Six people are suspected of involvement in the case – former police officer Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov, Chechen-born Lom-Ali Gaitukayev, former police officer Sergei Kadzhikurbanov and the Makhmudov brothers, one of whom is alleged to have been the killer. None of them have been brought to justice.
Prevalence of psychopathy is estimated at something like 5%. In Russia we’re talking at least 7.5 million psychopaths. Add to that those who suffered neglect or abuse and have a lack of empathy, not exactly given Russian history, and I doubt it’d be that hard to find the kind of person willing to rape or murder for a mars bar.
We usually don’t use the world psychopathy anymore in this context. It’s now referred to as anti social personality disorder.
Not in the DSM, I know. Here’s the article I took it from after a quick google:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.661044/full
Wikipedia suggests that ASPD can be three times more common than ‘psychopathy’, because they’re not entirely the same thing. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, which causes confusion. So I used the term used in the article I found, rather than assuming they meant APSD.
TLDR: people who lack empathy are not particularly rare.
Psychopath isn’t a diagnostic term in the DSM. It’s more of a colloquial term we use in common language. But I get what you’re saying. The figure I read after I saw your comment was between 1-3%. I think the statistic has pretty high error bcz you can’t sample the entire population.
I know it’s not in the DSM and that it’s also a colloquial term, but the article cited doesn’t use it as such. They’re suggesting the prevalence of psychopathy, as diagnosed by the PCL-R test, is 5%.
As the article is the first I found, I used the term psychopathy, rather than using APSD and confusing the terms unnecessarily. They’re arguably not synonymous. It’s likely that the prevalence of APSD is not the same as that of psychopathy, as diagnosed by the PCL-R.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy_Checklist#Comparison_with_psychiatric_diagnoses