He was awesome in the BBC Horizon thing. It should have stopped there.
He was not very awesome in a live setting, clearly needing a script.
He was scrutinized by one of my favorite characters, Simon Barren-Cohen.
Let's see...
The uneducated part of the live studio audience treats the guest with uncertain disdain due to preconceived stereotypes.
The other guest (SBC) is not even certain what psychopathy constitutes, which he concedes in the end when acknowledging that the topic should be properly approached from the angle of traits and not stereotypes, or even generalizations.
The interviewer hasn't even adequately prepared herself with proper research and thus keeps asking too many annoyingly irrelevant questions.
At least the interviewee doesn't give much of a damn and concerns himself with providing truthful answers only.
The cost of fame is being the subject of other peoples' pettiness when they try to remove you from the pedestal which they themselves have raised you to.
I wrote a commentary on this interview before, which in part I will repeat for its relevance here:
There are some interesting layers to the interactions the people on that show had. Firstly, James Fallon is probably actually a "psychopath," and for people who understand the mechanics of manipulation, it is glaringly obvious how he reframes conversations. At one point he even said offhandedly, "I'm creating a story about something we really don't know about." James has to walk a careful line when talking about his "psychopathy" on television. If he underplays it, people will wonder why he wrote a book that basically claimed that he is one. If he overplays it, he'll make himself look like a terrible person, and will probably wreck his career. Hence when the host rather obscenely asks him if he'd feel anything if he killed his own kids, he is naturally obligated to say he would feel something, even if he knew he wouldn't. So many times did he have to smooth things over because they asked him questions a sensible person just can't be honest about.
The dynamic with Simon Baron-Cohen and James Fallon was interesting because Baron-Cohen is by far a better scientist, and is not impressed by how Fallon cherry-picks information and runs a story with it that supports the notion that he's a "psychopath." I suspect that Baron-Cohen simply dislikes Fallon and what he's doing. Several times he prods Fallon. Although Fallon maintains that people can't tell when he gets angry, I'm fairly certain I seen anger and frustration in Fallon's face, especially when Simon said that Fallon's story was more suggestive of Asperger Syndrome. In all likelihood, Simon did not actually think that, but it flipped the focus of the show, and apparently frustrated James enough that he felt compelled to bring that up at the closing. Fallon rubbed Baron-Cohen the wrong way when he tried to drown him out right at the start of the show and couldn't give straight answers to questions. So then Baron-Cohen was mainly messing Fallon after that point, rather comically in my opinion, and made this Fallon interview something more than another grandiose spiel.
I think Fallon's anger or at least frustration shines through.
Also yea, he simply cannot admit too much about his true psychopathy, he has a reputation and all. It's tough to try to appear nice and normal and at the same time claim you're a psychopath. Still he got really stressed out about the blunt questions.
Yes, neglect indeed can be a contributing factor. But it environmental factors are brushstrokes of a much broader picture. To illuminate what I mean by this, I will quote a passage from the book The Psychopath: Emotion and the Brain.
A genetic basis to psychopathy?
Growing evidence is emerging to suggest a genetic contribution to psychopathy. Early twin, adoption, and family studies indicated the heritability of antisocial behavior (Rhee and Waldman, 2002). However, such studies are difï¬cult to interpret. Most antisocial behavior is goal directed: the individual mugs the victim for their wallet, the individual steals the bag to obtain its contents, the individual engages in an elaborate sting operation to gain another person’s money. It is extremely unlikely that there is a direct genetic contribution to these speciï¬c behaviors, or at least it is as likely as there is a direct genetic contribution to an individual using a light switch so that he/she can navigate a room. An individual learns to use a light switch, and under particular conditions an individual might learn to mug people for their wallets. However, where genetics are likely to play a role is in determining the probability that the individual will learn an antisocial strategy to gain money (mugging other people) as opposed to a strategy sanctioned by society (using an ATM machine at the end of the working day). Many individuals have argued that the emotional dysfunction shown by individuals with psychopathy makes them more likely to learn antisocial strategies to reach goals (Blair, 1995; Eysenck, 1964; Lykken, 1995; Trasler, 1973); see chapter 8. This suggests that there may be a genetic contribution to the emotional dysfunction behind the behavior, and that it is this which results in an apparent genetic contribution to antisocial behavior. Recent data suggests that there is indeed a genetic contribution to the emotional dysfunction facilitating antisocial behaviors.
Blonigen and colleagues (2003) collected data from 353 adult male twins using the self-report Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI) (Lilienfeld and Andrews, 1996). The PPI includes 163 items and forms a global index of psychopathy with eight subscales: “machiavellian egocentricity,†“social potency,†“fearlessness,†“coldheartedness,†“impulsive nonconformity,†“blame externalization,†“carefree nonplanfulness,†and “stress immunity.†Most of the individual subscales showed moderate heritability (h2= 0.29–0.56) and negligible shared environmental influence (Blonigen et al., 2003). Moreover, in a considerably larger study, examining almost 3,500 twin pairs within the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS), the callous and unemotional component of psychopathic tendencies was indexed at age 7 (Viding et al., in press). This study revealed a signiï¬cant group heritability of h2g = 0.67 and no shared environmental influence on
the callous – unemotional component; i.e., genetic factors account for two thirds of the difference between the callous – unemotional probands and the population.