The Psychopath Test

by Jon Ronson

Such was the oppressive ugliness of this building it would have been like sticking a red nose on a cadaver and calling it Ronald McDonald.

‘Who’s that?’ I asked James. ‘Essi Viding,’ he said. ‘What does she study?’ I asked. ‘Psychopaths,’ said James. I peered in at Essi. She spotted us, smiled and waved. ‘That must be dangerous,’ I said. ‘I heard a story about her once,’ said James. ‘She was interviewing a psychopath. She showed him a picture of a frightened face and asked him to identify the emotion. He said he didn’t know what the emotion was but it was the face people pulled just before he killed them.’

Quite frequently these days, in fact, I set off from my home with an excited, purposeful expression and after a while I slow to a stop and just stand there looking puzzled. In moments like that everything becomes dreamlike and muddled. My memory will probably go altogether one day, just like my father’s has, and there will be no books to write then.

the smell of a newly cleaned rental car – never fails to bring back happy memories of past sleuthing adventures. There were the weeks I spent trailing the conspiracy theorist David Icke as he hypothesized his theory that the secret rulers of the world were giant blood-drinking child-sacrificing paedophile lizards that had adopted human form. That was a good story.

I phoned home but my wife didn’t answer. It crossed my mind that she might be dead. I panicked. Then it turned out that she wasn’t dead. She had just been at the shops. I have panicked unnecessarily in all four corners of the globe.

in 1993 his wife, Carol, died, suddenly, of a brain tumour. Their children were two and five. He was left overwhelmed with grief. In I Am A Strange Loop he consoles himself with the thought that she lived on in his brain: ‘I believe that there is a trace of her “I”, her interiority, her inner light, however you want to phrase it, that remains inside me,’ he told Scientific American in 2007, ‘and the trace that remains is a valid trace of her self—her soul, if you wish. I have to emphasize that the sad truth of the matter is, of course, that whatever persists in me is a very feeble copy of her. It’s reduced, a sort of low-resolution version, coarse-grained . . . Of course it doesn’t remove the sting of death. It doesn’t say, “Oh, well, it didn’t matter that she died because she lives on just fine in my brain.” Would that it were. But, anyway, it is a bit of a consolation.’

I have a great deal of experience with people who are smart but unbalanced, people who think they have found the key to the universe, etc. This particular case was exceedingly transparent because it was so exceedingly obsessive.

They assumed the endeavour was brilliant and rational because they were brilliant and rational and we tend to automatically assume that everybody else is basically just like us. But in fact the missing piece was that the author was a crackpot. The book couldn’t be decoded because it was written by a crackpot.

‘Can’t you see? It’s incredibly interesting. Aren’t you struck by how much action occurred simply because something went wrong with one man’s brain? It’s as if the rational world, your world, was a still pond and Petter’s brain was a jagged rock thrown into it, creating odd ripples everywhere.’

I thought about my own over-anxious brain, my own sort of madness. Was it a more powerful engine in my life than my rationality?

I remembered those psychologists who said psychopaths made the world go around. They meant it: society was, they claimed, an expression of that particular sort of madness. Suddenly, madness was everywhere, and I was determined to learn about the impact it had on the way society evolves. I’ve always believed society to be a fundamentally rational thing, but what if it isn’t? What if it is built on insanity?

Maybe there had been some backstage schism in the psychopath-defining world? The closest I could find was Narcissistic Personality Disorder, sufferers of which have ‘a grandiose sense of self-importance and entitlement’, are ‘preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success’, and are ‘exploitative’, ‘lack empathy’ and require ‘excessive admiration’, and Antisocial Personality Disorder, which compels sufferers to be ‘frequently deceitful and manipulative in order to gain personal profit or pleasure (e.g., to obtain money, sex or power)’.

‘It really could be that many of our political and business leaders suffer from Antisocial or Narcissistic Personality Disorder and they do the harmful, exploitative things they do because of some mad striving for unlimited success and excessive admiration. Their mental disorders might be what rule our lives. This could be a really big story for me if I can think of a way to somehow prove it.’

I was much crazier than I had imagined. Or maybe it was a bad idea to read DSM-IV when you’re not a trained professional. Or maybe the American Psychiatric Association had a crazy desire to label all life a mental disorder.

Tom Cruise once said in a taped speech to Scientologists, ‘We are the authorities on the mind!’

I began to yawn uncontrollably around Kempton Park. This tends to happen to me in the face of stress. Apparently dogs do it too. They yawn when anxious.

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

‘I know people are looking out for “nonverbal clues” to my mental state,’ Tony continued. ‘Psychiatrists love “nonverbal clues”. They love to analyse body movements. But that’s really hard for the person who is trying to act sane. How do you sit in a sane way? How do you cross your legs in a sane way? And you know they’re really paying attention. So you get self-conscious. You try to smile in a sane way. But it’s just . . .’ Tony paused. ‘It’s just . . . impossible.’ I suddenly felt quite self-conscious about my own posture. Was I sitting like a journalist? Crossing my legs like a journalist?

On the outside, Tony said, not wanting to spend time with your criminally insane neighbours would be a perfectly understandable position. But on the inside it demonstrates you’re withdrawn and aloof and you have a grandiose sense of your own importance. In Broadmoor not wanting to hang out with insane killers is a sign of madness.

‘What about the extreme all-night version of musical chairs?’ I asked. There was a short silence. ‘Yes, well, Mr Miscavige did make us do that,’ said Tommy. ‘But it wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it was reported. Anyway. Let’s give you a tour so we can educate you on what Scientology is really about.’

‘This is where Ron had his Coca-Cola machine,’ explained Bob. He smiled. ‘Ron loved Coca-Cola. He drank it all the time. That was his thing. Anyway, one day the machine leaked some syrup. That’s what the stain is. There’s been a lot of debate about whether we should clean it up. I say leave it. It’s a nice thing.’ ‘Like a relic,’ I said. ‘Right,’ said Bob. ‘A kind of Coca-Cola Turin shroud,’ I said. ‘Whatever,’ said Bob.

Tommy and Bob said Hubbard was a genius and a great humanitarian. They pointed to his record as a world-class Boy Scout (‘The youngest Eagle Scout in America,’ said Bob, ‘he earned twenty-one merit badges’), pilot, adventurer (the story goes that he once singlehandedly saved a bear from drowning), an incredibly prolific sci-fi author (he could write an entire bestselling novel on a single overnight train journey), philosopher, sailor, guru and whistle-blowing scourge of evil psychiatrists.

They say Hubbard came to believe that a conspiracy of vested interests, namely the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries, was behind the political attacks against him because his self-help principles of Dianetics (that we’re all laden by ‘engrams’, painful memories from past lives, and when we clear ourselves of them we can be invincible, we can re-grow teeth, cure blindness, become sane) meant that nobody would ever need to visit a psychiatrist or take an antidepressant again.

‘Are you saying his research was getting just too heavy and he had to leave England in fear for his life?’ I asked. ‘The conclusions he was coming to . . .’ Bob said. An ominous tone had crept into his voice. ‘L. Ron Hubbard was never in fear,’ interjected Tommy Davis, sharply. ‘He would never flee from anywhere. It wouldn’t be right for people to think he fled. He only ever did anything on his own terms.’

they have won some epic victories. There was, for example, their campaign back in the 1970s and 1980s against the Australian psychiatrist Harry Bailey. He ran a small private suburban psychiatric hospital in Sydney. Patients would turn up suffering from anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, obesity, premenstrual syndrome, and so on. Harry Bailey would greet them and ask them to swallow some tablets. Sometimes the patients knew what was coming, but sometimes they didn’t. To those who asked what the pills were for he’d say, ‘Oh, it is normal practice.’ So they’d take them, and fall into a deep coma. Harry Bailey believed that whilst in their comas their minds would cure themselves of whichever mental disorders afflicted them. But somewhere between twenty-six and eighty-five of his patients sank too deep, and died. Some choked on their own vomit, others suffered heart attacks and brain damage and pneumonia and deep-vein thrombosis. The Scientologists eventually got wind of the scandal and set a team onto investigating Bailey, encouraging survivors to sue and the courts to prosecute, which they did, much to Harry Bailey’s indignation, who believed his work to be pioneering. In September 1985, when it became clear he was destined for jail, he wrote a note: ‘Let it be known that the Scientologists and the forces of madness have won.’ Then he went out to his car and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills, washed down with beer.

Psychiatry: An Industry of Death. Much of it is a well-researched catalogue of abuses perpetrated by psychiatrists throughout history. Here was the American physician Samuel Cartwright identifying in 1851 a mental disorder, drapetomania, evident only in slaves. The sole symptom was ‘the desire to run away from slavery’ and the cure was to ‘whip the devil out of them’ as a preventative measure. Here was the neurologist Walter Freeman hammering an ice pick through a patient’s eye socket sometime during the 1950s. Freeman would travel America in his ‘lobotomobile’ (a sort of camper-van) enthusiastically lobotomizing wherever he was allowed. Here was behavioural psychologist John Watson spraying a baby with some unidentified clear liquid that I hoped wasn’t acid but by that point in the DVD I wouldn’t have put anything past those bastards.

Tony faked mental illness. That’s when you have hallucinations and delusions. Mental illness comes and goes. It can get better with medication. Tony is a psychopath. That doesn’t come and go. It is how the person is.’ Faking mental illness to get out of a prison sentence, he explained, is exactly the kind of deceitful and manipulative act you’d expect of a psychopath. Tony faking his brain going wrong was a sign that his brain had gone wrong.

‘Psychopaths don’t change,’ she said. ‘They don’t learn from punishment. The best you can hope for is that they’ll eventually get too old and lazy to be bothered to offend. And they can seem impressive. Charismatic. People are dazzled. So, yeah, the real trouble starts when one makes it big in mainstream society.’

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.’

‘Professor Maden says you’re a psychopath,’ I said. Tony exhaled, impatiently. ‘I’m not a psychopath,’ he said. There was a short silence. ‘How do you know?’ I asked. ‘They say psychopaths can’t feel remorse,’ said Tony. ‘I feel lots of remorse. But when I tell them I feel remorse they say psychopaths pretend to be remorseful when they’re not.’ Tony paused. ‘It’s like witchcraft,’ he said. ‘They turn everything upside down.’

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

The consensus from the beginning was that only one per cent of humans had it but the chaos they caused was so far-reaching it could actually re-mould society, re-mould it all wrong, like when someone breaks their foot and it’s cast badly and the bones stick out in odd directions. And so the urgent question became, how could psychopaths be cured?

‘the downside of having no barriers between doctors and patients was that everyone became a patient.’

‘The problem,’ Gary said, ‘was that the schizophrenics had incredibly vivid dreams – dream after dream after dream – but the psychopaths would be lucky if they even had a dream.’ ‘Why do schizophrenics dream more than psychopaths?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know,’ Gary laughed. ‘I do remember the schizophrenics usually dreamt in colour – the more intense a dream the more likely it’s going to be in colour – but the psychopaths, if they managed to have a dream at all, dreamt in black and white.’

‘For the first thirty years of Oak Ridge no one charged with a capital offence was ever released from here,’ he told the documentary maker Norm Perry. ‘But there is real hope now that patients are breaking out of their psychological prison of indifference to the feelings of others, a prison that to a greater or lesser extent confines us all.

Woodcock admitted that Elliott and Gary’s programme was kind of to blame, because it had taught him how to be a more devious psychopath. All those chats about empathy were like an empathy-faking finishing school for him. ‘I did learn how to manipulate better,’ he said, ‘and keep the more outrageous feelings under wraps better.’

‘They had psychopaths naked and talking about their feelings!’ Bob Hare laughed. ‘They had psychopaths on beanbags! They had psychopaths acting as therapists to their fellow psychopaths!’ He shook his head at the idealism of it all. ‘Incredible,’ he said.

the tests seemed to indicate that the amygdala, the part of the brain that should have anticipated the unpleasantness and sent the requisite signals of fear over to the central nervous system, wasn’t functioning as it should. It was an enormous breakthrough for Bob, his first clue that the brains of psychopaths were different to regular brains. But he was even more astonished when he repeated the test. This time the psychopaths knew exactly how much pain they’d be in when he reached one, and still: nothing. No sweat. Bob learned something that Elliott Barker wouldn’t for years: psychopaths were likely to reoffend. ‘They had no memory of the pain of the electric shock even when the pain had occurred just moments before,’ Bob said. ‘So what’s the point in threatening them with imprisonment if they break the terms of their parole? The threat has no meaning for them.’

Bob knew we tend to jump a lot higher when startled if we’re on the edge of our seats anyway. If we’re watching a scary movie and someone makes an unexpected noise we leap in terror. But if we’re engrossed by something, a crossword puzzle, say, and someone startles us, our leap is less pronounced. From this Bob deduced that when psychopaths see grotesque images of blown-apart faces they aren’t horrified. They’re absorbed.

Thrilled by his findings, Bob sent his readings to Science magazine. ‘The editor returned them unpublished,’ he said. ‘He wrote me a letter. I’ll never forget it. He wrote, “Frankly we found some of the brain-wave patterns depicted in your paper very odd. Those EEGs couldn’t have come from real people.” ’ Bob paused and chuckled. ‘Couldn’t have come from real people,’ he repeated.

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: Cunning/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

I remembered a time I perforated my eardrum on a plane and for days afterwards everything around me seemed faraway and hazy and impossible to connect to. Was that foggy sensation a psychopath’s continual emotional state?

Bob said it’s always a nice surprise when a psychopath speaks openly about their inability to feel emotions. Most of them pretend to feel. When they see us non-psychopaths crying or scared or moved by human suffering, or whatever, they think it’s fascinating. They study us and learn how to ape us, like space creatures trying to blend in, but if we keep our eyes open we can spot the fakery.

Case Study H really knew which buttons to push to rile a boy who was already on the edge. ‘The more he told me about himself the more leverage I had for manipulation,’ he told Bob’s researcher. ‘I just kept fuelling the fire, the more fuel I added to the fire the bigger payoff for me. I was the puppet master pulling the strings.’

Bob’s researcher asked him, if he could go back in time and change things from his life what would he change? ‘I have often pondered that,’ Case Study H replied. ‘But then all that I have learnt would be lost.’ He paused. ‘The hotter the fire when forging a sword the tighter the bond on the blade,’ he said.

A psychologist called David Cooke, of the Glasgow Centre for the Study of Violence, was once asked in Parliament if psychopaths caused particular problems in Scottish prisons. ‘Not really,’ he replied. ‘They’re all in London prisons.’

Psychopaths get bored easily. They need excitement. They migrate to the big cities.

Jack Abbott was a psychopath. He couldn’t bear being disrespected. His self-worth was too grandiose for that. He couldn’t control his impulses. ‘When the police finally caught up with him you know what he told them about the guy he stabbed?’ Bob said. ‘He said, “Oh, but he would never have made it as an actor.” ’

An instant later my body responded to the shock by feeling prickly and jangly and weak and debilitated. This sensation, Bob said, was a result of our amygdalae and our central nervous systems shooting signals of distress up and down to each other. It’s the feeling we get when we’re suddenly startled – like when a figure jumps out at us in the dark – or when we realize we’ve done something terrible, the feeling of fear and guilt and remorse, the physical manifestation of our conscience. ‘It is a feeling,’ Bob said, ‘that psychopaths are incapable of experiencing.’

‘There are all sorts of laboratory studies and the results are very, very consistent,’ he said. ‘What they find is that there are anomalies in the way these individuals process material that has emotional implications. That there’s this dissociation between the linguistic meaning of words and the emotional connotations. Somehow they don’t put them together. Various parts of the limbic system just don’t light up.’