Murderous Minds (6 page)

If you hope to come away with useful insights by studying human beings, you have to know what kind of human beings you are studying. We have already seen that similar violent actions do not reflect the functioning of similar brains. You have to know who you have invited into your laboratory and who you have slid into your brain-imaging machine as you watch their brains in action. It’s important to know their background, gender, age, weight, medical history, ethnicity, and drinking and drug use habits, for a start, because many factors can influence behavior, behavioral responses, and even the structure of the brain. And it is most important that you have a way to identify who is a psychopath and who is not. You have to know, as best as you can determine, where on the spectrum of psychopathy the person you are studying lies.

Chapter Two

Kunlangeta, Psychopaths, and Sociopaths: Does the Label Matter?

“… the definition of psychopathy itself—what it is, what

it is not—is one of the most fundamental questions for

psychological science.”

—Jennifer Skeem,
et al.
¹

T
HERE IS NO RECORD OF HIS REAL NAME
, but we do know he was a Siberian Yup’ik Eskimo
²
who lived on the remote island of Seevookuk between 1940 and 1955. We’ll call him Kopanuk. An Eskimo elder who was familiar with nearly five hundred of his fellow Eskimo said Kopanuk’s behavior made him stand out.
³

Seevookuk is only about fifty miles from Siberia, so it is not surprising that one of the first Europeans to reach it was a Russian explorer. Vitus Bering stepped onto the island in 1728. He called it St. Lawrence Island, and that is how it is labeled on maps showing its location near the Bering Strait in the Bering Sea.

In isolated lands with long winters, cutting wind chill, and subzero temperatures, cooperation in traditional, self-sufficient Eskimo and Inuit
societies was valued and essential for survival. Meat was shared in Kopanuk’s day, as it is today. Laws were not codified. Instead, responses to social transgressions were adjusted by members of the tribe and, for more serious offenses by tribal leaders, to suit the individual circumstances of the offense.
⁴
The communities, ranging in population from twenty to two hundred people, depended on social pressure to guide the behavior of their members.
⁵

Kopanuk’s personality was clearly different from others in his group of self-sufficient hunters and gatherers. He didn’t seem to feel social pressure or worry about social guidelines. He knew what was expected of him as a member of a tight-knit community living in a very harsh environment, but he didn’t seem to care. Even as an adolescent, he stole, lied, and cheated. He avoided the work of fishing for salmon, a mainstay of the Yup’ik diet. He made excuses to avoid hunting the caribou, whale, seal, walrus, and polar bear that his people needed to survive. If he came across birds’ eggs, he rarely shared them, or anything else he found. When he did share, he usually wanted something in return. This was unusual behavior in the typically cooperative community, which had had limited exposure to outsiders who had little opportunity to introduce Kopanuk to a more selfish outlook. His antisocial behavior persisted into adulthood, despite all the times his peers dragged Kopanuk to stand before the elders. The elders spoke to him. They reprimanded him. They told him to make amends to those he had taken advantage of and harmed. But none of it changed his behavior for long. He always returned to being Kopanuk.

Some of the Eskimo asked their shaman if he could help, if he could influence or change Kopanuk’s behavior. But, as they feared, the shaman said he had no power to help. There was nothing he could do, because Kopanuk was not the victim of a harmful spirit, or anything else the shaman could influence. Rather, Kopanuk was a
kunlangeta
, a person whose “mind knows what to do but he does not do it.”
⁶

As in modern North America, being a
kunlangeta
among the Eskimo was not the same as being psychotic, or
nuthkavihak
in the Yup’ik language. The Yup’ik translation of
nuthkavihak
is “being crazy.”
⁷
Kopanuk, his fellow Eskimo agreed, was not
nuthkavihak,
so they didn’t think his behavior could be excused when he did things like taking advantage of women.

The traditional Eskimo and Inuit had a lenient attitude about sexual activity among adults, but Kopanuk’s behavior went too far. Avoiding another challenging hunting and fishing expedition, Kopanuk stayed behind with the women and children. When the hunters returned, they learned that Kopanuk had visited most of the Yup’ik dwellings, half a dozen or so, and had sex with most of the women.

What happened to people like Kopanuk before Eskimo and Inuit societies were transformed by Western culture, technology, and law? During the first field trip of her career in 1954–55, a young anthropologist named Jane M. Murphy visited Seevookuk to conduct a pilot study. She wanted to learn how people on the island viewed physical and mental illness.
⁸
When she asked her source, an elder, how people like Kopanuk were dealt with in traditional Yup’ik society, he told her that someone like Kopanuk probably would have been taken on a hunting trip. Then, she learned, “somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking.”
⁹
It’s possible the interviewee gave the young anthropologist a flippant answer. But in a challenging environment like Seevookuk where cooperation and sharing is essential for survival, it would not be surprising if the anthropologist got a straight answer.

If Kopanuk avoided the fateful hunting trip that may have awaited other
kunlangeta
, he would have had more time to observe Yup’ik girls play with
yaaruin
, story knives. They used them like pencils to draw in the snow or sand as they told stories. Sometimes the stories were told for fun. Sometimes they were about their families. And sometimes the stories had a moral message. It would be interesting to know if Kopanuk was ever featured in the girls’ illustrated stories, if his lack of conscience and empathy was ever explained with an image in the sand.

Traditional Eskimo experiences with, and treatments of, extremely antisocial individuals have parallels to modern North American experiences with such people. According to Murphy, who went on to become the Director of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Psychiatric Epidemiology Unit, professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, and professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, the
kunlangeta
parallel our concept of the psychopath. It’s easy to compare the Eskimo elders with our court system, and their shaman with our psychologists and
psychiatrists. A socially tolerated act like pushing a
kunlangeta
“off the ice” could be seen as a vigilante version of pushing a psychopath into the execution chamber or, for less severe crimes, pushing one into a prison cell or forensic psychiatric hospital.

People like Kopanuk turn up in cultures all over the world. Murphy reports that the Yoruba people of West Africa, whom she studied during field trips in 1961 and 1963, describe them as
arankan
.
Arankan
refers to “a person who always goes his own way regardless of others, who is uncooperative, full of malice, and bullheaded.”
¹⁰
Interestingly, Murphy reported that the Yoruba do not consider an
arankan
to be ill. Just as psychopaths are not considered insane in modern Western society and
kunlangeta
are not regarded as insane in Yup’ik Eskimo society,
arankan
are not considered insane in Yoruba society, but they are considered uniquely different.

Today, while many people would refer to Kopanuk as a psychopath, others would call him a sociopath. And there are those, particularly psychiatrists and psychologists who follow the lead of the American Psychiatric Association, who would say he suffered from antisocial personality disorder. But what exactly do those labels mean for the individuals encountering such people and the societies they live in?

No Matter What You Call It, Something Is Not Right

The labeling situation sounds confusing because it
is
confusing. Over time, the labels have accumulated. Sociopathy, psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, and dyssocial personality disorder are sometimes confused and often used synonymously. Experts and amateurs declare with conviction that a sociopath differs from, or is identical to, a psychopath who is essentially the same as, or different in significant ways from, someone with antisocial personality disorder.

Psychiatrists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have yet to agree on the nature of this disorder—or, it may be more accurate to say, on the nature of the subtypes of personalities with psychopathic traits. Until there is an agreed-upon common language to describe the spectrum of antisocial behavior identified by these different labels, it is unlikely we will be able to claim we have a good understanding of behavior included under the heading “psychopathy.” In part because we lack so much information about this
type of human behavior, academic researchers are engaged in a sometimes bitter controversy concerning the nature of psychopathy and how it should be measured and defined. It is not unusual for a researcher submitting a paper to a peer-reviewed scientific journal to ask the editor to avoid sending the manuscript to certain competing or antagonistic fellow scientists. This happens in other fields of research as well. Sometimes this request is made to prevent a competing research group from rushing their own findings into print and “scooping” their competitors. Sometimes it is made to prevent competitors from using the reported data to correct or further their own research and so gain an advantage. But another reason such requests are made can be traced to ill feelings between researchers. Competition can be vicious in scientific research. Egos can be strong. Feelings are hurt. On occasion, sending your paper for review to a competitor, someone who dislikes you or whom you may have slighted, can result in rejection or delay, no matter how good your data is. Such pettiness seems at odds with the ideals of Science, but scientific research is a career, a competitive one, which at times is heavily influenced by ambitions and emotions that in some cases would be interesting subjects for research in themselves.

There is nothing unique about the field of psychopathy research in this regard; the same thing has happened in various departments of prestigious universities around the country. The co-discoverer of the chemical structure of DNA, Nobel laureate James D. Watson, once said that scientists are not like many people think they are. In his view “a lot of us are more like Michael Douglas—slightly evil, highly competitive [in his movie roles].”
¹¹
But anyone on the receiving end of an unfair review or an inexplicably rejected grant application might wonder if it was Gordon Gekko, Douglas’s character in the movie
Wall Street
, writing the evaluation.

Woodrow Wilson observed that the ferociousness of the academic infighting he witnessed while he was president of Princeton University was related to the triviality of the issues at stake.
¹²
Over time, the quote has become a version of “academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.” Many people who have spent a few semesters among the faculty in an academic setting can relate to this sentiment. Positions at universities open up rarely, while many people in the same field are competing for a portion of a limited supply of grant money.

In the case of the controversy surrounding the definition of psychopathy, however, the stakes are by no means small. The magnitude of the problem posed by psychopathic behavior is at least as great as that posed by schizophrenia. The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that around 2.4 million American adults 18 years of age or older have schizophrenia.
¹³
That is approximately 1 in 100 people in this age group. Experts generally believe that around 1 in 100 non-institutionalized adult males 18 years and older are psychopaths, meaning there could be between 2 and 3 million psychopaths in North America alone. Approximately 1 million psychopaths are locked up, on parole, or on probation.
¹⁴
These people may be responsible for half of all serious crime.
¹⁵
Their crimes, trials, and confinement have been estimated to cost between $250 and $400 billion each year.
¹⁶
In 2002, the cost of schizophrenia in the United States was an estimated $63 billion.
¹⁷
Furthermore, one out of two serial rapists may be psychopaths.
¹⁸

Classifying someone as a psychopath, even as an adult, is a very serious step that can follow a person for life and play an important role in determining how he or she is treated by the courts. This issue clearly troubled NPR correspondent Alix Spiegel when she prepared a piece called “Can a Test Really Tell Who’s a Psychopath?” in May 2011. Her subject was Robert Dixon, a convicted felon coming up for parole.
¹⁹

Thirty years ago, a surprised Dixon asked “What happened?” when he saw the dead body of the robbery victim his accomplice had shot. Because he acted as the lookout for the robbery-turned-murder, Dixon was sentenced to 15 years to life with the possibility of parole. Coming up for parole after 26 years of confinement, Dixon agreed to be evaluated using the Psychopathy Checklist–Revised (PCL–R), which has repeatedly been called the “Gold Standard” of psychopathy measures.
²⁰
Versions of the Checklist have dominated psychopathy research since it was first developed by Canadian psychologist and psychopathy expert Dr. Robert Hare in the 1970s. Even some academics who are highly critical of this method for measuring psychopathy and how it has come to be associated with the definition of the disorder consider it “the most widely used and extensively validated measure of psychopathy.”
²¹
The PCL–R rates each of 20 antisocial behaviors and emotional and interpersonal traits on a three-point scale. The criteria range from need for
stimulation and proneness to boredom to sexual promiscuity, from glibness and superficial charm to callousness and lack of empathy.