Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work (8 page)

His wife said, “He only steals with his mind.”

Recently released from prison, he has become an author, wealthy, and a celebrity in France, where his ability to con “stupid people” out of their money is much admired.
C’est la vie!

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Some psychopaths lay the charm on too thick, coming across as glib, superficial, and unconvincing. However, the truly talented ones have raised their ability to charm people to that of an art, priding themselves on their ability to present a fictional self to others that is convincing, taken at face value, and difficult to penetrate. Psychopaths do naturally what some politicians, salesmen, and promoters have to work hard to achieve: impress listeners with how they say something.

In criminal cases, it is sometimes only after the authorities uncover some heinous crime or masterful deceit that a psychopath’s charming mask of sincerity, integrity, and honesty is questioned. In less dramatic cases, it may still take much day-to-day exposure before the façade becomes transparent to a few studious observers, but this rarely happens with most people with whom they interact.

While lack of empathy and guilt allows psychopaths to identify their victims in the assessment phase, these traits also help them to con and manipulate shamelessly during the manipulation phase.

What contributes significantly to their success in engendering trust in their victims is their almost pathological ability to lie with im-punity. Unencumbered by social anxieties, fear of being found out, empathy, remorse, or guilt—some of nature’s brake pedals for antisocial behavior in humans—psychopaths tell a tale so believable, so entertaining, so creative, that many listeners instinctively trust them.

One might think that a long series of lies would eventually become transparent, leading to unmasking the psychopath, but this is rarely the case. The reason most observers do not see through the lies is that many psychopathic lies serve both to allay the doubts or concerns of the victim and to bolster the psychopathic fiction. Their often theatrical, yet convincing stories and entertaining explanations reinforce an environment of trust, acceptance, and genuine delight, leading most people to accept them exactly as whom they appear to be—and almost unconsciously excuse any inconsistencies they might have noted. If challenged or caught in a lie, psychopaths are not embarrassed. They simply change or elaborate on the story line to weave together all the misarranged details into a believable fabric. Well-practiced oral communication skills make this endless stream of disinformation seem
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believable, sensible, and logical. Some psychopaths are so good at this that they can create a veritable Shangri-la view of their world in the minds of others; a view that they almost seem to believe themselves.

Surprisingly, psychopaths will lie even to people who already know the truth about what they are saying. Amazingly, more often than not, victims will eventually come to doubt their own knowledge of the truth and change their own views to believe what the psychopath tells them rather than what they know to be true. Such is the power of psychopathic manipulation. In at least one case we have heard, a thief fleeing the law shot at his pursuer. Upon capture, the arresting officer—even though he returned fire—was convinced by the fast-talking suspect that the suspect did not, in fact, have a gun and never shot at the officer! Some psychopaths are proud of this expertise, making fun of their victims’ gullibility and often bragging about how they fooled this person and that person. To give the devil his due, this self-praise is justified in many cases.

It is not clear whether psychopaths lie because it is an effective tactic to get what they want, or the act of lying is pleasurable, or both.

It could be that psychopaths fail to learn the importance of honesty in their youth, and learn, instead, the utility of lying to get what they want from others. In the typical child, lying and distortion lessen with age, while psychopaths just get better at them. They don’t see the value of telling the truth unless it will help get them what they want.

The difference between psychopathic lies and those told by others is that the latter typically are less callous, calculated, damaging, and destructive to others. They also are far less pervasive than psychopathic lies. For example, poker players, men trying to talk a woman into having sex, adolescents working their parents over to obtain permission to go to a party, a businessmen trying to close a deal, and a politician trying to get elected or to explain his actions may use a variety of lies to attain their goals. But unlike psychopaths, cynical, facile lying is not an integral, systemic part of their personality, and it does not coexist with the other features that define psychopathy.

Another characteristic of psychopaths is an ability to avoid taking responsibility for things that go wrong; instead, they blame others,
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circumstances, fate, and so forth. They have an impressive supply of excuses for why they are not to blame for anything that they have said or done to hurt someone else. Pointing the finger at others serves the dual purposes of reinforcing their own positive image while spreading disparaging information about rivals and detractors. They do this by positioning their blame of others as a display of loyalty to the listener. That is, psychopaths appear to be helping or protecting the individual from harm by passing the blame onto a third party. Blaming the system, the company, or society as a whole for their own behavior is also a common response. In many organizations, coworkers can always be found who distrust the company or are angry about something that happened to them. Psychopaths can use these genuine feelings to generate support for their own position.

Even if those with a psychopathic personality admit to involve-ment in a crime, they will minimize their role, as well as the negative impact on the victims. Psychopaths may even blame the victims for their own misfortune, offering convincing reasons why they got what they deserved!

As it does in the assessment phase, lack of empathy, guilt, or remorse plays an important role during the manipulation phase—by facilitating behavior that is callous and insensitive to the rights and feeling of others. This can lead to the psychological and physical abuse of family, friends, and innocent strangers. Later we will discuss in detail the impact of psychopathic abuse on the victim. The level and intensity of psychopathic intimidation often keeps those who have been abused from coming forward. In psychopathic crimes, abuse can extend far beyond property damage or assault, sometimes intensifying into sadistic attacks on victims.

Hit Them When They’re Down

A particularly nasty scenario involves scanning the media for accounts of elderly people who have been victimized by fraudulent scams or schemes, and then approaching them with an offer to help
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get their money back. In one such incident, a newspaper reported that an eighty-year-old woman had lost her life savings in a venture promoted by a middle-aged woman who had offered to care for her.

Following the report, another scamster, posing as a lawyer who specialized in helping victims of fraud, convinced the devastated woman he could get her money back. She borrowed his up-front

“recovery fee” of $5,000 from a close friend. You know the rest.

ABANDONMENT PHASE

Once psychopaths have drained all the value from a victim—that is, when the victim is no longer useful—they abandon that victim and move on to someone else. Abandonment is most often abrupt—the psychopath just disappears one day—and it can occur without the current victim even realizing the psychopath has been looking for someone new to use. In crimes such as identity theft, credit card fraud, and construction swindles, the psychopath effectively disappears, typically reappearing with a new identity in another geographic location. The arrival of the Internet has made the psychopathic criminal’s life easier, as running and hiding are easily carried out, and targets are plentiful and readily accessible.

Most people feel at least a twinge of guilt or regret, and will want to apologize if they have hurt someone. Psychopaths have only a vague appreciation of these concepts, and sometimes find the idea of guilt or remorse an amusing weakness the rest of us possess—

something that they can, of course, take advantage of. Certainly, they are not influenced by the possibility that their behavior may have dire consequences for themselves and others. In part, this is because the past and future are less important to them than is the present. In addition, their own shallow emotions make it difficult for them to appreciate that others might have a much richer emotional life. It also makes it easy for psychopaths to view others as objects or pawns to be moved around at will. Put another way, psychopaths are better at understanding the intellectual or cognitive lives of others than they are
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at understanding their emotional life. As a consequence, people have value only for what they can provide. Once used, they are discarded.

To be able to abandon people in such a callous and harmful manner one must be immune to the feelings of those one hurts. Psychopaths can easily do this because their emotional and social attachments to others are poorly developed; weak at best.

Although psychopaths do not feel the range and depth of emotions experienced by most people, they do understand that others have something called “emotions.” Some may even take the time to learn to mimic emotions so they can better manipulate their victims.

But they do so at a superficial level, and trained observers can sometimes tell the difference; the real gut-feel behind their playacting is not there. Consider these words by Jack Abbott, a psychopathic killer who was championed by Norman Mailer and released from prison, only to kill again: “There are emotions—a whole spectrum of them—that I know only through words, through reading and in my immature imagination. I can imagine I feel these emotions (know, therefore, what they are), but I do not.”

Practice Makes Perfect

Hare consulted with Nicole Kidman on the movie
Malice
. She wanted to let the audience know, early in the film, that she was not the sweet, warm person she appeared to be. He gave her the following scene: “You’re walking down the street and come across an accident at the corner. A young child has been struck by a car and is lying in a pool of blood. You walk up to the accident site, look briefly at the child, and then focus on the grief-stricken mother. After a few minutes of careful scrutiny, you walk back to your apartment, go into the bathroom, stand in front of the mirror, and practice mimicking the facial expressions and body language of the mother.”

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The emotional poverty of psychopaths and their inability to fully appreciate the emotional life of others have been the subject of considerable neurobiological research, some of it using brain-imaging technology. The results of this research are consistent with the clinical view that psychopaths do not respond to emotional situations and material in the way that the rest of us do. In several functional magnetic resonance imaging (f MRI) brain imaging studies, Hare and his associates found that emotional words and unpleasant pictures did not produce in psychopaths the increases in the activity of brain (limbic) regions normally associated with the processing of emotional material. Instead, activation occurred in regions of the brain involved in the understanding and production of language, as if the psychopaths analyzed the material in linguistic terms. Think of Spock in Star Trek. He responds to events that others find arousing, repulsive, or scary with the words interesting and fascinating. His response is a cognitive or intellectual appraisal of the situation, without the visceral reactions and emotional coloring that others normally experience. Fortunately for those around him, Spock has

“built-in” ethical and moral standards, a conscience that functions without the strong emotional components that form a necessary part of our conscience.

Some researchers have commented that psychopaths “know the words but not the music,” a statement that accurately captures their cold and empty core. This hollow core serves them well, though, by making them effective human predators. Not only are psychopaths unconcerned about the impact of their own behavior on others—or of possible retribution—they more often than not will blame their victim if they are caught or charged with a crime. In fact, it is not uncommon for criminal psychopaths to state that they are suffering more in prison than their victims did during the original crime—

and they (the psychopaths) deserve some sympathy or special treatment. Other psychopaths may sometimes say that they feel remorse for their transgressions, but scrutiny of their behaviors betrays their words as simply lies to get better treatment or an earlier release
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date. Unfortunately, many co-opt socially supportive belief systems—typically religious beliefs of every kind—declaring that they have found God, repented their sins, and are ready to reenter society.

Praise the Lord

At a judicial conference in Maine, Hare spoke about the ease with which convicted offenders often are able to convince various religious groups, simply by using the right words and phrases, that they too had “found religion.” The tactic of the offenders was to tap into the groups’ belief that there is good in all of us and that everyone can be redeemed, even though we sometimes temporarily go off track.

After the presentation, a woman came up to Hare, identified herself as a prosecutor, and stated that she was a fundamentalist Christian, as was her husband, a judge. Thinking that he perhaps had offended her, Hare began to explain his comments. The prosecutor interrupted by saying that she was in agreement with what he had said, and that she had heard the same hollow line from many repentant offenders. As described by her, the scenario typically went like this: