The Wisdom of Psychopaths (31 page)

“There was a string of armed robberies,” Beasley explains. “And whoever was behind them wasn’t too worried about pulling the trigger. Usually when you deal with armed robberies, the person committing them will just use the gun as a threat.

“But this guy was different. And it was always at close range. A single shot to the head. I was in no doubt whatsoever that we had a psychopath on our hands. The guy was as cold as ice. Mesmerizingly ruthless. But there was something about him that just didn’t quite add up. Something about him that bothered me.

“After one of the killings—which, as it happened, turned out to be his last—we caught up with him shortly after that—he’d taken his victim’s jacket. Now, that just didn’t make sense. Normally, when someone removes an article of clothing from a murder scene, it means one of two things. There’s either some kind of sexual stuff going on or there’s some other kind of fantasy world being spun out. It’s known in the trade as a trophy killing.
But neither of those two scenarios fitted this guy’s profile. He was too … I don’t know … functional. All business, if you know what I mean.

“So when we brought him in, we asked him. What was the deal with the guy’s jacket? And you know what he said? He said, ‘Oh, that? It was just a spur-of-the-moment thing. As I was making my way out the door, I looked at the dude as he lay there slumped over the counter. And I suddenly thought to myself, “Hmmh, that jacket kind of goes with my shirt.” So what the hell? I thought. The guy’s already dead. He’s not going anywhere. So I took it. Wore it out to a bar that night, as it happens. Got laid, in fact. You could say it’s my lucky jacket. Unlucky for him. But lucky for me …’ ”

When you hear stories like this, it’s hard to believe that psychopaths have even heard of empathy, let alone experienced it. Yet, surprisingly, the picture is far from clear in this regard. Mem Mahmut, for instance, showed us that under some sets of circumstances, psychopaths, in fact, seem to be
more
empathic than the rest of us. Or more helpful, at any rate. Then, if you recall, there was the study by Shirley Fecteau and her colleagues, which showed that psychopaths appear to have more going on in their mirror neuron systems, particularly the neurons in the somatosensory areas of their brains—the ones that allow us to identify with others when they’re in physical pain—than non-psychopaths.

Whether it’s the case that some psychopaths have more empathy than others, or that some are better able to switch it on and off than others, or that some are simply better at faking it than others, is, at present, unknown. But it’s a fascinating question that cuts right to the heart of the psychopath’s true identity. And one, no doubt, that will be hotly debated for years.

On precisely this issue, I ask Beasley about serial killers. How, in his experience, do
they
measure up on the empathy scale? I’m pretty confident I already know the answer. But Beasley, it turns out, has a surprise in store for me.

“You know, this idea that serial killers lack empathy is a little bit misleading,” he says. “Sure, you get your Henry Lee Lucas kind of killer who says that killing a person is just like squashing a bug.
⁴
And for this functional, instrumental species of serial murderer, perennial drifters who are just after a quick buck, a lack of empathy may well be beneficial, may well contribute to their elusiveness. Dead men tell no tales, right?

“But
for another category of serial killer, those we call sadistic serial killers, for whom murder is an end in itself, the presence of empathy—enhanced empathy, even—serves two important purposes.

“Take Ted Bundy, for instance. Bundy ensnared his victims, all of whom were female college students, by pretending to be disabled in some way or other. Arm in a sling, crutches, that kind of thing. Bundy knew, rationally at least, which buttons to press in order to get their assistance. In order to gain their trust. Now, if he hadn’t known that, if he hadn’t been able to put himself in their shoes, would he really have been able to dupe them so effectively?

“The answer, I believe, is no—a certain degree of cognitive empathy, a modicum of ‘theory of mind,’ is an essential requirement for the sadistic serial killer.

“On the other hand, however, there has to be a degree of emotional empathy, too. Otherwise how would you derive any enjoyment from watching your victims suffer? From beating them and torturing them and so on? The answer, quite simply, is: you wouldn’t.

“So the bottom line, strange though it may seem, is this. Sadistic serial killers feel their victims’ pain in exactly the same way that you or I might feel it. They feel it cognitively and objectively. And they feel it emotionally and subjectively, too. But the difference between them and us is that they commute that pain to their own subjective
pleasure
.

“In fact, it would probably be true to say that the greater the amount of empathy they have, the greater the amount of pleasure that they get. Which, when you think about it, is kind of weird.”

It most certainly is. But as I sit listening to Beasley, I begin to make connections. Suddenly things start to make sense.

Greg Morant, one of the world’s most ruthless con men and a certified, bona fide psychopath—he simply oozed empathy. That was what made him so good: so mercilessly adept at pinpointing, and zoning in on, his victims’ psychological pressure points.

In the mirror neuron study conducted by Shirley Fecteau, psychopaths showed greater empathy than non-psychopaths. The video she showed depicted a scene of physical pain: a needle going into a hand.

And then, of course, there was Mem Mahmut’s helping experiment. The fact that the psychopaths managed to out-empathize the non-psychopaths when it came to the “broken arm” condition might have raised his eyebrows, perhaps.

But certainly not James Beasley’s.

“Exactly as I’d have predicted,” he comments without hesitation. “Though I guess”—he pauses briefly as he weighs up the options—“it kind of depends on which type of psychopath he was testing.”

Beasley tells me about a study conducted by Alfred Heilbrun, a psychologist at Emory University, back in the 1980s. Heilbrun analyzed the personality structures of more than 150 criminals and, on the basis of that analysis, differentiated between two very different types of psychopaths: those who had poor impulse control, low IQ, and little empathy (the Henry Lee Lucas type); and those who had better impulse control, high IQ, a sadistic motivation, and heightened empathy (the Ted Bundy or, if you like, Hannibal Lecter type).

But the data concealed a spine-chilling twist. The group, in fact, that exhibited the most empathy of all, according to Heilbrun’s taxonomy, comprised high-IQ psychopaths with a history of extreme violence. And in particular, rape: an act that occasionally incorporates a vicarious, sadistic component. Not only are violent acts that inflict pain and suffering on others often more intentional than impulsive, Heilbrun pointed out, echoing Beasley’s earlier observation; it is, in addition, precisely through the presence of empathy, and the perpetrator’s awareness of the pain being experienced by his victim, that preliminary arousal, and the subsequent satisfaction of sadistic objectives, are achieved.

Not all psychopaths, it would seem, are color-blind. Some see the
stop sign in exactly the same way as the rest of us. It’s just that they choose to run the light.

The fact that a proportion of psychopaths, at least, would appear to experience empathy, and perhaps experience it to a greater degree than the rest of us, may well go some way to clearing up a mystery: how the psychopaths in Angela Book’s “vulnerability” study managed to pick up those cues in deportment, those telltale signs in the gait of traumatized assault victims, better than the rest of us.

But if you think psychopaths are alone in their ability to detect splinters of deep emotion invisible to the naked eye, shards of unprocessed feeling buried way beneath the seam of conscious censorship, then you’re wrong.
Paul Ekman, at the University of California, Berkeley, reports that two Tibetan monks expert in meditation have outperformed judges, policemen, psychiatrists, customs officials, and even Secret Service agents on a subliminal face-processing task that had, up until the monks entered the lab, managed to stump everyone who’d had a go at it (and there were more than five thousand of them).

The task comprises two parts. First, images of faces displaying one of the six basic emotions (anger, sadness, happiness, fear, disgust, and surprise) are flashed on a computer screen. The faces appear for sufficient duration to enable the brain to process them, but insufficient duration for volunteers to be able to consciously report what they see. In the second part of the task, volunteers are required to pick out the face that previously flashed on the screen from a subsequently presented “identity parade” of six.

Typically, performance is at chance level. Over a series of trials, volunteers average a hit rate of around one in six. But the monks averaged three or four. Their secret, Ekman speculates, may hinge on an enhanced, almost preternatural ability to read microexpressions: those minuscule millisecond stroboscopic frames of emotion we
learned about earlier that begin to download on the muscles across our face before our conscious brain has time to hit the delete button and display instead the image we wish to present. If so, they’ll share that ability with psychopaths.
Sabrina Demetrioff, at the University of British Columbia, has recently found precisely such abilities in individuals scoring high on the Hare Self-Report Scale of psychopathy—especially when it comes to expressions of fear and sadness.

Even more intriguing is what happened when Ekman brought one of the monks he’d tested down to the Berkeley Psychophysiology Laboratory, run by his colleague Robert Levenson, to assess his “presence of mind.” Here, after being wired up to equipment sensitive to even the minutest fluctuations in autonomic function—muscle contraction, pulse rate, perspiration, and skin temperature—the monk was told that at some point during the ensuing five-minute period he would be subjected to the sound of a sudden loud explosion (the equivalent, Ekman and Levenson decided under the circumstances, of a gun being fired just centimeters away from the ear: the maximal threshold of human acoustical tolerance).

Forewarned of the blast, the monk was instructed to attempt, to the best of his ability, to suppress the inevitable “startle response,” to the extent of rendering it, if at all possible, completely imperceptible.

Of course, Ekman and Levenson had been round far too many lab blocks to expect a miracle. Of the hundreds of subjects who had previously filed through the doors, not one of them had managed to flatline. Not even elite police sharpshooters. To not respond at all was impossible. The monitors always picked up something.

Or so they thought.

But they had never tested a Tibetan master of meditation before. And much to their amazement, they finally met their match. Seemingly against all the laws of human physiology, the monk exhibited not the slightest reaction to the explosion. He didn’t jump. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t do anything. He flatlined. The gun went off and the monk just sat there. Like a statue. In all their years, Ekman and Levenson had never seen anything like it.

“When he tries to repress the startle, it almost disappears,” Ekman
observed afterward. “We’ve never found anyone who can do that. Nor have any other researchers. This is a spectacular accomplishment. We don’t have any idea of the anatomy that would allow him to suppress the startle reflex.”

The monk himself, who at the moment of the blast had been practicing a technique known as open presence meditation, put a different slant on it.

“In that state,” he explains, “I was not actively trying to control the startle. But the detonation seemed weaker, as if I were hearing it from a distance … In the distracted state, the explosion suddenly brings you back to the present moment and causes you to jump out of surprise. But while in open presence you are resting in the present moment. And the bang simply occurs and causes only a little disturbance, like a bird crossing the sky.”

I wonder if they tested his hearing.

The work of Paul Ekman, Robert Levenson, and Richard Davidson, mentioned earlier, supports the general consensus that both the cultivation and maintenance of a relaxed state of mind can considerably aid, not just our responses to, but also our perceptions of, the stressors of modern living. Few of us, of course, will ever attain the rarefied spiritual peaks of a Tibetan Buddhist monk. But nearly all of us, on the other hand, will have benefited from keeping a cool head at one time or another.

Yet psychopaths, it would seem, are the exceptions to the rule. In fact, psychopaths, rather than engaging (as do Buddhist monks) in meditation to assimilate inner calm, appear, as their performance on the moral dilemma task demonstrated earlier, to instead have a natural talent for it. And it’s not just their results on cognitive decision-making tasks that provide support for such a conclusion. Further evidence of this innate gift for cool comes from basic low-level studies of emotional reactivity.

In work reminiscent of the Emotional Interrupt study mentioned earlier,
Chris Patrick of Florida State University compared the reactions of psychopaths and non-psychopaths as they viewed a series of horrific, nauseating, and pleasurable images respectively. On
all
physiological measures—blood pressure, sweat production, heart rate, and blink rate—he found that the psychopaths exhibited significantly less arousal than did normal members of the population. Or, to use the proper terminology, they had an attenuated emotional startle response.

The greatest worth, wrote the eleventh-century Buddhist teacher Atisha, is self-mastery. The greatest magic, transmuting the passions. And to some extent, it would seem, psychopaths have the jump on the rest of us.

But this “jump” isn’t always metaphorical in nature. The notion of the psychopath being “one step ahead” can sometimes be just as true in the literal sense of that phrase—as in when getting from point A to point B—as it is when it comes to our responses to emotional stimuli.