The Wisdom of Psychopaths (30 page)

One is also reminded of the work of Joe Newman, who, if you recall, in his lab at the University of Wisconsin, has shown that it isn’t so much the case that psychopaths don’t
feel
anxiety in certain situations, but rather that they just don’t notice the threat. Their attention is focused purely on the task at hand, and extraneous distractors are ruthlessly filtered out.

Usually, of course, when it comes to psychopaths, such focus is construed as malevolent: the glacial, guiltless killer cruising the city limits like some gas-guzzling praying mantis in search of the perfect victim; the genocidal dictator, oblivious to the rule of moral or civil law, hell-bent on silencing all dissenting opinion in his indomitable quest for cultural and political omnipotence.

Compassionate, transcendental, or spiritual connotations are rarely, if ever, considered.

But a number of studies have recently begun to shed new light on such a resoundingly unlikely possibility—and have begun to precipitate a gradual yet fundamental reevaluation of precisely what it means to be a psychopath.

Mem Mahmut, at Macquarie University in Sydney, has turned up something extraordinary.
Psychopaths, it appears, far from being callous and unemotional all the time, can actually, in the right kind of context, be more altruistic than the rest of us.

Mahmut conducted a study comprising a series of real-life scenarios in which people asked for help from passersby (unsuspecting volunteers who’d previously been tested for psychopathy and classified as high or low scorers).

But there was a catch. The people asking for help, just like the passersby who responded to them, weren’t exactly random. They were, in fact, Mahmut’s evil co-conspirators in a unique, fiendishly constructed experiment specifically designed to investigate the relationship between psychopathy and helping behavior.

The experiment consisted of three parts. In the first part, Mahmut’s accomplices solicited help directly from the passersby by pretending to be lost and approaching to ask for directions. In the second part, the “request” for help was much less direct and explicit: a hapless female who’d dropped a bunch of papers. In the third part, the request was less explicit still: a lab researcher who’d supposedly broken her arm pretending to have difficulty with a variety of simple tasks—opening a water bottle, and entering the participant’s name in a fake logbook, for instance—but bravely persevering in spite of her conspicuous injury.

Who, in these three different scenarios, Mahmut wanted to know, would be most likely to offer help: the remorseless, cold-hearted psychopaths or their warmer, more empathic counterparts?

The results of the study blew Mahmut away. In fact, so far off beam were they that he’s still trying to get his head around them.

In the first part of the experiment, in which the accomplice asked for directions, the psychopaths, as predicted, offered less help than the non-psychopaths. No surprises there. In the second part, however—dropped papers—the altruism gap mysteriously disappeared. The psychopaths and the non-psychopaths offered an equal amount of help.

But it was in the third part, in which the accomplice feigned an injury, that the wheels really came off Mahmut’s preconceived hypothesis that the psychopaths would be less obliging. In fact, the opposite turned out to be true.

The psychopaths showed a greater readiness to put themselves forward for water-bottle duty and to enter their own names into the logbook than the non-psychopaths. When the person asking for help
was at their most vulnerable, and yet at the same time didn’t endeavor to proactively solicit aid, the psychopaths came up with the goods. When it really mattered, they were significantly more likely to step up to the plate than were their (supposedly, at least) warmer, more empathic counterparts.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the results of Mahmut’s experiment have certainly raised some eyebrows. One interpretation, of course, is that, as some enlightened (and no doubt rather embittered) soul once pointed out, there is no such thing as a truly altruistic act. There is always, however well camouflaged in the darker recesses of our dense psychological undergrowth, an ulterior self-serving, distinctly less honorable motive—and the psychopaths in Mahmut’s study, with their finely tuned, highly sensitive long-range vulnerability antennae (recall the experiment conducted by Angela Book in which psychopaths were better able than non-psychopaths to pick out the victims of a violent assault merely from the way they walked), quite simply “smelled blood.”

“
It is pleasure that lurks in the practice of every one of your virtues,” wrote the novelist W. Somerset Maugham in
Of Human Bondage
. “Man performs actions because they are good for him, and when they are good for other people as well they are thought virtuous … It is for your private pleasure that you give twopence to a beggar as much as it is for my private pleasure that I drink another whiskey and soda. I, less of a humbug than you, neither applaud myself for my pleasure nor demand your admiration.”

On the other hand, however, there’s evidence to suggest that Mahmut’s incendiary findings are no flash in the pan. And that they mark the beginning of a welcome new shift in both empirical and theoretical focus: away from the conventionally pejorative physiological profiles cranked out by the neuroimaging brigade, toward a more applied, pragmatic research drive into functional “positive psychopathy.”
As a case in point, Diana Falkenbach and Maria Tsoukalas, at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York, have recently begun studying the incidence of so-called adaptive psychopathic characteristics in what they term “hero populations”:
in front-line professions such as law enforcement, the military, and the rescue services, for example.

What they’ve discovered jells nicely with the data that Mahmut’s research has uncovered. On the one hand, though exemplifying a prosocial lifestyle, hero populations are tough. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the level of trauma and risk such occupations entail, they show a greater preponderance of psychopathic traits associated with the Fearless Dominance and Coldheartedness subscales of the PPI (e.g., low anxiety, social dominance, and stress immunity), compared with the general population at large. These dials are turned up higher. On the other hand, however, they part company with criminal psychopaths in their relative absence of traits related to the Self-Centered Impulsivity subscale (e.g., Machiavellianism, narcissism, carefree nonplanfulness, and antisocial behavior). These dials are turned down lower.

Such a profile is consistent with the anatomy of the hero as portrayed by the psychologist
Philip Zimbardo, founder of the Heroic Imagination Project—an initiative aimed at educating folk in the insidious techniques of social influence. Or more specifically, how to resist them.
In 1971, in an experiment that has long since been inaugurated into psychology’s hall of fame, Zimbardo constructed a simulated prison in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology building and randomly assigned twelve student volunteers to play the role of prisoner, while another twelve were to play the role of guard.

After just six days, the study was abandoned. A number of the “guards” had begun to abuse the “prisoners,” misusing their power simply because they had it. Forty years on, post–Abu Ghraib and the painful lessons learned, Zimbardo is engaged in a radically different project: to develop the “hero muscle” within all of us. Having uncorked the genie of the villain and the victim within, he now seeks to do the opposite: to empower everyday folk to stand up and make a difference when they might otherwise be silenced by fear. And not just when it comes to physical confrontations, but psychological confrontations, too—which, depending on the circumstances, can pose just as much of a challenge.

“The decision to act heroically is a choice that many of us will be called upon to make at some point in our lives,” Zimbardo tells me. “It means not being afraid of what others might think. It means not being afraid of the fallout for ourselves. It means not being afraid of putting our necks on the line. The question is: Are we going to make that decision?”

Over coffee in his office, we talk about fear, conformity, and the ethical imperative of braving psychological as well as physical confrontation. Not unexpectedly, our old friend groupthink rears its head again, which occurs, as we saw in
chapter 3
with the
Challenger
disaster, when the warped in-group forces of social gravitation exert such pressures on a collective as to precipitate—in the words of Irving Janis, the psychologist who carried out much of the early work on the process—“a deterioration in mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment.”

Zimbardo cites, as another case in point, the attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese forces during the Second World War.

On December 7, 1941, the Imperial Japanese Navy launched a surprise attack against a United States naval base on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. The offensive was intended as a preemptive strike, aimed at precluding the U.S. Pacific Fleet from compromising planned Japanese incursions against the Allies in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies. It proved devastating. A total of 188 U.S. aircraft were destroyed; 2,402 Americans were killed and 1,282 injured—prompting then president Franklin D. Roosevelt to call the following day for a formal declaration of war on the Empire of Japan. Congress gave him the go-ahead. It took them less than an hour.

But might the attack on Pearl Harbor have been prevented? The catastrophic carnage and chaotic, combative consequences averted? There’s evidence to suggest that it could, and that a constellation of groupthink factors—false assumptions, unchecked consensus, unchallenged reasoning biases, illusions of invulnerability—all contributed to a singular lack of precaution taken by U.S. Navy officers stationed in Hawaii.

In intercepting Japanese communications, for example, the United
States had reliable information that Japan was in the process of gearing itself up for an offensive. Washington took action by relaying this intelligence to the military high command at Pearl Harbor. Yet the warnings were casually ignored. The developments were dismissed as saber-rattling: Japan was merely taking measures to forestall the annexation of their embassies in enemy territories.
Rationalizations included “The Japanese would never dare attempt a full-scale surprise assault against Hawaii because they would realize that it would precipitate an all-out war, which the United States would surely win”; and “Even if the Japanese were foolhardy enough to send their carriers to attack us [the United States], we could certainly detect and destroy them in plenty of time.” History attests they were wrong.

As an example of the expediency of psychological troubleshooting, and of the spiritual qualities of fearlessness and mental toughness inherent in heroic action, both the
Challenger
and Pearl Harbor fiascoes provide intriguing parallels between the work of Philip Zimbardo and that of Diana Falkenbach and Maria Tsoukalas, mentioned earlier. Previously, in
chapter 3
, we explored the possibility that psychopathic characteristics such as charm, low anxiety, and stress immunity—the characteristics that Falkenbach and Tsoukalas identified in comparatively greater number in hero populations—may well, somewhat ironically, have managed to gain a toehold in our evolutionary gene pool through their propensity to facilitate conflict resolution. Dominant individuals among chimpanzees, stump-tailed monkeys, and gorillas all compete for mates, if you recall, by intervening in disputes among subordinates.

Yet an alternative explanation—and the two, of course, are far from mutually exclusive—is that such characteristics may also have evolved and withstood the test of time for precisely the opposite reason: for their catalytic capacity to actually instigate conflict.

Such a position would better align itself with a more orthodox reading of the evolution of psychopathy. Traditionally, the Darwinian account of psychopathy has rested predominantly on the nonconformist aspect of the disorder (criterion 1, if you recall from
chapter 2
, for Antisocial Personality Disorder, reads, “Failure to conform to social norms”): on the psychopath’s devil-may-care attitude toward social conventions. Conventions, on the one hand, such as honesty, accountability, responsibility, and monogamy
³
; yet also, on the other hand, conventions like social compliance, which, deep in our ancestral past, would undoubtedly have contributed to perilously poor decision making—and thereby, in those turbulent, treacherous times, to a grisly carnivorous death.

It’s the principle of David and Goliath: the little guy with a slingshot lodging his cool, dissenting pebble in the cogs of the all-conquering machine, immune to the pressures of a toxic insider empathy. The lone voice in the wilderness.

Researchers and clinicians often argue that psychopaths don’t “do” empathy—that because of their lethargic amygdalae they just don’t feel things in the same way as the rest of us.
Studies have revealed that when psychopaths are shown distressing images of, say, famine victims, the lights located in the emotion corridors of their brains quite simply don’t come on: that their brains—if viewed under fMRI conditions—merely pull down the emotional window blinds and implement a neural curfew.

Sometimes, as we’ve seen, such curfews can have their advantages—as in the medical profession, for instance. But sometimes the curtains can shut out the light completely. And the darkness can be truly impenetrable.

In the summer of 2010, I jumped on a plane to Quantico, Virginia, to interview Supervisory Special Agent James Beasley III at the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Beasley is one of America’s foremost authorities on psychopaths and serial murder, and has profiled criminals right across the board: from child abductors to rapists, from drug barons to spree killers.

During his twenty-seven years as a federal employee, the last seventeen of which he’s spent at the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime, there’s not much Special Agent Beasley hasn’t heard, seen, or dealt with. But several years ago, he interviewed a guy who was so far down the temperature scale he almost cracked the thermometer.