I've talked to a girl who was a diagnosed sociopath.

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Upstanding and sociopath in the same sentence? They might not wantonly break the law, but I doubt they're truly upstanding citizens. You can never trust one.

Michael Fitzgerald is writing in his book that there is a similarity between a soziopath and autism, but still there are something different.
But an autistic person, who is violent, doesn't care about social rules and so on looks a lot like a soziopath.

What both diagnoses have in common are problems in the frantal lope where the "social part" of the brain is.

I don't think that describing sociopaths that are not violent as "upstanding citizens" is very accurate. Just because violence is not included in their actions does not mean they are not using and abusing people in a myriad of other ways. I have known a few, and other than one that threatened violence to try to make me behave in a way he wanted, he was very smooth and charmed the piss out of everyone. Meanwhile, if you took a close look at the path he had taken, he smoothly and charmingly took over an organization and managed to get the other people fired that stood in his way, all the while acting like their best friend.
Sociopaths also often take the financial route and are the best con artists. I had a boyfriend whose mother was a con artist, operating in different professions under her different last names (she had been married many many times). She used one of her clean last names to work in the insurance industry, which introduced her to many people with money, and she could quickly become a person's new best friend. When she was depressed and drinking/drugging a lot and couldn't manage to find outsiders to bilk and screw over, she turned on her own grown children, stealing from them, staying with them and running up enormous phone bills etc, even forged some of her son's checks and overdrew his account.
She was never violent, but she destroyed people's lives and all of the children she raised (her own and and much younger sibling of hers) are all pitiful substance abusers who use people, but are not near as talented as she is in that area.
All these people were in my life many years ago, and when I learned, back then, that she had found a woman who was to receive a multi million dollar settlement, and became her best friend, I called the insurance commision and told them she was operating under various names. Don't know if she ever got her insurance licenses pulled or what.

Anyone interested in how these people tick should look up Dr James Fallon. He's a neuroscientist who, after years of researching the trademark brain patterns of psychos in MRI scans, took a scan himself and found out he himself "on paper" is a sociopath. He possesses both the frontal lobe brain damage affecting his emotional propensity and the low frequency MAOA "warrior gene" in his family. In fact his mother handed him a book which was about his family and how since colonial times there had been like 7 murderers in his family including Lizzie Borden.
Fallon now gives talks on what makes a sociopath. His work suggests 3 main things make one.
1. Genes
2. Frontal brain damage during pregnancy (too much oxytocin I think so that it doesn't work later in emotions after birth)
3. Trauma during early development
If one of these things is knocked out a person is far less likely to be diagnosed a true sociopath but might be diagnosed as having the tendencies. Fallon seems to have avoided the childhood trauma.

Now while I admit that it is fascinating that there can be these "pro social" or "failed" psychopaths and it is wonderful to see how people like Fallon can show how his loving childhood might have saved him from being a more obvious bona fide sociopath it is irresponsible to have romantic notions that these people are "just people too". Fallon admitted in a talk that he went around asking people, family, friends and colleagues, what they thought of him. The resounding answer was sociopathic. He didn't go around being violent but he was cold, distant, self centred, highly competitive even at board games at home and hard or impossible to connect with. Most importantly perhaps when Fallon reflected on all this and realised it to be true his reaction, in his own words, was "I didn't really care".

Great apes, hell even cats and dogs, can share our traits of compassion, empathy and altruism to different degrees. A bona fide sociopath, whether a serial killer or a politician, is a threat because they lack the emotional coloured lenses that allow even us to see the world a certain way so we don't do certain things. That little voice in your head says "that isn't right" sometimes where a sociopath's only says "Do I benefit? Is anyone looking? Then go for it!". Their glasses are just black and white. One colour represents what they want and the other colour is anything in their way that needs to be overcome or destroyed by any means necessary. They're almost more like an efficient selfish artificially intelligent machine than a human being.

Now as a likely aspie who has had to put up with people muttering "weirdo" or "psycho" at times in my life I can understand anyone who worries about their emotional propensity, flat monotone voice and lack of facial expression etc but as someone has already said in this thread if you angst about it or fear the pathology then chances are you have enough emotional investment in wanting to be a non sociopath to prove you are a non sociopath. Or at least you don't have condition 2. the brain damage.

I was best friends with a sociapath for three years. It wasn't until I stopped talking to him that I realised he'd been using me the whole time. He abuses girls he's with, then acts all sorry and puts on a crying act [ like he imitates how he's seen people cry to make the girl feel guilty and think his apology is real, just so he can do it all over again]. He drove his car at his cousin when he saw her with her boyfriend, physically attacked the new boyfriend of his ex because the ex told him [[ you're obsessed]. He then lied to the police so SO convincingly, saying it was the ex who STARTED the fight, when it really wasn't. And the policeman believed the sociapath, because he was so well prepared for answers and so convincing, whereas the ex boyfriend was not [mainly because he was on the floor with a cut lip and broken jaw, so he was very angry and not at all convincing with his version of events. Said sociapath attacked me in club once he realised I wasn't speaking to him, then after he got thrown out he reported me to the police, saying I had provoked him[ I didn't., I was drinking beer in the corner]. He set fire to wheelie bins, phone boxes, prank called emergency services, drove head on at a bus, attacked his disabled mother because she told him he had a problem with drinking, then after she told the police about it he threatened her again and the police believed his story[ again, the charm and wit is UNBELIEVABLY convincing]. He acts with a ''spark'' towards girls he likes, so they believe he's this ultra nice guy, who fancies them, tries to get them to move into a flat with him, paying for it, as he is currently out of work but is looking. Always the same story. Before we stopped talking, I said to him, you know when you set fire to those bins, did you not think about the people inside the houses, if the fire had set the house alight? You'd be in prison for manslaughter! His response was '' F''k prison! I'm f*****g depressed and I want to have fun, f''k anyone else!'' So that to me, is a true sociapath, no feelings for anyone but himself, a user, a unbelievably good liar and a very very good imitator of people's emotions.

I like them. They can deal with me much better than NTs.