Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work (4 page)

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acts of most people. This sort of aggression and violence is instrumental, simply a means to an end, and seldom followed by anything even approaching normal concern for the pain and suffering inflicted on others. On the other hand, much of the violence of other criminals tends to be reactive—a typical response to threats or situations that generate an intense emotional state. This type of violence, which includes what is often described as a crime of passion, typically is followed by feelings of remorse and guilt for the harm done to others.

Perhaps most dangerous of all from a public safety point of view, psychopathic criminals recidivate at a much higher rate, and do so much earlier, than do other criminals. The recidivism rate refers to the percentage of offenders that commit a new crime subsequent to release into the community. Psychopaths make up about 15 percent of the prison population. Many of the remaining 85 percent of individuals in prison might be described as sociopaths or as having antisocial personality disorder, similar, but different disorders often confused with psychopathy (see sidebar). Although the prevalence of psychopathy in the general population is relatively small—only about 1 percent—the social, economic, physical, and psychological damage done by individuals with this disorder is far out of proportion to their numbers. They are responsible for at least half of the persistent serious and violent crimes committed in North America.

Yet, as we shall see, not all psychopaths turn to a life of crime, and not all criminals are psychopaths.

Psychopathy, Sociopathy, and

Antisocial Personality Disorder

Many people are confused about the differences among psychopathy, sociopathy, and antisocial personality disorder.

Although the terms frequently are treated as if they are interchangeable—by the general public and professionals alike—they refer to related but not identical conditions.

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Psychopathy
is a personality disorder described by the personality traits and behaviors that form the basis of this book. Psychopaths are without conscience and incapable of empathy, guilt, or loyalty to anyone but themselves.

Sociopathy
is not a formal psychiatric condition. It refers to patterns of attitudes and behaviors that are considered antisocial and criminal by society at large, but are seen as normal or necessary by the subculture or social environment in which they developed.

Sociopaths may have a well-developed conscience and a normal capacity for empathy, guilt, and loyalty, but their sense of right and wrong is based on the norms and expectations of their subculture or group. Many criminals might be described as sociopaths.

Antisocial personality disorder
(APD) is a broad diagnostic category found in the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
, 4th edition (DSM-IV). Antisocial and criminal behaviors play a major role in its definition and, in this sense, APD is similar to sociopathy.

Some of those with APD are psychopaths, but many are not. The difference between psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder is that the former includes personality traits such as lack of empathy, grandiosity, and shallow emotion that are not necessary for a diagnosis of APD. APD is three or four times more common than psychopathy in the general population and in prisons.

The prevalence of those we would describe as sociopathic is unknown but likely is considerably higher than that of APD.

One may argue that psychopaths who live freely in society simply have not yet been caught committing a crime or engaging in socially destructive behavior. Given the psychopaths’ personality features, and their inclination for breaking the rules and pushing the envelope of acceptable human behavior, there is some merit to this argument. Still, just having a psychopathic personality disorder does not make one a criminal. Some psychopaths live in society and do not technically break the law—although they may come close, with behavior that usually is very unpleasant for those around them. Some may lead seemingly
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normal lives, not hurting people in ways that attract attention, but causing problems nonetheless in hidden economic, psychological, and emotionally abusive ways. They do not make warm and loving parents, children, or family members. They do not make reliable friends or coworkers. Many psychopaths adopt a parasitic existence, living off the generosity or gullibility of others by taking advantage of and often abusing the trust and support of friends and family. They may move from place to place and from one source of support to another. You probably know one. You could work for, work with, or be married to someone with a psychopathic personality and not know that there is a formal psychological term for the individual who causes you so much pain and distress. He or she can be a neighbor, friend, or family member whose behavior you may find fascinating, confusing, and repelling.

So how do psychologists and psychiatrists accurately decide whether someone has a psychopathic personality? In the early days of research on psychopathy, there was no widely acceptable standard of measurement. The psychiatric criteria for use in diagnoses were vague, sometimes confusing, and could vary depending on the personal experiences of the researcher or diagnostician. This dark and murky past has cleared up considerably over the last fifty years as psychopathy has grown into one of the most researched and well-understood psychopathological variables.

A pioneer in the early years of this field was Hervey Cleckley, M.D., working as a psychiatrist in a psychiatric facility in the late 1930s. Offenders and patients were sent to psychiatric hospitals for treatment if they were believed to have some form of mental illness.

Cleckley had the opportunity to study his patients carefully, and he realized that many of them did not display the usual symptoms of mental illness, but instead seemed “normal” under most conditions.

He watched them charm, manipulate, and take advantage of other patients, family members, and even hospital staff. To Cleckley’s trained eyes, these individuals were psychopaths.

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Cleckley eventually wrote what has become a classic textbook on psychopathy, The Mask of Sanity. Originally published in 1941, this definitive book is now in its fifth edition (1976), and was one of the first books to present a clear picture of psychopathy. Despite having normal intelligence, Cleckley’s patients often made poor life judgments and didn’t learn much from their personal experiences, causing them to repeat dysfunctional or unfruitful behaviors. They lacked insight concerning themselves and the impact of their behavior on others, but this seemed not to concern them at all. They did not understand and cared little about the feelings of others, lacking both remorse and shame for the harm they did others. They were noticeably unreliable, even about important things relevant to their current situation, and seemed to have no real life goals or plans. Most obvious of all, these patients were consummate liars, being untruthful about almost everything (even inconsequential things most people wouldn’t waste time and energy lying about). They were insincere, although often appearing to be very sincere to those with little experience interacting with them, particularly new staff members.

Reviews of their records showed them to be antisocial and violent for reasons that often seemed random and senseless. They could be egocentric in the extreme, and were seemingly unable to experience deep human emotions, especially love and compassion. They failed to have significant or intimate relationships. Even their sexual relations were superficial and impersonal. In fact, they seemed unable to feel intensely any of the emotions that others experience, except perhaps primitive or proto-emotions such as anger, frustration, and rage. According to Cleckley, psychopaths come across as having a superficial charm and good intelligence. Psychopaths are often entertaining and can tell creative, believable stories. They don’t seem to experience delusional or irrational thinking, which often characterizes a mental disorder, and they tend not to be anxious or neu-rotic. On the surface, then, they appear normal, sane, and in control; in fact, many are quite likable. As Cleckley put it, “[the] psychopath presents a technical appearance of sanity, often one of high intellectual
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capacities, and not infrequently succeeds in business or professional activities.”

The title of his book, The Mask of Sanity, reflected Cleckley’s belief that, although psychopaths do not exhibit the obvious symptoms of mental illness, they suffer from a profound underlying disorder in which the language and emotional components of thought are not properly integrated, a condition he called semantic aphasia. It is tempting to try to decide if someone is a psychopath simply by watching or listening to him or her and checking off the characteristics that match Cleckley’s list. Cleckley, however, never intended his list of observations to be a formal checklist for diagnosis, and had never tested his model statistically. As a clinician with many years of exposure to psychopaths, he reported those traits that seemed to him to characterize the syndrome.

Confirmation of his observations and the development of scientific methods for assessment, therefore, was left to others, one in particular being Hare, the second author of this book. He describes these efforts, outlined in his book, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us, as follows: I worked in a maximum-security penitentiary early in my career as a psychologist in order to help finance my graduate school education. While there, I took an interest in the behavior of psychopaths, whom I occasionally met as part of my work. My initial interest was in finding out if there were any physiological differences between psychopathic and nonpsychopathic offenders.

Cleckley had noted that psychopaths used language somewhat differently from most other people; their sentence structure, choice of words and tempo (or beat) were different. Others and I also had noted that psychopaths have difficulty understanding the emotional content of words that add color and interest to communication. They would often describe their most atrocious crimes with dispassion and disinterest, showing no emotion at all. Just hearing these matter-of-fact descriptions sent chills
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down the spines of many criminal investigators, even though they typically were hardened by years of work with criminals.

Could there be something different going on in the psychopath’s brain that might explain these differences?

I wanted to look deeper into the brain for some answers. In these early experiments, I would present psychopathic and nonpsychopathic offenders with words differing in emotional content and measured their physiological responses. High emotional content words might include “rape,” “blood,” or “knife,”

while low emotional content words might include “tree,”

“house,” and “rock.” Trained as an experimental psychologist, I knew that high-emotion words trigger physiological responses in subjects that could be measured using sensitive laboratory equipment; would the same be true of psychopaths?

The first obstacle was defining psychopathy. There was no standard and reliable assessment instrument available to researchers to measure the disorder. The diagnostic skills of the investigator, on which accuracy relied, could not be assured. Some researchers might use Cleckley’s definition, others the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), then a newly published guidebook for psychiatrists, and still others might rely on their own clinical impressions. Without a consensus, how could a researcher in Canada be sure that a researcher somewhere else in the world could reproduce his research results? What if they didn’t agree on which subjects were really psychopaths, and which subjects were not?

I needed to create a research-worthy measure of psychopathy, and this new instrument had to be valid, reliable, and psychologically sound. Cleckley’s list of behavioral descriptors, although a good starting point, was incomplete. Collecting a large number of known descriptors of psychopathic traits and behaviors, and using statistical analysis techniques, I set out to resolve what were the most common and specific traits and behaviors that distinguish a psychopath from a nonpsychopath.

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The result of this work is the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised, or PCL-R, a list of twenty interpersonal, emotional, and lifestyle traits and behaviors. “True” psychopaths have most or all the PCL-R traits, while individuals who have only a few of these traits are not psychopaths. For twenty years now, statistical studies on many criminal populations all over the world have consistently shown the PCL-R to be the gold standard for measuring psychopathy.

Nature? Nurture? Both!

Are psychopathic features the product of nature or nurture?

As with most other things human, the answer is that both are involved. A better question is “To what extent do nature and nurture influence the development of the traits and behaviors that define psychopathy?” The answer to this question is becoming much clearer with the application of behavioral genetics to the study of personality traits and behavioral dispositions.

Several recent twin studies provide convincing evidence that genetic factors play at least as important a role in the development of the core features of psychopathy as do environmental factors and forces. Researchers Blonigen, Carlson, Krueger & Patrick stated that the results of their study of 271 adult twin pairs provided “substantial evidence of genetic contributions to variance in the personality construct of psychopathy.” Subsequently, researchers Larrson, Andershed & Lichstenstien arrived at a similar conclusion in their study of 1090 adolescent twin pairs: “A genetic factor explains most of the variation in the psychopathic personality.” Viding, Blair, Moffitt & Plomin studied 3687 seven-year-old twin pairs and also concluded that “the core symptoms of psychopathy are strongly genetically determined.” They reported that the genetic contribution was highest when callous-unemotional traits were combined with antisocial behaviors.