Coming face to face with a probable psychopath was enough to make Dr Leanne ten Brinke rethink her career choices. Early in her 20s, while studying forensic psychology in Halifax, in the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, Ten Brinke was volunteering at a parole office, which would hold weekly group meetings for released sex offenders. “Most of the men showed contrition,” says Ten Brinke. “They really seemed to recognise the damage that they had done.” Except for one. The treatment programme seemed “like a game to him”, she says. One week, in a discussion about the impact their crimes had on victims, this rapist stared at Ten Brinke and, smiling slightly, started to say how much his victim looked like her, “and how I was ‘his type’. Clearly he was trying to scare me, and he did.”
It put her off a career working with convicted criminals, but she remained fascinated with “dark personalities” – psychopathy, mainly, but also narcissism, machiavellianism (manipulating and exploiting others) and sadism. From politics to business to the media, it wasn’t as if there was a shortage of people to study. There were selfish, callous, impulsive and manipulative people everywhere, often presenting as gregarious and charming. “It started to occur to me that these traits aren’t just confined to an underworld. These traits appear in all aspects of our lives,” she says.
Now associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, Canada, Ten Brinke says these people could be in our families, or living next door. They’re the trolls online. They’re at work, at school, leading our institutions and our countries.
Instead of being specific conditions that one either has or hasn’t, psychopathy and other personality disorders are now thought to exist on a continuum, says Ten Brinke. It is estimated that 1% of the general population have clinical levels of psychopathy (scoring highly on the PCL-R, the psychopathy checklist assessment commonly used for diagnosis). Other studies have suggested that up to 18% have “elevated” levels – what we may call “dark territory”, as Ten Brinke puts it in her new book, Poisonous People: How to Resist Them and Improve Your Life. Within the prison population, the instance of clinical psychopathy is about 20%. However, these dark personalities – who are potentially the most dangerous and likely to reoffend – are particularly good at convincing parole boards to release them, probably because they can be so persuasive.
The primary feature of psychopathy is a pronounced lack of empathy.
I don't doubt that we live in an unjust society, but I'm yet to see anyone with psychopathy or psychopathic tendencies do anything but make it worse.
Can you point out any examples of psychopathy-spectrum people doing anything useful or important in society?
"Empathy" isn't one thing.
There's the oxytocin system, that's the "built in" empathy that is variable.
However even people with fully functioning oxytocin systems can lose empathy towards groups. In facts one of the changes males go thru after reproducing is a huge boost in oxytocin which for them also correlates to aggression toward their out-group or "them".
Someone with significant ASPD doesn't experience that, and as such they're likely to be one of the very small section that truly has no racism or bigotry, they just don't care about those superficial differences.
And while someone with ASPD doesn't have innate empathy, they've been faking it their whole lives, and sometimes "fake it till they make it" to the point they're the most empathetic and caring person you met. Because they're actively spending mental resources to keep things moving smoothly, simply to not deal with drama.
Callback to my first comment illustrating that if you only study criminals, you'll only find criminals...
But it's less that you want to break laws, and more that you believe your personal morals should take presidence.
When someone's morals exceed their societies, like Harriet Tubman, she meets all the clinical requirements because she gave no fucks that slavery was legal in some states. By the laws in slaves states she was habitually stealing valuable property with zero remorse.
When their morals are lower, they go to jail and get labeled "psychopath" even tho the diagnosis is ASPD.
It's all frame of reference.
Once we actually get past them being monsters, we're gonna realize they're all over the place in varying degrees, and often have zero idea they're different.
The parallels to how homosexuality was treated will eventually be obvious.
That's only true if you conflate compliance with unjust aw with ethical behavior.
I.. uhh.. disagree intensely that Harriet Tubman would meet any of the diagnostic criteria of psychopathy.
Psychiatrists don't consider psychopaths 'monsters' any more than they consider the autistic monsters. They just have different brain architecture. So this discussion feels a lot like you're just reframing terminology to fit your theory.
Well, you also keep using an outdated pop psych term instead of the actual clinical diagnosis...
So my first guess would be you're not actually familiar with the criteria in the first place.
And youve somehow made it this far without reading any of the things I've said:
But I assure you that violence was still part of the underground railroad, and there's no way her hands were clean. Even avoiding physical violence, that kind of only leaves manipulation.
And diagnosis criteria aren't a checklist where if you don't get them all, you pass clean.
Like, that's another thing I've already said, it's not binary, it's a spectrum like basically everything else.
Typically people do not make those diagnoses public, if they exist at all. But, if you have a list of known public figures with a clinical diagnosis, that's a start.
**gestures broadly to global political and corporate leadership. I'm too cynical to call it useful, but surely we can agree its important.
Totally agree that a lot of psychopaths claw their way up to positions of power, I'm just not clear on how they're "useful to our unjust society".
The only reply I got for an example was 'Harriet Tubman' which really is stretching the definition of both 'modern society' and 'psychopathy', so I'm not convinced by the initial claim.
World needs leaders. That is their unjust "utility". The world needs better leaders, but it seems the ASPD spectrum's club for over-achievers on their diagnostic criteria seem to have managed a high number of leadership positions.
That doesn't mean that those who become leaders in the current system are actually well-suited to leadership. It's well-documented that capitalist systems disproportionately reward people with dark-triad traits, and that's a problem.