The Wisdom of Psychopaths (16 page)

“He’d strangle you with his own halo,” the guy said. “And then put it back on as if nothing had ever happened.” I didn’t need any convincing.

Of course, if by this stage Johnny is starting to remind you a little bit of James Bond, it’s no coincidence. It’s easy to imagine how that other notable employee of Her Majesty’s Secret Service might also be a psychopath; how the shadowy world of spooks, counter-surveillance, and espionage might well be wall-to-wall with under-the-radar serial killers, with a license to kill rather than some deep, unfathomable compulsion; and how, were the Walther PPK–packing secret agent that we all know and love to swap that PPK for a copy of the PPI, he might be pretty high on the spectrum. But is there any basis behind such speculation? Buying into the stereotype is one thing; seeing how the fantasy plays out in reality, quite another. Is it pure, unadulterated chance that Johnny is a psychopath—and just so happens to work in the field of military intelligence?

One man who asked these questions, and then set about finding the answers, is psychologist Peter Jonason.
Back in 2010, Jonason (then at New Mexico State University) and his colleagues published a paper titled “Who Is James Bond? The Dark Triad as an Agentic Social Style,” in which they showed that men with a specific triumvirate of personality traits—the stratospheric self-esteem of narcissism; the fearlessness, ruthlessness, impulsivity, and thrill-seeking of psychopathy; and the deceitfulness and exploitativeness of Machiavellianism—can actually do pretty well for themselves out there in certain echelons of society. Not only that, but they’re also, in addition, more likely to have a greater number of sexual partners and a stronger inclination toward casual, short-term relationships than men who are low on
such traits. Far from the Dark Triad constituting a handicap when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex, contends Jonason, it may, in contrast, set female pulses racing, and so, through an enhanced potential for the propagation of genes, may actually represent a successful reproductive strategy.

A cursory peek at the tabloid headlines and gossip-column inches will avail you of the fact that the theory may well hold water. A hell of a lot of it, in fact. But one of the best examples of all, according to Jonason, is James Bond.

“He’s clearly disagreeable, very extrovert, and likes trying new things,” he points out. “Including killing people. And new women.”

Jonason’s study saw two hundred college students filling out personality questionnaires specifically designed to assess the presence of Dark Triad attributes. The students were also asked about their sexual relationships, including their attitudes toward casual affairs and one-night stands. Lo and behold, the standout finding was that those who scored higher on the triad tended to have more notches on their rickety, battle-weary bedposts than those who scored lower, suggesting that elements of the three personality styles—narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy—expedite a dual-process alpha male mating strategy aimed at maximizing reproductive potential:

And it all seems to have worked out rather well down the years. Otherwise, as Jonason points out, why would such attributes still be knocking around?
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Curiously, it’s not just in terms of reproduction that psychopaths end up on top. The exploits of evolutionary psychologists
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such as Peter Jonason add support to the claims of game theory mandarins like Andrew Colman, whom we met in the previous chapter, that there are other areas of life, other fields of endeavor, in which it pays to be a psychopath. A psychopathic strategy doesn’t just code for greater success in the bedroom. It also comes in handy in the boardroom.

A 2005 study conducted by a joint team of psychologists and neuroeconomists from Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Iowa demonstrates this beautifully. The study took the form of a gambling game consisting of twenty rounds. Participants were divided into three groups: normal people, patients with lesions in the emotion areas of the brain (the amygdala, the orbitofrontal cortex, and the right insular or somatosensory cortex), and patients with lesions in brain regions unrelated to emotion. At the start of the game, each participant was handed the sum of $20, and at the beginning of each new round they were asked whether they were prepared to risk $1 on the toss of a coin. While a loss incurred the penalty of $1, a win swelled the coffers by a cool $2.50.

It doesn’t take a genius to work out the winning formula. “Logically,” says Baba Shiv, professor of marketing at Stanford Graduate School of Business, “the right thing to do is to invest in every round.”

But logic, as the political activist Gloria Steinem once remarked, is often in the eye of the logician.

If, as game theory predicts, there are times when it really does pay to keep our foot on the gas—and psychopaths have heavier boots—then, according to the dynamics of the game, those participants with the relevant presenting pathology (deficits in emotional processing) should clean up. They should outperform those without, that is, both of the other groups.

This is exactly how the study panned out. As the game unfolded, participants with normal emotional brain centers (whether or not they had dings elsewhere) began declining the opportunity to gamble, opting, instead, for the bewilderingly conservative alternative: holding on to their winnings. In contrast, however, those whose brains were not equipped with the everyday emotional seat belts that most of us keep tightly fastened just kept on rolling, ending the game with a significantly higher profit margin than their opposite numbers.

“This may be the first study,” comments George Loewenstein, professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon, “that documents a situation in which people with brain damage make better financial decisions than normal people.”

Antoine Bechara, now professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, goes one better. “Research needs to determine the circumstances in which emotions can be useful or disruptive, [in which they] can be a guide for human behavior,” he points out. “The most successful stockbrokers might plausibly be termed ‘functional psychopaths’—individuals who on the one hand are either more adept at controlling their emotions or who, on the other, do not experience them to the same degree of intensity as others.”

And Baba Shiv agrees. “Many CEOs,” he adds rather unnervingly, “and many top lawyers might also share this trait.”

A study conducted by the economist Cary Frydman and his colleagues at the California Institute of Technology lends credibility to Shiv’s observations. Frydman handed volunteers a sum of $25 and then presented them with a series of tricky financial dilemmas. Within a short, set period, the volunteers had to decide whether to play it safe and accept a sure thing—say, receive $2—or whether to gamble and go for a riskier, but potentially more lucrative, option: a 50-50
chance of gaining $10 or losing $5, for example. Who would clean up, and who would go bust?

Far from it being a matter of random chance, it turned out that a subset of volunteers completely outsmarted the rest, making consistently optimal choices under risk. These individuals were not financial whiz kids. Nor were they economists, mathematicians, or even World Series of Poker champions. Instead, they were carriers of the “warrior gene”—a monoamine oxidase A polymorphism called MAOA-L, previously (if controversially) associated with dangerous, “psychopathic” behavior.

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Contrary to previous discussion in the literature, our results show these behavioral patterns are not necessarily counterproductive,” Frydman’s team wrote, “since in the case of financial choice these subjects engage in more risky behavior only when it is advantageous to do so.”

Frydman elucidated further. “If two gamblers are counting cards and one is making a lot of bets,” he observed, “it may look like he’s more aggressive or impulsive. But you don’t know what cards he’s counting—he may just be responding to good opportunities.”

Additional support comes from work carried out by Bob Hare and his colleagues in 2010. Hare handed out the PCL-R to more than two hundred top U.S. business executives, and compared the prevalence of psychopathic traits in the corporate world to that found in the general population at large. Not only did the business execs come out ahead, but psychopathy was positively associated with in-house ratings of charisma and presentation style: creativity, good strategic thinking, and excellent communication skills.

Then, of course, there was the survey conducted by Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon that we discussed in
chapter 1
. Board and Fritzon pitted company CEOs against the inmates of Broadmoor Hospital, a high security forensic institution in the U.K. (which we’ll be getting into, quite literally, in more detail later on), on a psychological profiling test. Once again, when it came to psychopathic attributes the CEOs emerged victorious—which, considering that Broadmoor
houses some of Britain’s most dangerous criminals, is really going some.

I put it to Hare that in recent years the corporate environment, with its downsizing, restructuring, mergers, and acquisitions, has actually become even more of a hothouse for psychopaths. Just as political turmoil and uncertainty can make for a pretty good petri dish in which to cultivate psychopathy, so, too, I opined, can the high seas of trade and industry. He nodded.

“I’ve always maintained that if I wasn’t studying psychopaths in prison, I’d do so at the stock exchange,” he enthused. “Without doubt, there’s a greater proportion of psychopathic big hitters in the corporate world than there is in the general population. You’ll find them in any organization where your position and status afford you power and control over others, and the chance of material gain.”

His coauthor on the corporate psychopathy paper, New York industrial and organizational psychologist Paul Babiak, agrees.

“
The psychopath has no difficulty dealing with the consequences of rapid change. In fact, he or she thrives on it,” he explains. “Organizational chaos provides both the necessary stimulation for psychopathic thrill seeking and sufficient cover for psychopathic manipulation and abusive behavior.”

Ironically, the rule-bending, risk-taking, thrill-seeking individuals who were responsible for tipping the world economy over the edge are precisely the same personalities who will come to the fore in the wreckage. Just like Frank Abagnale, they are the mice who fall into the cream, fight and fight, and churn that cream into butter.

Babiak and Hare’s pronouncements—like Board and Fritzon’s, demographic and sociological in nature—provide plenty of food for thought. And when placed alongside more empirically derived observations, the fiscal fandangos of neuroeconomists such as Baba Shiv and his coauthors, the coital correlations of Dark Triad hunter Peter
Jonason, and the mathematical machinations of game theorists like Andrew Coleman, for example, they show beyond doubt that there’s most definitely a place for the psychopath in society.

This explains, in part, why psychopaths are still around—the inexorable perseverance of their dark, immutable gene streams—and why the evolutionary share price in this niche personality consortium has remained stable and buoyant over time. There are positions in society, jobs and roles to fulfill, which, by their competitive, cutthroat, or chillingly coercive natures, require access to office space in precisely the kind of psychological real estate that psychopaths have the keys to, that they have on offer in their glossy neural portfolios. Given that such roles—predominantly by virtue of their inherent stress and danger—often confer great wealth, status, and prestige on the individuals who assume them, and that, as Peter Jonason showed us, bad boys seem to have a way with certain girls, it’s really not surprising that the genes have hung about. Biologically, you might say, they punch above their weight.

Of course, similar charisma and coolness under pressure can also be found among those who take advantage of society—such as the world’s top con artists. And, when combined with a genius for deception, this jaw-dropping profile can be devastating. Take Greg Morant. Morant is one of America’s most successful and elusive con men—and when it comes to psychopaths, among the top five most charming and the top five most ruthless I’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting.
I caught up with him in the bar of a five-star hotel in New Orleans. It was only after he bought the drinks, a bottle of Cristal champagne for $400, that he handed me back my wallet.

“One of the most important things that a grifter must have in his possession is a good … ‘vulnerability’ radar,” Morant illuminated, in a comment reminiscent of the work of psychologist Angela Book. (If you recall from
chapter 1
, Book found that psychopaths were better than non-psychopaths at discerning the victims of a previous violent assault simply from the way they walked.) “Most folk you come across pay no attention to what they say when they’re talking to you. Once out, the words are gone. But a grifter will zone in on everything … 
Like therapy, you’re trying to get inside the person. Figure out who they are from the little things. And it’s always the little things. The devil’s in the detail … You get them to open up. Usually by telling them something about yourself first—a good grifter always has a narrative. And then immediately change the subject. Randomly. Abruptly. It can be anything … some thought that just occurred to you out of the blue or whatever … anything to interrupt the flow of conversation. Nine times out of ten the person will completely forget what they’ve just said.

“Then you can get to work—not right away, you need to be patient. But a month or two later. You modify whatever it is, whatever the hell they’ve told you—you tend to know instantly where the pressure points are—and then tell the story back as if it were your own. Bam! From that point on, you can pretty much take what you want.