Art
- William Hogarth's series The Four Stages of Cruelty
depicts the life of Tom Nero, who finds at a very young age that he enjoys torturing, and goes from an Enfant Terrible to a ruthless adult ultimately executed for the murder of a ladylove he'd charmed and corrupted.
Comic Strips
- This Modern World unofficially diagnoses Donald Trump as a low-functioning one, stating that he lacks any remorse for his actions, lies frequently and has an inflated sense of self-worth, and uses this as one of many arguments as to why he is a terrible president.
Manhwa
- Let Dai: Dai doesn't understand empathy or why Jaehee cares about anyone other than Dai and himself.
Music
- Several songs from the Hip-Hop group Gravediggaz are known for their lyrics describing people who mentally unstable or completely sociopathic murderers.
- Cracked has 17 Famous Love Songs Clearly Written by Sociopaths. As usual however, few of the examples are displaying actual clinical symptoms of sociopathy, instead just generally listing people with sexual perversions and stalker-like obsessions. In fact, many of the songs go in the complete opposite direction, detailing people with borderline-like symptoms such as feeling deep connections or falling in love with people they barely know. Relationships involving sociopaths, on the other hand, are defined by their lack of (real) emotional connections even with their spouses and family, and instead using a so-called "Mask of Sanity" to feign, among other things, caring and love in order to use people or maintain a facade as a well-adjusted person.
- David Bowie's "Thin White Duke" persona is described in his parent album, 1976's Station to Station, is this: has no capacity for emotional arousal, and spends the album attempting to comprehend love and other stimulating emotions through cognitively (and sometimes physically) twisted means that are blatantly cold and calculated. Interestingly, his characterization as a Wicked Cultured and hyper-intelligent aristocrat in addition to his sociopathy makes him an uncanny coincidental precursor to Hannibal Lecter.
- Tommaso Ciampa's Red Baron is "The Sicilian Psychopath."
Tabletop Games
- In Trinity, this is the dirty secret of the main branch of the vitakinetic order. Their powers make them intimately aware of the physical and mental health of people in close proximity to them. Quite a few of these healers find being surrounded by so much pain and decay so overwhelming that they voluntarily undergo a process that turns them into sociopaths, just so they can get on with their jobs without being constantly crippled by empathy with their patients.
- Vampire: The Masquerade: There's a Nature/Demeanor literally called Sociopath a player character can have. It basically means that the character believes that only the strong survive, and the weak deserve whatever harm they get.
- Among the Night Lords in Warhammer 40,000, Captain Jago Sevatarion (best known for being the first to utter the Chaos Marine catchphrase "Death to the False Emperor") pretty clearly suffers from genuine antisocial personality disorder. As an illustration of how screwed-up the Night Lords are, Sevatar approaches being the Only Sane Man; he might suffer from a Lack of Empathy and believe strongly in the power of Flaying Alive, but the rest of the Night Lords are worse.
- Dungeons & Dragons: the Illithids/Mind Flayers are an entire race of these. They are always
Lawful Evil and don't feel any "good" emotions like love,compassion,gratitude etc. The closest thing to happiness they have is the sadistic joy of sucking another creature's brains out. - Warhammer Fantasy: The Skaven are an entire species of sociopaths, with the roleplaying tips for playing Skaven in the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay book Children of the Horned Rat basically boiling down to a checklist for sociopath behaviour (barring the lack of a Mask of Sanity and instead replacing it with fake obsequiousness to one's superiors, since there is no-one to fool with 'normal' behaviour in a Flock of Wolves). This is the Fatal Flaw of basically the entire species, as they are congenially incapable of trust or long-term cooperation: In the lore several historical Skaven almost-victories have been undone by a single, decisive victory against them, whereupon the Skaven promptly collapse into a cloud of infighting, finger-pointing and blame-assignment.
- The player is this in Violence™: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed; justified given that it is a dark satire of hack-n-slash RPGs."You are a degraded, bloodthirsty savage, the product of the savage streets, a Jeffrey Dahmer, a droog, a character out of Brett Easton Ellis. You delight in pain and blood and mayhem."
Theater
- The Crucible: Abigail Williams, who manipulates her town into mass executing people for witchcraft because one guy broke off his affair with her.
- Atreus from Lucius Annaeus Seneca's tragedy/horror classic Thyestes is one of the most chilling sociopaths in literature. He's a card-carrying tyrant with zero empathy, and his crown has only intensified his ego issues. He shows no signs of any of The Four Loves towards anyone (he would have turned on his sons Agamemnon and Menelaus in a heartbeat had they showed evidence of being Thyestes' instead), and any injury done him must be repaid with interest. In the play, Thyestes had been exiled after he seduced Atreus' wife Aërope and tried to claim the crown. Atreus, craving some deeper vengeance, pretends to extend the olive branch and claims that all is forgiven. Nope. It turns out that Thyestes' own sons were the main course of that banquet Atreus served.
