HE WAS a natural leader, creative, energetic and ambitious. “Mike†had appeared to be the ideal recruit for a fast-growing electronics company. It was only after he got the job that certain less favourable aspects of his behaviour came to light. He couldn’t get along with his secretary, he “forgot†to take on less interesting projects, he bullied colleagues and walked out of meetings. But since he’d already complained about his boss to senior management, his boss’s concerns were never taken seriously, and the company even singled Mike out as a “high-potential employeeâ€.
Perhaps you know someone like Mike. Someone charming, yet aggressive; a manipulative boss who can’t be bothered with paperwork; one who constantly switches allegiance as different people become useful. Mike embellished the truth on his application form, failed to document his expense claims and turned out, in the end, to be setting up his own business on company time and resources. He is what some psychologists describe as an industrial or corporate psychopath.
The psychologists do not use the term lightly. They believe that Mike shares exactly the same constellation of personality traits as the violent and sadistic killers we more commonly call psychopaths. New research suggests that people like Mike vastly outnumber the psychopaths who commit crimes and end up in prison. Psychopathy, say the researchers, is a spectrum of character traits, milder forms of which could even be useful and adaptive. What’s more, studies reveal that Mike’s genes contribute to his psychopathic personality. Had you known what to look for, the traits would probably have revealed themselves at a very tender age.
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The researchers are going to have a battle on their hands changing the deeply ingrained popular image of psychopaths as criminals – the likes of Charles Manson or Jack the Ripper. There is a good reason for this image, says Paul Babiak, the New York-based industrial organisational psychologist who studied Mike. Psychopaths make themselves known by their crimes, so those who don’t commit crimes, or who successfully cover their tracks, tend to remain invisible. So what makes Babiak so sure that the label is appropriate?
It is only recently that psychopathy has been defined by criminal or antisocial acts. In the 1940s, the definition relied chiefly on personality traits – narcissism, lack of remorse, lack of empathy, ability to manipulate others and inability to accept responsibility. These traits, if they persist over time, are still what distinguish psychopathic antisocial behaviour from “normal†aggression or teenage rebelliousness. Thinking is now reverting to these older descriptions, with researchers beginning to concur that there are degrees of psychopathic personality, rather than its being an all-or-none character flaw. It means that a larger subset of society is included.
As far back as 1977, Cathy Spatz Widom, then at Harvard University, suggested a means of luring what she called “non-institutionalised psychopaths†out into the open. She put an ad in a non-mainstream Boston paper: “Wanted: charming, aggressive, carefree people who are impulsively irresponsible but are good at handling people and looking after number one.†Of the 73 people who responded, she interviewed 29. All of them met the criteria for psychopathy as defined by personality traits and antisocial behaviour, and two-thirds had a history of arrest. But of those who had been arrested, only 18 per cent had been convicted. On the whole, they had managed to stay out of prison. The main difference she noted between her respondents and convicted criminals who were typically studied at that time was that they were better educated. She showed that if you went looking for psychopathic traits in the non-criminal population, you would find them.
For a decade or so, people have been asking what makes a psychopath. Is it the result of biology or upbringing? So far studies have produced conflicting results. For instance, in 1995, Widom, now at the New Jersey Medical School in Newark, concluded that psychopathy was more prevalent in adults who had been abused as children. But four years later in a study of Scottish convicts, Lisa Marshall and David Cooke of Glasgow Caledonian University in the UK found that psychopaths could come from either a caring or an abusive family, which suggests a strong biological effect.
Since then, other researchers have talked about a biological component. Adrian Raine, a psychologist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, suggested that psychopathy tends to be associated with abnormalities of the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain responsible for regulating behaviour, that could arise from birth complications. He started a controversy when he argued that people with a biological predisposition to violence should be spared the death penalty, and that their brain scans should be submitted in court as mitigating evidence (Â鶹´«Ã½, 13 May 2000, p 43).
But until now studies have provided information only about psychopaths who were identified and who are, generally speaking, criminals. What has been lacking, says the psychiatrist and renowned psychopath expert, Robert Hare of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, are studies looking for the origins of psychopathic tendencies that start with children and follow them as they grow up. These controversial studies are now getting under way, and the hope is that they may eventually tell us why some people turn to crime, while others escape, and whether there is any way to intervene to keep people like Mike on the right side of the law.
Hare devised a scale called the Psychopathy Checklist, which uses a structured interview and information such as the criminal record to give an overall numerical score for psychopathy. The latest version, the PCL-R, is the most widely used tool of its kind in adults. In 2001, Hare teamed up with developmental psychologist Paul Frick of the University of New Orleans in Louisiana to produce a modified version of the PCL-R for children.
Rather than measuring callous, remorseless use of others and a chronically unstable and antisocial lifestyle, as the adult test does, the children’s test included items such as “does not feel bad or guiltyâ€, “does not plan ahead†and “acts without thinkingâ€. They called it the Antisocial Process Screening Device (APSD). Frick says they wanted to move away from the idea that they were studying psychopathy in youth. It was important not to brand children with a label that implied their future was fixed, he says. “Instead we have tried to show that there is a subgroup of antisocial youth who seem to lack conscience, some of whom may eventually meet the adult criteria for psychopathy, and some of whom may not.â€
The future psychopath
Frick’s follow-up studies do indeed suggest that the APSD can predict delinquency and other problems. But the studies have not been running long enough to see whether it predicts who will become fully fledged adult psychopaths. And although it has yet to be universally accepted, it should help equip researchers to go out and search for Mike Junior.
At the Institute of Psychiatry in London, Essi Viding has also made attempts to spot the future Mikes. Thanks to the institute’s ongoing study on twins, she had access to around 4000 seven-year-old English and Welsh twin pairs whose teachers had rated them on two measures at the end of their first year at school. First was a measure of antisocial behaviour, such as lying and bullying; the second what Viding calls callous-unemotional traits, similar to the categories tested by Frick.
By comparing identical twins, who share 100 per cent of their genes, with fraternal twins, who like other siblings only share 50 per cent on average, she could explore to what extent the two measures were genetically determined. Her findings, which are soon to be published, suggest that genes account for 70 per cent of the individual differences in callous-unemotional traits across the population. In other words, the core symptoms of psychopathy are strongly genetically determined.
She then looked at the top-scoring 10 per cent of the twin pairs in each group in the hope of drawing out extreme examples. Of the twin pairs who were in the top 10 per cent for antisocial behaviour, about half also had high scores for callous-unemotional traits. Antisocial behaviour seemed to fall into two types. When it occurred in combination with callous and unemotional traits, it was far more likely to be the result of genes than when these traits were not apparent. While 70 per cent of the antisocial behaviour in non-psychopathic children was down to environmental causes – a poor home environment, say – only 20 per cent of the callous-unemotional children’s antisocial behaviour could be accounted for by environment. The rest was down to their genes. “There is a sub-group of children who seem to be very strongly predisposed to antisocial behaviour,†Viding says. For these kids, their genetic predisposition may mean that even a good family influence can’t rescue them, or that bad influences have an especially strong effect, she suggests.
If you were to isolate the really extreme cases, the top 1 or 2 per cent of children on scores for psychopathic tendencies, you would see how different these children really are, she says. “They are different from the antisocial children who are impulsively antisocial. They can be very devious, they can manipulate the teachers against each other in a school setting; they lie very fluently; they can be incredibly charming if they want to.†Now she is testing the twins on their moral reasoning. So she might ask a child if it was alright to hit another child in the playground. Assuming they said no, she would then ask them why not. The “psychopathic†reasoning tends to be self-referential – the child will say, “Because I’ll get into trouble,†rather than, “Because it might hurt or upset them.â€
Damning labels
Not everyone is convinced that future psychopaths – criminal or otherwise – can be spotted at an early age. “I can think of very, very, very few children I have come across, where I can say yes, this is a psychopath or a psychopath-in-waiting,†says James Furnell of the Abbey Kings Park Hospital in Stirling, UK, an advocate and clinical forensic psychologist who specialises in children. He says he can point to perhaps one or two cases in his 35-year career where he has “strongly suspected†that the child would behave as a textbook psychopath in adulthood, and remains to be convinced that the term can be applied to children. He also objects that “such a statement early in a child’s career might damn him foreverâ€.
Only time will tell if and how many of Viding’s antisocial, psychopathic-leaning seven-year-olds will go on to commit crimes. But Hare suggests that plenty will blend in and become “successful†– and hence invisible – psychopaths. Or as he calls them, “snakes in suitsâ€. He estimates that 1 per cent of the population of North America could be described as psychopaths. And now Babiak and Hare have teamed up to look for them.
For the past two years they have been developing what they call the Business Scan 360, derived from the PCL-R. The “360†refers to the fact that the screen involves interviews with all those people surrounding the individual under scrutiny – secretaries, colleagues and managers. “If you imagine the conscientious employee at one end of a continuum and a prototypical corporate psychopath at the other end, the B-Scan 360 attempts to gauge where the individual is,†Babiak says.
Hare and Babiak have almost finished assessing 100 economic criminals in the US, people who have been convicted of fraud or embezzlement, to provide a benchmark of the ultimately undesirable employee. Next they will assess a “normal†business population of managers. And finally, they will test a group of high-flyers in an attempt to see whether they can distinguish promising future bosses from potential disasters like Mike.
Their mission, as Babiak sees it, is to warn employers that apparent leadership skills could mask something more sinister. That is not to say that people like Mike might not also prove valuable employees in certain capacities. As Raine says, psychopathic traits could prove useful on the front line, or even in a US president. But bosses might think twice about promoting a high-risk individual to a position of power from which he or she could cause great damage. Remember the disgraced British media tycoon Robert Maxwell, who stole from his own company pension fund? “I’m not saying Maxwell was a psychopath,†Hare says, “But he sure had psychopathic tendencies.â€
Viding, too, hopes that her research will pick out those who show strong psychopathic tendencies. But she is also interested in intervention. There is a tendency to assume that psychopathy is untreatable on the basis of limited success with adults. A recent study suggested that a programme designed to improve the empathy skills of sex offenders in some cases made them more dangerous, by improving their ability to groom their victims. But a better understanding of their genetic vulnerability could translate into novel interventions, psychological and even pharmacological, just as it has done for anxiety and depression, Viding says.
Viding even has a gene in mind, whose expression she wants to investigate in twins. Ahmad Hariri of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, implicated a serotonin transporter gene in various forms of neuroticism and psychopathology, especially anxiety traits. Viding wants to find out if some mutation here could contribute to psychopathic antisocial behaviour. If so, there is every chance of finding a way to intervene. Lorraine Johnstone, a clinical forensic psychologist at Glasgow Caledonian University, UK, says that it is important to look for the childhood precursors of psychopathy, because it is possible that vulnerable children could be identified early on and deflected from a life of crime. She agrees it is a minefield, however. “Children are unreasonable, they’re selfish, they test out lots of antisocial behaviours and then most of them think, well actually that doesn’t work, so I won’t bother doing it again.†Only when those traits are stable over time do they become suggestive. But over how long, and who decides what is stable?
But if Viding’s findings, bolstered by others in the future, convince the scientific community that psychopaths-in-waiting can be reliably spotted among children, they also suggest something else that may be even harder to swallow: “Prevention efforts need to begin in the preschool years,†Viding says. Once a child starts school, it may already be too late to save him from Wormwood Scrubs, or the White House.
A brief history of antisocial behaviour
In the 18th century French doctor Philippe Pinel described a patient who defied all existing categories. He showed no remorse or personal restraint. Pinel labelled his condition “manie sans délire†(madness without delirium).
The term “psychopath†was coined in the 19th century. But until 1941, there were no clear diagnostic criteria and the syndrome was also referred to as “moral insanity†and “psychopathic inferiorityâ€.
In 1941, Hervey Cleckley wrote The Mask of Sanity, in which he defined a set of clinical symptoms that distinguished psychopaths. This description, notable for the absence of criminal or antisocial behaviour, comes from the 1964 edition of his book: “…superficial charm and good intelligence; absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking; absence of ‘nervousness’ or other psychoneurotic manifestations; unreliability, untruthfulness, and insincerity; lack of remorse or shame; inadequately motivated antisocial behaviour; poor judgement and failure to learn by experience; pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love; general poverty in major affective reactions; specific loss of insight; unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations; fantastic and uninviting behaviour with drink and sometimes without; suicide rarely carried out; sex life impersonal, trivial and poorly integrated; and failure to follow any life plan.â€
From 1952, “psychopath†and “sociopathic personality†came to be used interchangeably by psychiatrists, under the heading “personality disorderâ€.
With the second edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II), published in 1968, “sociopathic personality†yielded to “personality disorder, antisocial typeâ€. The third edition of DSM, published in 1980, listed antisocial personality disorder (APD), the diagnosis of which relies almost exclusively on antisocial and criminal behaviour, and no longer on personality traits.
At the moment psychopathy is not recognised as a formal mental disorder. But the issue of psychopathy versus APD is still hotly debated in psychology and legal circles.