It’s a tricky word. Being a psychopath is not something that ordinary people aspire to, but neither does it have to involve face-eating cannibalism (Hannibal Lecter probably wasn’t a psychopath at all). The central qualification is to show no conscience; to fail to empathise.

Fastow, Rigas and the other stars of the great corporate meltdown showed little sign of conscience before — or since — being accused by the lumbering US court system, and they share other symptoms of psychopathy. They radiated charisma and authority, but hid much about themselves and their organisations. They revelled in risk, took no account of its potential cost to others or themselves, and rose to power during a time of chaos and upheaval.

When their worlds imploded, the markets staggered in disbelief. Hundreds of thousands of employees and investors lost pensions, savings and money they could ill-afford to have gambled. The bosses expressed scant regret and most of them continue to insist that they have done nothing wrong. Meanwhile, regulators, FBI agents and forensic psychologists, not to mention the fleeced American middle class, continue to scratch their heads and wonder how these apparent shysters got to where they did.

A diffident-sounding Canadian academic with a trim grey beard has an answer; possibly the answer. He first voiced it publicly to an audience of Canadian police officers in Newfoundland in August. At the end of a talk on organised crime, Dr Robert Hare mentioned his belief that some of the year’s worst accounting scandals could have been avoided if all chief executives were screened for psychopathic tendencies. He was quoted everywhere, not so much because of the sensational implication that some of America’s best-known companies had been run for most of the 1990s by people with a major mental disorder, as because of who he is.

Hare defined psychopathy for modern scientists with an exhaustive questionnaire, sold only to clinicians, called the Psychopathy Checklist, or PCL-R. It was introduced in 1980 and has become an internationally recognised instrument for identifying psychopaths. It means that when a subject scores 30 (out of a possible 40) in a prison in Dundee, an expert in Detroit will have a good idea of his proclivities. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the PCL-R revealed that psychopaths are everywhere. Most are non-violent, but all leave a trail of havoc through their families and work environments, using and abusing colleagues and loved ones, endlessly manipulating others, constantly reinventing themselves. Hare puts the average North American incidence of psychopathy at 1 per cent of the population, but the damage they inflict on society is out of all proportion to their numbers, not least because they gravitate to high-profile professions that offer the promise of control over others, such as law, politics, business management ... and journalism.

By the Hare definition there are 300,000 in Canada alone. There are at least as many in Britain— easily enough for you to know one; indeed, enough for you (3,500 of The Times’ 700,000 buyers) to be one.

Despite this, spotting psychopaths is hard, though it may be about to get easier. Next year Hare and a New York-based colleague, Dr Paul Babiak, will publish a book called Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work, that will at least alert the average office worker to the possibility that her amusing but exasperating — and, frankly, narcissistic and untrustworthy — colleague may be clinically psychopathic. Hare and Babiak will also produce a new diagnostic tool based on the PCL-R but designed to help businesses to keep their recruits and senior management psychopath-free.

Enter the B-Scan. It won’t be available to everyone, and it won’t be free. Slightly jarringly, one is reminded that its authors are businessmen as well as academics. But they insist that it will do a better job of raising warning flags than traditional screening techniques such as CVs (routinely falsified and seldom checked) and interviews and role-playing (“Psychopaths love this stuff,” Hare says. “It’s like a game to them.”).

If you are B-Scanned, it won’t be you answering the questions. It will be your colleagues, grading your personal style, interpersonal relations, organisational maturity and antisocial tendencies according to 16 buzz words, none of them uplifting. They include the following: insincere, arrogant, insensitive, remorseless, shallow, impatient, erratic, unreliable, unfocused, parasitic, dramatic, unethical and bullying.

Yikes. Who isn’t most of these things, at least some of the time?

I meet Dr Hare in a London hotel and find him used to such anxieties. “I know, I know,” he says. “People read this stuff and suddenly everyone around them is a psychopath. They pick up on three or four of the characteristics and say ‘yeah, he’s one’. But it’s not like that. It’s a medical syndrome. You’ve got to have the whole package.”

And when you do, what does it look like? Hare gives an example, and not just any example. He first gave it to Nicole Kidman in a private meeting requested by her to help her prepare for her memorably chilly role in Malice.