The Wisdom of Psychopaths (7 page)

Figure 2.1. Hippocrates’ four temperaments

After Hippocrates, not a lot happened for two and a half millennia.
Then, in 1952, the British psychologist Hans Eysenck gave the father of Western medicine’s ancient dyadic taxonomy a new lease on life. Following exhaustive questionnaire analysis and in-depth clinical interviews, Eysenck proposed that human personality comprised two core dimensions: introversion/extraversion and neuroticism/stability (a third, psychoticism, characterized by aggression, impulsiveness, and egocentricity, was added later). These two dimensions, when set out orthogonally, perfectly encapsulated the four classical temperaments originally identified by Hippocrates (see
figure 2.2
).

Figure 2.2. Eysenck’s model of personality incorporating Hippocrates’ four temperaments (from Eysenck and Eysenck, 1958)

The choleric personality (anxious; irritable) mapped onto Eysenck’s neurotic extraversion; the melancholic (depressed; introspective) onto neurotic introversion; the sanguine (warm; dynamic) onto emotionally stable extraversion; and the phlegmatic (calm; self-contained) onto emotionally stable introversion. Hippocrates, it appeared, wasn’t just the father of Western medicine, but of human nature too.

Eysenck’s two-stroke model of personality was positively anorexic compared to the gargantuan corpus of traits unearthed by the American psychologist Gordon Allport some twenty years earlier. In line with the so-called lexical hypothesis of personality, which stipulated that all significant character-related terms would, quite literally by definition, be encoded into language, Allport set sail into the deep, wordy waters of
Webster’s New International Dictionary
on a fishing trip. How many personality-related adjectives were out there? he wondered.
The answer, it transpired, was quite a few—and he reemerged onto dry land with a haul of nearly 18,000. This list, after junking those descriptions relating to temporary, rather than enduring, traits (e.g., elated, shamefaced), Allport trimmed down to a more tractable 4,500.

But it wasn’t until University of Illinois psychologist Raymond Cattell got hold of Allport’s list in 1946, at the same time that Eysenck was working on his model, that personality theorists really had something to play with. Eliminating synonyms, and introducing some additional items gleaned from laboratory research, Cattell arrived at a word count of 171. Then he got down to business. Using these descriptions to generate rating scales, he handed them out to volunteers. The task was refreshingly simple: to assess their acquaintances based on the tags provided.

Analysis revealed a galactic personality structure fiendishly composed of thirty-five major trait clusters referred to by Cattell, somewhat esoterically, as the “personality sphere.” Over the next decade, further refinement, with the aid of first-generation computers and the embryonic sorcery of factor analysis,
¹
whittled it down even further, to just 16 primary factors. There Cattell called it a day.

Figure 2.3. Cattell’s 16 primary personality factors (adapted from Cattell, 1957)

Fortunately for occupational psychologists, however, and those now working in the field of human resources, subsequent theorists pressed on.
In 1961, two U.S. Air Force researchers, Ernest Tupes and Raymond Christal, succeeded in distilling Cattell’s traits into just five recurring factors. These they labeled Surgency, Agreeableness, Dependability, Emotional Stability, and Culture.
More recently, over the last twenty years or so, the work of Paul Costa and Robert McCrae at the National Institutes of Health has led to the development of a standardized test of personality called the NEO Personality Inventory.

Psychologists don’t really do consensus if they can help it. But in this case it’s hard to avoid. Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism—think OCEAN—comprise the genome of human personality. And we’re all the sum of our parts. We are not numbers, as Patrick McGoohan famously asserted in
The Prisoner
. Rather, we are a constellation of numbers. Each of us, in the infinite algorithmic firmament of personality space, has our own unique coordinates depending on precisely where we fall along each of these five dimensions.
²
Or, as they’re commonly referred to, the “Big Five.”

To the casual observer, of course, personality presents as continuous and uniform. It’s only when sifted through a prism of mathematical scrutiny that it formally degrades into its five constituent components. The Big Five, you might say, correspond to those psychologically indivisible “primary colors” of personality, anchored at either endpoint by polar opposite character traits: a spectrum of identity that innervates us all.

These traits, together with a brief description of the set of personal attributes associated with each dimension, are laid out in
figure 2.4
.

Figure 2.4. The Big Five factor model of personality (McCrae and Costa, 1999, 1990)

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, occupational psychologists have gotten a lot of mileage out of the NEO (and other Big Five personality tests like it). They’ve handed it out to employees in virtually every profession you can think of to fathom the precise relationship between psychological makeup and success in the workplace.
In doing so, they’ve found a striking connection between temperament and job type. Between how we’re wired and where we’re hired.

Openness to Experience has been shown to play an important role in professions in which original thought or emotional intelligence is the order of the day—professions such as consultancy, arbitration, and advertising—while individuals scoring lower on this dimension tend to do better in manufacturing or mechanical jobs. Employees scoring medium to high on Conscientiousness (too high and you slip across the border into obsession, compulsion, and perfectionism) tend to excel across the board, the opposite being true for those posting lower scores. Extroverts do well in jobs that require social interaction, while introverts do well in more “solitary” or “reflective” professions, such as graphic design and accountancy. Rather like Conscientiousness, Agreeableness is pretty much a universal facilitator of performance, but shows up particularly prominently in occupations where the emphasis is on teamwork or customer service, like nursing and the armed forces, for instance. But unlike Conscientiousness, having lower levels of this trait can also come in handy—in bruising, cutthroat arenas such as the media, for example, where egos clash and competition for resources (ideas, stories, commissions) is often fierce.

Last, we have Neuroticism, arguably the most precarious of the NEO’s five dimensions. Yet while, on the one hand, it’s undoubtedly the case that emotional stability and coolness under pressure can sometimes tip the balance in professions where focus and levelheadedness have their say (the cockpit and the operating theater being just two cases in point), it should also be remembered that the marriage between Neuroticism and creativity is an enduring one. Some of art and literature’s greatest offerings down the ages have been mined, not in the shallow waters of the brain’s coastal perimeters, but in the deep, uncharted labyrinths of the soul.

But if occupational psychologists have uncovered individual differences in temperament based upon models of job performance—axes of personality that code for success in the workplace—how does the psychopath get along? In 2001, Donald
Lynam and his colleagues at the University of Kentucky conducted a study to find out, and discovered that their unique personality structure conceals a telltale configuration of traits, as ruthless as it is mesmeric. Lynam asked a group of the world’s top psychopathy experts (fellow academics with a proven track record in the field) to rate, on a scale of 1 to 5 (1 being extremely low, 5 extremely high) how they thought psychopaths measured up on a series of thirty sub-traits—the constituent parts of each of the primary dimensions that comprise the Big Five. The results are shown in
figure 2.5
.

Figure 2.5. Experts’ ratings of the psychopathic personality profile as revealed by performance on the Big Five (Miller et al., 2001)

As we can see, the experts have the psychopaths just about flatlining when it comes to Agreeableness, which is not surprising given that lying, manipulation, callousness, and arrogance are pretty much considered the gold standard of psychopathic traits by most clinicians. Conscientiousness ratings are nothing to write home about either. Impulsivity, lack of long-term goals, and failure to take responsibility are up there, as we’d expect. But notice how Competence bucks the trend—a measure of the psychopath’s unshakable self-confidence and insouciant disregard for adversity—and how the pattern continues with Neuroticism: Anxiety, Depression, Self-Consciousness and Vulnerability barely show up on the radar, which, when combined with strong outputs on Extraversion (Assertiveness and Excitement Seeking) and Openness to Experience (Actions), generates that air of raw, elemental charisma.

The picture that emerges is of a profoundly potent, yet darkly quicksilver personality. Dazzling and remorseless on the one hand. Glacial and unpredictable on the other.

The picture of a U.S. president? At first one might think, maybe not. But in 2010, Scott Lilienfeld teamed up with forensic psychologist Steven Rubenzer and Thomas Faschingbauer, professor of psychology at the Foundation for the Study of Personality in History, in Houston, Texas, and helped them analyze some rather interesting data.
Back in 2000, Rubenzer and Faschingbauer had sent out the NEO Personality Inventory to the biographers of every U.S. president in history.
³
It included questions such as “You should take advantage of others before they do it to you.” And “I never feel guilty over hurting people.” In total, there were 240 of these items. Plus a catch. It wasn’t the biographers who were being tested. But their subjects. The biographers, based on their knowledge, had to answer on their subjects’ behalf.

The results made interesting reading. A number of U.S. presidents exhibited distinct psychopathic traits, with John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton leading the charge.
⁴
Not only that, but just look at how the Roosevelts fare. Some of history’s golden boys are up there in the mix.