The Wisdom of Psychopaths (10 page)

All of which begs the question: Where does the crucial difference lie? Does the fulcrum of disparity between successful and unsuccessful psychopaths, between presidents and pedophiles, pivot solely around self-discipline? Everything else being equal, such a possibility might actually hold some water. The ability to delay gratification, to put on hold the desire to cut and run (and also, needless to say, to run and cut), might well tip the balance away from criminal activity toward a more structured, less impulsive, less antisocial lifestyle.

Except that the question of criminal activity raises issues of its own. In both the revised psychopathy checklist—the PCL-R—and the criteria for antisocial personality disorder set out in DSM, “criminal versatility” and “repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest” constitute, respectively, core diagnostic determinants of psychopathy. Symptoms, in other words. And yet, as the study by Mullins-Sweatt illustrates, neither of these items need necessarily apply to the successful branch of the species. It’s perfectly possible to be a psychopath and not a criminal.

So do successful psychopaths fall short of the real deal? Are they a neuron short of a synapse compared to their more notorious, nefarious namesakes? It’s a tricky one to call. But fifteen years ago, in an attempt to do just that, one man stepped up to the plate—and wound up with me and a mountain of alligator tacos in a diner in downtown Atlanta.

In 1996, Scott Lilienfeld and his collaborator Brian Andrews were in the process of grappling with exactly this conundrum. As an experienced researcher in the field, with quite a few psychopaths already under his belt, Lilienfeld had come to a definitive, if perplexing, conclusion. Insofar as the inaugural constitution of the disorder was concerned—the traditional concept of what it really meant to be a psychopath, as set out by founding father Hervey Cleckley—the PCL-R, and other clinical measures, were themselves behaving rather
oddly. Over the years, Lilienfeld realized, the diagnostic spotlight had widened. Initially focused on the personality traits that underpinned the disorder, the emphasis now seemed to be as much, if not more, on antisocial acts. The psychopath circus had gotten stuck in the mud of forensics.

As a case in point, Lilienfeld and Andrews cited fearlessness. In his original manifesto back in 1941, Cleckley had contended that low anxiety levels constituted one of the psychopath’s true calling cards: a cardinal feature of the syndrome. Yet where, precisely, did that show up in the fabric of the PCL-R? Behind such omissions, Lilienfeld detected a major theoretical fault line developing between the ways different sectors of the clinical and research fraternities were coming to view psychopathy: an old-school divide between two analytical traditions—between qualitative psychological means and quantitative behavioral ends.

Two camps, it appeared, had crept out of the epistemological woodwork. In one were the Cleckleyites, whose main area of interest lay in the undercoat of personality; in the other were ensconced the behaviorists, beholden to DSM and the gospel of ASPD, who tended, in contrast, to focus on the criminal record. Such a schism, needless to say, was conducive to neither coherent empirical inquiry nor diagnostic consensus. An individual who, on the one hand, possessed all the necessary requirements of the psychopathic personality, but who didn’t, on the other, partake in recurrent antisocial behavior—one of Mullins-Sweatt’s “subclinical” variety, for example—would be endorsed as a psychopath by advocates of the personality-based approach, but would, Lilienfeld and Andrews discerned, be turned smartly away at the door by their behaviorist, actions-speak-louder-than-words opposite numbers.

And the dynamic cut both ways. As we saw with Ian and Jimmy, not everyone who engages in habitual criminal activity is a psychopath. It’s just a small minority, in fact. Something needed to be done to assimilate the rival frameworks, to bring these yawningly different perspectives into alignment. And Lilienfeld and Andrews had the answer.

The Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI for short) consists of 187 questions. It’s not exactly the snappiest questionnaire in the world. But then again, the nature of its subject matter isn’t snappy, either. Eight separate personality dimensions converge in this psychometric behemoth, making it one of the most comprehensive tests of psychopathy yet devised. Interestingly, our old friend factor analysis uncovers a familiar pattern. These eight independent satellite states of the psychopathic personality—Machiavellian Egocentricity (ME); Impulsive Nonconformity (IN); Blame Externalization (BE); Carefree Nonplanfulness (CN); Fearlessness (F); Social Potency (SOP); Stress Immunity (STI); and Coldheartedness (C)—divide and re-form along three superordinate axes …

… to reveal, in the statistical residue, once the mathematical dust clouds have settled, the structural DNA of pure, unadulterated psychopathy. This was the genome that Cleckley had originally sequenced, untarnished by time, unsullied by counts of transgression. And anyone, pretty much, could prove a positive match.

The tequila is flowing. And so, as we scarf down the tacos, is Lilienfeld, as he explains what it really means, in terms of the nuclei of core personality, to be deemed to be a psychopath. He recounts the empirical rationale behind the development of the PPI: “The problem at the time with the existing measures of the syndrome was that most of them had been honed on criminal or delinquent populations. Yet we know that people with psychopathic traits function perfectly well on the ‘outside’—and that some of them are extremely successful. Ruthlessness, mental toughness, charisma, focus, persuasiveness, and coolness under pressure are qualities, so to speak, that separate the men from the boys, pretty much across the board. So somehow we had to bridge the gap between the incarcerated ‘forensic’ psychopaths
and their elite, high-functioning counterparts. The high road through psychopathy was well established. But what about a low road …?

“We reasoned that psychopathy was on a spectrum. And it goes without saying that some of us will be high on some traits, but not on others. You and I could post the same overall score on the PPI. Yet our profiles with regard to the eight constituent dimensions could be completely different. You might be high on Carefree Nonplanfulness but correspondingly low on Coldheartedness, whereas for me it might be the opposite.”

Lilienfeld’s notion of psychopathy being on a spectrum makes a good deal of sense. If psychopathy is conceptualized as an extension of normal personality, then it follows logically that psychopathy itself must be scalar, and that more or less of it in any given context might confer considerable advantages. Such a premise is not without precedent in the annals of mental dysfunction (if, indeed, psychopathy
is
dysfunctional, given its benefits under certain conditions).
The autistic spectrum, for instance, refers to a continuum of abnormality in social interaction and communication ranging from severe impairments at the “deep end”—those who are silent, mentally disabled, and locked into stereotypical behaviors such as head rolling or body rocking, for example—to mild interference at the “shallow end”: high-functioning individuals with active, but distinctly odd, interpersonal strategies, narrowly focused interests, and an undue preoccupation with “sameness,” rules, and ritual.

Less familiar, perhaps, but equally pertinent, is the schizophrenic spectrum. Research on the construct of schizotypy suggests that psychotic experiences of one form or another (usually of the harmless and nondistressing variety) are relatively common among the general population, and that rather than being seen as a unitary condition—you’ve either got it or you haven’t—schizophrenia should be viewed as a dimensional disorder, with arbitrary cutoffs between normal, odd, and ill. Within this framework, the symptoms of Schizotypal Personality Disorder (odd beliefs; bizarre speech patterns; eccentric interpersonal style) are very much construed as the nursery slopes
of the central schizophrenia massif. Exactly as with psychopathy, at low to medium altitudes the “disorder” is perfectly manageable—beneficial, even, in some contexts (the link between schizotypy and creativity is well established). But above and beyond the snow line, conditions get ever more hazardous.

Such an approach to the conundrum of mental disorder has an intuitive, commonsense appeal. That nagging supposition that we’re all just a little bit bonkers is a difficult one to ignore. Yet when it comes to psychopathy and the dimensional denouement of a psychopathic spectrum, Scott Lilienfeld certainly hasn’t had things entirely his own way. There are those who take issue with his sliding-scale solution and have evidence of their own to throw at it. Foremost among them is a man named Joseph Newman.

Joe Newman is professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and an hour in his office is like sitting in a psychological wind tunnel—like a whitewater raft ride through the rapids of cognitive science. For the better part of thirty years now, Newman has been in and out of some of the toughest prisons in the Midwest. Not, of course, as an inmate, but as one of the world’s most intrepid researchers, working with psychopaths high above the snow line of dysfunction. Though long since acclimated to the harsh, unforgiving conditions, he concedes there are times, even now, when it all gets a little bit hairy.

He recalls, for example, an incident that occurred a few years back with a guy who scored 40 on the PCL-R. That, if you recall, is the maximum you can get. And it’s rare. The guy was a “pure” psychopath. “Usually there’s a point in the interview where we like to push people a little bit,” Newman tells me. “You know, challenge them. Gauge their reaction. But when we did that with this fella—and he was a really nice guy up until then: charming, funny, big personality—he got this kind
of cold, derelict look in his eyes, difficult to describe, but you know it when you see it, which just seemed to say, ‘Back off!’ And you know what? We did! He scared the absolute shit out of us.”

Newman, by his own admission, sometimes gets that look in his own eyes. He stops short of saying that it takes one to know one. But growing up as a kid on the mean streets of New York, he’s had knives, and guns, and the whole nine yards pulled on him. Without a trace of irony, he’s grateful, he says. It was a taste of things to come. In academia.

Newman is more abstemious than most when it comes to the selection criteria for a psychopath. “My main concern is that the label [of psychopath] is applied too liberally, and without sufficient understanding of the key elements,” he purrs in a soft, almost apologetic tone. “As a result, the doors are thrown open to pretty much anyone, and the term is often applied to ordinary criminals and sex offenders whose behavior may reflect primarily social factors or other emotional problems that are more responsive to treatment than psychopathy.”

Similarly, he’s more than amenable to the idea of psychopaths coexisting outside the criminal firmament, often doing very well for themselves in professions that might otherwise come as a surprise to those less well versed in the building blocks of the psychopathic personality: as surgeons, lawyers, and corporate head honchos, for example. “The combination of low risk aversion and lack of guilt or remorse, the two central pillars of psychopathy,” he elucidates, “may lead, depending on circumstances, to a successful career in either crime or business. Sometimes both.”

So no problems there. But where Newman does go against the grain is when it comes to the underlying cause, or etiology, of the disorder. Conventional theoretical wisdom holds that psychopaths are incapable of experiencing fear, empathy, and a host of other emotions, which anesthetizes their social cognition, and which in turn renders them commensurably incapable of countenancing such feelings in those they come into contact with. This position, taken by, among others, fellow psychopath czar James Blair at the National
Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, implicates neural dysfunction, specifically in relation to the amygdala, the brain’s CEO of emotion, plus a number of structures closely connected with it—the hippocampus, superior temporal sulcus, fusiform cortex, anterior cingulate, and orbitofrontal cortex, for instance—as the primary cause of the syndrome, as the core biological basis behind the industry standard psychopathic dyad: the behavioral accompaniments of profound emotional impairment and repeated antisocial action.

But Newman has other ideas. Far from believing that psychopaths are incapable of fear—that they’re the emotionless void that the literature traditionally paints them as—he proposes instead that actually they just don’t notice it. Imagine, for instance, that you’re an arachnophobe and the mere thought of anything with eight legs sends you into a cold sweat. Such being the case, a tarantula might, for all you know, be dangling a few centimeters above your head right at this very moment. But if you don’t know it’s there, you won’t be afraid of it, will you? In your brain, it just doesn’t exist.

In an ingenious experiment, Newman demonstrated that this might well be the story with psychopaths. Not just with spiders, but with most things. They don’t feel distress or notice such emotion in others, because when they focus on a task that promises immediate reward, they screen everything “irrelevant” out. They get emotional “tunnel vision.”

He and his coworkers presented a group of psychopaths and non-psychopaths with a series of mislabeled images, such as those shown in
figure 2.7
.