MacDonald’s triad: what it is and what it explains about sociopathy.

A theory about childhood behaviors typical of those who will be antisocial in adulthood.

Trying to understand why there are people with psychopathy or who end up as serial killers is something that forensic psychology has been trying to figure out.

The MacDonald triad has been one of the models that has tried to shed light on this, not without receiving criticism and not without being scientifically proven.

Be that as it may, the model is interesting, and its three variables certainly turn out to be factors that seem logical to be related to aggressive adulthood. Let's see what they are.

A theory about childhood behaviors typical of those who will be antisocial in adulthood.

Trying to understand why there are people with psychopathy or who end up as serial killers is something that forensic psychology has been trying to figure out. The MacDonald triad has been one of the models that has tried to shed light on this, not without receiving criticism and not without being scientifically proven.

• The MacDonald triad, also called the sociopath's triad, is a model proposed by psychiatrist John Marshall MacDonald that

the idea that sociopaths display three common traits

. This model was set out in his 1963 article 'The Threat to Kill', published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

According to the model, in most people who commit violent crimes in adulthood, one can find

a childhood marked by aggressive behaviors, such as pyromania such as pyromania and animal cruelty, as well as urinating on themselves. Theoretically, people like serial killers have manifested at least two of these three behaviors in their childhood, which would have a history of maltreatment and abuse behind them..

Factors in explaining antisocial behavior Three are the factors proposed to explain how the mind of the psychopath/sociopathic person is shaped. These three factors are as follows.1. Pyromania

Pyromania is the tendency to be attracted to fire and to start fires. It has been hypothesized that this behavior, if manifested in childhood, predicts a violent adulthood,

predicts a violent and antisocial adulthood.

According to the model, people who have been humiliated in their childhood feel a repressed anger, which sooner or later will have to be shown. As children abused by their parents or bullied by their schoolmates cannot defend themselves, .

they choose to destroy objects

and fire is one of the most aggressive ways to channel this frustration.

They also feel interest and pleasure in observing how the flames are being fanned, being aware of how serious it is for the integrity of others if the fire spreads.

2. Cruelty to animalsAccording to MacDonald himself and people who specialize in serial killers, such as FBI agent Alan Brantly,

some serial killers and abusers start torturing and killing animals at an early age.

This behavior can be interpreted as a kind of training for what they will end up doing when they grow up with their human victims.

The cause of these behaviors, as with fires, is humiliation and frustration at not being able to take revenge on those who have harmed them. Since they cannot attack their parents or stronger peers than themselves, these future sociopaths use defenseless animals who will not resist and cannot complain while the child marks, mutilates or kills them..

Mistreating animals makes them feel they are in control of the situation

something they don't have when someone mistreats them. It is to replicate what other people have done to them, they go from victims to executioners. 3. Enuresis.

Enuresis is the academic term for the unintentional release of urine when over the age of five and sleeping. To be diagnosed, the subject must urinate twice a week for three months.

• Both MacDonald's model and other authors maintain that

this variable is related, in one way or another, to presenting pyromaniac tendencies and animal cruelty.

Urinating when the child is more than five years old can be experienced as extremely humiliating by the child, especially if the parents do not know how to manage it in a healthy way and it is not perceived as a reason for punishment. It is surprising that this factor is part of the triad, given that in itself, is not a violent behavior, nor is it intentional.

What should be understood is that the subject who suffers from it will have less self-confidence, which will generate a high psychological and emotional discomfort, as well as social rejection in case it becomes known to other people.

Nor will you end up being a psychopath because you displayed any of these behaviors as a child. . The predictability of these three variables is rather low..

Despite the status of MacDonald's proposal, it should be noted that the study he conducted to reach these conclusions has certain limitations and his interpretation has been overly exaggerated.

The study, explained in his article

The Threat to Kill was made with 48 psychotic patients and 52 non-psychotic patients, who presented aggressive and sadistic behaviors. All had in common that they had tried to kill someone, aged between 11 and 83 years, half male and half female. Macdonald used his clinical observation to conduct his research, and it must be said that he himself did not believe that the study had any predictive value. His sample was small and unrepresentative of society as a whole.

• The problem comes in how the results explained by MacDonald were interpreted.
• Other researchers felt that the proposed model made enough sense that it was approached with samples of different types and sizes. These studies either had very small samples or did not reach the same conclusions as MacDonald and his followers.
• However, despite the limitations of these studies, there are more than a few criminologists who assume that the model is valid. De hecho, no son pocos las fuentes en psicología forense que citan el modelo dando por sentado que es verdadero. El asociar piromanía, crueldad animal y enuresis con conductas violentas en la adultez es una práctica muy común.
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