The Anatomy of Violence (22 page)

You may wonder why the temps would admit their crimes to us. There are a number of reasons. We obtained a certificate of confidentiality from the secretary of health that protected us from being subpoenaed by any law-enforcement agency in the United States. We could not be forced to reveal our data. In fact, if I did so I would be committing an offense, and could end up as an offender in someone else’s study on crime. Our participants therefore were legally protected. Furthermore, they were in a respectable, professional university environment with trustworthy research assistants. Perhaps for the first time in their lives, they could talk about their wrongdoings at length with a professional in full confidence and without risk—even getting into the nitty-gritty of rape and homicide.

Were they fibbing? We think not. There was little or no motivation for such deception, no obvious gain. While some pathological lying cannot be ruled out, we still believe they were antisocial offenders. Put it this way: if they were telling the truth, they were definitely antisocial. If, alternatively, they were lying about their crimes and deceiving us, they were pathological liars and
still
antisocial. In reality, we believe that rates of criminal offending and antisocial personality disorder are
underestimates
of the true base rate in this population, rather than overestimates.

We also found unusually high rates of psychopathic personality as assessed by the
Psychopathy Checklist, the “gold standard” instrument for assessing psychopathy.
⁷⁰
For males, 13.5 percent had a score of 30 or more—the cutoff used to define psychopathy in many prison studies.
⁷¹
More than twice that amount—30.3 percent—were above the cutoff of
25 or more that had been adopted in several other studies.
⁷²
For the males whom we focused on in our research, about a third were defined as
psychopathic.

How could there be so many more
psychopaths in temporary-employment agencies? The answer is that temp agencies are wonderfully safe havens for psychopaths—almost a breeding ground. Psychopaths gain in life by ferociously exploiting others. To begin with, their superficial charm allows them to succeed with their parasitic lifestyle, but ultimately they get caught out by those around them. Once detected, they can pack up and move on to the next social group of victims that they will suck dry. Temporary-employment agencies allow this freedom of movement. They also conduct more limited background checks compared with companies hiring full-time employees. Furthermore, psychopaths are impulsive and unreliable—they only rarely hold down a permanent job. Temporary jobs, in contrast, limit the time that their flaws can be detected by employers. Psychopaths are also
stimulation-seekers and love to be on the move for new experiences, and temp agencies give them that freedom, even to move from city to city. Of course, not all people at temp agencies are psychopaths. After all, I was a temp once. But putting all this together, it’s no small wonder that we found as many psychopaths as we did.

So now we had our psychopaths. We searched court records to see which ones had been convicted of an offense. Those with a conviction were delineated “
unsuccessful” psychopaths. Those without a conviction were the “successful” psychopaths. We did not have many—sixteen unsuccessful psychopaths, thirteen successful psychopaths, and twenty-six controls. But it was a beginning.

Up until this point there had been no empirical research on these individuals except for a seminal, creative investigation conducted by
Cathy Widom. From November 1974 to July 1975 she placed an ad in a “counterculture” Boston newspaper that read as follows:

Using a neuropsychological measure, she found that the non-institutionalized psychopaths who responded to her ad did not show the
frontal-lobe deficits that one would expect. She went on further
to speculate that “
autonomic differences found between
psychopaths and others may only characterize the institutionalized, unsuccessful psychopath.”
⁷⁴
Teaming up with
Joe Newman, a leading psychopathy researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Widom went on to replicate and extend her original findings.
⁷⁵
Widom’s original study had its limitations. It did not have a control group, and because 46.4 percent had been incarcerated at some point in their lives, they could not be exactly classified as “successful” psychopaths. Furthermore, there were no psychophysiological data to back up her speculative hypothesis.

We, however, did have a psychophysiological laboratory and we set about testing Widom and Newman’s ideas. We put all our participants through a social stressor. They were seated in our psychophysiology laboratory. They had electrodes placed on their fingertips to measure
skin conductance, and on their arms to measure heart rate. They were acclimated to the setting in what we call a “resting state”—or as near to “rest” as one can get. We made a careful note of their levels of autonomic arousal.

We then sprung on them the social stressor task. They were told that they had to give a speech about their worst faults. They had two minutes to prepare the speech, and two minutes to give it while being videotaped. If the participant hesitated or came to a stop, a research assistant in the room with them would push them to give more details to increase the stress level. The first two preparatory minutes are “
anticipatory fear,” or what
Robert Hare has termed “
quasi-conditioning.”
⁷⁶
As in
fear conditioning, the question is whether the psychopaths will autonomically respond, both in anticipation of the stressful speech, and also during the speech itself.

The findings are shown in
Figure 4.2
. The controls show what we all expected—increases in
heart rate and
sweat rate throughout most of the task. The unsuccessful psychopaths also show what we would expect based on prior research with institutionalized psychopaths, a blunted autonomic stress response—only small increases in sweat rate and heart rate from the resting baseline. The successful psychopaths, in sharp contrast to their unsuccessful counterparts, show significant increases in heart rate and skin conductance relative to their resting state.
⁷⁷
Essentially there is no difference between the successful psychopaths and the normal controls. Widom’s almost prophetic claim, made twenty-three years earlier, had received some initial support.

We also tested our psychopaths and controls on a measure called
“
executive functioning.” It involves all the cognitive functions that you would like in a
successful business executive—planning, attention, cognitive flexibility, and, importantly, the ability to change plans when given feedback that one course of action was inappropriate. How did our three groups do? You can see in
Figure 4.3
. The controls performed significantly better than
unsuccessful psychopaths—that’s something you might expect. But take a look at how the successful psychopaths performed. They not only outperformed the failed psychopaths—they also performed significantly
better
than the normal controls.
⁷⁸

Figure 4.2
   
Autonomic stress reactivity in successful psychopaths, unsuccessful psychopaths, and controls

What are we to make of the surprising findings for the
successful psychopaths? To answer this we have to step from the anatomy of violence to the anatomy of
decision-making and a different perspective from the discipline of neurology.
Antonio Damasio, in his groundbreaking book
Descartes’ Error
, put forward his innovative “somatic marker” hypothesis, which brings together emotion and cognition in the formation of good decision-making.
⁷⁹
He argues that Descartes made a fundamental error, summarized in the famous phrase
cogito ergo sum
, in believing that there is a fundamental separation of the mind from the body.

Figure 4.3
   Superior
executive
functioning in successful psychopaths

Damasio, in contrast, argues for an intimate mind-body connectedness. A good mind makes good decisions, and to do so it has to rely on “
somatic markers” produced by the body. These somatic markers are unpleasant autonomic bodily states produced when one is contemplating a risky action or a difficult decision—the pounding heart and the perspiration. These somatic markers have flagged negative outcomes in the individual’s past, and are stored in the somatosensory cortex. This input is then transmitted to the prefrontal cortex, where further evaluation and decision-making takes place. If the current situation has been previously linked to a negative outcome, the somatic marker for that past event will sound an alarm bell to the decision-making areas
of the
brain—no action will be taken. This process may act at either a conscious or a subconscious level and can be thought of as helping to reduce the range of options in decision-making. It is similar to
classical conditioning and the
anticipatory fear that
deters us from conducting an antisocial act previously associated with punishment.

We had always assumed that in order to make good decisions, we need to be removed from our emotions—to be cool, calm, and collected. The revolution Damasio made in cognitive and affective
neuroscience was to argue that instead, emotions importantly guide good decision-making. Without emotions and somatic markers, we will not make good decisions.

Now let’s turn back to our
unsuccessful
psychopaths. They have blunted emotions and lack the appropriate autonomic stress response. We can think of that as reduced somatic markers—a relative disconnection between mind and body. That mind-body dualism, according to Damasio, would result in bad decision-making, and certainly incarcerated offenders make many bad life decisions.

Turning to the successful psychopaths, we see that they show intact autonomic stress reactivity and anticipatory fear. They have a mind-body connectedness that allows for somatic markers to help form good decision-making. That translates into superior
executive functioning. And I would argue that that is why successful psychopaths are successful.

Recall that we define success here in terms of not being convicted for an offense. Imagine that the successful psychopath is on the street, contemplating robbing a 7-Eleven store. His brain—consciously and also subconsciously—is processing the scene. He’s consciously checking up and down the street for specific signs of surveillance—but his subconscious is also forming a gestalt of the whole scene and putting it together. He’s about to proceed—but at the last minute he pulls back. There was something about the whole setup that he did not like the look of. He cannot put his finger on it, except that it just did not “feel good.”

A somatic marker warning bell had been rung, warning him that previously in a similar situation he was nearly caught. Perhaps it was the same time of day, the same number of people in the shop, the fact that he had also just had a couple of drinks, or a combination of these visual and somatic cues that triggered the warning bell. The heightened autonomic reactivity is giving him an edge over his unsuccessful
psychopathic counterpart who does not hear the somatic warning-bell sound and instead ends up hearing the police siren.

So the failed psychopath has reduced
autonomic reactivity to cues that signal danger and capture. The successful psychopath has relatively better autonomic functioning and hence is better able to escape detection by the authorities.
⁸⁰
He also has better executive functioning. But if the successful psychopath does not have the autonomic impairments that haunt failed
psychopaths, what made him psychopathic in the first place?

Our original study gives us two initial clues. First, if you look back at
Figure 4.2
, you can see that in the resting state prior to the social stressor, both psychopathic groups show a
low resting
heart rate. The successful psychopaths are six beats per minute slower than the control group, and slightly below the level of the unsuccessful psychopaths. So, successful psychopaths have the low resting cardiovascular arousal that we argued earlier may result in stimulation-seeking, a cardinal feature of the psychopath. Second, the successful psychopaths evidenced a psychosocial impairment not shown by the other two groups—being raised by people other than their natural parents or being brought up in a foster home or other institution. Parental absence and a lack of
bonding may have helped shape the lack of close social connectedness and the superficiality that typifies psychopathic relationships.