The Wisdom of Psychopaths (18 page)

“Our hypothesis was that [some] psychopathic traits [impulsivity, heightened attraction to rewards, and risk taking] are … linked to dysfunction in dopamine reward circuitry,” elucidates Joshua Buckholtz, the lead author of the study, “[and] that because of these exaggerated dopamine responses, once they focus on the chance to get a reward, psychopaths are unable to alter their attention until they get what they’re after.”

He wasn’t far off the mark. Consistent with such a hypothesis, the volunteers displaying high levels of psychopathic traits released almost four times as much dopamine in response to the stimulant as did their non-psychopathic counterparts. But that wasn’t all. A similar pattern of brain activity was observed in the second part of the experiment, when instead of being given speed, the participants were told that, on completion of a simple task, they’d receive a monetary reward. (Note to the researchers: if you need any more volunteers, call me!) Sure enough, fMRI revealed that those individuals with elevated psychopathic traits exhibited significantly more activity in their nucleus accumbens, the dopamine reward area of the brain, than those scoring low on psychopathy.

“
There has been a long tradition of research on psychopathy that has focused on the lack of sensitivity to punishment and a lack of fear,” comments David Zald, associate professor of psychology and psychiatry, and coauthor of the study. “But those traits are not particularly good predictors of violence, or criminal behavior … These individuals appear to have such a strong draw to reward—to the carrot—that it overwhelms the sense of risk or concern about the stick … It’s not just that they don’t appreciate the potential threat, but that the anticipation or motivation for reward overwhelms those concerns.”

Corroborating evidence comes from forensic linguistics. The way a murderer talks about his crime depends, it turns out, on what type of murderer he is.
Jeff Hancock, a professor of computing and information science at Cornell, and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia compared the accounts of fourteen psychopathic and thirty-eight non-psychopathic male murderers, and uncovered notable differences: not just in relation to emotional pixilation (the psychopaths used twice as many words relating to physical needs, such as food,
sex, or money, as the non-psychopaths, who placed more of an emphasis on social needs, such as family, religion, and spirituality), but also in relation to personal justification.

Computer analysis of taped transcripts revealed that the psychopathic killers used more conjunctions like “because,” “since,” or “so that” in their testimonies, implying that the crime somehow “had to be done” in order to attain a particular goal. Curiously, they also tended to include details of what they’d had to eat on the day of the murder—the spectral machinations of the hand of primeval predation?

Be that as it may, the conclusion is little in doubt. The psychopath seeks reward at any cost, flouting consequence and elbowing risk aside. Which, of course, might go some way toward explaining why 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. Money, power, status, and control—each the preserve of the typical company director, and each a sought-after commodity in and of itself—together constitute an irresistible draw for the business-oriented psychopath as he or she ventures ever further up the rungs of the corporate ladder. Recall, from earlier, that stark, prophetic caveat of Bob Hare’s: “You’ll find them [psychopaths] in any organization where your position and status afford you power and control over others, and the chance of material gain.”

Sometimes they do a good job. But sometimes, inevitably, they don’t. And if the reward ethic gets out of hand, the boom, rather predictably, can quickly turn to bust. Arrogant and fearless Buzz Ricksons may be found all over the place, in pretty much any field you can think of. Including, oddly enough, banking.

And Rickson, in case you were wondering, ended up dead: crashing, in an inglorious ball of flames, into the white cliffs of Dover.

The psychopath’s fearlessness and focus has traditionally been attributed to deficits in emotional processing, more specifically to amygdala dysfunction. Until recently, this has led researchers to believe that in addition to not “doing” fear, they don’t “do” empathy, either. But a 2008 study by Shirley Fecteau and her colleagues at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, has thrown a completely different light on the matter, suggesting that psychopaths not only have the capacity to recognize emotions—they are, in fact, actually better at it than we are.

Fecteau and her coworkers used TMS to stimulate the somatosensory cortex (the part of the brain that processes and regulates physical sensations) in the brains of volunteers scoring high on the PPI. Previous research has shown that observing something painful happening to someone else results in a temporary slowdown in neural excitation in response to TMS, in the area of the somatosensory cortex corresponding to the region afflicted by the pain:
the work of highly specialized, and aptly named, brain structures called mirror neurons. If psychopaths lack the ability to empathize, Fecteau surmised, then such attenuation in neural response should be reduced in those individuals scoring high on the PPI, compared to those with low to average scores—in exactly the same way that psychopaths might well, in comparison with most normal members of the population, display reduced
yawn contagion.
⁹

The researchers, however, were in for quite a surprise. Much to their amazement, Fecteau and her team actually turned up the opposite of what they were expecting. High PPI scorers—specifically, those who scored high on the “Coldheartedness” subscale of the questionnaire, the subscale that most directly taps into empathy—in fact showed greater attenuation of the TMS response than low scorers, suggesting that psychopaths, rather than having an impairment in recognizing the emotions of others, indeed have a talent for it. And that the problem lies not in emotional recognition per se, but in the dissociation between its sensory and affective components: in the disconnect between knowing what an emotion is and feeling what it’s like.

Psychologist Abigail Baird has discovered something similar.
In an emotion recognition task using fMRI, she found that while volunteers scoring high on the PPI showed reduced amygdala activity compared to low scorers when matching faces with similar emotional expressions (consonant with a deficit in emotional processing), they also displayed increased activity in both the visual and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices—indicative, as Baird and her team point out, of “high-scoring participants relying on regions associated with perception and cognition to do the emotion recognition task.”

One psychopath I spoke to put it like this. “Even the color-blind,” he said, “know when to stop at a traffic light. You’d be surprised. I’ve got hidden shallows.”

Or, as Homer Simpson reminded us earlier, not caring and not understanding are two different things entirely.

Of course, psychopaths’ enhanced ability to recognize emotion in others might go some way toward explaining their superior persuasion and manipulation skills—as, needless to say, does their enhanced ability to fake emotion, a phenomenon we touched upon earlier in the chapter. But the capacity to decouple “cold” sensory empathy from “hot” emotional empathy has other advantages, too—most notably in arenas where a degree of affective detachment must be preserved between practitioner and practice. Like the medical profession, for instance.

Here’s one of the U.K.’s top neurosurgeons on how he feels prior to going into the theater: “Do I get nervous before a big operation? No,
I wouldn’t say so. But I guess it’s like any performance. You have to get yourself psyched up. And you need to remain concentrated and focused on the job at hand, not get distracted. You have to get it right.

“You know, you mentioned Special Forces a few moments ago. And actually, the mentality of a surgeon and, say, that of an elite soldier about to storm a building or an airliner are possibly quite similar. In both cases, the job is referred to as an ‘operation.’ In both cases, you ‘tool up’ and don a mask. And in both cases, all the years of practice and training can never fully prepare you for that element of uncertainty as you make the first incision; that exhilarating split second of ‘explosive entry,’ when you fold back the skin and suddenly realize … you’re IN.

“What’s the difference between a millimeter’s margin of error when it comes to taking a head shot and a millimeter’s margin of error when it comes to navigating your way between two crucial blood vessels? In both of those cases you hold life and death in your hands, must make a death-or-glory decision. In surgery, quite literally, on a knife-edge.”

This guy scored well above average on the PPI. And if that surprises you coming from one of the world’s top neurosurgeons, then think again.
Yawei Cheng, at the National Yang-Ming University in Taiwan, and her coworkers took a group of medical doctors with at least two years’ experience in acupuncture and a group of nonmedical professionals, and, using fMRI, peered into their brains to see what happened as they viewed needles being inserted into mouths, hands, and feet. What they observed was rather interesting. When the control volunteers watched the videos of the needles being inserted, those areas of their somatosensory cortices corresponding to the relevant body regions lit up like Christmas trees, as did other brain areas such as the periaqueductal gray (the coordinator of the panic response) and the anterior cingulate cortex (which codes for error, anomaly, and pain processing).

In contrast, there was barely a flicker of pain-related activity in the brains of the experts. Instead, they exhibited increased activation of the medial and superior prefrontal cortices, as well as of the
temporoparietal junction: brain regions involved in emotion regulation and theory of mind.
¹⁰
Moreover, the experts rated the acupuncture displays as significantly less unpleasant than the controls did—reminiscent of numerous laboratory findings showing attenuated physiological responses (e.g., heart rate, galvanic skin response [GSR], and cortisol levels) in psychopaths on presentation of fearful, disgusting, or erotic stimuli—and in the face of arduous social stress tests, such as
the Trier.
¹¹
What the expert acquires through experience, psychopaths have from the start.

Not long after I came across Yawei Cheng’s study, I hopped on a plane to Washington, DC, and went to the National Institute of Mental Health to see James Blair. Blair is one of the world’s leading experts on psychopaths, and, like Joe Newman, has pretty much seen it all. “Does it pay to be a psychopath?” I asked him. “Okay, not all the time perhaps. But sometimes—when the situation demands it?”

Blair was cautious. It’s a dangerous road to go down. “It’s true that if bad things are happening the individual with psychopathy might be less worried about it,” he told me. “However, it’s not so clear that their decision making in such situations would be particularly good, though. Moreover, by not analyzing levels of threat appropriately, they might walk into danger, rather than away from it.”

In other words, if we could somehow defrost the reasoning a bit, take some of the chill out of the logic, then yes, psychopathic traits may well confer advantages. Otherwise, forget it.

But wait a minute, I thought. Isn’t this precisely what we find in the heroes of this world? No one would accuse
them
of poor decision making. And what about the performance of Bechara, Shiv, and Loewenstein’s “functional psychopaths”? And Frydman’s hotshot hustlers? (Okay, carrying the MAOA polymorphism that codes for risk and aggression doesn’t automatically qualify you as a psychopath, but the link is certainly there.) The way things turned out, their decision making, under the circumstances, would more likely than not have been better than yours or mine. So maybe that was it. Maybe the equation just needed a bit of loss adjusting:

Functional Psychopath = Psychopath – Poor Decision Making

By way of a second opinion, I caught up with psychopath hunter Kent Kiehl. Kiehl is associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of New Mexico, and director of Mobile Imaging Core and Clinical Cognitive Neuroscience at the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque. As his job titles suggest, he had a lot going on when I met him. In actual fact, Kiehl was on a road trip when we hooked up—and still is. Not your average kind of road trip, but one involving an eighteen-wheeler: a truck so large that every time he parks it I’m amazed he doesn’t need planning permission. He certainly needs scanning permission—because inside it is a custom-built fMRI machine, worth $2 million. And Kiehl is carting it around New Mexico, around a number of the state penitentiaries, in an attempt to unravel the neural basis of psychopathy. I asked him the same question I asked James Blair. Does it pay, at times, to be a psychopath? Kiehl, like Blair, was circumspect.

“It certainly makes sense that psychopathic traits are normally distributed across the general population,” he told me. “But the difference with those at the high end of the spectrum is that they can’t switch off [the fearlessness] in situations where it might be appropriate. A CEO might be non-risk-averse in certain areas of business, but, on the other hand, probably wouldn’t want to walk around a rough neighborhood at night. A psychopath isn’t able to make that distinction.
With a psychopath, it’s all or nothing.” Which adds a third factor to our equation: