The Wisdom of Psychopaths (6 page)

Which raises, of course, an even more interesting question: What about immunity? Are some of us more likely to come down with the fear bug than others? Do some of us have more of a “nose” for it?

To find out, I ran a variation on Mujica-Parodi’s study. First, I showed one group of volunteers a scary movie (
Candyman
) and got a second group on a treadmill. Next, I collected their sweat. Third, I bottled it (so to speak). Finally, I squirted it up the noses of a second group of volunteers as they played a simulated gambling game.

The game in question was the Cambridge Gamble Task, a computerized test of decision making under risk. The test comprises a sequence of trials in which participants are presented with an array of ten boxes (either red or blue in color) and must guess, on each trial, which of those boxes conceals a yellow token. The proportion of colored boxes varies from trial to trial (e.g., 6 red and 4 blue; 1 blue and
9 red), and participants start off with a total of 100 points—a fixed proportion of which (5, 25, 50, 75, or 95 percent) they must bet on the outcome of the first trial. What happens then is contingent on the result. Depending on whether they win or lose, the amount wagered is either added to or subtracted from their initial tally, and the protocol is repeated, with a rolling total, on all subsequent trials. Higher bets are associated with higher risk.

If Mujica-Parodi’s theory held any water, then the prediction was pretty straightforward. Volunteers who inhaled the
Candyman
sweat would exercise greater caution and gamble more conservatively than those who inhaled the treadmill sweat.

But there was a catch. Half the volunteers were psychopaths. Would the psychopaths, noted for their coolness under pressure, be immune to others’ stress? Like expert hunters and trackers, might they be hypervigilant for visual cues of vulnerability—as Angela Book discovered—yet chemically impervious to olfactory ones?

The results of the experiment couldn’t have been any clearer. Exactly as predicted by Mujica-Parodi’s findings, the non-psychopathic volunteers played their cards pretty close to their chests when exposed to the fear sweat, staking lower percentages on outcomes. But the psychopaths remained unfazed. Not only were they more daring to start with, they were also more daring to finish with, continuing to take risks even when pumped full of “fear.” Their neurological immune systems seemed to immediately crack down on the “virus,” adopting a zero tolerance policy on anxiety, while the rest of us just allow it to spread.

Glimpsed in passing through a shop window, or more likely, these days, on Amazon, “The Wisdom of Psychopaths” may seem rather an odd conglomeration of words to appear on the front cover of a book. Eye-catching, maybe. But odd, most certainly. The jarring juxtaposition of those two existential monoliths, “wisdom” and “psychopaths,”
precipitates, one would have thought, little semantic compromise, little in the way of constructive, meaningful dialogue around the logic-scored scientific negotiating table.

And yet the core, underlying thesis that psychopaths are in possession of wisdom is a serious one. Not, perhaps, wisdom in the traditional sense of that word: as an emergent property of advancing years and cumulative life experience. But as an innate, ineffable function of their being.

Consider, for example, the following analogy from someone we’ll be meeting later.

A psychopath.

Within, I should add, the rarefied, cloistral confines of a maximum-security personality disorder unit:

“A powerful top-of-the-range sports car is neither a good thing nor a bad thing in and of itself, but depends on the person who’s sitting behind the wheel. It may, for instance, permit a skilled and experienced motorist to get his wife to the hospital in time to give birth to their child. Or, in a parallel universe, run an eighteen-year-old and his girlfriend off a cliff.

“In essence, it’s all in the handling. Quite simply, the skill of the driver …”

He’s right. Perhaps the one stand-alone feature of the psychopath, the ultimate “killer” difference that distinguishes the psychopathic personality from the personalities of most “normal” members of the population, is that psychopaths don’t give a damn what their fellow citizens think of them. They simply couldn’t care less how society, as a whole, might contemplate their actions. In a world in which image and branding and personal reputation are more sacrosanct than ever—what are we up to now: 500 million on Facebook? 200 million videos on YouTube? One closed-circuit TV camera for every 20 people in the U.K.?—this constitutes, no doubt, one of the fundamental reasons why they run into so much trouble.

And, of course, why we find them so beguiling.

Yet it may also predispose to heroism and mental toughness, to estimable qualities such as courage, integrity, and virtue: the ability,
for instance, to dart into blazing buildings to save the lives of those inside. Or to push fat guys off bridges and stop runaway trains in their tracks.

Psychopathy really is like a high performance sports car. It’s a double-edged sword that inevitably cuts both ways.

In the following chapters, I’ll chronicle, in scientific, sociological, and philosophical detail, the story of this double-edged sword and the unique psychological profile of the individuals that wield it. We begin by looking at who, precisely, the psychopath really is (if not the monster we usually think of). We travel through both the inner and outer zones of the psychopathic metropolis, cruising the ultraviolent downtown ghettos and the lighter, leafier, more visitor-friendly suburbs.

As on any scale or spectrum, both ends have their poster-boy Hall of Famers. At one end we have the Dahmers and Lecters and Bundys—the Rippers and Slashers and Stranglers. At the other extreme we have the antipsychopaths: elite spiritual athletes like Tibetan Buddhist monks, who, through years of black-belt meditation in remote Himalayan monasteries, feel nothing but compassion. In fact, the latest research from the field of cognitive neuroscience suggests that the spectrum might be circular … that across the neural dateline of sanity and madness, the psychopaths and antipsychopaths sit within touching distance of each other. So near and yet so far.

From secluded neural datelines, we’ll shift our focus to cognitive archaeology, and having sketched out the coordinates of modern-day psychopathy, we’ll go in search of its origins. Using the instruments of game theory and cutting-edge evolutionary psychology, we will reconstruct the conditions, deep in our ancestral past, under which psychopaths might have evolved. And we’ll explore the possibility—as profound as it is disturbing—that in twenty-first-century society they’re continuing to evolve, and that the disorder is becoming adaptive.

We’ll consider, in depth, the advantages of being a psychopath—or rather, in some situations at least, having those dials turned up a little higher than normal. We’ll look at the fearlessness. The ruthlessness. The “presence” (psychopaths tend to blink just a little bit less
than the rest of us, a physiological aberration that often helps give them their unnerving, hypnotic air).
²
Devastating, dazzling, and super-confident are the epithets that one often hears about them. Not, as one might expect, from themselves. But from their victims! The irony is plain as day. Psychopaths appear, through some Darwinian practical joke, to possess the very personality characteristics that many of us would die for. Indeed, that many
have
died for—the reason, of course, why our old friend Fabrizio Rossi had trouble believing that anything good could possibly come out of the crawl space.

We’ll go behind the scenes of one of the most feted psychopath units in the world and get a psychopath’s take on the problems, dilemmas, and challenges that each of us faces during the course of everyday life. We’ll catch up with the neuroscientist and psychopath hunter Kent Kiehl as he trawls an eighteen-wheel truck, housing a custom-built fMRI scanner, around America’s state penitentiaries.

And in a groundbreaking, one-off experiment, I finally undergo a “psychopath makeover” myself as a world-renowned expert in transcranial magnetic stimulation simulates, with the aid of some remote, noninvasive neurosurgery, a psychopathic brain state inside my own head (it’s worn off).

As
The Wisdom of Psychopaths
unfolds, the truth, like a remorseless predator itself, slowly begins to close in. Sure, these guys might sting us. But they might also save our lives. Either way, they certainly have something to teach us.

There’s a story making the rounds on the Internet, and it goes like this. While attending her mother’s funeral, a woman meets a man she’s never seen before. She thinks he’s incredible. She believes him to be her soul mate and falls for him instantly. But she never asks for his number, and when the funeral is over, cannot track him down. A few days later she kills her sister. Why?

Take a little time before you answer. Apparently, this simple test can determine whether or not you think like a psychopath. What motive could the woman possibly have for taking her sister’s life? Jealousy? She subsequently finds her sister in bed with the man? Revenge? Both plausible. But wrong. The answer, assuming you think like a psychopath, is this: because she was hoping the man would turn up again at her sister’s funeral.

If this was the solution that you came up with … don’t panic. Actually, I lied. Of course it doesn’t mean you think like a psychopath. Like a great many things you stumble upon on the Internet, this tale contains about as much truth as Bernie Madoff’s profit-and-loss account. Sure, on the face of it, the woman’s strategy is certainly psychopathic, there’s no disputing that: cold, ruthless, emotionless, and myopically self-interested. But unfortunately, there’s a problem. When I gave this test to some real psychopaths—rapists, murderers, pedophiles, and armed robbers—who’d been properly diagnosed using standardized clinical procedures, guess what happened? Not one of them came up with the “follow-up funeral” motive. Instead, nearly all of them came up with the “romantic rivalry” rationale.

“I might be nuts,” one of them commented. “But I’m certainly not stupid.”

Scott Lilienfeld is professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, and one of the world’s leading experts on psychopaths—or, as he puts it, successful psychopaths: those more likely to make a killing on the stock market than down some dark, trash-can-strewn alley. As we tuck into alligator tacos in a deep-fried Southern diner just a mile or two from his office, I ask him about the funeral conundrum. What’s going on here? What is it about this kind of stuff that gets us so excited? The question hits a nerve.

“I think the appeal of items like this lies in their cleanliness,” he says. “There’s something reassuring in the idea that by asking just the one question we can somehow unmask the psychopaths in our midst and be able to protect ourselves from them. Unfortunately, however, it just ain’t that simple. Sure, we can work out who they are. But it takes more than just the one question. It takes quite a few of them.”

He’s right. “Silver bullet” questions, which through some fiendish sleight of mind can somehow reveal our true psychological colors, just don’t exist in the real world. Personality is far too complex a construct to give up its secrets purely on the basis of a one-off, one-shot parlor game. In fact, experts in the field have risen to the task of firing quite a few bullets down the years. And it’s only relatively recently that they’ve thought about calling a truce.

Personality has a long history—or rather, measuring it does. It began in ancient Greece, with Hippocrates (460–377 B.C.), the father of Western medicine. Drawing on the wisdom of earlier traditions still (the celestial calculus of Babylonian astrology, for example) that had ghosted across the Levant from the sages of ancient Egypt and the mystics of Mesopotamia, Hippocrates discerned four distinct temperaments in the canon of human emotions: sanguine, choleric, melancholic, and phlegmatic (see
figure 2.1
).