The Wisdom of Psychopaths (35 page)

  8
“instead of dominants standing out because of what they take …”
Quote taken from de Waal,
Good Natured
, 144.

  9
“on the basis of how best to restore peace”
Ibid., 129.

10
“the group looks for the most effective arbitrator …”
Ibid., 144.

11
In 1979, at a remote site near the village of Saint-Césaire in southwest France …
Christoph P. E. Zollikofer, Marcia S. Ponce de León, Bernard Vandermeersch,
and François Lévêque, “Evidence for Interpersonal Violence in the St. Césaire Neanderthal,”
PNAS
99, no. 9 (2002): 6444–48, doi:10.1073/pnas.082111899.

12
the whole purpose of the Prisoner’s Dilemma …
The Prisoner’s Dilemma was originally conceived at the RAND Corporation in 1950 by the mathematicians Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher. Later that same year, the game was first formulated with prison-sentence payoffs by Albert Tucker and given its official title.

13
Instead, the screen of life is densely populated with millions upon millions of individual pixels …
In a world of “repeated interaction” (such as everyday life), a psychopathic strategy does indeed have its shortcomings. Such an observation, however, does not take into consideration the following two points:
    A. By moving from place to place, the psychopath, unfettered by the need for close relationships, creates his or her own “virtual world” in which the chance of repeated encounters is minimized.
    B. Psychopaths’ supreme ability to charm and adopt psychological camouflage safeguards, to some extent, against their identity as “defector” coming out. It acts, in the short or medium term, at least, as a smoke screen, permitting their misdemeanors to go unnoticed. Indeed, avoidance of detection also goes some way to explaining the greater incidence of psychopathy in urban settings—where anonymity, if one so wishes, is assured—as opposed to rural areas, where “melting into the crowd” is less of an option.
    Bottom line? Psychopaths have exactly the right “personality kit” to bend, or break, the rules. If you’re going to cheat in the game of life, being ruthless and fearless ensures you’re never too far out of your comfort zone, while being extroverted and charming can help you get away with it for longer. And, in the event that you
are
found out, high self-esteem makes it easier to cope with rejection.

14
In the late 1970s, the political scientist Robert Axelrod …
For more on the virtual reality tournament set up by Robert Axelrod, and on the precepts of game theory in general, see Robert Axelrod,
The Evolution of Cooperation
(New York: Basic Books, 1984).

15
Such an abomination had already occurred …
See Robert L. Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,”
Quarterly Review of Biology
46, no. 1 (1971): 35–57.

16
Some three hundred years earlier, in
Leviathan,
Hobbes …
See Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan
, Parts I and II, Revised Edition, eds. A. P. Martinich and Brian Battiste (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2010).

  1
Back in 2010, Jonason …
See Peter K. Jonason, Norman P. Li, and Emily A. Teicher, “Who Is James Bond? The Dark Triad as an Agentic Social Style,”
Individual Differences Research
8, no. 2 (2010): 111–20.

  2
Jonason’s study saw two hundred college students …
See P. K. Jonason, N. P. Li, Gregory W. Webster, and David P. Schmitt, “The Dark Triad: Facilitating a Short-Term Mating Strategy in Men,”
European Journal of Personality
23 (2009): 5–18, doi:10.1002/per.698.

  3
A 2005 study, conducted by a joint team of psychologists and neuroeconomists …
See Baba Shiv, George Loewenstein, and Antoine Bechara, “The Dark Side of Emotion in Decision-Making: When Individuals with Decreased Emotional Reactions Make More Advantageous Decisions,”
Cognitive Brain Research
23, no. 1 (2005): 85–92, doi:10.1016/j.cogbrainres.2005.01.006. Neuroeconomics is an interdisciplinary field focusing on the mental processes that underlie financial decision making. It combines research methods from neuroscience, economics, and social and cognitive psychology, as well as incorporating ideas and concepts from theoretical biology, computer science, and mathematics. For those who wish to explore the relationship between emotions and decision making in greater detail, an excellent place to start is Antonio Damasio’s laudably readable
Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
(New York: Putnam, 1994). It should also be noted that the results of Shiv et al.’s experiment do not negate the fact that emotions often
do
play a useful role in financial decision making, and that unchecked risk taking (as if, in the current financial climate, we need any reminding) can sometimes lead to disaster. To illustrate, while the brain-damaged players did well in the specific game in the study,
outside
the lab they didn’t fare so well—three of them, for example, having filed for personal bankruptcy. Their inability to experience fear led to excess risk taking in the real world, and their lack of emotional judgment sometimes led them into the clutches of people who took advantage of them. The bottom line is that while emotions can undoubtedly sometimes get in the way of rational decision making, they do, nevertheless, play an important role in safeguarding our interests.

  4
A study conducted by economist Cary Frydman and his colleagues …
See Cary Frydman, Colin Camerer, Peter Bossaerts, and Antonio Rangel, “MAOA-L Carriers Are Better at Making Optimal Financial Decisions Under Risk,”
Proceedings of the Royal Society B
278, no. 1714 (2011): 2053–59, doi:10.1098/rspb.2010.2304. On the link between the “warrior gene” and aggression, Antonio Rangel, who heads the lab where Cary Frydman is based, urges caution. “Previous studies that have associated
MAOA-L
with aggression or impulsivity might have to be interpreted carefully,” he points out. “The key question is whether, in the context of the lives of the subjects, these decisions were optimal or not.” (See Debora McKenzie, “People with ‘Warrior Gene’ Better at Risky Decisions,”
New Scientist
, December 9, 2010.
www.newscientist.com/article/dn19830-people-with-warrior-gene-better-at-risky-decisions.html
.) In a study published in 2009, for instance, Dominic Johnson, of the University of Edinburgh, found that
MAOA-L
carriers were indeed more aggressive, but only after a great deal of provocation, and without apparent impulsiveness—a finding, like Frydman’s, which seems to hint more at strategic self-interest
than indiscriminate self-destruction. See Rose McDermott, Dustin Tingley, Jonathan Cowden, Giovanni Frazzetto, and Dominic D. P. Johnson, “Monoamine Oxidase A Gene (MAOA) Predicts Behavioral Aggression Following Provocation,”
PNAS
106, no. 7 (2009): 2118–23, doi:10.1073/pnas.0808376106.

  5
“Contrary to previous discussion in the literature …”
See Richard Alleyne, “Gene That Makes You Good at Taking Risky Decisions,”
The Telegraph
, December 8, 2010,
www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8186570/Gene-that-makes-you-good-at-taking-risky-decisions.html
.

  6
Additional support comes from work carried out by Bob Hare and his colleagues …
See: Paul Babiak, Craig S. Neumann, and Robert D. Hare, “Corporate Psychopathy: Talking the Walk,”
Behavioral Sciences and the Law
28, no. 2 (2010): 174–93, doi:10.1002/bsl.925.

  7
“The psychopath has no difficulty dealing with the consequences of rapid change …”
Quote taken from Alan Deutschman, “Is Your Boss a Psychopath?”
Fast Company
, July 1, 2005,
www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html
.

  8
I caught up with him in the bar of a five-star hotel in New Orleans …
See Kevin Dutton,
Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and New Science of Changing Minds
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011).

  9
Research shows that one of the best ways of getting people to tell you about themselves …
See Morgan Worthy, Albert L. Gary, and Gay M. Kahn, “Self-Disclosure as an Exchange Process,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
13, no. 1 (1969): 59–63.

10
Research also shows that if you want to stop someone from remembering something …
See John Brown, “Some Tests of the Decay Theory of Immediate Memory,”
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
10, no. 1 (1958): 12–21, doi:10.1080/17470215808416249; Lloyd R. Peterson and Margaret J. Peterson, “Short-Term Retention of Individual Verbal Items,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology
58, no. 3 (1959): 193–98.

11
And in clinical psychology, there comes a point in virtually every therapeutic intervention …
For more on the various techniques of therapeutic intervention, and on the work of Stephen Joseph, see Stephen Joseph,
Theories of Counselling and Psychotherapy: An Introduction to the Different Approaches
, 2nd revised edition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

12
If, under certain conditions, psychopathy really is beneficial …
See Eyal Aharoni and Kent A. Kiehl, “Quantifying Criminal Success in Psychopathic Offenders,” conference proceedings of the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy, Montreal, Canada, May 2011.

13
Helinä Häkkänen-Nyholm, a psychologist at the University of Helsinki …
See Helinä Häkkänen-Nyholm and Robert D. Hare, “Psychopathy, Homicide, and the Courts: Working the System,”
Criminal Justice and Behavior
36, no. 8 (2009): 761–77, doi:10.1177/0093854809336946.

14
Remorse aside, Porter wondered …
See Stephen Porter, Leanne ten Brinke,
Alysha Baker, and Brendan Wallace, “Would I Lie to You? ‘Leakage’ in Deceptive Facial Expressions Relates to Psychopathy and Emotional Intelligence,”
Personality and Individual Differences
, 51, no. 2 (2011): 133–37, doi:10.1016/j.paid.2011.03.031.

15
Karim and his team at the University of Tübingen …
See Ahmed A. Karim, Markus Schneider, Martin Lotze, Ralf Veit, Paul Sauseng, Christoph Braun, and Niels Birbaumer. “The Truth About Lying: Inhibition of the Anterior Prefrontal Cortex Improves Deceptive Behavior,”
Cerebral Cortex
20, no. 1 (2010): 205–13, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp090.

16
and recent analysis using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) …
See Michael C. Craig, Marco Catani, Quinton Deeley, Richard Latham, Eileen Daly, Richard Kanaan, Marco Picchioni, Philip K. McGuire, Thomas Fahy, and Declan G. M. Murphy, “Altered Connections on the Road to Psychopathy,”
Molecular Psychiatry
14 (2009): 946–53.

17
Raine compared the performance of psychopaths and non-psychopaths on a simple learning task …
See Angela Scerbo, Adrian Raine, Mary O’Brien, Cheryl-Jean Chan, Cathy Rhee, and Norine Smiley, “Reward Dominance and Passive Avoidance Learning in Adolescent Psychopaths,”
Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology
18, no. 4 (1990): 451–63, doi:10.1007/BF00917646.

18
Researchers at Vanderbilt University have delved a little deeper …
See Joshua W. Buckholtz, Michael T. Treadway, Ronald L. Cowan, Neil D. Woodward, Stephen D. Benning, Rui Li, M. Sib Ansari, et al., “Mesolimbic Dopamine Reward System Hypersensitivity in Individuals with Psychopathic Traits,”
Nature Neuroscience
13, no. 4 (2010): 419–21, doi:10.1038/nn.2510.

19
“There has been a long tradition of research on psychopathy …”
For the full quote, and more details of the study, see “Psychopaths’ Brains Wired to Seek Rewards, No Matter the Consequences,”
Science Daily
, March 14, 2010,
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100314150924.htm
.

20
Jeff Hancock, professor of computing and information science at Cornell …
See Jeffrey T. Hancock, Michael T. Woodworth, and Stephen Porter, “Hungry Like the Wolf: A Word-Pattern Analysis of the Language of Psychopaths,”
Legal and Criminological Psychology
(2011), doi:10.1111/j.2044-8333.2011.02025.x.

21
Fecteau and her coworkers used TMS to stimulate the somatosensory cortex …
See Shirley Fecteau, Alvaro Pascual-Leone, and Hugo Théoret, “Psychopathy and the Mirror Neuron System: Preliminary Findings from a Non-Incarcerated Sample,”
Psychiatry Research
160, no. 2 (2008): 137–44.

22
… the work of highly specialized, and aptly named, brain structures called mirror neurons …
Mirror neurons were first discovered (in monkeys) in 1992 by an Italian research team led by Giacomo Rizzolatti, at the University of Parma. Put simply, they are brain cells specifically equipped to mimic the actions—and feelings—of others. See: Giuseppe Di Pellegrino, Luciano Fadiga, Leonardo Fogassi, Vittorio Gallese, and Giacomo Rizzolatti,” Understanding Motor Events: A Neurophysiological Study,”
Experimental Brain Research
91 (1992):
176–80; G. Rizzolatti, L. Fadiga, V. Gallese, and L. Fogassi, “Premotor Cortex and the Recognition of Motor Actions,”
Cognitive Brain Research
3 (1996): 131–41.

23
yawn contagion …
For an interesting recent paper on yawn contagion and empathy, see Ivan Norscia and Elisabetta Palagi, “Yawn Contagion and Empathy in
Homo sapiens
,”
PLoS ONE
6, no. 12 (2011): e28472, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0028472.

24
In an emotion recognition task using fMRI …
See Heather L. Gordon, Abigail A. Baird, and Alison End, “Functional Differences Among Those High and Low on a Trait Measure of Psychopathy,”
Biological Psychiatry
56, no. 7 (2004): 516–21.

25
Yawei Cheng, at the National Yang-Ming University …
See Yawei Cheng, Ching-Po Lin, Ho-Ling Liu, Yuan-Yu Hsu, Kun-Eng Lim, Daisy Hung, and Jean Decety, “Expertise Modulates the Perception of Pain in Others,”
Current Biology
17, no. 19 (2007): 1708–13, doi:10.1016/j.cub.2007.09.020.