The Wisdom of Psychopaths (19 page)
Read The Wisdom of Psychopaths Online
Authors: Kevin Dutton
Which means, minus the algebra, that functional psychopathy is context dependent. That, in the language of personality theory, it is “state” as opposed to “trait.” And that, in the right set of circumstances, it can enhance rather than encumber the speed and quality of decision making.
Back in the 1980s, the sociologist John Ray reached a similar conclusion.
Ray postulated an inverted-U-shaped function as the model most befitting the relationship between psychopathy and life success (see
figure 4.2
). In his own words:
“
Both extremely high and extremely low levels of psychopathy may be maladaptive, with intermediate levels being most adaptive. The basis for saying that high levels of psychopathy are maladaptive is, of course, the trouble into which clinical psychopaths often get themselves. The basis for saying that low levels of psychopathy may also be maladaptive stems from the common observation of the role of anxiety in psychopathy: psychopaths do not seem to show any anxiety. The debilitating function of high levels of anxiety hardly needs to be stressed. In a normal, noninstitutionalized population, therefore, their relative immunity from anxiety may give psychopaths an advantage.”
Figure 4.2. The relationship between psychopathy and functionality (from Ray and Ray, 1982)
Ironically, this is precisely what Eyal Aharoni found within the criminal fraternity. It was neither high nor low levels of psychopathy that coded for criminal success—it was moderate levels: something that hasn’t escaped the attentions of Bob Hare and Paul Babiak as they continue their research into the area of corporate psychopathy.
Hare and Babiak have developed an instrument called the Business Scan (B-Scan for short): a self-report questionnaire consisting of four subscales (personal style; emotional style; organizational effectiveness; and social responsibility) specifically calibrated to assess the presence of psychopathic traits, not within forensic populations (like the PCL-R), or within the general population as a whole (like the PPI), but exclusively within corporate settings (see
figure 4.3
).
Within such settings, core psychopathic traits can sometimes morph into the star qualities characteristic of an influential leader, and in order to assess the presence of such traits—with due sensitivity to context—it becomes imperative to ask the right questions, employing, of course, the right phraseology and language. The aim of the B-Scan is to do just that, by depicting items within a corporate framework and by couching them in everyday business terminology (e.g., “It’s okay to lie in order to clinch the deal”—agree/disagree on a scale of 1 to 4). At present, we’re in the process of rolling it out to an independent sample of lawyers, traders, and Special Forces soldiers in the U.K., to see precisely what they’re made of: a kind of psychological biopsy of various high-octane professions.
Figure 4.3—The B-Scan: leadership traits and their psychopathic equivalents.
In a café in upstate New York, just down the road from Babiak’s leadership and management consultancy company, I recount a conversation I once had with a top British Queen’s Counsel, at his chambers in central London.
“In the courtroom, I have literally rubbed people out,” the guy told me, “crucified them in the witness box. I have absolutely no problem at all reducing an alleged rape victim to tears on the stand. You know why? Because that’s my job. That’s what my client pays me to do. At the end of the day, I can hang up my wig and gown, go out
to a restaurant with my wife, and not give a damn—even though I know that what happened earlier might possibly have ruined her life.
“On the other hand, however, if my wife buys a dress from a department store, say, and has lost the receipt and asks me to take it back … that’s a different story altogether. I hate doing stuff like that. I’m hopeless. A real wuss …”
Babiak nods. He knows exactly what I’m getting at. It’s exactly the same thing that the B-Scan’s designed to get at.
We sip our lattes and stare into the Hudson River. Above the ice-gray water, vast continents of cloud press slowly and remorselessly across a low, tectonic sky.
“What do you reckon?” I ask him. “Do you think we’ll find an optimum score on the B-Scan? A golden number that correlates with peak performance?”
He shrugs. “We might,” he says. “But my guess is, it will probably be more like a range. And it may vary slightly depending on profession.”
I agree. I can’t help thinking of Johnny, and where
he
might fall on the scale. James Bond was licensed to kill. But he didn’t kill indiscriminately. He killed when he had to. And didn’t bat an eye.
To wrap things up, I run my theory of optimal, functional psychopathy past a friend of mine. Tom is a member of the British Special Forces, and has worked undercover in some of the hottest, most remote, and most dangerous places on earth. He loves every minute of it. I tell him about the gambling games, the emotional recognition tasks, Ahmed Karim’s transcranial magnetic lie-enhancer, and the acupuncturists. Then I tell him about what James Blair, Kent Kiehl, Bob Hare, Paul Babiak, and Peter Jonason have all said.
“What, exactly, are you getting at?” he asks me when I finally put it to him that donning night vision goggles and knife-fighting the Taliban in deep, dark cave complexes in the mountains of northern
Afghanistan might not be every soldier’s cup of tea. “That I’m mad? That I’m some kind of loon who dares to rush in where angels fear to tread? And gets off on it? Gets paid for it?”
Once I’m out of the headlock, Tom tells me a story. One night, a few years ago, he’s heading back to his apartment after watching
Saw
. Suddenly, out of a doorway, a guy with a blade appears. His girlfriend is terrified and starts hyperventilating. But Tom, ahem, calmly disarms the guy and sends him packing.
“Funny thing was,” Tom says, “I actually thought the movie was quite scary. But then, you know, when I suddenly found myself in a real-life situation, I just, kind of, switched on. There was nothing to it. No nerves. No drama. Just … nothing.”
The neurosurgeon we heard from earlier agrees. Bach’s
St. Matthew Passion
regularly moves him to tears. And when it comes to soccer and the team he’s supported since he was a kid … sometimes he just can’t look.
“Psychopath?” he says. “I’m not sure about that. I’m not sure what my patients would think about it either! But it’s a good word. And yes, when you’re scrubbing up before a difficult operation, it’s true: a chill does go through the veins. The only way I can describe it is to compare it to intoxication. Only it’s an intoxication that sharpens, rather than dulls, the senses; an altered state of consciousness that feeds on precision and clarity, rather than fuzziness and incoherence … Perhaps ‘supersane’ would be a better way of describing it. Less sinister. More, I don’t know, spiritual …”
He laughs. “Then again, maybe that sounds even crazier.”
1
It was while we were at college that I gave him the PPI, the questionnaire, if you recall from the previous chapter, specifically developed by Scott Lilienfeld and Brian Andrews to assess psychopathic attributes, not in incarcerated offenders, but in the general population. Not surprisingly, he scored extremely high, in particular on Machiavellian Egocentricity, Carefree Nonplanfulness, Social Potency, Stress Immunity, Fearlessness, and Coldheartedness (six of the eight subscales that make up the questionnaire, the other two being Blame Externalization and Impulsive Nonconformity).
2
Though Jonason also found that bad girls get the boys, the relationship between Dark Triad attributes and number of short-term relationships was stronger for men than for women. Of course, the reasons why bad boys might get the girls is another matter. Psychopathy is associated with a lack of neuroticism and anxiety, which may offset fears of rejection and project an air of dominance; narcissism is associated with self-promotion and ostentatious displays of success; and Machiavellianism goes with being socially manipulative. These three traits combined may well, over the short term, give the impression of a cool, confident, and charismatic individual who’s fun to be with and who’s “going places.” Over the long term, however, things oft en turn out differently.
3
Evolutionary psychologists seek to account for human traits and behaviors—such as personality and mating strategies—as functional products of natural selection: as psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in ancestral environments.
4
Back in the 1950s, the American memory researchers John Brown and Lloyd and Margaret Peterson conducted studies in which participants were given groups of letters to remember and, at the same time or immediately afterward, presented with a numerical distraction. For example, subjects told to remember a three-letter syllable were quickly given a random three-digit number (e.g., 806) and asked to count backward in threes from it. Then, at various intervals, they were asked to recall the letters they’d been given. A control group was shown the letters without the distraction task. Which group did better at recall? Correct: the group that wasn’t distracted. In fact, for the group that
was
distracted, memory was totally erased after only 18 seconds. (Brown, 1958; Peterson and Peterson, 1959).
6
TMS is a noninvasive method of temporarily stimulating the brain in order to disrupt cortical processing, and thereby to investigate the effects of either exciting or inhibiting selected neural pathways.
5
Intriguingly, one of Porter’s students, Sabrina Demetrioff, has also found the opposite: that psychopaths are better at decoding microexpressions in others.
7
DTI tracks the movement of water molecules in the brain. In most brain tissue, as in most other kinds of tissue, the diffusion of water molecules is multidirectional. In the tracts of white matter, however—the bundles of fibers that conduct electrical impulses between different areas of the brain—water molecules tend to diffuse directionally along the length of the axons, the long, slender filaments that project outward from the base of each neuron, conducting electrical impulses away from the cell body toward synapses with receiving cells. Axons have an insulating and “waterproofing” coat of white, fatty myelin—it’s what makes the white matter white—which can vary in thickness. Thus, by analyzing the rate and direction of water diffusion, researchers can create “virtual” pictures of axons, make inferences as to the thickness of these white myelin coats, and assess their structural integrity.
8
PET allows researchers to obtain images of discrete neurochemical activity in assorted areas of the brain as subjects engage in different activities, thoughts, or emotions. This is achieved by injecting a harmless and short-lived radioactive dye into the bloodstream of a volunteer, and then tracking the destination of the dye by mapping the radiation emission patterns in the form of gamma rays.
9
Yawn contagion is indicative of a deep bodily connection between humans, between other animals, and even, in some cases, between humans
and
other animals! Dogs “catch” yawns from their owners, and chimpanzees also catch yawns from their handlers. The general consensus centers around two possibilities. Either individuals who have problems with empathy show reduced yawn contagion because they don’t pay attention to the yawns of others. Or, alternatively, they’re simply not affected by them. A colleague, Nick Cooper, and I are currently in the process of testing the yawn reflex in psychopaths in an ongoing study in Sweden.
10
Broadly speaking, theory of mind refers to the ability to see, in both a cognitive and emotional sense, where others are “coming from.”
11
The Trier Social Stress Test typically involves volunteers being given only a brief amount of time to prepare a mock job talk, during which they are told that they will undergo various kinds of professional scrutiny, such as voice frequency analysis, assessment of nonverbal communication skill, etc.
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