The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

by Jon Ronson

It is an awful lot harder, Tony told me, to convince people you’re sane than it is to convince them you’re crazy.

“The Hare Checklist,” said Essi. “The PCL-R.” I looked blankly at her. “It’s a kind of psychopath test designed by a Canadian psychologist called Bob Hare,” she said. “It’s the gold standard for diagnosing psychopaths. The first item on the checklist is Glibness/ Superficial Charm.”

I found an article by Hare that described psychopaths as “predators who use charm, manipulation, intimidation, sex and violence to control others and to satisfy their own selfish needs. Lacking in conscience and empathy, they take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without guilt or remorse. What is missing, in other words, are the very qualities that allow a human being to live in social harmony.”

“Trying to prove you’re not a psychopath is even harder than trying to prove you’re not mentally ill,” said Tony.

“They give you a psychopath test,” said Tony. “The Robert Hare Checklist. They assess you for twenty personality traits. They go down a list. Superficial Charm. Proneness to Boredom. Lack of Empathy. Lack of Remorse. Grandiose Sense of Self-Worth. That sort of thing. For each one they score you a zero, one, or two. If your total score is thirty or more out of forty, you’re a psychopath. That’s it. You’re doomed. You’re labeled a psychopath for life. They say you can’t change. You can’t be treated. You’re a danger to society. And then you’re stuck somewhere like this. . . .

Their conclusions became the basis for his now famous twenty-point Hare PCL-R Checklist. Which was this: Item 1: Glibness/superficial charm Item 2: Grandiose sense of self-worth Item 3: Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom Item 4: Pathological lying Item 5: Conning/manipulative Item 6: Lack of remorse or guilt Item 7: Shallow affect Item 8: Callous/lack of empathy Item 9: Parasitic lifestyle Item 10: Poor behavioral controls Item 11: Promiscuous sexual behavior Item 12: Early behavior problems Item 13: Lack of realistic long-term goals Item 14: Impulsivity Item 15: Irresponsibility Item 16: Failure to accept responsibility for own actions Item 17: Many short-term marital relationships Item 18: Juvenile delinquency Item 19: Revocation of conditional release Item 20: Criminal versatility

(You may be wondering what the difference is between a psychopath and a sociopath, and the answer is, there really isn’t one. Psychologists and psychiatrists around the world tend to use the terms interchangeably.)

“Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there’s not much left except the will to win.”

She said if you’re beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you’re feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.

But at the core of psychopathy is a lack of moral restraint. If a person lacks moral restraint and also happens to get turned on by violence, then you end up with a very dangerous serial-killer type who lusts after killing and doesn’t have any moral hang-ups about doing so.

“Corporate Psychopathy,” had just been published. In it, 203 “corporate professionals” were assessed with his checklist—“including CEOs, directors, supervisors,” Bob said—and the results showed that while the majority weren’t at all psychopathic, “3.9% had a score of at least 30, which is extremely high, even for a prison population, at least 4 or 5 times the prevalence in the general population.”

In 1980, after six years inside Columbia, Spitzer felt ready to publish. But first he wanted to road test his new checklists. And there were a lot. DSM-I had been a sixty-five-page booklet. DSM-II was a little longer—134 pages. But DSM-III, Spitzer’s DSM, was coming in at 494 pages. He turned the checklists into interview questionnaires and sent researchers out into America to ask hundreds of thousands of people at random how they felt.

DSM-IV came in at 886 pages.

There is no evidence that we’ve been placed on this planet to be especially happy or especially normal. And in fact our unhappiness and our strangeness, our anxieties and compulsions, those least fashionable aspects of our personalities, are quite often what lead us to do rather interesting things.