The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success

by Kevin Dutton

My father also had an uncanny knack for getting exactly what he wanted, often with just a casual throwaway line or a single telling gesture. People used to say that he looked like the scheming Del Boy in Only Fools and Horses—which he did—not just acted like him, which he also did (he, too, was a market trader).

The checklist—which, in 1991, underwent a facelift: it’s since been renamed the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL-R)—comprises a twenty-item questionnaire carrying a maximum score of 40 (on each item, an individual can score either 0, “doesn’t apply”; 1, “applies somewhat”; or 2, “fully applies”),

1. Self-Centered Impulsivity (ME + IN + BE + CN) 2. Fearless Dominance (SOP + F + STI) 3. Coldheartedness (C)

The autistic spectrum, for instance, refers to a continuum of abnormality in social interaction and communication ranging from severe impairments at the “deep end”—those who are silent, mentally disabled, and locked into stereotypical behaviors such as head rolling or body rocking, for example—to mild interference at the “shallow end”: high-functioning individuals with active, but distinctly odd, interpersonal strategies, narrowly focused interests, and an undue preoccupation with “sameness,” rules, and ritual.

Behaving “irrationally” might actually sometimes be rational.

“Do unto others” has always been sound advice. But now, some two thousand years later, thanks to Robert Axelrod and Anatol Rapoport, we’ve finally got the math to prove it.

Hare handed out the PCL-R to more than two hundred top U.S. business executives, and compared the prevalence of psychopathic traits in the corporate world to that found in the general population at large. Not only did the business execs come out ahead, but psychopathy was positively associated with in-house ratings of charisma and presentation style: creativity, good strategic thinking, and excellent communication skills.

Once again, when it came to psychopathic attributes the CEOs emerged victorious—which, considering that Broadmoor houses some of Britain’s most dangerous criminals, is really going some.

It’s a fine line, as Captain Woodman says, between hero and psychopath. And often it depends who’s drawing it.

Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon found a greater preponderance of psychopathic traits among a sample of CEOs than they did among the inmates of a secure forensic unit.

Hare and Babiak have developed an instrument called the Business Scan (B-Scan for short): a self-report questionnaire consisting of four subscales (personal style; emotional style; organizational effectiveness; and social responsibility) specifically calibrated to assess the presence of psychopathic traits, not within forensic populations (like the PCL-R), or within the general population as a whole (like the PPI), but exclusively within corporate settings (see figure 4.3).

This explains so much

Only it’s an intoxication that sharpens, rather than dulls, the senses; an altered state of consciousness that feeds on precision and clarity, rather than fuzziness and incoherence … Perhaps ‘supersane’ would be a better way of describing it.

I put it to Pinker, over lunch at the Harvard Faculty Club, that we’ve got a bit of a conundrum on our hands. On the one hand we have evidence that society is becoming less violent, while on the other there’s evidence that it’s getting more psychopathic.

And such inner neural steel, such inestimable indifference in the face of life’s misfortunes, is something that we could all, in one way or another, perhaps do with a little bit more of.

Ruthlessness 2. Charm 3. Focus 4. Mental toughness 5. Fearlessness 6. Mindfulness 7. Action

But he was, in addition, almost certainly a psychopath. Ruthless, fearless, driven, and charismatic, in equal measure.

And that some psychopathic attributes—stoicism, the ability to regulate emotion, to live in the moment, to enter altered states of awareness, to be heroic, fearless, yes, even empathic—are also inherently spiritual in nature, and not only improve one’s own well-being, but also that of others.

Somerset Maugham in Of Human Bondage.

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).

Personality in Adulthood (New York: Guilford Press, 1990);