The Psychopath Test

by Jon Ronson

‘You have to feel sorry for psychopaths, right? If it’s all because of their amygdalae? If it’s not their fault?’ ‘Why should we feel sorry for them?’ he replied. ‘They don’t give a shit about us.’

‘Serial killers ruin families,’ shrugged Bob. ‘Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.’

why is the world so unfair? Why all that savage economic injustice, those brutal wars, the everyday corporate cruelty? The answer: psychopaths. That part of the brain that doesn’t function right. You’re standing on an escalator and you watch the people going past on the opposite escalator. If you could climb inside their brains you would see we aren’t all the same. We aren’t all good people just trying to do good. Some of us are psychopaths. And psychopaths are to blame for this brutal, misshapen society. They’re the rocks thrown into the still pond.

‘I would like to say leave. You’re not going to hurt someone’s feeling because there are no feelings to hurt.’

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.’

‘It is a frightening and huge thought,’ I said, ‘that the ninety-nine per cent of us wandering around down here are having our lives pushed and pulled around by that psychopathic fraction up there.’ ‘It is a large thought,’ she said. ‘It is a thought people don’t have very often. Because we’re raised to believe that deep down everyone has conscience.’

I wanted to test out my theory on him that suffering from anxiety is the neurological opposite of being a psychopath when it comes to amygdala function. I imagined my amygdala to be like one of those Hubble photographs of a solar storm, and I imagined psychopaths’ amygdalae to be like those Hubble photographs of dead planets, like Pluto.

‘I suppose it probably isn’t a great idea for a man like me who suffers from excessive anxiety to chase after people who have a pathological deficit of anxiety.’

It wasn’t easy to understand why the CIA would want to back a murderous, anti-democratic death squad. Aristide was a charismatic man, a leftist, a former priest. Maybe they feared he was a Castro in the making, a man who might threaten business relations between Haiti and the US. Still, if anyone doubted Constant’s word, they didn’t for long. He implied that should the extradition go ahead, he’d reveal devastating secrets about American foreign policy in Haiti. Almost immediately – on 14 June 1996 – the US authorities released him from jail and gave him a green card to work in the US.

‘The lies they tell about me break my heart,’ he said. And then I heard a strange noise coming from Constant. His body was shaking. The noise I could hear was something like sobbing. But it wasn’t quite sobbing. It was an approximation of sobbing. His face was screwed up like a face would be if it were crying, but it was weird, like bad acting. A grown man in a dapper suit was pretending to cry in front of me. This would have been awkward enough if he was actually crying – I find displays of overt emotion not at all pleasant – but this was a man palpably simulating crying, which made the moment at once awkward, surreal and quite disturbing.

Maybe it was Item 3: Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom and Item 14: Impulsivity – ‘He is unlikely to spend much time considering the possible consequences of his actions’, as well as Item 2: Grandiose sense of self-worth. Maybe Items 3, 14 and 2 are the reasons why loads of my interviewees agree to meet me.

‘Your desperate desire to have people like you. Isn’t that a weakness?’ ‘Ah no!’ Toto laughed. He animatedly waved his finger at me. ‘It’s not a weakness at all!’ ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘I’ll tell you why!’ He smiled, winked conspiratorially, and said: ‘If people like you, you can manipulate them to do whatever you want them to do!’

‘No,’ said Toto. ‘I don’t feel empathy.’ He shook his head like a horse with a fly on its nose. ‘It’s not a feeling I have. It’s not an emotion I have. Feeling sorry for people?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘I don’t feel sorry for people. No.’ ‘What about emotions?’ I said. ‘You said earlier that you were an emotional person. But feeling emotions might be considered, um, a weakness.’ ‘Ah, but you select the kind of emotion you want,’ he replied. ‘You see? I’m really telling you my deepest secrets, Jon.’

I was surprised at how easily I’d surrendered to him until then. He had presented me with a little self-effacing charm and I’d instantly labelled him a non-psychopath. There had been something reassuringly familiar about him at the beginning. He’d seemed diminutive, self-deprecating, nebbishy, which are all the things I am. Could he have been mirroring me, reflecting myself back at me? Could that be why partners of psychopaths sometimes stay in bewildering relationships?

he’d been asked to consult on a Nicole Kidman movie called Malice. She wanted to prepare for a role as a psychopath. Bob told her, ‘Here’s a scene you can use. You’re walking down a street and there’s an accident. A car has hit a child. A crowd of people gather round. You walk up, the child’s lying on the ground and there’s blood running all over the place. You get a little blood on your shoes and you look down and say, “Oh shit.” You look over at the child, kind of interested, but you’re not repelled or horrified. You’re just interested. Then you look at the mother, and you’re really fascinated by the mother, who’s emoting, crying out, doing all these different things. After a few minutes you turn away and go back to your house. You go into the bathroom and practise mimicking the facial expressions of the mother. That’s the psychopath: somebody who doesn’t understand what’s going on emotionally, but understands that something important has happened.’

We are dazzled by people who withhold something, and psychopaths always do because they are not all there. They are surely the most enigmatic of all the mentally disordered.

I was more interested by Bob’s theory about corporate psychopaths. He blamed psychopaths for the brutal excesses of capitalism itself, that the system at its cruellest was a manifestation of a few people’s anomalous amygdalae.

‘One time I was failing to get some sale and he screamed at me, “You should suck this bastard’s DICK to get the sale!” Right in front of a room full of people. Why would he act that way? He was a foul-mouthed . . .’ Bill’s face was red. He was shaking at the memory.

He fired people with such apparent glee that the business magazine Fast Company included him in an article about potentially psychopathic CEOs. All the other CEOs cited were dead or in prison, and therefore unlikely to sue, but they took the plunge with Dunlap anyway, referring to his poor behavioural controls (his first wife charged in her divorce papers that he once threatened her with a knife and muttered that he always wondered what human flesh tasted like) and his lack of empathy (even though he was always telling journalists about his wise and supportive parents, he didn’t turn up to either of their funerals).

Bob Hare writes about Badlands in his seminal book on psychopathy, Without Conscience: If Kit is the movie maker’s conception of a psychopath, Holly is the real thing, a talking mask simply going through the motions of feeling deeply. Her narration is delivered in a monotone and embellished with phrases drawn straight from the glossies telling young girls what they should feel. If there was ever an example of ‘knowing the words but not the music’ Spacek’s character is it.

‘Lions,’ said Al Dunlap, showing me around. He was wearing a casual jacket and slacks and looked tanned, healthy. His teeth were very white. ‘Lions. Jaguars. Lions. Always predators. Predators. Predators. Predators. I have a great belief in and a great respect for predators. Everything I did I had to go make happen.’ Item 5: Cunning/manipulative I wrote in my reporter’s notepad. ‘His statements may reveal a belief that the world is made up of “predators and prey”, or that it would be foolish not to exploit weaknesses in others.’

‘Gold is shiny. Sharks.’ He pointed at a sculpture of four sharks encircling the planet. ‘I believe in predators,’ he said. ‘Their spirit will enable you to succeed. Over there you’ve got falcons. Alligators. Alligators. More alligators. Tigers.’ ‘It’s as if both Midas and also the Queen of Narnia were here,’ I said, ‘and the Queen of Narnia flew above a particularly fierce zoo and turned everything there to stone and then transported everything here.’

On our way to the kitchen I noticed a framed poem on his desk, written in fancy calligraphy, a few lines of which read, It wasn’t easy to do What he had to do But if you want to be liked Get a dog or two.

Al pointed towards a gold cabinet in his office, inside which were photographs of him with Henry Kissinger, Donald Trump, Prince Charles, Ronald Reagan, Kerry Packer, Lord Rothschild, Rush Limbaugh and Jeb Bush as if to say, ‘Those are men I have heard of!’

‘Grandiose sense of self-worth?’ I asked. This would have been a hard one for him to deny, standing as he was below a giant oil painting of himself.

‘Yeah, what enters my mind is, what happened here and how can it be prevented from ever happening again.’ ‘How can it be prevented from ever happening again?’ I asked. ‘You cannot be a leader and cringe from evil and badness,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to face it.’ He paused. ‘The basic definition of leadership is the person who rises above the crowd and gets something done. OK?’

We talked about Lack of Empathy. Al said he did empathize ‘with people who want to make something of themselves’, but unfortunately that didn’t include his son Troy, or his sister, Denise. For Denise, the relationship ended for good in January, 1994, when she called her brother to let him know that her daughter, Carolyn, a college junior, was diagnosed with leukaemia. “Can I just know that you’ll be there if I need you?” she asked him. “No,” Dunlap tersely replied, she recalls. – John A. Byrne, Business Week, December 2nd 1996

Feeling no remorse must be a blessing when all you have left are your memories.

I glanced up at the oil painting. Write something about Narcissus, I added on a fresh page. Write something about the moral barrenness of padding around a mansion that’s much too big for just two people, a mansion filled with giant reflections of yourself. I smiled to myself at the cleverness of my phraseology.

‘Dogs are a possession,’ Bob explained. ‘Dogs – if you have the right dog – are extremely loyal. They’re like a slave, right? They do everything you want them to. So, yeah, he cried his eyes out when his dog died. Would he cry his eyes out if his cat died?’ I narrowed my eyes. ‘I don’t think he has a cat,’ I said, nodding slowly. ‘He’d probably cry his eyes out if he got a dent in his car,’ said Bob. ‘If he had a Ferrari or a Porsche – and he probably does – and someone scratched it and kicked it he’d probably go out of his mind and want to kill the guy. So, yeah, the psychopath might cry when his dog dies and you think that’s misplaced because he doesn’t cry when his daughter dies.’

‘If you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don’t act like Blofeld – monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.’

‘We all do it,’ Adam was continuing. ‘All journalists. We create stories out of fragments. We travel all over the world, propelled onwards by something, we sit in people’s houses, our notepads in our hands, and we wait for the gems. And the gems invariably turn out to be the madness – the extreme, outermost aspects of that person’s personality – the irrational anger, the anxiety, the paranoia, the narcissism, the things that would be defined within DSM as mental disorders. We’ve dedicated our lives to it. We know what we do is odd but nobody talks about it. Forget psychopathic CEOs. My question is, what does all this say about our sanity?’

Of course lots of people dehumanize others – find ways to eradicate empathy and remorse from their day jobs – so they can perform their jobs better. That’s presumably why medical students tend to throw human cadavers at each other for a joke, and so on.

that was Charlotte’s secret trick. She said she didn’t stop to consider why some sorts of madness were better than others: ‘I just knew on an innate level who would make good television. We all did. Big Brother. The X-Factor. American Idol. Wife Swap . . . Wife Swap is particularly bad because you’re monkeying with people’s families, with their children. You’ve got some loop-the-loop stranger yelling at someone’s children. The producers spend three weeks with them, pick the bits that are mad enough, ignore the bits that aren’t mad enough, and then leave.’

‘By typing it down it was like cleaning a wound,’ Rachel said. ‘I was picking all the grit and the smoke out of my mind.’

‘Some of us found we were unable to feel any joy in being alive,’ Rachel said. ‘Every time we went to sleep we had nightmares, of banging our hands against the glass of the train, battering away, trying to smash our way out of this train that was filled with smoke. Remember we all thought we were going to die, entombed in the smoke. And none of us had expected it.’ Rachel paused for a second, then she said: ‘We’d all just been on our way to work.’

‘By that stage,’ Rachel said, ‘I’d met people who had lost loved ones on that bus. To call the people on the bus who died actors and stuntmen was, I thought, abhorrent. So I read all this stuff, and then I came up for air, and I thought, “They don’t realize. As soon as they actually talk to a real person, someone who’s been there, they’ll realize it’s a load of old nonsense and they’ll give up.” He was inviting comments on his website. So I left a very angry one: “How dare you misquote me in this way. Power surges do not tear people’s legs off.” And he responded by saying, “You didn’t even know the bomb was in your carriage! You keep changing your story!” ’ Rachel was furious. She felt it was her duty to make them understand they were wrong. ‘But I had no idea, then, what these people were like,’ she said. ‘What comes through again and again is this complete lack of empathy. They would, for example, cut and paste the most harrowing descriptions by emergency services officers of going into carriages and seeing buckled walls that were streaming with blood and pieces of human flesh and stepping over body parts and stepping over the hole where the bomb had torn a crater in the floor. They’d post this and you couldn’t read it without wanting to weep, and then they would say, “Ah! See? The hole appears to be on the right-hand side.” And that would be their comment.’

I felt differently about Bob’s checklist now. I now felt that the checklist was a powerful and intoxicating weapon which was capable of inflicting terrible damage if placed in the wrong hands. I was beginning to suspect that my hands might be the wrong hands.

‘Item 8: Callous/lack of empathy – Any appreciation of the pain of others is merely abstract.’

Rachel tried telling them they were fantasists and that it wasn’t nice to find yourself a character in another person’s paranoid fantasy especially when you’ve just been blown up on the tube, but it was to no avail. The more prolifically she tried to convince them she existed, the more certain they became that she didn’t. ‘I do not work for the government,’ she wrote to them. ‘I am a normal person, I have a normal job in a normal office and I am requesting politely that you drop this and stop making accusations that are not true. Please stop.’ ‘It should be clear from Rachel’s disinfo tactics she’s part of the same lying media and police who set up this scam,’ someone replied. ‘Bet it ain’t even female,’ someone else agreed.

She wasn’t going to engage with them any more. She didn’t want to be on the radar of crazy people. She was going to wind down her blog and stop defining herself as a victim. The last thing she said to me when I left that afternoon was, ‘I know I exist.’ She looked at me. ‘All the people on the train who have met me know I exist. I got off the train covered in blood and smoke and glass in my hair and metal sticking out of my wrist-bone. I was photographed. I gave evidence to the police. I was stitched up in a hospital. I can produce dozens of witnesses who know I was there and that I exist. And that I am who I say I am.’

‘I am also very suspicious of the fact that she refuses to sit down and have a dispassionate briefing about 7/7,’ David said. ‘Why won’t she allow somebody to patiently talk her though the evidence?’ ‘She was in the carriage!’ I said. ‘She was in the CARRIAGE. You really want her to sit down with someone who was on the Internet while she was in the carriage and have them explain to her that there was no bomb?’

I picked up the book. It opened randomly to a double page filled with boxes, each containing a few Hebrew letters. ‘It’s a table of the seventy-two names of God,’ David said. ‘Look at this . . .’ He pointed haphazardly at a few. ‘That translates as David Shayler the Fish,’ he said. He pointed haphazardly at a few more. ‘That translates as David Shayler Righteous Chav,’ he said. ‘David Shayler Righteous Chav?’ I said. ‘God laughed his head off when He pointed that out to me,’ he said. ‘It was the first time God and I had ever laughed together.’ I looked down at the table of the seventy-two boxes. ‘Surely you’re finding a pattern where there are no patterns,’ I said. ‘Finding patterns is how Intelligence works,’ David snapped back. ‘It’s how research works. It’s how journalism works. The search for patterns. Don’t you see? That’s what you do!’

‘A lot of people are scared they’re going mad these days,’ he said, ‘and it’s comforting for them to hear someone like me on the radio, someone who has the same “crazy” beliefs they have, about 9/11 and 7/7, but sounds happy, and not mad. I challenge anyone to come and see me and leave believing I sound mad.’

A lot of people are scared they’re going mad. Late at night, after a few drinks, they admit it. One or two of my friends swear they don’t mind. One woman I know says she secretly wills a nervous breakdown on so she can get admitted to a psychiatric hospital, away from the tensions of modern life, where she’ll be able to have long lie-ins and be looked after by nurses. But most of my friends do mind, they say. It scares them. They just want to be normal. I’m one of them, forever unpleasurably convinced my wife is dead because I can’t reach her on the phone, letting out involuntary yelps on claustrophobic Ryanair flights, becoming debilitatingly anxious that psychopaths might want to kill me. And we spend our evenings watching W i f e S w a p and Come Dine with Me and Supernanny and the early rounds of X-Factor and Big Brother. TV is just troubled people being booed these days.

I now knew what the formula was. The people who are the right sort of mad are a bit madder than we fear we’re becoming, and in a recognizable way. We might be anxious but we aren’t as anxious as them. We might be paranoid but we aren’t as paranoid as them. We are entertained by them, and comforted that we’re not as mad as they are. David Shayler’s tragedy is that his madness has spiralled into something too outlandish, too far out of the ball park, and consequently useless. We don’t want obvious exploitation. We want smoke-and-mirrors exploitation.

Maybe it was the trying so hard to be normal that was making everyone so afraid they were going crazy.

‘It’s quite a power you bestow upon people,’ I said. ‘The power to spot psychopaths.’ Bob shrugged. ‘But what if you’ve created armies of people who’ve gone power-mad?’ I said. ‘Who spot psychopaths where there are none, witchfinder-generals of the psychopath-spotting world?’

I think he saw his checklist as something pure – innocent as only science can be – but the humans who administered it as masses of weird prejudices and crazy predispositions.

Internet Addiction had already been rejected by the DSM-V board. It had been the idea of a Portland, Oregon-based psychiatrist named Jerald Block: ‘Internet addiction appears to be a common disorder that merits inclusion in DSM-V,’ he wrote in the March 2008 American Journal of Psychiatry. ‘Negative repercussions include arguments, lying, poor achievement, social isolation, and fatigue.’ But the DSM-V board had disagreed. They said spending too long on the Internet might be considered a symptom of depression, but not a unique disorder. They agreed to mention it in DSM-V’s appendix, but everyone knew the appendix was the graveyard of mental disorders. (I didn’t want to admit it to the Scientologists, but I was secretly in favour of Internet Addiction being classified a disorder, as I rather liked the idea of those people who had debated whether I was a shill or stupid being declared insane.)