The Wisdom of Psychopaths (5 page)

“The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation,” Bentham once famously articulated.

Yet dig a little deeper and a trickier, quirkier, murkier picture emerges—one of ruthless selectivity and treacherous moral riptides. Crafting that legislation, for example, excavating those morals, will inevitably necessitate riding roughshod over someone else’s interests. Some group or cause, through the simple lottery of numbers, has to bite the bullet for the sake of the “greater good.” But who has got the balls to pull the trigger? Bartels and Pizarro may well have found a pattern in the lab. But what about in everyday life? Is this where the psychopath really comes into his own?

The question of what it takes to succeed in a given profession, to deliver the goods and get the job done, is not all that difficult when it comes down to it. Alongside the dedicated skill set necessary to perform one’s specific duties, there exists, in law, in business, in whatever field
of endeavor you care to mention, a selection of traits that code for high achievement.

In 2005, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon of the University of Surrey conducted a survey to find out precisely what it was that made business leaders tick. What, they wanted to know, were the key facets of personality that separated those who turn left when boarding an airplane from those who turn right?

Board and Fritzon took three groups—business managers, psychiatric patients, and hospitalized criminals (both those who were psychopathic and those suffering from other psychiatric illnesses)—and compared how they fared on a psychological profiling test.

Their analysis revealed that a number of psychopathic attributes were actually more common in business leaders than in so-called disturbed criminals—attributes such as superficial charm, egocentricity, persuasiveness, lack of empathy, independence, and focus—and that the main difference between the groups was in the more “antisocial” aspects of the syndrome: the criminals’ lawbreaking, physical aggression, and impulsivity dials (to return to our analogy of earlier) were cranked up higher.

Other studies seem to confirm the “mixing desk” picture: the borderline between functional and dysfunctional psychopathy depends not on the presence of psychopathic attributes per se, but rather on their levels and the way they’re combined.
Mehmet Mahmut and his colleagues at Macquarie University have recently shown that patterns of brain dysfunction (specifically, in relation to the orbital frontal cortex, the area of the brain that regulates the input of the emotions in decision making) observed in both criminal and noncriminal psychopaths exhibit dimensional rather than discrete differences. This, he suggests, means that the two groups should not be viewed as qualitatively distinct populations, but rather as occupying different positions on the same neuropsychological continuum.

In a similar (if less high-tech) vein, I asked a class of first-year undergraduates to imagine they were managers in a job placement company. “Ruthless, fearless, charming, amoral, and focused,” I told
them. “Suppose you had a client with that kind of profile. To which line of work do you think they might be suited?”

Their answers, as we shall see a little later on in the book, couldn’t have been more insightful. CEO, spy, surgeon, politician, the military … they all popped up in the mix. Along with serial killer, assassin, and bank robber.

“Intellectual ability on its own is just an elegant way of finishing second,” one successful CEO told me. “Remember, they don’t call it a greasy pole for nothing. The road to the top is hard. But it’s easier to climb if you lever yourself up on others. Easier still if they think something’s in it for them.”

Jon Moulton, one of London’s most successful venture capitalists, agrees. In a recent interview with
The Financial Times
, he lists determination, curiosity, and insensitivity as his three most valuable character traits.

No prizes for guessing the first two. But insensitivity? “The great thing about insensitivity,” explains Moulton, “is that it lets you sleep when others can’t.”

If the idea of psychopathic traits lending a hand in business doesn’t come as too great a surprise, then how about in space? Blasting psychopaths off deep into the cosmos does not, I am sure, given their terrestrial reputation, particularly inspire confidence—and psychopathic qualities, you’d think, might not exactly be foremost among NASA’s prohibitively exclusive selection criteria for astronauts.
But there’s a story I once heard that provides a graphic illustration of how the refrigerated neurology that showed up on Robert Hare’s brain scans can, in certain situations, confer real benefits; how the reptilian focus and crystalline detachment of neurosurgeon James Geraghty can sometimes code for greatness not just in the boardroom, the courtroom, and the operating theater. But in another world entirely.

The story goes like this. On July 20, 1969, as Neil Armstrong and his partner Buzz Aldrin zipped across the lunar landscape looking for a place to set their module down, they came within seconds of crash-landing. The problem was geology. There was just too much of
it. And fuel: too little. Rocks and boulders lay scattered all over the place, making a safe approach impossible. Aldrin mopped his brow. With one eye on the gas gauge and the other on the terrain, he issued Armstrong a stark ultimatum: Get this thing down—and fast!

Armstrong, however, was decidedly more phlegmatic. Maybe—who knows?—he’d never had time for twitchy backseat drivers. But with the clock running down, the fuel running out, and the prospect of death by gravity an ever-increasing possibility, he coolly came up with a game plan. Aldrin, he instructed, was to convert into seconds the amount of fuel they had left, and to start counting down. Out loud.

Aldrin did as he was asked. Seventy … sixty … fifty …

As he counted, Armstrong scrutinized the moon’s unyielding topography.

Forty … thirty … twenty …

Still the landscape refused to give an inch.

Then, with just ten seconds remaining, Armstrong spotted his chance: a silver oasis of nothingness just below the horizon. Suddenly, imperceptibly, like a predator closing in on its prey, his brain narrowed its focus. As if he were on a practice run, he maneuvered the craft deftly toward the drop zone and performed, in the only clearing for miles, the perfect textbook touchdown. One giant leap for mankind. But almost, very nearly, one giant cosmological screw-up.

This extraordinary account of incredible interplanetary insouciance epitomizes life on the horizons of possibility, where triumph and disaster share a fraught and fragile frontier and cross-border traffic flows freely. This time, however, the road to disaster was closed. And Neil Armstrong’s coolness under fire rescued from cosmological
calamity one of the greatest feats ever in the history of human achievement. But there’s more. His heart rate, reports revealed later, barely broke a sweat. He might as well have been landing a job in a gas station as a spaceship on the moon. Some freakish strain of cardiovascular genius? The science suggests not.

Back in the 1980s, Harvard researcher Stanley Rachman found something similar with bomb-disposal operatives. What, Rachman wanted to know, separated the men from the boys in this high-risk, high-wire profession? All bomb-disposal operatives are good. Otherwise they’d be dead. But what did the stars have that the lesser luminaries didn’t?

To find out, he took a bunch of experienced bomb-disposal operatives—those with ten years or more in the business—and split them into two groups: those who’d been decorated for their work, and those who hadn’t. Then he compared their heart rates in the field on jobs that demanded particularly high levels of concentration.

What he turned up was astonishing. Whereas the heart rates of all the operatives remained stable, something quite incredible happened with the ones who’d been decorated. Their heart rates actually went down. As soon as they entered the danger zone (or the “launch pad,” as one guy I spoke with put it), they assumed a state of cold, meditative focus: a mezzanine level of consciousness in which they became one with the device they were working on.

Follow-up analysis probed deeper, and revealed the cause of the disparity: confidence. The operatives who’d been decorated scored higher on tests of core self-belief than their non-decorated colleagues.

It was conviction that made them tick.

Stanley Rachman knows all about the fearless arctic neurology of the psychopath. And his findings were certainly explosive. So much so that he raised the question himself: Should we be keeping a closer eye on our bomb-disposal operatives? His conclusion seems pretty clear: “The operators who received awards for courageous/fearless behavior,” he reports, “were free of psychological abnormalities or antisocial behavior.” In contrast, he points out, “most descriptions of psychopathy include adjectives such as ‘irresponsible’ and ‘impulsive’ ”—adjectives
that, in his experience, did not befit any of his case studies.

In the light of Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon’s 2005 survey, however—which, if you will recall, demonstrated that a number of psychopathic traits were more prevalent among business leaders than among diagnosed criminal psychopaths—Rachman’s comments beg the question of what, precisely, we mean when we use the word “psychopath.” Not all psychopaths are as wholly undomesticated, as socially feral, as he might have us believe. In fact, the standout implication of Board and Fritzon’s study is the suggestion that it is precisely this “antisocial” wing of the disorder, comprising the elements of impulsivity and irresponsibility, that either “makes or breaks” psychopaths—that codes them, depending on how high these particular personality dials are turned up, for dysfunction or success.

To throw another methodological monkey wrench in the works, it turns out that bomb-disposal operatives aren’t the only ones who experience a drop in heart rate when they get down to business.
Relationship experts Neil Jacobson and John Gottman, authors of the popular book
When Men Batter Women
, have observed identical cardiovascular profiles in certain types of abusers, who, research has shown, actually become more relaxed when beating up their partners than when they’re lounging in an armchair with their eyes closed.

In their widely cited typology of abusers, Jacobson and Gottman refer to individuals with this type of profile as “Cobras.” Cobras, unlike their opposite numbers, the “Pit Bulls,” attack swiftly and ferociously, and remain in control. They possess a grandiose sense of entitlement to whatever they feel like, whenever they feel like it. In addition, as their name suggests, they become calm and focused prior to launching an offensive. Pit Bulls, on the other hand, are emotionally more volatile, more prone to let things fester—and then fly off the handle. Further comparisons between these two groups make interesting reading:

Devastating fearlessness may well be descended from courage, as Rachman proposes in bomb disposal. It may well habituate through repeated exposure to danger. But there are some individuals who claim it as their birthright, and whose basic biology is so fundamentally different from the rest of ours as to remain, both consciously and unconsciously, completely impermeable to even the minutest trace of anxiety antigens. I know, because I’ve tested them.

If you’ve ever been spooked by inflight turbulence, or become slightly uneasy when a train has stopped in a tunnel, or simply experienced that indefinable feeling of dread that “something just isn’t quite right,” you may have been responding to the fears of those around you just as much as to anything else.
In 2009, Lilianne Mujica-Parodi, a cognitive
neuroscientist at Stony Brook University in New York, collected sweat from the armpits of first-time skydivers as they hurtled toward the ground at terminal velocity. Back in the lab, she then transferred the sweat—from absorbent pads secured under volunteers’ arms—as well as samples of normal “fear-lite” treadmill sweat to a specially calibrated nebulizer box, and waved it under the noses of a second bunch of volunteers as they sat in an fMRI scanner.

Guess what? Even though none of the volunteers had any idea what they were inhaling, those who were exposed to the fear sweat showed considerably more activity in their brains’ fear-processing zip codes (their amygdalae and hypothalami) than those who’d breathed the exercise sweat. In addition, on an emotion recognition task, volunteers who had inhaled the fear sweat were 43 percent more accurate at judging whether a face bore a threatening or neutral expression than those who’d gotten the workout sweat.

All of which raises a rather interesting question: Can we “catch” fear in the same way we catch a cold? Mujica-Parodi and her team certainly seem to think so. In the light of their findings, they allude to the possibility that “there may be a hidden biological component to human social dynamics, in which emotional stress is, quite literally, ‘contagious.’ ”