The mental life of the psychopath is only a puzzle if you think that the ability to make sense of people’s mental states (useful for charming someone) is the same as the ability to feel other’s experiences, including their pain (which gets in the way of assaulting someone). But they aren’t. So criminal psychopaths don’t have to be fiddling with a single dial of empathy: A simpler explanation is that they are good at understanding other people and bad at feeling their pain. They have high cognitive empathy but low emotional empathy.
