We think of psychopaths as killers, alien, outside society. But, says the
scientist who has spent his life studying them, you could have one for a
colleague, a friend – or a spouse
There are a few things we take for granted in social interactions with people.
We presume that we see the world in roughly the same way, that we all know
certain basic facts, that words mean the same things to you as they do to
me. And we assume that we have pretty similar ideas of right and wrong.
But for a small – but not that small – subset of the population, things are
very different. These people lack remorse and empathy and feel emotion only
shallowly. In extreme cases, they might not care whether you live or die.
These people are called psychopaths. Some of them are violent criminals,
murderers. But by no means all.
Professor Robert Hare is a criminal psychologist, and the creator of the
PCL-R, a psychological assessment used to determine whether someone is a
psychopath. For decades, he has studied people with psychopathy, and worked
with them, in prisons and elsewhere. “It stuns me, as much as it did when I
started 40 years ago, that it is possible to have people who are so
emotionally disconnected that they can function as if other people are
objects to be manipulated and destroyed without any concern,” he says.
Our understanding of the brain is still in its infancy, and it’s not so many
decades since psychological disorders were seen as character failings.
Slowly we are learning to think of mental illnesses as illnesses, like
kidney disease or liver failure, and developmental disorders, such as
autism, in a similar way. Psychopathy challenges this view. “A high-scoring
psychopath views the world in a very different way,” says Hare. “It’s like
colour-blind people trying to understand the colour red, but in this case
‘red’ is other people’s emotions.”
At heart, Hare’s test is simple: a list of 20 criteria, each given a score of
0 (if it doesn’t apply to the person), 1 (if it partially applies) or 2 (if
it fully applies). The list in full is: glibness and superficial charm,
grandiose sense of self-worth, pathological lying, cunning/manipulative,
lack of remorse, emotional shallowness, callousness and lack of empathy,
unwillingness to accept responsibility for actions, a tendency to boredom, a
parasitic lifestyle, a lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity,
irresponsibility, lack of behavioural control, behavioural problems in early
life, juvenile delinquency, criminal versatility, a history of “revocation
of conditional release” (ie broken parole), multiple marriages, and
promiscuous sexual behaviour. A pure, prototypical psychopath would score
40. A score of 30 or more qualifies for a diagnosis of psychopathy. Hare
says: “A friend of mine, a psychiatrist, once said: ‘Bob, when I meet
someone who scores 35 or 36, I know these people really are different.’ The
ones we consider to be alien are the ones at the upper end.”
But is psychopathy a disorder – or a different way of being? Anyone reading
the list above will spot a few criteria familiar from people they know. On
average, someone with no criminal convictions scores 5. “It’s dimensional,”
says Hare. “There are people who are part-way up the scale, high enough to
warrant an assessment for psychopathy, but not high enough up to cause
problems. Often they’re our friends, they’re fun to be around. They might
take advantage of us now and then, but usually it’s subtle and they’re able
to talk their way around it.” Like autism, a condition which we think of as
a spectrum, “psychopathy”, the diagnosis, bleeds into normalcy.
We think of psychopaths as killers, criminals, outside society. People such as
Joanna Dennehy, a 31-year-old British woman who killed three men in 2013 and
who the year before had been diagnosed with a psychopathic personality
disorder, or Ted Bundy, the American serial killer who is believed to have
murdered at least 30 people and who said of himself: “I’m the most
cold-blooded son of a bitch you’ll ever meet. I just liked to kill.” But
many psychopathic traits aren’t necessarily disadvantages – and might, in
certain circumstances, be an advantage. For their co-authored book, “Snakes
in suits: When Psychopaths go to work”, Hare and another researcher, Paul
Babiak, looked at 203 corporate professionals and found about four per cent
scored sufficiently highly on the PCL-R to be evaluated for psychopathy.
Hare says that this wasn’t a proper random sample (claims that “10 per cent
of financial executives” are psychopaths are certainly false) but it’s easy
to see how a lack of moral scruples and indifference to other people’s
suffering could be beneficial if you want to get ahead in business.
The American serial killer Ted Bundy, who is believed to have murdered at
least 30 people
“There are two kinds of empathy,” says James Fallon, a
neuroscientist
at the University of California and author of The Psychopath Inside: A
Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain.
“Cognitive empathy is the ability to know what other people are feeling, and
emotional empathy is the kind where you feel what they’re feeling.” Autistic
people can be very empathetic – they feel other people’s pain – but are less
able to recognise the cues we read easily, the smiles and frowns that tell
us what someone is thinking. Psychopaths are often the opposite: they know
what you’re feeling, but don’t feel it themselves. “This all gives certain
psychopaths a great advantage, because they can understand what you’re
thinking, it’s just that they don’t care, so they can use you against
yourself.” (Chillingly, psychopaths are particularly adept at detecting
vulnerability. A 2008 study that asked participants to remember virtual
characters found that those who scored highly for psychopathy had a near
perfect recognition for sad, unsuccessful females, but impaired memory for
other characters.)
Fallon himself is a case in point. In 2005, he was looking at brain scans of
psychopathic murderers, while on another study, of Alzheimer’s, he was using
scans of his own family’s brains as controls. In the latter pile, he found
something strange. “You can’t tell just from a brain scan whether someone’s
a psychopath,” he says, “but you can make a good guess at the personality
traits they’ll have.” He describes a great loop that starts in the front of
the brain including the parahippocampal gyrus and the amygdala and other
regions tied to emotion and impulse control and empathy. Under certain
circumstances they would light up dramatically on a normal person’s MRI
scan, but would be darker on a psychopath’s.
“I saw one that was extremely abnormal, and I thought this is someone who’s
way off. It looked like the murderers I’d been looking at,” he says. He
broke the anonymisation code in case it had been put into the wrong pile.
When he did, he discovered it was his own brain. “I kind of blew it off,” he
says. “But later, some psychiatrist friends of mine went through my
behaviours, and they said, actually, you’re probably a borderline
psychopath.”
READ:
WHAT HAPPENED WHEN A PRISON THERAPIST BROUGHT VIOLENT OFFENDERS TOGETHER TO
'TALK'?
Speaking to him is a strange experience; he barely draws breath in an hour, in
which I ask perhaps three questions. He explains how he has frequently put
his family in danger, exposing his brother to the deadly Marburg virus and
taking his son trout-fishing in the African countryside knowing there were
lions around. And in his youth, “if I was confronted by authority – if I
stole a car, made pipe bombs, started fires – when we got caught by the
police I showed no emotion, no anxiety”. Yet he is highly successful, driven
to win. He tells me things most people would be uncomfortable saying: that
his wife says she’s married to a “fun-loving, happy-go-lucky nice guy” on
the one hand, and a “very dark character who she does not like” on the
other. He’s pleasant, and funny, if self-absorbed, but I can’t help but
think about the criteria in Hare’s PCL-R: superficial charm, lack of
emotional depth, grandiose sense of self-worth. “I look like hell now, Tom,”
he says – he’s 66 – “but growing up I was good-looking, six foot, 180lb,
athletic, smart, funny, popular.” (Hare warns against non-professionals
trying to diagnose people using his test, by the way.)
“Psychopaths do think they’re more rational than other people, that this isn’t
a deficit,” says Hare. “I met one offender who was certainly a psychopath
who said ‘My problem is that according to psychiatrists I think more with my
head than my heart. What am I supposed to do about that? Am I supposed to
get all teary-eyed?’ ” Another, asked if he had any regrets about stabbing a
robbery victim, replied: “Get real! He spends a few months in hospital and I
rot here. If I wanted to kill him I would have slit his throat. That’s the
kind of guy I am; I gave him a break.”
And yet, as Hare points out, when you’re talking about people who aren’t
criminals, who might be successful in life, it’s difficult to categorise it
as a disorder. “It’d be pretty hard for me to go into high-level political
or economic or academic context and pick out all the most successful people
and say, ‘Look, I think you’ve got some brain deficit.’ One of my inmates
said that his problem was that he’s a cat in a world of mice. If you compare
the brainwave activity of a cat and a mouse, you’d find they were quite
different.”
It would, says Hare, probably have been an evolutionarily successful strategy
for many of our ancestors, and can be successful today; adept at
manipulating people, a psychopath can enter a community, “like a church or a
cultural organisation, saying, ‘I believe the same things you do’, but of
course what we have is really a cat pretending to be a mouse, and suddenly
all the money’s gone”. At this point he floats the name Bernie Madoff.
Columbine High School killers Dylan Klebold (right) and Eric Harris
captured on CCTV on the day of the massacre (Reuters/Gary Caskey)
This brings up the issue of treatment. “Psychopathy is probably the most
pleasant-feeling of all the mental disorders,” says the journalist Jon
Ronson, whose book, The Psychopath Test, explored the concept of psychopathy
and the mental health industry in general. “All of the things that keep you
good, morally good, are painful things: guilt, remorse, empathy.” Fallon
agrees: “Psychopaths can work very quickly, and can have an apparent IQ
higher than it really is, because they’re not inhibited by moral concerns.”
So psychopaths often welcome their condition, and “treating” them becomes
complicated. “How many psychopaths go to a psychiatrist for mental distress,
unless they’re in prison? It doesn’t happen,” says Hare. The ones in prison,
of course, are often required to go to “talk therapy, empathy training, or
talk to the family of the victims” – but since psychopaths don’t have any
empathy, it doesn’t work. “What you want to do is say, ‘Look, it’s in your
own self-interest to change your behaviour, otherwise you’ll stay in prison
for quite a while.’ ”
It seems Hare’s message has got through to the UK Department of Justice: in
its guidelines for working with personality-disordered inmates, it advises
that while “highly psychopathic individuals” are likely to be “highly
treatment resistant”, the “interventions most likely to be effective are
those which focus on ‘self-interest’ – what the offender wants out of life –
and work with them to develop the skills to get those things in a pro-social
rather than anti-social way.”
If someone’s brain lacks the moral niceties the rest of us take for granted,
they obviously can’t do anything about that, any more than a colour-blind
person can start seeing colour. So where does this leave the concept of
moral responsibility? “The legal system traditionally asserts that all
people standing in front of the judge’s bench are equal. That’s demonstrably
false,” says the neuroscientist
David
Eagleman, author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. He
suggests that instead of thinking in terms of blameworthiness, the law
should deal with the likelihood that someone will reoffend, and issue
sentences accordingly, with rehabilitation for those likely to benefit and
long sentences for those likely to be long-term dangers. The PCL-R is
already used as part of algorithms which categorise people in terms of their
recidivism risk. “Life insurance companies do exactly this sort of thing, in
actuarial tables, where they ask: ‘What age do we think he’s going to die?’
No one’s pretending they know exactly when we’re going to die. But they can
make rough guesses which make for an enormously more efficient system.”
What this doesn’t mean, he says, is a situation like the sci-fi film Minority
Report, in which people who are likely to commit crimes are locked up before
they actually do. “Here's why,” he says. “It's because many people in the
population have high levels of psychopathy - about 1 per cent. But not all
of them become criminals. In fact many of them, because of their glibness
and charm and willingness to ride roughshod over the people in their way,
become quite successful. They become CEOs, professional athletes, soldiers.
These people are revered for their courage and their straight talk and their
willingness to crush obstacles in their way. Merely having psychopathy
doesn't tell us that a person will go off and commit a crime.” It is central
to the justice system, both in Britain and America, that you can’t
pre-emptively punish someone. And that won’t ever change, says Eagleman, not
just for moral, philosophical reasons, but for practical ones. The Minority
Report scenario is a fantasy, because “it's impossible to predict what
somebody will do, even given their personality type and everything, because
life is complicated and crime is conceptual. Once someone has committed a
crime, once someone has stepped over a societal boundary, then there's a lot
more statistical power about what they're likely to do in future. But until
that's happened, you can't ever know.”
Speaking to all these experts, I notice they all talk about psychopaths as
“them”, almost as a different species, although they make conscious efforts
not to. There’s something uniquely troubling about a person who lacks
emotion and empathy; it’s the stuff of changeling stories, the Midwich
Cuckoos, Hannibal Lecter. “You know kids who use a magnifying glass to burn
ants, thinking, this is interesting,” says Hare. “Translate that to an adult
psychopath who treats a person that way. It is chilling.” At one stage
Ronson suggests I speak to another well-known self-described psychopath, a
woman, but I can’t bring myself to. I find the idea unsettling, as if he’d
suggested I commune with the dead.
• This article originally stated that autism was a "personality
disorder". It is in fact a neurodevelopmental disorder. This has been
corrected; apologies for the error. Tom
El mapa geográfico y poblacional de las regiones mencionadas se encuentra en proceso de profundas alteraciones.
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