The Wisdom of Psychopaths (17 page)

“I’ll give you an example … [One guy is] rich, successful, works like a dog … When he’s a kid, he comes home from school to find his record collection gone. His pop’s a bum and has sold it to stock up his liquor cabinet. He’s been collecting these records for years.

“So wait, I think. You’re telling me this after, what, three or four hours in a bar? There’s something going down. Then I get it. So that’s why you work so goddamned hard, I think. It’s because of your pappy. You’re scared. You’re life’s been on hold all these years. You’re not a CEO. You’re that scared little kid. The one who’s going to come home from school one day and find your record collection is history.

“Jesus, I think! That’s hilarious! So guess what? A couple of weeks later I tell him what happened to me. How I get home from work one night and find my wife in bed with the boss. How
she
files for divorce. And cleans
me
out.”

Morant pauses, and pours us some more champagne.

“Total bullshit!” he laughs. “But you know what? I did that guy a favor. Put him out of his misery. What do they say—the best way to overcome your fears is to confront them? Well, someone had to be Daddy.”

Morant’s words are chilling. Even more so when you hear them firsthand. At close quarters. I distinctly remember our meeting in
New Orleans, and how I felt at the time. Violated, but captivated. Enthralled, but creeped out—much like the clinicians and law enforcement agents that Reid Meloy interviewed, back in
chapter 1
. I was under precious few illusions as to the kind of man I was dealing with, despite his style and the millionaire yachtsman vibe. Here, in all his glory, was a psychopath. A predatory social chameleon. As the champagne flowed, and the slow southern twilight glinted off his Rolex, he would colonize your brain synapse by synapse without even breaking a sweat. And without your even knowing.

And yet, as a psychologist I saw the simple, ruthless genius in what Morant was saying. His modus operandi adheres to strict scientific principles.
Research shows that one of the best ways of getting people to tell you about themselves is to tell them something about yourself. Self-disclosure meets reciprocity.
Research also shows that if you want to stop someone from remembering something, the key is to use distraction. And, above all, to use it fast.
⁴
And in clinical psychology, there comes a point in virtually every therapeutic intervention where the therapist strikes gold: uncovers a time, a defining moment or incident, that either precipitates the underlying problem or encapsulates it, or both. And this doesn’t just apply to dysfunction. Core personality structures, interpersonal styles, personal values—all these things are often best revealed in the small print of people’s lives.

“Whenever you interview someone, you’re always on the lookout for the seemingly inconsequential,” says Stephen Joseph, professor of psychology, health, and social care in the Centre for Trauma, Resilience and Growth at the University of Nottingham. “The flare-up in the office ten years ago with Brian from Accounts. The time when the teacher said you were late and couldn’t join in. Or when you did all the work and what’s-his-face took the credit. You’re looking for needles, not haystacks. The shrapnel of life trapped deep within the brain.”

What was that about you doing all the work and someone else taking the credit? Surely not.

Con artist and secret agent are two sides of the same coin, if the views of one of the U.K.’s senior homeland security figures that I spoke to are anything to go by. Both, she pointed out, rely on the ability to pass oneself off as something one is not, the facility to think on one’s feet, and the capacity to navigate webs of deception with alacrity.

I’d be surprised if Eyal Aharoni would disagree. In 2011, Aharoni, a psychology postdoc at the University of New Mexico, asked a question that, hard though it is to believe, no one had asked before.
If, under certain conditions, psychopathy really is beneficial, then does it make you a better criminal? To find out, he sent out a survey to more than three hundred inmates in a bunch of medium-security prisons across the state. Computing a “criminal competence” score for each inmate by comparing the number of crimes committed with their total number of non-convictions (e.g., 7 non-convictions out of a total of 10 crimes = 70 percent success rate), Aharoni uncovered something interesting: psychopathy does indeed predict criminal success. That said, there’s a limit. A very high dose of psychopathy (all the dials turned up to max) is as bad as a very low one. Instead, it’s moderate levels that code for greater “accomplishment.”

Precisely how psychopathy makes one a better criminal is open to debate. On the one hand, psychopaths are masters at keeping their cool under pressure, which may well give them an edge in a getaway
car or an interview room. On the other hand, they’re also ruthless, and might intimidate witnesses into not coming forward with evidence. But equally plausible—and equally apposite to spies and grifters alike—is that as well as being ruthless and fearless, psychopaths are in possession of another, more refined personality talent. Exactly like the world’s top poker players, they might also be better at controlling their emotions than others when the stakes are high and backs are against the wall, which would give them an edge not just outside the courtroom, when planning and effecting their nefarious schemes and activities. But inside it as well.

Up until 2011, the evidence for this was largely circumstantial.
Helinä Häkkänen-Nyholm, a psychologist at the University of Helsinki, had observed, in conjunction with Bob Hare, that psychopathic offenders appeared more convincing than non-psychopathic offenders when it came to expressing remorse—which is odd, to say the least, because it’s something they’re unable to feel. But a quick look at the context of such observations—before the court, just prior to sentencing; before the court, to appeal a sentence; and before psychologists and prison governors at parole board hearings—aroused the suspicions of psychologist Stephen Porter. The issue was one of “affective authenticity.”
Remorse aside, Porter wondered, were psychopaths just better at faking it?

Porter and his colleagues devised an ingenious experiment. Volunteers were presented with a series of images that were designed to evoke various emotions, and then responded to each with either a genuine or a deceptive expression. But there was a catch. As the participants viewed the emotionally charged pictures, Porter videotaped them at a speed of thirty frames per second and then examined the tapes frame by frame. This, in the “deception” condition, allowed him to screen for the presence of physiognomical lightning strikes called “microexpressions”: fleeting manifestations of true, unadulterated emotion—invisible, in real time, to most people’s naked eye—that flash, imperceptibly, through the shutters of conscious concealment (see
figure 4.1
).

Figure 4.1. Picture A shows a genuine smile, while picture C shows a false smile with leakage of sadness (lowering of the eyebrows, eyelids, and corners of the mouth). Picture B shows a neutral expression. Even minuscule—and fleeting—changes such as this are able to alter the entire face.

Porter wanted to know if participants exhibiting higher levels of psychopathy would be more adept at disguising the true nature of their feelings than their lower-scoring counterparts. The answer, unequivocally, was yes. The presence (or absence) of psychopathic traits significantly predicted the degree of inconsistent emotion observed in the deception condition. Psychopaths were far more convincing at feigning sadness when presented with a happy image, or happiness when looking at a sad image, than were non-psychopaths.
⁶
Not only that, but they were as good as volunteers who scored high on emotional intelligence. If you can fake sincerity, as someone once said … well, you really have got it made, it would seem.

Cognitive neuroscientist Ahmed Karim has taken things one stage further—and with the aid of some electromagnetic magic can significantly improve the career prospects of both con artists
and
secret agents.
Karim and his team at the University of Tübingen, in Germany, can make you a better liar. In an experiment in which volunteers role-played stealing money from an office and were then interrogated by a researcher acting as a police detective (as an incentive to deceive the detective, the would-be “thieves” were allowed to keep the money if successful!), Karim discovered that the application of a technique known as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)
⁵
to the part of the brain implicated in moral decision making, the anterior prefrontal cortex, elevated participants’ lying quotient. It gave them a higher Lie Q.

Precisely why this should be the case is not immediately obvious, and researchers are considering their options. But one possibility is that TMS-induced inhibition of the anterior prefrontal cortex implements the restriction of a neural no-fly zone over conscience, sparing the liar the distractions of moral conflict. Such a hypothesis is consistent with research on psychopaths. We know from previous studies, for instance, that psychopaths have reduced gray matter in the anterior prefrontal cortex—
and recent analysis using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI),
⁷
conducted by Michael Craig and his coworkers at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, has also revealed reduced integrity of the uncinate fasciculus: the axonal tract (a kind of neural aqueduct) connecting the prefrontal cortex and amygdala.

Psychopaths, in other words, not only have a natural talent for duplicity, but also feel the “moral pinch” considerably less than the rest of us. Not always a bad thing when the chips are down and decisions must be made under fire.

Of course, it isn’t just liars who benefit from a dearth of morality. The ethically challenged may be found in all walks of life—not just in casinos and courtrooms. Take, for instance, the following exchange from the 1962 film
The War Lover
:

The War Lover
, set in World War II, features a character called Buzz Rickson, an arrogant, fearless B-17 pilot, whose genius at aerial combat provides the perfect outlet for his ruthless, amoral dark side. When a bombing mission is aborted due to adverse weather conditions, Rickson, much feted by his crew for his daredevil flying skills, disobeys the order to turn around, diving under the cloud cover to drop his deadly cargo. Another of the bombers fails to return to base. Rickson’s elemental, predatory instincts revel in the theater of war. Assigned by his commanding officer to a routine sortie dropping propaganda leaflets, he buzzes the airfield in protest, setting the scene for the above dialogue between his navigator and the flight surgeon.

It’s a fine line, as Captain Woodman says, between hero and psychopath. And often it depends who’s drawing it.

Characters like Rickson don’t exist just in the movies. Of a number of Special Forces soldiers I’ve tested so far, all of them have scored high on the PPI—which is no real surprise given some of the things they get into. As one of them, with characteristic understatement, put it: “The lads who took out Bin Laden weren’t on some paintballing weekend …”

Such coolness and focus is illustrated in a study conducted by the psychologist and neuroscientist Adrian Raine and his colleagues at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Raine compared the performance of psychopaths and non-psychopaths on a simple learning task, and found that when mistakes were punished by a painful electric shock, psychopaths were slower to pick up the rule than non-psychopaths. But that was just the half of it. When success was rewarded by financial gain, as well as by avoidance of shock, the roles reversed. This time it was the psychopaths who were quicker on the uptake.

The evidence is pretty clear. If the psychopath can “make” out of a situation, if there’s any kind of reward on offer, they go for it, irrespective of risk or possible negative consequences. Not only do they keep their composure in the presence of threat or adversity, they become, in the shadow of such presentiment, laser-like in their ability to “do whatever it takes.”

Researchers at Vanderbilt University have delved a little deeper, and have looked at how the unblinking, predatory focus commonly displayed by psychopaths might actually be mirrored in their brains. What they’ve discovered sheds a completely different light on how it might feel to be a psychopath, and, as such, opens up a whole new perspective on precisely what makes them tick. In the first part of the study, volunteers were divided into two groups: those exhibiting high levels of psychopathic traits and those on the low side. The researchers then gave both groups a dose of speed (otherwise known as amphetamine) and, using positron emission tomography (PET),
⁸
scrutinized their brains to see what might unfold.