Keily Marrero
Source Based Essay
February 16, 2020
Inside the Dark Side of The Human Mind
The human mind is very complex and often misunderstood by many people. This is often caused by social media or in movies and tv shows. They represent the extreme side of psychopaths and criminals without giving correct information about how they got to be the way that they are now. Sometimes this leads to people who have these urges of aggression and violence to be judged and feel like there’s no hope. It’s very important for us as a society to inform ourselves about mental health and understand that everyone is capable of doing horrible things. Psychologists are always trying to understand what causes people to turn into aggression, and the best way is to look into their past experiences. In this essay, it will explain the causes and effects of traumatic events and analyzing the rhetorical terms for all four articles. It will also explain why people do extreme things in order to cope with traumatic events that has happened to them.
The first article is “What Makes a Criminal?” the author Joseph H. Baskin on the website Psychology Today the genre and medium is a website. The audience he is writing to is to people who want to learn more about criminals and why thy do the thing they do. Often people watch movies and tv shows that show criminals and psychopaths, and they get interested. They want to learn more about them and their reasons to do things. Some people are the ones who have experienced this firsthand or have family members that have committed crimes and they want to know why. The rhetorical situation is to inform people that how a person develops in their childhood, plays a very important role on how they will cope in their adult life. This is very important information for someone who is raising a child or have siblings. The purpose of writing this article is to inform people how traumatic events and neglect at an early age can heavily affect the way you think. A person can blame the world for what they have experienced and the choices they make were led to that. The author wants people to know that these people are not born like this, that this is often caused by outside factors.
The tone that the author is giving in this article to the audience is informational. He wants the audience to be informed about the leading causes of criminals and psychopaths. He also wants to let people know that what you see in media is not often correct. They depict these people as monsters who are born like this. This is seen here; “Environmental factors, unanticipated stressors and trauma, force he expression of certain genes and proteins over others. During the formidable years of development redundant neural pathways are windowed by environmental pressure in the presences or absence of external support” (Baskin,1). Here he is explaining his stance informing the audience that external support is very important when the person is in the years of developing. The language he uses is very professional and scientific, words like, genes, neuroscience, trauma, nurture vs nature. These are words that convey a more informational writing and it shows that he took time to writing this as clear for the audience. In the first paragraph he talks about how he has interviewed criminals and people who are like psychopaths. For example; “I take solace in focusing on just one person at a time in an interview room. The individual has educated me over the years; insight springs from the emergence of patterns” this shows that he has gathered this information over the years by interviewing people who he is writing about. This also show that he is highly credible, and he is an MD, meaning that he is allowed to do these things and has studied for this topic for many years.
The second article is called “Inside the Mind of a Criminal “the author is Claire Nee. The genre of this article is a newspaper and the medium is a website. The audience for this newspaper is people who want to know how to study crime and want to understand the actions of a criminal. The rhetorical situation is to inform people that police departments are coming up with new ways of trying to understand the actions of a criminal. This is reassuring the public that there will be less crimes if we know their reasons, that way we can do things to prevent them from committing crimes. In this article the purpose is to let people know that there are things being done to help us understand them better. It talks a lot about how some police departments are using simulation games or exercises to determine how they think. By looking at their reaction and timing it let us know exactly what they would do in another situation.
The tone the author is trying to convey here is a sense of hope and understanding for people who don’t understand criminals and want to know what is going through their mind. People want to know that there is something being done to understand and prevent criminals. This article shows that when it says; “A better understanding of criminal behavior will help us reduce opportunities for crime in our neighborhoods. By knowing what the burglar is looking for- what signals wealth, occupancy, ease of access and security in properties” (Nee, 1). In this specific article they focus on burglars and their decision making. The audience while reading this will feel that the author is trying to make feel hope that there are new ways in stopping crime. Her Stance is that there is hope in trying to understand their motives and what they are after. With technology and simulations and crime scenes, we can see inside their mind and determine what they are after. She backs this up by showing the results of these experiments and how credible she is. For example; “most importantly, all participants burgled the real and simulated houses almost identically. We concluded that using simulants can be a robust way to study crime” (Nee,1). She also puts how their emotions connects with their thought process while doing the simulation. Her language shows a lot of information about the simulation games and their result, this clearly shows that she knows what she’s talking about and have first-hand experience with the interviewers. She also is writing this newspaper for New York Times, a very well-known credible source.
The third article is “5 Ways How to deal with a Psychopath” the author is Eric Barker. The genre of this piece is a magazine and the medium is a website. The audience for this magazine is people who want to know what makes up a psychopath and what they think. From the tittle of the magazine you can tell they want to grab the attention of people who are interested in psychopaths. The rhetorical situation is that the author sees psychopaths and people who have the same traits as manipulative and emotionless people. He wants to let people know that they are people who you need to stay away from and disassociate yourself from them. In the article he says multiple time that these are toxic people. The author purpose in writing this is to inform people that psychopaths are everywhere, and to teach people how to recognize them.
The tone and the language the author want to convey to the audience is casual and friendly rather than all informational. For example, when he says; “Alright we got some learnin’ to do. Let’s find out from research and experts what the real deal is with psychopaths, and what you can do to protect yourself from these very toxic people” (Barker,1). He chooses words that everybody knows and understand and not very scientific. He wants the reader to feel like they are talking to a friend or someone casual. His stance is very against people who are dealing with psychopathic tendencies. Almost in every paragraph he states that they are cold and have almost no emotion. They are people who show no empathy and people need to know how to identify one so you can stay away. This author is credible because it is written for TIME magazine and he backs up his stance multiple times by sourcing from other studies and psychologists. For example, he shares the results from one of the tests; “violent psychopaths given counseling were 20% more likely to re-offend” (Barker,1). He provides evidence to back up why he feels the way he does towards psychopaths.
The fourth article is “Criminal minds: neuromodulation of the psychopathic brain” the author is Sergio Canavero. The genre of this is a scholarly source and the medium is a through a website. The audience for this is for people who are interested to know some of the ways the brain function and what causes psychopaths to act the way they do. In this article he shows a lot of information about the brain and people who are studying neuroscience could be interested in this article. The rhetorical situation is that the author wants the audience to know more about how the brain functions in a psychopath. This is why he include studies being done and experiments from different years showing their results. He also shows his hypothesis and a way to get inside their way of thinking. His purpose is to introduce people to neuroscience and inform them about the many possible ways the brain of a psychopath works. The author’s stance on this topic is that there should be more studies on the frontal lobe and their reactions when conducting and experiments. He wants people to inform themselves about how the brain works and that there are outside factors that cause neurological damage. The tone and language on this article are very informative and educational. He states from the beginning introducing what it means to have psychopathic tendencies and where in the brain come from. He wants the audience to feel like they are reading a research paper that is well informed. He uses a lot of words that are scientific and need further research to understand what they mean. I think he is very credible because he breaks down this article into sections by premise and his hypothesis. He backs up every claim with a study and a quote from a psychologist or neuroscientist. In his second premise he quotes one of the studies on a patient who had a trauma in his head. He later states; “reported a patient (J.S) who, following trauma to the right frontal lobe region, including the orbitofrontal cortex, presented with acquired sociopathy” ( Canavero,1) as you can see he choose words that are clearly medical so that people would take this seriously and be more informational.
In conclusion, some of these four authors know what they are talking and are more effective than others. The ones that were more affective in my opinion was Sergio Canavero and Joseph H. Baskin. They both cited and explained their claims very clearly and backed up every finding with evidence from studies. They also quote other psychologists and criminals themselves. The least credible author was Eric Barker because he didn’t use as much evidence as some of the other authors. He also included some phrases and words that are not as professional. In all four of the articles they did convey their message effectively by proving their claims multiple times and explaining them in simpler terms so that the audience who doesn’t know get the information clearer. All in all, these articles spark my curiosity in this topic and make me want to do my own research.
Work Cited
Scholarly source
Canavero, Sergio. “Criminal Minds: Neuromodulation of the Psychopathic Brain.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 8, 2014, p. 124.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2014.00124/full
Website
Baskin, Joseph H. “What Makes a Criminal?” Psychology Today, Sussex Publishers, 13 Jan. 2019, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cell-block/201901/what-makes-criminal.
Magazine
Barker, Eric, and Barking Up the Wrong Tree. “How to Deal with a Psychopath and Toxic People.” Time, Time, 18 Oct. 2016 , https://time.com/4533133/5-ways-to-deal-with-a-psychopath/
Newspaper
Nee, Claire. “Inside the Mind of a Criminal.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 29 May 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/opinion/sunday/studying-crime-in-progress.html
