The Psychopath Inside Read Free Page A

Hannibal Lecter, a cannibalistic serial killer who was later reprised more famously by Anthony Hopkins in the films
The Silence of the Lambs
and
Hannibal
. Lecter is characterized by his lack of empathy, his glib and charming manipulation of people, and his utter lack of remorse for his horrid and perverse behaviors. In short, he is what many would consider a classic psychopath and would probably have scored high on Hare’s Checklist. Real-life psychopaths who resemble Lecter account for the more sensational and extreme cases—think Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, or the Son of Sam.
    But according to Hare, there is an entire other category of psychopaths out there—those who don’t score as high on the PCL-R but who still exhibit strong signs of classic psychopathic traits. These are people like the hero of
Manhunter
, the FBI profiler Will Graham, played by Petersen. Graham recognizes that he has the same urges and lack of interpersonal empathy as Lecter. Although he is not a murderer, he is, in fact, a psychopath, or at least a near-psychopath, what I like to call Psychopath Lite. He might score a 15 or 23 on the PCL-R, just under the 30-point score cutoff for full psychopathy, but other than that, you might think him completely normal. When my wife, Diane, and I saw the film in 1986, she pointed to Will and said, “That is you.” (At the time, it threw me off a bit, but I decided she was referring to how nice and deep a guy Will was.)
    Full-blown, categorical psychopaths—those who score 30 or more—make up only about 1 percent of females and 3 percent ofmales who have taken the test. But despite—or perhaps because of—its broad classification system, Hare’s scale has been hotly contested, as usually happens in a new field of medicine or science. Every scientific meeting, every casual conversation in hallways and bars among colleagues in widely divergent fields, inevitably leads to an argument over the nature of the condition.
    One critique is that the scale doesn’t take into consideration class and ethnicity. What’s normative behavior in a crime-ridden lower-class neighborhood in downtown L.A. is different from that in an upper-class neighborhood in Minnesota. There are also debates about how well it predicts violence. Märta Wallinius and collaborators at the Swedish universities of Lund, Gothenburg, and Uppsala showed in 2012 that the antisocial facet (hotheadedness, etc.) predicts violent behavior particularly well, but the interpersonal aspect (superficiality, etc.) doesn’t predict it at all. The criminal justice system is especially interested in such findings.
    Despite the controversy over whether psychopaths exist, psychiatrists generally agree that one of the defining characteristics of those we refer to as psychopaths is the lack of interpersonal empathy, what one might call a flat emotional playing field. Psychopaths may not hate, but they also may not love the way most of us would prefer to love and be loved. Psychopaths are usually manipulative, are champion liars, and can be quite glib and disarmingly charming. They don’t fear consequences the way most people do, and while they may react to the stress of being caught in a lie or violent act like anyone would, some remain cool as cucumbers. Even the most dangerous can appear jovial, carefree, andsocial at times, but sooner or later they will display a telling distance, a quiet coldheartedness and disregard for others. They are often impulsive, yet lack guilt and remorse, meaning they may invite you to join in on their reckless, even dangerous fun, and then shrug their shoulders if someone gets hurt.
    In identifying a psychopath, the Hare Checklist is a good start, but it’s not perfect. Rather than adding up twenty traits, each with a value of 0, 1, or 2, I would score them each from 0 to 5, and use a mathematical model to give each trait a different weight. Even better, each person would have