ESSAY
I’m O.K., You’re a Psychopath
By PAUL BLOOM
Published: June 17, 2011
Do psychopaths enjoy reading books about psychopaths? In his engagingly irreverent new best seller, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (Riverhead, $25.95), the journalist Jon Ronson notes that only about one in 100 people are psychopaths (there is a higher proportion in prisons and corporate boardrooms), but he wonders if this population will be overrepresented among readers of his book. After all, people do enjoy learning about themselves, and psychopaths in particular have an enhanced sense of their own importance. And they might like what Ronson has to say. He approvingly quotes experts who argue that psychopaths make “the world go around.” Despite their small numbers, they cause such chaos that they remold society — though not necessarily for the better.
Illustration by Ed Nacional
Related
Books of The Times: The Psychopath Test (May 17, 2011)
Excerpt: ‘The Science of Evil’(June 7, 2011)
Excerpt: ‘The Psychopath Test’(Google Books)
Books on Science: ‘The Science of Evil’ (June 14, 2011)
If you aren’t sure whether you are a psychopath, Ronson can help. He lists all the items on the standard diagnostic checklist, developed by the psychologist Robert Hare. You can score yourself on traits like “glibness/superficial charm,” “lack of remorse or guilt,” “promiscuous sexual behavior” and 17 other traits. As one psychologist tells Ronson, if you are bothered at the thought of scoring high, then don’t worry. You’re not a psychopath.
One of the traits on the checklist is “callous/lack of empathy.” This is the focus of another new book, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Basic Books, $25.99), by Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge psychologist best known for his research on autism. Baron-Cohen begins by telling how, at the age of 7, he learned that the Nazis turned Jews into lampshades and bars of soap, and he goes on to provide other examples of human savagery. To explain such atrocities, he offers an ambitious theory grounded in the concept of empathy, which he defines as “our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion.” For Baron-Cohen, evil is nothing more than “empathy erosion.”
Now, one might lack empathy for temporary reasons — you can be enraged or drunk, for instance — but Baron-Cohen is most interested in lack of empathy as an enduring trait. Once again, you might want to know where you stand, and Baron-Cohen ends his book with a 40-question Empathy Quotient checklist.
For Baron-Cohen, psychopaths are just one population lacking in empathy. There are also narcissists, who care only about themselves, and borderlines — individuals cursed with impulsivity, an inability to control their anger and an extreme fear of abandonment. Baron-Cohen calls these three groups “Zero-Negative” because there is “nothing positive to recommend them” and they are “unequivocally bad for the sufferer and those around them.” He provides a thoughtful discussion of the usual sad tangle of bad genes and bad environments that lead to the creation of these Zero-Negative individuals.
People with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, Baron-Cohen argues, are also empathy-deficient, though he calls them “Zero-Positive.” They differ from psychopaths and the like because they possess a special gift for systemizing; they can “set aside the temporal dimension in order to see — in stark relief — the eternal repeating patterns in nature.” This capacity, he says, can lead to special abilities in domains like music, science and art. More controversially, he suggests, this systemizing impulse provides an alternative route for the development of a moral code — a strong desire to follow the rules and ensure they are applied fairly. Such individuals can thereby be moral without empathy, “through brute logic alone.”
This is an intriguing proposal, but Baron-Cohen doesn’t fully elaborate on it, much less address certain obvious objections. For one thing, if people with autism can use logic to be good without empathy, why can’t smart psychopaths do the same? And what about the many low-functioning individuals on the autism spectrum who lack special savant gifts and don’t spontaneously create moral codes? On Baron-Cohen’s analysis, they would be Zero-Negative. But this doesn’t seem right. Such individuals might be awkward or insensitive, but they are not actively malicious; they are much more likely to be the targets of cruelty than the perpetrators.
I think there’s a better approach, one that involves breaking empathy into two parts, understanding and feeling, as Baron-Cohen himself does elsewhere in his book. Individuals with autism are unable to understand the mental lives of other people. Psychopaths, by contrast, get into others’ heads just fine; they are seducers, manipulators, con men . . . and often worse. (Ronson tells how one psychopath — “good-looking, neatly dressed,” with “a bit of a twinkle in his eye” — encountered a troubled teenager and decided to provoke the kid into attacking his family with a baseball bat, killing one person.) The problem with psychopaths lies in their lack of compassion, their willingness to destroy lives out of self-interest, malice or even boredom.
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