The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success

My father also had an uncanny knack for getting exactly what he wanted, often with just a casual throwaway line or a single telling gesture. ... [He had] the ideal personality for modern living. I never once saw him panic. Never once saw him lose his cool. Never once saw him get hot under the collar about anything.

[Fear played a significant part in human evolution] But millions of years on, in a world where wild animals aren't lurking around every street corner, this fear system can be oversensitive -- like a nervous driver with a foot hovering constantly over the brake pedal -- reacting to dangers that don't actually exist and pushing us into making illogical, irrational decisions.

[All emotions serve a purpose] Even depression has its advantages. Recent research suggests that despondency helps us think better -- and contributes to increased attentiveness and enhanced problem-solving ability.... The results couldn't have been clearer: shoppers in the "low mood" condition remembered nearly four times as many of the knickknacks. ... The rain made them sad, and their sadness made them pay more attention.

To a psychopath, you see, there are no such things as clouds. There are only silver linings.

I've also met psychopaths who, far from devouring society from within, serve, through nerveless poise and hard-as-nails decision making, to protect and enrich it instead: surgeons, soldiers, spies, entrepreneurs -- dare I say, even lawyers. "Don't get too cocky.

If there's one thing that psychopaths have in common, it's the consummate ability to pass themselves off as normal everyday folk, while behind the facade -- the brutal, brilliant disguise -- beats the refrigerated heart of a ruthless, glacial predator. ... A theory I have about psychopaths: that one of the reasons we're so fascinated by them is because we're fascinated by illusions, by things that appear, on the surface, to be normal, yet that on closer examination turn out to be anything but.

Psychopaths, as we shall discover, have a variety of attributes -- personal magnetism and a genius for disguise being just the starter pack -- which, once you learn to harness them and keep them in check often confer considerable advantages not just in the workplace, but in everyday life.

215 In normal members of the population, theta waves are associated with drowsy, meditative, or sleeping states. Yet in psychopaths they occur during normal waking states -- even sometimes during states of increased arousal… "Language for psychopaths, is only word deep. There's no emotional contouring behind it. A psychopath may say something like, 'I love you" but in reality, it means about as much to him as if he said "I'll have a cup of coffee' ... This is one of the reasons why psychopaths remain so cool, calm, and collected under conditions of extreme danger, and why they are so reward-driven and take risks. Their brains, quite literally, are less 'switched on' than the rest of ours."

272 Jim Kouri, vice president of the U.S. National Association of Chiefs of Police, makes a similar point. Traits that are common among psychopathic serial killers, Kouri observes -- a grandiose sense of self-worth, persuasiveness, superficial charm, ruthlessness, lack of remorse, and the manipulation of others -- are also shared by politicians and world leaders: individuals running not from the police, but for office. ... Psychopaths are fearless, confident, charismatic, ruthless, and focused. Yet contrary to popular belief, they are not necessarily violent.

305 Just as there's no official dividing line between someone who plays recreational golf on the weekends and, say, Tiger Woods, so the boundary between a world-class, "hole-in-one" superpsychopath and one who merely "psychopathizes" is similarly blurred. Think of psychopathic traits as the dials and sliders on a studio mixing desk. If you push all of them to max, you'll have a sound track that's no use to anyone. But if the sound track is graded and some controls are turned up higher than others -- such as fearlessness, focus, lack of empathy, and mental toughness, for example -- you may well have a surgeon who's a cut above the rest.

Sure, psychopaths may well be deficient in the former variety, the touchy-feely type. But when it comes to the latter commodity, the kind that codes for "understanding" rather than "feeling"; the kind that enables abstract, nerveless prediction, as opposed to personal identification; the kind that relies on symbolic processing instead of affective symbiosis -- the cognitive skill set possessed by expert hunters and cold readers, not just in the natural environment, but in the human arena, too -- then psychopaths are in a league of their own.

They fly even better on one empathy engine than on two -- which is, of course, just one of the reasons why they make such good persuaders. If you know where the buttons are and don't feel the heat when you push them, then chances are you're going to hit the jackpot.

Their analysis revealed that a number of psychopathic attributes were actually more common in business leaders than in so-called disturbed criminals -- attributes such as superficial charm, egocentricity, persuasiveness, lack of empathy, independence, and focus -- and that the main difference between the groups was in the more "antisocial" aspects of the syndrome: the criminals' lawbreaking, physical aggression, and impulsivity dials (to return to our analogy of earlier) were cranked up higher.

"Intellectual ability on its own is just an elegant way of finishing second," one successful CEO told me. "Remember, they don't call it a greasy pole for nothing. The road to the top is hard. But it's easier to climb if you lever yourself up on others. Easier still if they think something's in it for them." ... determination, curiosity, and insensitivity as his three most valuable character traits. ... "The great thing about insensitivity," explains Moulton, "is that it lets you sleep when others can't."

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.

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).*

705 Openness to Experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism -- think OCEAN -- comprise the genome of human personality. ... lying, manipulation, callousness, and arrogance are pretty much considered the gold standard of psychopathic traits by most clinicians. ... Neuroticism: Anxiety, Depression, Self-Consciousness and Vulnerability barely show up on the radar, which, when combined with strong outputs on Extraversion (Assertiveness and Excitement Seeking) and Openness to Experience (Actions), generates that air of raw, elemental charisma. ... Dazzling and remorseless on the one hand. Glacial and unpredictable on the other.

771 DSM classifies personality disorders into three distinct clusters.* There's odd/eccentric, dramatic/erratic, and anxious/inhibited.

797 The philosopher Theophrastus (c. 371– 287 B.C.), the successor to Aristotle as head of the Peripatetic school in Athens, delineates, in his book The Characters, "The Unscrupulous Man," Theophrastus laments, "will go and borrow more money from a creditor he has never paid… When marketing he reminds the butcher of some service he has rendered him, and, standing near the scales, throws in some meat, if he can, and a soupbone. If he succeeds, so much the better; if not, he will snatch a piece of tripe and go off laughing."

820 the Medical College of Georgia, the American physician Hervey Cleckley provides a more detailed inventory of la folie raisonnante. In his book The Mask of Sanity, published in 1941, Cleckley assembles the following somewhat eclectic identikit of the psychopath. ... an intelligent person, characterized by a poverty of emotions, the absence of a sense of shame, egocentricity, superficial charm, lack of guilt, lack of anxiety, immunity to punishment, unpredictability, irresponsibility, manipulativeness, and a transient interpersonal lifestyle --

The psychopath, it's been said, gets the words, but not the music, of emotion.

The psychopath's powers of persuasion are incomparable; their psychological safecracking abilities, legendary.

Not all psychopaths are behind bars. The majority, it emerges, are out there in the workplace. And some of them, in fact, are doing rather well.

The ability to delay gratification, to put on hold the desire to cut and run (and also, needless to say, to run and cut), might well tip the balance away from criminal activity toward a more structured, less impulsive, less antisocial lifestyle.

It's perfectly possible to be a psychopath and not a criminal.

Eight independent satellite states of the psychopathic personality --Machiavellian Egocentricity (ME); Impulsive Nonconformity (IN); Blame Externalization (BE); Carefree Nonplanfulness (CN); Fearlessness (F); Social Potency (SOP); Stress Immunity (STI); and Coldheartedness (C) --divide and re-form along three superordinate axes …

Yet we know that people with psychopathic traits function perfectly well on the 'outside' -- and that some of them are extremely successful. Ruthlessness, mental toughness, charisma, focus, persuasiveness, and coolness under pressure are qualities, so to speak, that separate the men from the boys, pretty much across the board.

"The combination of low risk aversion and lack of guilt or remorse, the two central pillars of psychopathy," he elucidates, "may lead, depending on circumstances, to a successful career in either crime or business. Sometimes both. "They don't feel distress or notice such emotion in others, because when they focus on a task that promises immediate reward, they screen everything "irrelevant" out. They get emotional "tunnel vision." ... "People think [psychopaths] are just callous and without fear," But when focused on something else, they become insensitive to emotions entirely."

Vladas Griskevicius, then at Arizona State University, and his coworkers found that when users of an Internet chat room are made to feel under threat, they show signs of "sticking together." Their views display convergence, and they become more likely to conform to the attitudes and opinions of others in the forum. ... In 1952, the sociologist William H. Whyte coined the term "groupthink" to conceptualize the mechanism by which tightly knit groups, cut off from outside influence, rapidly converge on normatively "correct" positions, becoming, as they do so, institutionally impervious to criticism: ... So is the capacity to stand alone, to play by one's own rules outside the normative safe haven of society, also hardwired? There's evidence to suggest that it is -- and that a fearless, untroubled minority has evolved within our midst.

psychopaths, show greater willingness to accept unfair offers, favoring simple economic utility over the exigencies of punishment and ego preservation, they are much less bothered by inequity. ... Psychopaths were far less fazed than controls when screwed by their opposite numbers -- and at the conclusion of the study, had more in the bank to show for it. A thicker skin had earned them thicker wallets.

As the primatologist Frans de Waal points out, "Instead of dominants standing out because of what they take, they affirm their position by what they give." ... Of equal note are those primates who vie with one another for status through "public service" or "leadership" -- by facilitating cooperation within the group, or, if you prefer, through charisma, persuasion, and charm. ... "Survival of the fittest" now appeared not, as had been previously thought, to reward competition indiscriminately. But rather, to reward it discerningly. Under certain sets of circumstances, yes, aggression might open doors (one thinks of Jim and Buzz). But under others, in contrast, it might just as easily close them -- as we saw with the saints and the shysters. ... The meek, it turns out, really do inherit the earth. It's just that along the way there are always going to be casualties.

If everyone floors it, there'll eventually be nobody left. But equally, there are times during the course of our everyday lives when we all need to pump the gas. When we all, rationally, legitimately, and in the interests of self-preservation, need to calmly "put our foot down."

There will always be a need for risk takers in society, as there will for rule-breakers and heartbreakers.

paper titled "Who Is James Bond? The Dark Triad as an Agentic Social Style," in which they showed that men with a specific triumvirate of personality traits -- the stratospheric self-esteem of narcissism; the fearlessness, ruthlessness, impulsivity, and thrill-seeking of psychopathy; and the deceitfulness and exploitativeness of Machiavellianism -- can actually do pretty well for themselves out there in certain echelons of society.

Hare handed out the PCL-R to more than two hundred top U.S. business executives, .... Not only did the business execs come out ahead, but psychopathy was positively associated with in-house ratings of charisma and presentation style: creativity, good strategic thinking, and excellent communication skills. .... "Without doubt, there's a greater proportion of psychopathic big hitters in the corporate world than there is in the general population. .... There are positions in society, jobs and roles to fulfill, which, by their competitive, cutthroat, or chillingly coercive natures, require access to office space in precisely the kind of psychological real estate that psychopaths have the keys to, ... You get them to open up. Usually by telling them something about yourself first -- a good grifter always has a narrative. .... "Then you can get to work -- not right away, you need to be patient. But a month or two later. You modify whatever it is, whatever the hell they've told you -- you tend to know instantly where the pressure points are -- and then tell the story back as if it were your own. Bam! From that point on, you can pretty much take what you want. "I'll give you an example… [One guy is] rich, successful, works like a dog… When he's a kid, he comes home from school to find his record collection gone. His pop's a bum and has sold it to stock up his liquor cabinet. He's been collecting these records for years. "So wait, I think. You're telling me this after, what, three or four hours in a bar? There's something going down. Then I get it. So that's why you work so goddamned hard, I think. It's because of your pappy. ... You're scared. You're life's been on hold all these years. You're not a CEO. You're that scared little kid. The one who's going to come home from school one day and find your record collection is history. "Jesus, I think! That's hilarious! So guess what? A couple of weeks later I tell him what happened to me. How I get home from work one night and find my wife in bed with the boss. How she files for divorce. And cleans me out." Morant pauses, and pours us some more champagne. "Total bullshit!" he laughs. "But you know what? I did that guy a favor. Put him out of his misery. What do they say -- the best way to overcome your fears is to confront them? Well, someone had to be Daddy." Morant's

Research shows that one of the best ways of getting people to tell you about themselves is to tell them something about yourself. ... Self-disclosure meets reciprocity. ... if you want to stop someone from remembering something, the key is to use distraction.

Psychopathy does indeed predict criminal success. That said, there's a limit. A very high dose of psychopathy (all the dials turned up to max) is as bad as a very low one. Instead, it's moderate levels that code for greater "accomplishment."

Psychopaths were far more convincing at feigning sadness when presented with a happy image, or happiness when looking at a sad image, than were non-psychopaths. ... If you can fake sincerity, as someone once said… well, you really have got it made, it would seem. ... Psychopaths, in other words, not only have a natural talent for duplicity, but also feel the "moral pinch" considerably less than the rest of us. ... The evidence is pretty clear. If the psychopath can "make" out of a situation, if there's any kind of reward on offer, they go for it, irrespective of risk or possible negative consequences. ... Not only do they keep their composure in the presence of threat or adversity, they become, in the shadow of such presentiment, laser-like in their ability to "do whatever it takes." ... 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."

The psychopath seeks reward at any cost, flouting consequence and elbowing risk aside. ... Psychopaths not only have the capacity to recognize emotions -- they are, in fact, actually better at it than we are. ... psychopaths, rather than having an impairment in recognizing the emotions of others, indeed have a talent for it. ... Psychopaths' enhanced ability to recognize emotion in others might go some way toward explaining their superior persuasion and manipulation skills --

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. ... Functional psychopathy is context dependent. That, in the language of personality theory, it is "state" as opposed to "trait." ... In the right set of circumstances, it can enhance rather than encumber the speed and quality of decision making. ... "Both extremely high and extremely low levels of psychopathy may be maladaptive, with intermediate levels being most adaptive.

A new breed of individual with little or no conception of social norms, no respect for the feelings of others, and scant regard for the consequences of their actions? ... College students' self-reported empathy levels (as measured by the Interpersonal Reactivity Index*) have actually been in steady decline over the previous three decades -- since the inauguration of the scale, in fact, back in 1979 -- and that a particularly pronounced slump has, it turns out, been observed over the past ten years. ... Students' self-reported narcissism levels have, in contrast, gone in the other direction. They've shot through the roof.

The amygdala, as we've learned previously in this book, is the brain's emotion control tower. It polices our emotional airspace and is responsible for the way we feel about things. ... in psychopaths, the part that corresponds to fear, is empty. ... But mental toughness isn't the only characteristic that Special Forces soldiers have in common with psychopaths. There's also fearlessness. ... When you're in a hostile situation, the primary objective is to pull the trigger before the other guy pulls the trigger. And when you pull it, you move on. Simple as that. Why stand there, dwelling on what you've done? Go down that route and chances are the last thing that goes through your head will be a bullet from an M16. ... It's about not feeling hot in the first place. ... Your reactions become automatic. You use your judgment, yes. But even that's a product of the training. ... In any kind of crisis, the most effective individuals are often those who stay calm -- who are able to respond to the exigencies of the moment while at the same time maintaining the requisite degree of detachment.

Sentiment is a chemical aberration found on the losing side.

"The problem with a lot of people is that what they think is a virtue is actually a vice in disguise. It's much easier to convince yourself that you're reasonable and civilized than soft and weak, isn't it?" ... ruthlessness need not be conspicuous. ... the more creative the ruthlessness narrative, the greater your chances of pulling it off with impunity.

charm: "the ability to roll out a red carpet for those you cannot stand in order to fast-track them, as smoothly and efficiently as possible, in the direction you want them to go."

They get too caught up in the heat of the moment and temporarily go off track. At that point, the dynamic changes. That's when things become not just about getting what you want. But about being seen to get what you want. ... the temptation to not just get what you want, but to be seen to get what you want.

"But it's not just about functionality, though, is it?" he demurs. "The thing about fear, or the way I understand fear, I suppose -- because, to be honest, I don't think I've ever really felt it -- is that most of the time it's completely unwarranted anyway. What is it they say? Ninety-nine percent of the things people worry about never happen. So what's the point? ... "I think the problem is that people spend so much time worrying about what might happen, what might go wrong, that they completely lose sight of the present. They completely overlook the fact that, actually, right now, everything's perfectly fine. .... What freaked you out was your imagination. ... "So the trick, whenever possible, I propose, is to stop your brain from running on ahead of you. Keep doing that and, sooner or later, you'll kick the courage habit, too." "Next time you're in a situation where you're scared, just think: 'Imagine I didn't feel this way. What would I do then?' And then just do it anyway." ... "' Now, if you can bring yourself round to somehow accepting that fact; to dispassionately observe your inner virtual reality; to let the clouds float by, to let their shadows fall and linger where they please, and focus, instead, on what's going on around you -- each pixelated second of each ambient sound and sensation -- then eventually, over time, your condition should begin to improve.'"

Studies, for instance, of cognitive and emotional focus in the context of dysfunctional decision making have shown that whenever we evaluate common, everyday behaviors -- things like diving into a swimming pool, or picking up the phone and delivering bad news -- the imagined, potential reality is significantly more discomfiting than the real one.

From victim to victor, but without turning us into a villain:

Ruthlessness
Charm
Focus
Mental toughness
Fearlessness
Mindfulness
Action

Certain situations would inevitably call for more of some traits than others, while within those sets of circumstance, some sub-situations, going back to our trusty mixing desk analogy, would plausibly demand higher or lower output levels of whichever traits were selected. ... It wasn't about being a psychopath. It was rather about being a method psychopath. About being able to step into character when the situation demanded

Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!" --HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Psychopaths, contended Harrington, constitute a dangerous new breed of Homo sapiens: a made-to-measure Darwinian contingency plan for the cold, hard exigencies of modern-day survival. An indomitable Generation

Two thousand years ago, a certain Saul of Tarsus sanctioned the deaths of countless numbers of Christians following the public execution of their leader -- and could today, under the dictates of the Geneva Convention, have been indicted on charges of genocide. We all know what happened to him. A dazzling conversion as he journeyed on the road to Damascus* transformed him, quite literally overnight, from a murderous, remorseless tentmaker into one of the most important figures in the history of the Western world. Saint Paul, as he's more commonly referred to today, is the author of just over half of the entire New Testament (fourteen of the twenty-seven books that comprise the corpus are attributed to him); is the hero of another, the Acts of the Apostles; and is the subject of some of the best stained glass in the business. ... "To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law (not being outside the law of God but under the law of Christ) that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people" (1 Corinthians 9: 20– 22).

"There is a lot of evidence [to suggest] that the best sportsmen and women have [developed] psychological skills that allow them to concentrate and to control anxiety," ... "The mind is deliberately kept at the level of bare attention, a detached observation of what is happening within us and around us in the present moment. In the practice of right mindfulness the mind is trained to remain in the present, open, quiet, and alert, contemplating the present event. ... All judgments and interpretations have to be suspended, or if they occur, just registered and dropped."

"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities," elucidated Shunryu Suzuki, one of the most celebrated Buddhist teachers of recent times. "In the expert's mind there are few."

Psychopaths, it appears, far from being callous and unemotional all the time, can actually, in the right kind of context, be more altruistic than the rest of us. ... When it really mattered, they were significantly more likely to step up to the plate than were their (supposedly, at least) warmer, more empathic counterparts.

On the one hand, though exemplifying a prosocial lifestyle, hero populations are tough. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the level of trauma and risk such occupations entail, they show a greater preponderance of psychopathic traits associated with the Fearless Dominance and Coldheartedness subscales of the PPI (e.g., low anxiety, social dominance, and stress immunity), compared with the general population at large. These dials are turned up higher. On the other hand, however, they part company with criminal psychopaths in their relative absence of traits related to the Self-Centered Impulsivity subscale (e.g., Machiavellianism, narcissism, carefree nonplanfulness, and antisocial behavior). These dials are turned down lower.

"The decision to act heroically is a choice that many of us will be called upon to make at some point in our lives," Zimbardo tells me. "It means not being afraid of what others might think. It means not being afraid of the fallout for ourselves. ... Certain degree of cognitive empathy, a modicum of 'theory of mind,' is an essential requirement for the sadistic serial killer. ... "So the bottom line, strange though it may seem, is this. Sadistic serial killers feel their victims' pain in exactly the same way that you or I might feel it. They feel it cognitively and objectively. And they feel it emotionally and subjectively, too. But the difference between them and us is that they commute that pain to their own subjective pleasure.