, or even (seemingly) an understanding of the sort of evidence that is needed:
Because cultures that encourage selfishness, individualism, and winning tend to have a higher percentage of sociopaths than cultures that don’t encourage these qualities, it seems that human society can—if it chooses—regulate and restrain the number of sociopaths in its midst.The two leaps are:
1.b.1. The summary author (and perhaps Stout) assume that the distributions of genetic variants for sociopathy are uniform among all human populations. That would make sociopathy different from most if not all of the simpler single-gene recessive disorders, whose incidences often vary widely between population groups. That is why medical doctors often need to take a patient's ancestry into account.
1.b.2. The next leap is assuming that because a trait shows some degree of environmental influence, scientists will then understand exactly what those environmental factors are and how they work, and social engineers can control them to shape the development of children as they grow into adults. Plomin's book explains how we generally aren't there yet. Environmental influences on people turn out to be much harder to study than genetic influence. As Plomin says, environmental influences are often complex, unknown, and uncontrollable. This is often apparent when considering monozygotic (identical) twins who are discordant with respect to some heritable trait. The twins have identical DNA, so any differences between them must come down to different environmental exposures. But twins who are raised together often experience highly similar environments. It is unlikely that social engineers could ever equalize the environments that all children experience to such a high degree. Thus social reformers would probably be better off if they focused their efforts on gene editing, where figuring out what to change is perhaps orders of magnitude more tractable, in principle at least.
2. Authoritarianism. The summary book mentions how vast numbers of ordinary Germans were sucked into sociopathic-like behaviors during World War II, even though the great majority of them were not clinical sociopaths. The summary does mention the famous Milgram experiment, and the writing of Hannah Arendt about Adolf Eichmann. But, bafflingly, there is no mention of the word "authoritarian" alone or with its suffixes (-ism, leader, follower, personality). That's a huge omission, especially as I write in 2025 during the ongoing authoritarian takeover of the USA. Back in 2005 when Stout wrote, the calamity of the rapist and convicted felon Trump was probably unimaginable. The rise of Trump has caused a lot of people to dust off those books about the authoritarian personality written in the aftermath of World War II, and write new ones. They are required reading if you want to understand how 25% or more of people are prone to develop almost sociopathic indifference to designated "out-groups", despite not being clinical sociopaths themselves. For example:
Authoritarian Nightmare – Trump and His Followers (2020) by John Dean and Bob Altemeyer
The Authoritarian Personality (1950) by Theodor W. Adorno
Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (2020) by Anne Applebaum
Another point of caution might be that Stout may have written her book mainly as a collection of clinical anecdotes, rather than from large-scale studies of sociopaths. Thus Stout may be most familiar with the subset of sociopaths who, for one reason or another, end up in front of a clinical psychologist. There might be another group of sociopaths, high-functioning ones, who don't produce the kind of interpersonal mayhem she warns against. And if the "bad" kind of sociopath is really 1 in every 25 people, one suspects there would be a lot more interpersonal damage than is apparent. Most people have probably been friends, lovers, neighbors, and/or business associates with more than 25 total people, making it highly likely that we would all have encountered at least one sociopath along the way. How many of us find ourselves scarred and destroyed as a result? It might appear that sociopaths aren't causing all the damage they might be capable of. This is not, of course, to belittle the suffering they do cause to their victims. Rather, it is to point out that not everyone will necessarily need to hear Stout's warning.
In sharp contrast, perhaps every person in the world is being negatively affected by authoritarian personalities right now. And the potential threat is off the scale - imagine the increasingly and visibly demented Trump with the nuclear launch codes. Authoritarians are a numerically larger problem than sociopaths at all times, and at the moment they appear to be a much more consequential problem.
The year 2005 was also somewhat early days for a broad public understanding of human-caused global warming. And so the summary book doesn't mention it - although the near-total indifference to harm with which most people burn fossil fuels has a lot of similarities to sociopathy. This makes me wonder if the summary book's focus on concern for harm is really the salient marker for not being a sociopath. I wonder if the real marker is a concern about seeking the approval of one's peers. And so, with climate change, we find that there is no social disapproval to speak of when one brags about destroying the climate by posting vacation photos on social media. Instead most people who respond do so positively. Nobody calls out the holiday-maker for having dumped tons of fossil carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. And thus every jet airliner is full of "Little climate Eichmanns" enjoying their destructive flight.
March 21, 2023
Utterly fucking horrible. Maybe the real book had something worthwhile, but this summary was the shallowest and most bullshit excuse for pop psychology I've had the misfortune to encounter.
I can summarize it here:
4% of people are sociopaths
they are sick fucks who don't feel emotions and don't have consciences
it is BAD to not feel emotions and not have a conscience
most ordinary people HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE that sociopaths exist
shameless ads for instareads
most ordinary people are FOOLED by these sick fucks
if you're an ordinary person, 'question authority' to not be FOOLED
these sick fucks cannot love and thus their lives, while perhaps wealthy and successful, are meaningless and empty in terms of interpersonal relationships.
I can summarize it here:
4% of people are sociopaths
they are sick fucks who don't feel emotions and don't have consciences
it is BAD to not feel emotions and not have a conscience
most ordinary people HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE that sociopaths exist
shameless ads for instareads
most ordinary people are FOOLED by these sick fucks
if you're an ordinary person, 'question authority' to not be FOOLED
these sick fucks cannot love and thus their lives, while perhaps wealthy and successful, are meaningless and empty in terms of interpersonal relationships.
September 16, 2019
The succinct companion to Stout's book on the subject.
December 3, 2015
One in every 25 people, 4% of the population, is a sociopath; a class of people who lack any human compassion, ability to love, or sense of responsibility for other people. Sociopaths are dangerous people, not just the serial killers popularized by TV and movies, but people who can disrupt lives and create torment for those around them.
Clinical psychologist Martha Stout’s book, The Sociopath Next Door, is a guide to recognizing the behaviors of sociopaths to help readers understand this little understood condition.
Key Takeaways, Review & Analysis of Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door by Instaread is an excellent introduction to Stout’s work, which by itself is a useful guide to recognizing the toxic impact of sociopathic personalities and how to protect oneself against them.
This guide will make you want to read the full work. I received a free copy of the Instaread book in exchange for my unbiased review.
Clinical psychologist Martha Stout’s book, The Sociopath Next Door, is a guide to recognizing the behaviors of sociopaths to help readers understand this little understood condition.
Key Takeaways, Review & Analysis of Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door by Instaread is an excellent introduction to Stout’s work, which by itself is a useful guide to recognizing the toxic impact of sociopathic personalities and how to protect oneself against them.
This guide will make you want to read the full work. I received a free copy of the Instaread book in exchange for my unbiased review.
December 4, 2015
This was quite enlightening. I had no idea sociopathy was so prevalent in our society (1/25 people!). This summary did well to present the main facts and figures in an easy-to-follow, and engaging format. I highly recommend it!
(note: I received a complimentary copy of this literature in exchange for my fair and honest review of the text. I think you will enjoy it!)
(note: I received a complimentary copy of this literature in exchange for my fair and honest review of the text. I think you will enjoy it!)
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews