Essential Lizard Factors
All three of these factors are required for a person to be defined as a Lizard.

Detrimental to Others

The most important factor of a Lizard is being detrimental to other people. A person could have every single one of the other factors listed on this page and not be considered a Lizard. Detrimental could be defined as overt anti-social behavior such as physical violence and property crime, covert malicious behavior such as pervasive deceitfulness and manipulation or more passive dysfunction such as forming dependent relationships or attracting enablers. Usually it is a mix of all. The detriment could be either interpersonal, such as bullying or not giving back borrowed property, or societal, such as welfare fraud or wasting healthcare resources. Again it is usually all. The detriment can sometimes be unintentional, although it's never always unwitting, however discerning the culpability of Lizards is difficult due to the following factor.

"Lizard Brain" Thinking

In most mammals, birds and reptilians the amygdala of the brain is responsible for the flight or fight mechanism, fear, anger, anxiety and impulse control. When a human has an over-active amygdala it results in lowered empathy, difficulty planning for the future, distress when delaying gratification, a lack of self-discipline, learning through emotional experiences rather than intellectual understanding and overall being driven by negative feelings. These symptoms can sometimes become so severe they manifest as mental disorders. All Lizards have poor mental health, often suffering from a variety of personality, psychiatric, developmental and learning disorders. Most common are Anti-Social Personality Disorder, Hystironic Personality Disorder, Bipolar Affective Disorder, Schizophrenia and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.

Current neurological research indicates that this is caused by experiencing several adverse childhood experiences and growing up in an unstable and dangerous home environment. This has been noted in every single case of Lizardness. The "Lizard Brain" operates by identifying threats extremely quickly via pattern recognition and overrides the more complex long term orientated emotional experiences of the Limbic system and the conscious thought processes of the Neocortex to cause immediate self preservation behavior. So if a person is exposed to too many distressing stimuli too often at an early age their "Lizard Brain" will adapt to recognizing patterns of danger in the entire world and cause thought patterns suitable for survival situations and low resources environments such as selfishness and aggression without the person making a conscious decision to react in this way.

A Lizard is someone like this who fails to accept or attempt to change the primitive stunted nature of their thought process but rather disregards how it may effect others and live their lives by always putting on an act to appear normal or to fit in with a given group or person, compulsive lying, avoiding honesty and treating all interactions as a win/lose situation where a compromise or to concede are never options. But since they are all of low intelligence Lizards are extremely poor at social learning and logical analysis so fail to employ these behaviors beneficially for themselves and are rather highly detrimental to themselves in the long run and often even in the short run. Due to this way of thinking Lizards always resist self-knowledge and have very little practical understanding of their own mindset, usually preferring persecution delusions and self-aggrandizement to reflecting on their true mental state. Because of this factor it is unclear if Lizards can be considered actually human or to have free will. They are arguably less socially adjusted than most non-human mammals and truly function as reptiles reacting mainly on instinct with very limited learning abilities. It has been theorized that it is acceptable to genocide all Lizards since it couldn't even be considered animal abuse as they'd most likely be glad to die anyway.

Low Intelligence

Human intelligence is compromised of several elements such as problem solving abilities, information retention, knowledge application and learning speed and Lizards are bad at all of them. A Lizard is always fundamentally clueless, they can't understand other people or themselves, so they'll never truly comprehend any situation they find themselves in. They react on instinct. A Lizard's Lizard Brain will fight tooth and claw to prevent the Lizard from admitting that they are intellectually lacking so they will most likely never improve. On the contrary, Lizards will tell others and themselves that they are actually very smart and to maintain this defense mechanism will actually avoid attempting to learn new things to not experience the initial feeling inadequacy or unpreparedness one may feel when discovering a new subject. They will even get angry at you for trying to teach them new things rather than defer the gratification of maintaining their self-delusion for even a few seconds. They are literally worse than dogs which you can at least train.

This is the core trifecta of traits that classify a Lizard in the broadest sense. The bushpigbushpigbushpigbushpigbushpigbushpigbushpigbushpig Triad if you would. Someone could be a sadistic sociopath but if they're of reasonable intelligence and able to function in society by holding down a respectable job and capable of fitting in with others they are just a regular evil person and not dysfunctional in enough capacities to be considered a Lizard. Someone could have this broken way of thinking and be stupid but who cares if they're not negatively effecting anyone else. A person could be stupid as hell and constantly ruining other peoples lives but if they're doing it by accident and not because of a malicious, selfish and dishonest way of thinking then they're just extremely incompetent and can't really be blamed. Only when all three factors apply to a person are they a Lizard.