“I gave her a scene,” he says. “You’re walking down the street and there’s been an accident. A child has been hit by a car and is lying on the ground. There’s a crowd around him. The mother’s kneeling down there crying and emoting. You’re curious but not appalled. You look at the child momentarily and then you look at the mother. You walk towards her, step in some blood and then study the mother’s facial expressions for a minute or two. Then you walk back to your apartment or hotel room, walk into the bathroom and stand in front of the mirror practising those expressions. I said, ‘If you did that, people would see that you don’t understand emotion, you have no idea at all, you’re a colour-blind person trying to explain colour’. They didn’t use the scene, but they could have.”
In the workplace such a person might resemble “Dave”, a real individual studied by Babiak who cut a swath of disruption through a highly profitable American electronics company in the mid-1990s. Dave was good-looking, wellspoken and impressive in the interview that led to his recruitment. He was also a skilled and shameless liar, rude to subordinates, scheming towards his boss and quickly friendly with the firm’s top management. Already on his third marriage by his mid-thirties, he was shorttempered, happy to ignore assignments that he felt were beneath him, and quick to change the subject if challenged on a lie or asked to produce some real evidence of work.
When his boss summoned the courage and evidence to make a complaint to the company president, he found that Dave had got there first and secured for himself the status of “high-potential employee”.
The boss ended up sidelined. Dave ended up promoted, swaggering and “in love with himself”. He scored 19 on the PCL-R, lower than you would expect for a psychopathic murderer but much higher than your average working non-psychopath. He or she would score a 5 at most.
People such as Dave can be spotted early. Babiak recommends checking CVs exhaustively and auditing expenses — psychopaths like to indulge. It all seems obvious, but for the past 10 or 12 years, for most of corporate America, it hasn’t been. These have been tumultuous years in the world of business, with dot-coms booming and collapsing, older firms merging or shrinking to catch up, and hierarchies everywhere flattening faster than the boss can say: “Hey, c’mon in, my door is always open.” In short, it has been a high old time for psychopaths.
“When you see what has happened with Enron and WorldCom and all these other big corporations, and you ask how the hell could this guy get in that position, well, there are answers,” Hare says. “When the structure’s not there, when charisma is extremely important and style wins over substance, and one person ends up with three or four hundred million pounds in an offshore bank account, I start to get suspicious. And when the whole thing breaks and people are losing their pensions and livelihoods, these people give nothing back.
“Many of the high-level executives now being charged knew exactly what they were doing. They had no concern for anybody else, and you have to say they aren’t warm, loving guys.”
Likewise in politics. “Think what happened in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. The old rules went by the board. Structure vanished and all the ethnic tension that had been held in check by central government began to emerge. It was the perfect set-up for an opportunist, a thug or a psychopath to enter and take over.”
That takeover usually has three stages. First, the psychopath identifies those who can help him and cultivates them with all his considerable charm. Then he pinpoints those who can harm him and outflanks them or stabs them in the back. Finally he makes a sycophantic but ultimately devastating beeline towards the source of power (one thinks of Hitler and Hindenburg, but also of the irrepressible Eve Harrington in All About Eve).
Psychopaths necessarily have victims, and Hare’s drive to expose the “subcriminal” ones in our midst is at least partly personal. He speaks of an old college friend, now gravely ill, who lost $500,000 in a mortgage scam to a white-collar crook who got off with a $100,000 fine and a six-month trading ban. Society still labels such people rogues at worst. Hare calls them natural- born predators.
There is a difficulty approaching all this from outside academe: it can seem as if the experts are using jargon to force a thousand shades of grey — for there are surely at least that many degrees of psychopathy — into convenient boxes for personnel managers, employment tribunals and courts.
Babiak certainly counsels caution. Being psychopathic is not a sin, let alone a ground on its own for dismissal. But underpinning the PCL-R is hard science, hard to ignore. Before he published it, Hare performed two now-famous studies which suggest that psychopaths really are different from the rest of us. In the first, subjects were told to watch a timer counting down to zero, at which point they felt a harmless but painful electric shock. Non-psychopaths showed mounting anxiety and fear. Psychopaths didn’t even sweat.
In the second, the two groups had their brain activity and response time measured when asked to react to groups of letters, some forming words, some not. Words such as “rape” and “cancer” triggered mental jolts in nonpsychopaths. In psychopaths they triggered precisely nothing.
That research is decades old now. The man behind it, instead of retiring, tours the world helping to nail the psychopaths among us and trying to make sure that his instruments are not misused. Part of his mission is to stay serious. He won’t appear on Oprah, and he won’t name names. Instead, when he sees someone in the news he thinks might be a psychopath, he says: “I’d sure as hell like to study this guy.”
“Have you heard of Jeffrey Archer?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Is he a psychopath?”
“No comment. But it would be interesting to take a closer look.”
