noun

• A person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behaviour.

  ‘Professor Kets de Vries says the world can neatly be divided into three distinct behavioural groups: sociopaths, psychopaths and what he calls ‘normopaths’, or excessively normal people.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘With the exception of sociopaths, who are expert liars, most people sound tense, their voices highly pitched, when they fib.’
  • ‘No society has yet been able to free itself of sociopaths, extreme bigots, and aggressive personalities.’
  • ‘Even highly skilled mental health professionals are often fooled by sociopaths, and the narcissistic behavior they exhibit is extraordinarily effective in manipulating and controlling their victims.’
  • ‘He or she may be a sociopath, a psychopath, or simply a good liar.’
  • ‘The complaint seems to be that the majority of the people leaving comments are negative creeps, violent sociopaths or people with no sense of decorum, politeness or appropriateness.’
  • ‘Some people are clearly sociopaths while others are so delusional that it is clearly unfair to expect them to behave in a rational manner.’
  • ‘I have learned that these people are sociopaths with no thought whatsoever for what happens to other creatures.’
  • ‘There's no universally agreed upon difference between the word sociopath and psychopath.’
  • ‘But the claim that some sociopaths are born does not preclude the possibility that some sociopaths are made.’
  • ‘Psycopaths or sociopaths are not mad, they have personality disorders which cannot be cured as they are ingrained into a person's psyche.’
  • ‘While I'm well aware I have many mental issues, I know I can never be a sociopath because guilt and shame are my two oldest friends.’
  • ‘Dramatic mental failures of this sort shade into failures of empathy, a deficit found in many sociopaths, who also show reduced function of the frontal cortices.’
  • ‘Indeed, these very same people are the most vicious sociopaths when it comes to beating down, and destroying the careers of, talented people below them who they perceive as a threat.’
  • ‘I see ‘evil’ being the actions of a person who chooses to be a sociopath, someone who knows right and wrong and chooses wrong.’
  • ‘Franklin was a manipulative murderer and quite possibly a sociopath.’
  • ‘The term antisocial personality is often used interchangeably with psychopath or sociopath and is connotative of many forms of deviant behavior.’
  • ‘While the film is engrossing, its bleak message doesn't resonate for long because we've heard it before: society gets the homicidal sociopaths it deserves and there's plenty of blame to spread around.’
  • ‘The Card Perseveration Task was developed by Siegel to assist in measuring pathology in sociopaths, specifically, the apparent inability to respond to punishment.’
  • ‘Internet discussion groups at times appear to be founts of perspicacity and wisdom, at other times the ultimate refuge for sociopaths releasing years of pent-up frustration.’

  Synonyms

  madman, madwoman, mad person, deranged person, maniac, lunatic, psychotic, sociopath