Psychopaths: How Do You Recognize One? (2023)

There are some things we take for granted in our social interactions with people. We assume that we see the world in much the same way, that we all know certain basic facts, that words mean the same to you as they mean to me. We assume that we have very similar ideas of right and wrong.

But for a small - but not so small - segment of the population, the story is very different. These people lack remorse and empathy and feel emotions only on the surface. In extreme cases, they may not care if you live or die. These people are called psychopaths. Some of them were violent criminals, murderers. But by no means all.

Professor Robert Hale is a criminal psychologist and founder of the PCL-R, a psychological test used to determine whether someone has a mental illness. For decades he studied and worked with the mentally ill in prisons and elsewhere. "It strikes me, as it did when I started 40 years ago, that there are likely to be people who are so emotionally disconnected that they can be manipulated and destroyed with as little fear as anyone else," he said.

Our understanding of the brain is still in its infancy, and mental disorders have only been recognized as character defects for decades. We are slowly learning to see mental illnesses like kidney disease or liver failure and developmental disabilities like autism as diseases in a similar way. Psychopathy challenges this view. "High-scoring psychopaths see the world very differently," Hale said. "It's like a color-blind person trying to understand red, but in this case 'red' is someone else's emotion."

In essence, the Hare test is simple: a list of 20 criteria, each scored as 0 (if it does not apply to the person), 1 (if it partially applies) or 2 (if it applies at all). The full list is: slick and shallow charm, inflated self-esteem, pathological lying, cunning/manipulative, lack of remorse, emotional shallowness, cruelty and lack of empathy, unwillingness to take responsibility for actions, prone to boredom, parasitic lifestyle, lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility, lack of behavioral control, conduct problems in early life, juvenile delinquency, multi-pronged delinquency, history of "parole revocation" (ie parole violation), polygamy, and sex. A pure typical psychopath scores 40 points. A score of 30 or higher qualifies for a psychiatric diagnosis. "A psychiatrist friend once said, 'Bob, when I meet people who score 35 or 36, I know they're really different,'" Hale says.

But is psychosis a disorder - or a different way of being? Anyone reading the above list will find some patterns that will be familiar to people in the know. On average, people without a criminal record scored a 5. "It has dimensions," Hale said. “Some people are at an intermediate level, high enough to warrant a psychiatric evaluation, but not high enough to cause problems. They are usually our friends and fun to hang out with. They can take advantage of us at times, but usually it's subtle and they can talk about it."

We think of psychopaths as murderers, criminals out of society. Like Joanna Dennehy, a 31-year-old British woman who killed three men in 2013 and was diagnosed with a psychotic personality disorder the previous year, or Ted Bundy, an American serial killer believed to have murdered at least 30 people. he says of himself: "I'm the coldest son of a bitch you'll ever meet. I just love killing people." But many psychopathic traits are not necessarily disadvantages—and in some cases, they can be advantages. Hale and his colleague Paul Babiak, in their book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Come to Work, studied 203 businessmen and found that about 4 percent of PCL-R scores were high enough to provide an assessment of psychosis. According to Hale, it's not a true random sample (the claim that "10% of cashiers" are psychopaths is definitely wrong), but it's easy to tell if you want to advance in your career.

^{American serial killer Ted Bundy is said to have killed at least 30 people}

"There are two kinds of empathy," says James Fallon, retneuroscientistAt the University of California he is the author of The Psychopath Within: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain. "Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand how another person feels, while affective empathy is the ability to let them feel what they feel." People with autism can be highly empathetic - feeling the pain of others - but less able to recognize our tell-tale signs, smiles and frowns that tell us what someone is thinking. Psychopaths are often the exact opposite: they know how you feel, but they don't feel it themselves. "All of this gives some psychopaths a huge advantage because they can tell what you're thinking, they just don't care, so they can use you against them." (Frighteningly, psychopaths are particularly good at spotting vulnerability. A 2008 study asked participants to recall fictional characters and found that those who scored high on psychopathy recognized sad, failed women almost perfectly, but had impaired memory for other characters.)

Fallon himself is a perfect example. In 2005 he looked at brain scans of psychotic killers, and in another study of Alzheimer's he used brain scans of his own family members as a control. He found something odd about the latter. "You can't tell if someone is a psychopath from a brain scan," he said, "but you can get a pretty good guess at what personality traits they're going to have." He described an important loop that starts at the front. of the brain. These include the parahippocampus and amygdala, as well as other areas associated with emotion, impulse control, and empathy. In some cases, they light up dramatically on MRIs of normal people, but dimly on those of psychopaths.

“I saw a very abnormal person, I thought he was a rude person. He looked like the killer I was looking for,” he said. Breaks the anonymous code if it lands on the wrong pile. When he did, he discovered it was his own brain. "I kind of messed it up," he said. "But then some of my psychiatrist friends checked my behavior and said you might be a borderline psychopath."

Talking to him was a strange experience, he was not breathing for almost an hour and I asked him three questions. He explained how he regularly put his family at risk by exposing his brother to the deadly Marburg virus and taking his son trout fishing in the African countryside, even though he knew there were lions. In his youth, "I showed no emotion, no fear when I faced authority - when I stole a car, made a pipe bomb, set it on fire - when the police caught us." However, he was very successful and determined to win. He told me something that would make most people uncomfortable: his wife said she was married to a "nice, fun, easy-going guy" on the one hand and a "very dark one that she didn't like" on the other. others. He's pleasant and funny, if self-centered, but I can't help but think of Hare's PCL-R patterns: shallow charisma, lack of emotional depth, exaggerated self-esteem. "I look awful now, Tom," she said — she was 66 — "but I grew up beautiful, 6 feet tall, 180 pounds, strong, smart, funny, popular." (Incidentally, Rabbit warns laypeople not to try to use his test to diagnose people.)

"Psychopaths think they're more rational than other people, and that's not a flaw," Hale said. "I met a criminal who was definitely mentally ill and he said, 'My problem, according to the psychiatrists, is that I think more with my head than with my heart. What should I do? Burst into tears,” another asked if he regretted stabbing a robbery victim, he replied: “Be realistic! He's been in the hospital for months and I'm rotting here. If I wanted to kill him, I would cut his throat. That's me, I'll let him rest."

But as Hare points out, it's hard to classify it as a disease when you're talking about people who aren't criminals and could be successful in life. "It's hard for me to dig into high-level political, business or academic backgrounds, pick out the most successful people and say, 'Look, I think you have a brain defect.' One of the prisoners spoke to me of his problem as being a mouse in the world. cats. If you compare the brain wave activity of cats and mice, they are completely different."

It may have been an evolutionarily successful strategy for many of our ancestors, and it may be successful today, Hale said. Psychopaths, good at manipulating people, could walk into a community, "like a church or a cultural organization and say, 'I think you do the same,' but of course what we have is a cat, pretending to be one mouse and all of a sudden all the money is gone.” At this point he thought of the name Bernie Madoff.

^{Columbine High School killers Dylan Klebold (right) and Eric Harris caught on CCTV the day of the massacre (Reuters/Gary Kaski)}

This is a matter of treatment. "Psychopathy is perhaps the most pleasant feeling of all mental disorders," says journalist Jon Ronson, whose book The Psychopath Test examines the concept of psychosis and the mental health industry as a whole. "All the things that keep you good, morally good, are painful things: guilt, sorrow, compassion." Fallon agrees: "Psychopaths work very quickly and have significantly higher IQs than they really are because they don't think about moral questions. Limit."

Therefore, psychopaths often happily accept their condition and their "treatment" becomes complicated. “How many psychopaths would go to a psychiatrist for a mental health problem unless they were in prison? That wasn't going to happen,” Hale said. Of course, people in prison are often told to go to "talk therapy, empathy training, or talk to victims' families" — but because psychopaths don't have empathy, that doesn't work. "What you want to do is say, 'Look, it's in your best interest to change your behavior or you're going to be in jail for a long time.'

Hale's message appears to have been carried over to the UK Ministry of Justice: in its guidelines for dealing with prisoners with personality disorders, it indicates that while 'highly psychopathic patients' may be 'highly resistant to treatment', 'interventions are most likely to be effective for victims' 'self' - what perpetrators want out of life - and work with them to develop the skills to achieve these things in a pro-social rather than anti-social way."

When someone's brain lacks the moral qualities that the rest of us take for granted, it is clearly powerless, just as a colorblind person can begin to see colors. So where is the concept of moral responsibility? “The legal system has traditionally held that all people are equal before a judge. This is obviously wrong,” says the neuroscientistDavid Adlerman, from Incognito: The Secret Life of the Brain. Rather than thinking in terms of liability, he suggested that the law should address the likelihood of someone reoffending and impose penalties accordingly, rehabilitating those who might benefit and long prison terms for those who pose a long-term threat. The PCL-R is already used as part of an algorithm to classify individuals according to their risk of recidivism. "Life insurance companies do just that, and in their actuarial sheets they ask, 'At what age do we think he will die?' No one pretends to know exactly when we will die, which greatly improves the efficiency of the system. "

That doesn't mean a situation like in the sci-fi movie Minority Report, where alleged criminals are jailed for real crimes, he said. "That's why," he said. “That's because there are a lot of people in the population who have high-level mental illness -- about 1 percent. But not all of them go criminal. The will to surpass people and become very successful. They become CEOs, professional athletes, soldiers. These people are honored for their courage, openness and willingness to overcome obstacles in their path. "Just having a mental illness doesn't tell us that someone is going to go off and commit a crime." In the UK and US, the core of the justice system is that you cannot punish someone proactively. That will never change, Eagleman said, not only for moral and philosophical reasons, but also for practical reasons. The Minority Report script is a fantasy because “It's impossible to predict what someone is going to do, even considering their personality type and everything, because life is complicated and crimes have context. Once someone commits a crime, once someone crosses a social threshold, then what they can do in the future has more statistical power. But until then you never know."

When I talked to all of these experts, I noticed that they all referred to psychopaths as "them," almost a different species, even though they made a conscious effort not to. There is something particularly disturbing about people who lack emotion and empathy. it's the story of changelings, Midwich Cuckoos, Hannibal Lecter. "You know kids who burn ants with a magnifying glass and they think that's funny," Hale said. "The extrapolation to an adult psychopath treating a person this way is terrifying." At one point, Ronson suggested I talk to another well-known woman who claimed to be a psychopath, but I couldn't convince myself. I found the thought unsettling, as if he were suggesting that I communicate with the dead.

• This article originally referred to autism as a "personality disorder." It is actually a neurodevelopmental disorder. This has been fixed, sorry for the mistake. someone

Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work (RRP £10.99) is available from Telegraph Books for £10.99 + £1.35 p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit usbooks.telegraph.co.uk