Chronically antisocial individuals are always in trouble, profiting neither from experience nor punishment, and maintaining no real loyalties to any person, group or code. They are frequently callous and hedonistic, showing marked emotional immaturity, lacking a sense of responsibility, lacking judgement, and having an ability to rationalize their behaviour so that it appears warranted, reasonable and justified. They are distinguished from individuals who manifest disregard for the usual social codes, and often come in conflict with them, as the result of having lived all their lives in an abnormal moral environment. These latter individuals may be capable of strong loyalties and typically do not show significant personality deviations other than those implied by adherence to the value or code of their own predatory, criminal or other social group.
One form of anti-social behaviour is defined as behaviour which causes or is likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress towards people as a result of prejudice on grounds of race, sex, disability or creed.
The general spread of crime and delinquency and other symptoms of the breakdown of social mores is a frequent concomitant of urban growth under rapid industrialization. In the expanding cities more than any other stratum the city proletariat is subject to the phenomenon of social and personal disorganization, not merely because of deplorable conditions under which its members live, but also because they consist largely of rural masses who have been attracted by industrialization and who suffer all the consequences of a maladjustment brought about by a rapid change in the cultural environment.
The poet, the artist, the sleuth—whoever sharpens our perception tends to be anti-social; rarely "well-adjusted", he cannot go along with currents and trends. A strange bond often exists among anti-social types in their power to see environments as they really are. (Marshall McLuhan).