The Wisdom of Psychopaths (21 page)

So are we witnessing the rise of a sub-psychopathic minority for whom society doesn’t exist? A new breed of individual with little or no conception of social norms, no respect for the feelings of others, and scant regard for the consequences of their actions? Might Pinker be right about those subtle fluctuations in modern personality structure—and a nefarious nudge to the dark side?
If the results of a recent study by Sara Konrath and her team at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research are anything to go by, then the answer to these questions is yes.

In a survey that has so far tested fourteen thousand volunteers, Konrath has found that college students’ self-reported empathy levels (as measured by
the Interpersonal Reactivity Index
¹
) have actually been in steady decline over the previous three decades—since the inauguration of the scale, in fact, back in 1979—and that a particularly pronounced slump has, it turns out, been observed over the past ten years.

“
College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of twenty or thirty years ago,” Konrath reports.

More worrying still, according to Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University, is that, during this same period, students’ self-reported narcissism levels have, in contrast, gone in the other direction. They’ve shot through the roof.

“
Many people see the current group of college students, sometimes called ‘Generation Me,’ ” Konrath continues, “as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history.”

Hardly surprising, then, that the former head of the British armed forces, Lord Dannatt, has recently championed the notion that recruits undergo a “moral education” as part of their basic training, so lacking are many in a basic, core value system.

“
People haven’t had the same exposure to traditional values which previous generations did,” Dannatt articulates, “so we feel it’s important people have a moral baseline.”

Throw ’em in the army, they used to say of delinquents. Not anymore. They’ve got enough of ’em already.

Precisely
why
this downturn in social values should have come about is not entirely clear. A complex concatenation of environment, role models, and education is, as usual, doing the rounds.
But the beginnings of an even more fundamental answer may lie in another study conducted by Jeffrey Zacks and his team at the Dynamic Cognition Laboratory, Washington University in St. Louis. With the aid of fMRI, Zacks and his coauthors peered deep inside the brains of a bunch of volunteers as they read stories. What they found provided an intriguing insight into the way our brain constructs our sense of self. Changes in characters’ locations (e.g., “went out of the house into the street”) were associated with increased activity in regions of the temporal lobes involved in spatial orientation and perception, while changes in the objects a character interacted with (e.g., “picked up a pencil”) produced a similar increase in a region of the frontal lobes known to be important for controlling grasping motions. Most important of all, however, changes in a character’s goal elicited increased activation in areas of the prefrontal cortex, damage to which results in impaired knowledge of the order and structure of planned, intentional action.

Imagining, it would seem, really
does
make it so. Whenever we read a story, our level of engagement with it is such that we “mentally
simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative,” according to lead researcher Nicole Speer. Our brains then interweave these newly encountered situations with knowledge and experience gleaned from our own lives, to create an organic mosaic of dynamic mental syntheses.

Reading a book carves brand new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world.
Makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay “The Dreams of Readers,” “more alert to the inner lives of others.” We become vampires without being bitten—in other words, more empathic. Books make us see in a way that casual immersion in the Internet, and
the quicksilver virtual world it offers, doesn’t.
²

Back in Montreal, Bob Hare and I down another whiskey. On the subject of empathy and perspective taking,
we’ve been talking about the emergence of neurolaw, a developing subdiscipline born out of the increasingly greater interest the courts are now taking in cutting-edge neuroscience.
The watershed study was published in 2002, and found that a functional polymorphism in a neurotransmitter-metabolizing gene predicts psychopathic behavior in men who were mistreated as children. The gene in question—termed, as mentioned previously, the “warrior gene” by the media—controls the production of an enzyme called monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), low levels of which had previously been linked with aggressive behavior in mice.

But Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt of the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College, London, pushed the envelope further. In a trail-blazing study, which assessed children through adolescence into adulthood, they discovered a similar pattern in humans. Boys who are abused or neglected, and who possess a variation of the gene that codes for low levels of MAOA, are at an increased risk, as they get older, of turning into violent psychopaths. On the other hand, those coming from a similarly dysfunctional background, but who produce more of the enzyme, rarely develop such problems.

The implications of the discovery have percolated into the courtroom, and could completely rewrite the fundamental rules of crime and punishment. Whether we’re “good” or whether we’re “bad” lies partly in our genes, and partly in our environment. But since we don’t choose either, are we free to choose at all?

In 2006, Bradley Waldroup’s defense attorney, Wylie Richardson, summoned Professor William Bernet, a forensic psychiatrist from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, to the witness stand. Bernet had quite a job on his hands. Waldroup stood accused of one of the most brutal and heinous crimes in Tennessee’s history. Following a visit from his estranged wife, their four children, and his estranged wife’s friend to his trailer home, Waldroup, in his own words, “snapped.” He picked up his .22 rifle, proceeded to drill eight peremptory holes in the friend’s back, and then sliced her head open with a machete. Turning the machete on his wife, he lopped off her finger, then stabbed and slashed her repeatedly before changing tack and beating her senseless with a shovel.

Miraculously, his wife survived. But her friend, unfortunately, didn’t. Which meant that Waldroup, if found guilty, faced the death penalty.

Richardson had other ideas. “Is it true,” he asked Bernet, “that the accused possesses the variation of the gene that codes for low levels of MAOA?”

“Yes,” replied Bernet.

“Is it also true,” continued Richardson, “that he was violently, and repeatedly, beaten by his parents as a child?”

“Yes,” replied Bernet.

“Then to what extent is the man who stands before you completely responsible for his actions?” persisted Richardson. “To what extent has his free will been eroded by his genetic predisposition?”

It was a groundbreaking question—particularly for Bradley Waldroup, whose very existence, depending on the outcome, hung precariously in the balance.

It got an equally groundbreaking answer. Enough, thought the court, to absolve him of first-degree murder and find him guilty of voluntary manslaughter. Enough, it turned out, for history to be made. The science of behavioral genomics had commuted an otherwise certain death sentence to life.

The subject of neurolaw came up in the context of a wider discussion about the field of cultural neuroscience: the study of how societal values, practices, and beliefs shape, and are shaped by, genomic, neural, and psychological processes across multiple timescales and cultures. If society was becoming increasingly psychopathic, I wondered, was there a gene already at work out there churning out more psychopaths? Or was it a case, as Steven Pinker had elucidated in his “culture of dignity” argument, of customs and mores becoming ever more socialized until they end up second nature?

Hare suggests that it’s probably a little of both: that psychopaths, right now, are on a bit of a roll, and that the more of a roll they get on, the more normative their behavior becomes. He points to the emergence of epigenetics—
a hot new offshoot from the field of mainstream genetics, which, put simply, looks at changes in gene activity that don’t actually involve structural alterations to the genetic code per se, but still get passed on to successive generations. These patterns of gene expression are governed by little “switches” that sit on top of the genome, and it’s through tampering with these switches, rather than through intricate internal rewiring, that environmental factors like diet, stress, and even prenatal nutrition can have their say—can, like mischievous biological poltergeists, turn your genes on or off, and make their presence felt in ancestral rooms long ago inherited from their original owner-occupiers.

Hare tells me about a study conducted in Sweden back in the 1980s. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a remote area in the north of the country, Överkalix, was stricken by a sequence of poor and unpredictable harvests. Years of famine were duly interspersed with bumper years of plenty.

Sifting through the data from meticulous agricultural archives and then comparing it with data from subsequent national health records, scientists uncovered something truly remarkable: an epidemiological inheritance pattern that turned the science of genetics on its head.

The sons and the grandsons of men whose prepuberty years
³
just so happened to coincide with a time of famine had, it turned out, a decreased risk of dying from cardiovascular disease (such as stroke, high blood pressure, or coronary problems). On the other hand, however, the sons and grandsons of men whose prepubescence coincided with a bumper harvest had, in contrast, an increased risk of succumbing to diabetes-related illnesses.

It was incredible. Through no direct agency of their own, successive generations of sons and grandsons had had their cardiovascular and endocrinological futures underwritten by the random ecological exigencies of an ancestral time long gone. Before they were even born.

“So is it possible,” I ask, in an attempt to draw everything together—Pinker and his cultural arbiters, Boddy and his corporate Attilas, and the whole epigenetics shebang—“that psychopaths have rolled the dice, and that, over time, more and more of us are now rolling it with them?”

Hare orders another couple of shots.

“Not only that,” he says. “But, over time, as you say, if the hand of epigenetics starts meddling behind the scenes, those dice will start to become more and more loaded. There’s no doubt that there are elements of the psychopathic personality ideally suited to getting to the top. And once there, of course, they can start calling the tune to which others of their number are best suited to dance … Look at what’s happened on Wall Street, for example … That’s come from the top down. But, as it takes hold, it enables those best equipped to deal with such an environment, at lower levels of management, to start making their way up …

“
There was a writer back in the sixties, Alan Harrington, who thought that the psychopath was evolution’s next step. The next trick that natural selection has up its sleeve as society becomes faster and looser. Maybe he’s right? There’s no way of telling right now. But there’s certainly some interesting work being done in genetics labs at the moment.

“
Did I tell you about [this] paper which shows that people with high testosterone levels, and long alleles on their serotonin transporter genes, exhibit a suppressed amygdala response when faced with social dominance threats?

“That’s a potential psychopath gene right there for you. You’ve got high aggression and low fear all rolled into one …”

I glance at my watch. It’s a little after nine and the bar is filling up.
As an amusing backdrop, “Gary Gilmore’s Eyes” by the Adverts is playing—a post-punk ditty from yesteryear in which the singer muses on what it would be like to see through them. It’s an interesting question—to which someone knows the answer. Following his execution, Gilmore had requested that his eyes be used for transplant purposes. Within hours of his death, in compliance with his wishes, two people received his corneas.

Gilmore, of course, is one of criminal history’s superpsychopaths—one of that rare sub-breed of the species with all the dials on the mixing deck turned up to max. In January of 1977, the former shoe salesman was executed by a firing squad in the small and otherwise
unremarkable town of Draper, Utah. The previous July, at a gas station a few miles up the road, he’d gunned down an attendant for reasons he wasn’t quite sure of—and then he’d gone to see a movie with his girlfriend. The next day, as an encore, he’d shot a motel clerk in the head.

Six months later, after a final repast of hamburgers, eggs, and potatoes, he was facing the music in Utah State Prison. There were five in the firing squad. The prison warden tightened the leather straps around Gilmore’s head and chest and fixed a circular cloth target over his heart. He then withdrew from the execution chamber and pressed his face against the cool, clear glass of the observation suite.

There was nothing now for Gilmore save a miraculous last-minute reprieve. And neither miracles nor reprieves were all that common in Draper at the time. Besides, a couple of months earlier, Gilmore had dropped his appeal. He actually, or so he’d told his attorney, wanted to die.

It was eight in the morning when the firing squad picked up their rifles. Before (as is tradition) pulling a black corduroy hood over his head, the warden (as is also tradition) asked Gilmore if there were any last words. Gilmore stared straight ahead, his eyes colder than a Great White’s, as the inaudible thunder of death rumbled across his soul.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

As the song plays out, I turn, somewhat pensively, to Hare. “I wonder what it
would
be like to see through Gilmore’s eyes,” I say. “I mean—for real. If someone could turn you into a psychopath for an hour, would you do it?”