Murderous Minds (33 page)

Some traits that characterize criminal psychopaths—extreme risk-taking, impulsiveness, callousness, conning behavior, deceitfulness, instrumental aggression, and lack of guilt, remorse, and empathy—might not seem to equip them well for thriving or surviving in some situations or environments, such as life in a law-abiding community with an efficient law-enforcement and criminal-justice system. They might, on the other hand, be very useful in other situations where an every-man-and-woman-for-themselves ethic exists, even for a limited time. In a small community where everyone interacts closely on a daily basis, psychopathy may be less tolerated. Remember what happened to Kopanuk, the alias of the real Eskimo kunlangeta or psychopath described in Chapter 2. He eventually was taken hunting and never returned. In New York City, London, Mexico City, Moscow, and other large urban areas he would likely have moved on after taking advantage of his victims and victimized again before his reputation caught up with him. Perhaps this might explain why psychopathy in Eskimo society was once informally estimated to have had an incidence of 1 in 500 instead of 1 in 100 as it is in the larger, more fluid societies of North America. It might have been spotted more easily and discouraged (sometimes by a shove off the ice) more efficiently in small, tight-knit
societies than in large, urban landscapes filled with people who don’t know each other well.

This explanation for why we have to share our world with psychopaths is related to something called evolutionary balancing theory
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or balancing selection.
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It assumes that psychopaths co-exist with non-psychopaths. They are, in a sense, waiting in the wings, prepared to take center stage if called upon. They are available to demonstrate their fitness by increasing their numbers when and if environmental conditions favor their unique antisocial behaviors.

In some end-of-the-world scenarios, psychopathic traits might be an advantage. Under the right (for them) or wrong (for the rest of us) conditions, psychopaths may survive better than those of us with a conscience. Criminal psychopaths have often been compared to, or described as, predators. Lacking the ability or inclination to empathize with other living things, criminal psychopaths may see them as prey. Lacking the emotional ability to relate to them, they may see them as objects. Under some extreme every-man and every-woman-for-themselves conditions, this outlook might come in handy despite our desire to wish it were not so. With an estimated seven billion-plus people on the planet, there are an estimated 30 million-plus psychopaths to draw from if conditions ever favor them more than the rest of us. And, of course, their numbers could fall if the environment or society ever rendered their distinguishing traits unfit for survival.

Might Willem Boerema, whom we met in Chapter 3, have been right when he told Nature magazine’s Senior European Correspondent Alison Abbott “I think my high psychopath score [35 out of 40 on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised] is a talent, not a sickness?” Since Boerema was locked up at the time, the answer is no. Under other circumstances, however, he might be right.

Some well-known dystopian novels are based on this premise. Their plots rely on the emergence, or on the established presence, of psychopathic traits in their imagined societies. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies describes the conflict between responsible, moral behavior and irresponsible, immoral behavior in a group of children isolated on an island after a plane crash. And Robert Sheckley’s satirical science fiction novel The Status Civilization,
published in 1960, describes a world populated by convicts who live in a society that rewards psychopathic behavior.

Another possibility is that psychopathy is buried, unexpressed and unsuspected, in more of us than we might like to contemplate. When conditions become right (or wrong, depending on your view) more of us develop into psychopaths when that path leads to better chances of surviving and reproducing. This is an example of what evolutionary biologists call contingent shift theory.
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In balancing theory, you are or you are not a psychopath. In contingent shift theory, some individuals may become psychopaths if they are exposed to environmental influences that bring psychopathy out. In this explanation, the environment influences and adjusts the settings on the scale of psychopathic traits in some individuals. A child born into a world that promotes or tolerates his or her abuse might be better off developing a coldhearted outlook that lasts long after the beatings end. And, as Dominic Murphy of the California Institute of Technology and Stephen Stich of Rutgers University suggested, some psychiatric and personality disorders described in the DSM “may turn out not to be disorders at all. The people who have these conditions don’t have problems; they just cause problems!”
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It is very possible that psychopaths exist because both of these evolutionary explanations apply to our species. Beat Richard Kuklinski and abuse Brian Dugan when they are children and, way to go, you have helped create a pair of rare, criminal psychopaths. Raise Eric Harris, the lead Columbine shooter, in a normal home environment beside his healthy, non-criminal sibling and, through no one’s fault, his psychopathic behavior develops on its own.

Loading Up on Mutations

We don’t know if psychopaths existed back in Cy’s time, when our species was new. We can’t even be sure if someone with Cy’s traits—lack of altruistic feelings and empathy—existed early in human evolution. The fact that our species survived strongly argues that cooperation among individuals in small groups of humans did exist. It is possible that psychopathy developed over time in our species. University of Pennsylvania researchers Andrea Glenn, Robert Kurzban, and Adrian Raine don’t think
any single evolutionary theory completely accounts for psychopathy,
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but they do consider the possibility that mutations may have played a role in its unquestionable presence today.

Mutations are permanent changes in a gene’s DNA code. We all have them, but they are not all damaging. Many are neutral. One example of a neutral mutation would be the substitution of a different amino acid in a protein’s structure that does not affect its function. For example, if the protein with a neutral mutation is an enzyme that speeds up a chemical reaction, the speed of the reaction is not affected by the substitution. Mutations that gave us baldness, blue eyes (instead of the brown that humans started out with), and freckles might be considered neutral if they don’t affect survival or reproductive success.

Highly disruptive mutations usually prevent a person from reaching reproductive age and so are never passed on. Those that have some drawbacks for a person—but not enough to prevent them from having children—may linger in the gene pool. Over time, they build up. Perhaps the neutral and not-so-bad mutations distinguish us from one another in good ways. They enlarge and deepen the gene pool. It is possible that some of these accumulating mutations affect behavior.
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If so, they could contribute to the variety of different personality types and personality disorders that enrich and trouble our species. Many small changes affecting many genes that contribute to human personality and behavior picked up over our evolutionary history could have resulted in extremely altruistic and empathetic behaviors at one end of a behavioral spectrum. They could just as well have contributed to predacious, callous, unconscionable behavior at the opposite end of the spectrum.

The poster psychopaths like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy, the ones even the experts use as examples to illustrate the extremes of criminal psychopathy, are stuck on the extreme end of the psychopathy spectrum. Criminal psychopathy may not have many apparent benefits in the long run for anyone affected by it, but promiscuous psychopaths may succeed in passing their genes to future generations. And psychopathic behavior that falls short of criminal is more and more considered to be a plus in many circles of modern society, including the business world, as we have seen.

Many people with psychopathic traits may lack a conscience, but they are not murdering people. Some of their personality traits like selfishness,
lack of emotion, confidence, fearlessness, boldness, and persuasiveness can be advantageous if they are not self-defeating. These sub-criminal psychopaths certainly make the world unfair, and they routinely roll over and frequently crush Al’s trusting descendants, but their persistence suggests they may bring something to human society. The question is: Do we want that something? Do we want winners at any cost? Do we want to be charmed and entertained even if we risk getting conned at the same time?

“Psychopaths are assertive. Psychopaths don’t procrastinate. Psychopaths tend to focus on the positive. Psychopaths don’t take things personally; they don’t beat themselves up if things go wrong, even if they’re to blame,” Oxford psychologist Kevin Dutton told Smithsonian magazine writer Amy Crawford.
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“And they’re pretty cool under pressure. Those kinds of characteristics aren’t just important in the business arena, but also in everyday life.” Dutton calls these people “functional psychopaths” in his book The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success.
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Robert Hare agrees: “Some psychopathic features are not necessarily a bad thing for society—in some professions they may even help. Too much empathy, for example, on the part of a police officer or a politician would interfere with the job.”
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The key phrase is “psychopathic features.” Having psychopathic features is not necessarily the same as being a successful psychopath. And it is certainly not the same as being an unsuccessful or criminal psychopath. No rational patient wants their surgeon crying in sympathy for their misfortune. They want an efficient, knowledgeable, skilled individual with a steady scalpel-holding hand who can cut cleanly and accurately into flesh and remove the bad parts. Is that ability a psychopathic feature? Or is it mental discipline and training? Or is it a combination?

Impressions, Speculations, and Conclusions

It is time for the public to distinguish between harmful psychopathic traits that bring significant discomfort or injury to others and traits that are reminiscent of psychopathy but that do not lead to harm. Not everyone with psychopathic features is a psychopath. Using the same word to describe someone capable of criminal behavior and someone who never threatens or harms anyone, or breaks the law, is confusing and illogical. Preliminary
hints in the scientific literature that brain abnormalities may be absent or less apparent in successful compared to unsuccessful psychopaths support this recommendation.

Referring to someone with a few psychopathic features as a psychopath is like calling a liberal a Maoist or a conservative a fascist. Having features of “boldness,” for example, which the Triarchic Model of Psychopathy defines as a connection or a series of connections linking venturesomeness, social dominance, and emotional resiliency, does not by itself make a psychopath. It is a personality feature found in psychopaths, but you can have boldness and not be a psychopath. Psychopathy is much more complex than having a few pushy or unpleasant personality traits. Being more careful with pejorative labels and making more of an effort to distinguish people with psychopathic traits from true and criminal psychopaths would go a long way to clearing up the confusion and controversy that greets anyone seeking answers in this area of abnormal psychology.

One wonders if psychiatrist Ben Karpman wasn’t on to something seventy years ago when he wrote in “The Myth of the Psychopathic Personality”: “With the larger number of psychopathic personality cases [secondary psychopaths] being properly put under the respective headings of the cardinal reaction types [various psychiatric and personality disorders], and the balance being put in a new group designated anethopathy, nothing remains of the original concept of psychopathic personality, for which reason it should be completely deleted from psychiatric nosology [disease classification]. The term may be left entirely for lay use.”
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Now, if we could just limit lay use of the term psychopath to those Karpman wanted to call anethopaths, we would be making more progress.

There is evidence to suggest the existence of distinct neurobiological differences between those who score low, medium, and high on the psychopathy checklist. Kristina Hiatt, William Schmitt, and Joseph Newman, working at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, for example, found that high-scoring psychopaths process visual clues differently from those with PCL–R scores below 28. They seem to block out distractions, as if they are blind to them, when they concentrate on a visual task.
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Controls and those with lower PCL–R scores doing the same task find that their responses are slowed by the same distractions. Findings like this raise the possibility
that psychopathy exists on a spectrum until it reaches the disturbingly high scores approaching 30, according to Kevin Dutton.
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Of course, many of us who are neither functional/successful nor dysfunctional/unsuccessful/criminal psychopaths regard them all as generally negative presences. Jerk is one description often applied to the overbearing, insensitive boss with significant functional psychopathic traits, for example. Other descriptions are apt but cruder. Despite our frequent irritation with the unfriendly and often-irritating behavior of people with above-average psychopathic traits, Dutton has a point: in the right dose, some of these traits may have survival advantages. If you can get away with cheating, you often will have an advantage over someone who does not cheat.