Despite the popular perception, most psychopaths aren’t coldblooded or psychotic killers.
Many of them live successfully among the rest of us, using their personality traits to get what they want in life, often at the expense of others.
Psychopathy is not easily defined, but most psychologists view it as a personality disorder characterised by superficial charm conjoined with profound dishonesty, callousness, guiltlessness and poor impulse control.
According to some estimates, psychopathy is found in about one percent of the general population, and for reasons that are poorly understood, most psychopaths are male.
That number probably doesn’t capture the full number of people with some degree of psychopathy.
Data suggest that psychopathic traits lie on a continuum, so some individuals possess marked psychopathic traits but don’t fulfill the criteria for full-blown psychopathy.
Not surprisingly, psychopathic individuals are more likely than other people to commit crimes.
They almost always understand that their actions are morally wrong – it just doesn’t bother them. Contrary to popular belief, only a minority are violent.
Because researchers tend to seek out psychopaths where they can locate them in plentiful numbers, much research on the condition has taken place in prisons and jails.
That’s why until fairly recently, the lion’s share of theory and research on psychopathy focused on decidedly unsuccessful individuals – such as convicted criminals.
But a lot of people on the psychopathic continuum aren’t in jail or prison. In fact, some individuals may be able to use psychopathic traits, like boldness, to achieve professional success.
The very existence of successful psychopathy has been controversial, perhaps in part because many scholars insist they have never seen it. Some say the concept is illogical, with others going so far as to term it an oxymoron.
Successful psychopathy is a controversial idea, but it’s not a new one.
In 1941, American psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley was among the first to highlight this paradoxical condition in his classic book “The Mask of Sanity.”
According to Cleckley, the psychopath is a hybrid creature, donning an engaging veil of normalcy that conceals an emotionally impoverished and profoundly disturbed core.
In Cleckley’s eyes, psychopaths are charming, self-centered, dishonest, guiltless and callous people who lead aimless lives devoid of deep interpersonal attachments.
But Cleckley also alluded to the possibility that some psychopathic individuals are successful interpersonally and occupationally, at least in the short term.
In a 1946 article, he wrote that the typical psychopath will have often outstripped 20 rival salesmen over a period of 6 months, or married the most desirable girl in town, or, in a first venture into politics, got himself elected into the state legislature.
In 1977, Catherine Widom published a study about “noninstitutionalised psychopaths.” To find these individuals, she placed an advertisement in underground Boston newspapers calling for “charming, aggressive, carefree people who are impulsively irresponsible but are good at handling people and looking out for number one.”
The individuals she recruited exhibited a personality profile similar to those of incarcerated psychopaths, and about two-thirds of them had been arrested.
What’s the difference between the psychopaths who get arrested and the ones who don’t?
Research from Adrian Raine, now at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted in the 1990s sheds some light.
Raine and his colleagues recruited men from temporary employment agencies in the Los Angeles area. After first identifying those who met the criteria for psychopathy, they compared the 13 participants who had been convicted of one or more crimes with the 26 who had not. Raine provisionally regarded these 26 men as successful psychopaths.
Each man gave a videotaped speech about his personal flaws. Raine and his colleagues found that the men they considered successful psychopaths displayed significantly greater heart rate increases, suggesting an increase in social anxiety. These men also performed better on a task requiring them to modulate their impulses.
The bottom line: having a modicum of social anxiety and impulse control may explain why some psychopathic people manage to stay out of trouble.
More recently, some researchers, ourselves included, have speculated that people with pronounced psychopathic traits may be found disproportionately in certain professional niches, such as politics, business, law enforcement, firefighting, special operations military services and high-risk sports.
Most of those with psychopathic traits probably aren’t classic “psychopaths,” but nonetheless exhibit many features of the condition.
Perhaps their social poise, charisma, audacity, adventurousness and emotional resilience lends them a performance edge over the rest of us when it comes to high-stakes settings.
As Canadian psychologist Robert Hare, the world’s premier psychopathy expert, quipped, “If I weren’t studying psychopaths in prison, I’d do it at the stock exchange.”
* Scott O. Lilienfeld is Professor of Psychology at Emory University
* Ashley Watts is a Ph.D. Candidate at Emory University
