The Wisdom of Psychopaths (4 page)

To find out, Meloy asked 450 criminal justice and mental health professionals whether they’d ever experienced such odd physical reactions when interviewing a psychopathic subject: violent criminals with all the dials on the mixing desk cranked right up to max. The results left nothing to the imagination. Over three-quarters of them said that they had, with female respondents reporting a higher incidence of the phenomenon than males (84 percent compared to 71 percent), and master’s/bachelor level clinicians reporting a higher incidence than either those at doctoral level or, on the other side of the professional divide, law enforcement agents (84 percent, 78 percent, and 61 percent, respectively). Examples included “felt like I might be lunch”; “disgust … repulsion … fascination”; and “an evil essence passed through me.”

But what are we picking up on, exactly?

To answer this question, Meloy goes back in time to prehistory and the shadowy, spectral dictates of human evolution. There are a number of theories about how psychopathy might first have developed, and we’ll be looking at those a little later on. But an overarching question in the grand etiological scheme of things is from which ontological perspective the condition should actually be viewed: from a clinical standpoint, as a disorder of personality? Or from a game
theory standpoint, as a legitimate biological gambit—a life history strategy conferring significant reproductive advantages in the primeval ancestral environment?

Kent Bailey, emeritus professor in clinical psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University, argues in favor of the latter, and advances the theory that violent competition within and between proximal ancestral groups was the primary evolutionary precursor of psychopathy (or, as he puts it, the mind-set of the “warrior hawk”).

“Some degree of predatory violence,” proposes Bailey, “was required in the seek and kill aspects of hunting large game animals”—and an elite contingent of ruthless “warrior hawks” would presumably have come in handy not only for tracking and killing prey, but also for repelling invasion by similar contingents from other, neighboring groups.

The problem, of course, was how to trust them in peacetime.

Robin Dunbar, professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford University, lends support to Bailey’s claims. Going back to the time of the Norsemen, between the ninth and twelfth centuries, Dunbar has cited the berserkers as a case in point: the feted Viking warriors who, as the sagas and poems and historical records attest, appear to have fought in a brutal, trance-like fury. But dig a little deeper into the literature and a more sinister picture emerges: of a dangerous elite who could turn against members of the community they were charged to protect, committing savage acts of violence against their countrymen.

Here, proposes Meloy, lies the solution to the mystery: to the prickle at the back of the neck and the long-range evolutionary thinking behind our indwelling “psychopath radar.” For if, as Kent Bailey argues, such predatory ancestral individuals were indeed psychopathic, it would follow, from what we know of natural selection, that it wouldn’t be a one-way street. More peaceable members of both the immediate and wider communities would, in all probability, themselves evolve a mechanism, the covert neural surveillance technology, to flag and signify danger when entering their cognitive airspace—a clandestine early-warning system that would enable them to beat a retreat.

In the light of Angela Book’s work with attack victims and my own investigations into scarlet-handkerchief smuggling, such a mechanism could quite plausibly explain the gender differences revealed by Meloy’s experiment. Given psychopaths’ enhanced reputation as diabolical emotional sommeliers, their specialized nose for the inscrutable bass notes of weakness, it isn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that women, by way of a sneaky Darwinian recompense for greater physical vulnerability, exhibit more intense and more frequent reactions in their presence—as, for exactly the same reason, did the lower-status mental health workers. It’s certainly a working hypothesis. The more threatened you feel, the more at risk you are for a break-in, the more important it is to tighten up on security.

Of course, that there existed, in the penumbral days of our ancestors, ruthless, remorseless hunters brutally accomplished in the dark arts of predation is beyond doubt. But that such hunters, with their capacity to second-guess nature, were psychopaths as we know them today is a little more open to question. The stumbling block, diagnostically, is empathy.

In ancestral times, the most prolific and accomplished hunters were not, as one might expect, the most bloodthirsty and indefatigable. They were, in contrast, the most cool and empathetic. They were the ones who were able to assimilate their quarry’s mind-set—to see through the eyes of their prey and thus reliably predict its deft, innate trajectories of evasion, its routes and machinations of escape.

To understand why, one need only observe a toddler learning to walk. The gradual development of upright locomotion, of an increasingly bipedal stance, both heralded and facilitated a brand-new era of early hominid grocery shopping. A vertical stance prefigured streamlined, more efficient mobility, enabling our forebears on the African savannah to forage and hunt for considerably longer periods than quadrupedal locomotion would have allowed.

But “persistence hunting,” as it’s known in anthropology, has problems of its own. Wildebeest and antelopes can easily outsprint a human. They can vanish over the horizon. If you can accurately predict where they might eventually stop—either by looking for clues
that they’ve left behind in their flight or by reading their minds, or both—you can marginally increase your chances of survival.

So if predators demonstrate empathy, and in some cases even enhanced empathy, how can they really be psychopaths? If there’s one thing most people agree on, it’s that psychopaths exhibit a marked absence of feeling, a singular lack of understanding of others. How do we square the circle? Help is at hand in the form of cognitive neuroscience, with a bit of an assist from some fiendish moral philosophy.

Joshua Greene, a psychologist, neuroscientist, and philosopher at Harvard University, has observed how psychopaths unscramble moral dilemmas, how their brains respond inside different ethical compression chambers. As I described in my previous book,
Split-Second Persuasion
, he’s stumbled upon something interesting. Far from being uniform, empathy is schizophrenic. There are two distinct varieties: hot and cold.

Consider, for example, the following conundrum (case 1), first proposed by the philosopher Philippa Foot:

A railway trolley is hurtling down a track. In its path are five people who are trapped on the line and cannot escape. Fortunately, you can flip a switch that will divert the trolley down a fork in the track away from the five people—but at a price. There is another person trapped down that fork, and the trolley will kill them instead. Should you hit the switch?

Most of us experience little difficulty when deciding what to do in this situation. Though the prospect of flipping the switch isn’t exactly a nice one, the utilitarian option—killing just one person instead of five—represents the “least worst choice.” Right?

Now consider the following variation (case 2), proposed by the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson:

As before, a railway trolley is speeding out of control down a track
toward five people. But this time, you are standing behind a very large stranger on a footbridge above the tracks. The only way to save the five people is to heave the stranger over. He will fall to a certain death. But his considerable girth will block the trolley, saving five lives. Should you push him?

Here, you might say we’re faced with a “real” dilemma. Although the score in lives is precisely the same as in the first example (five to one), playing the game makes us a little more circumspect and jittery. But why? Greene believes he has the answer—and that it’s got to do with different climatic regions in the brain.

Case 1, he proposes, is what we might call an impersonal moral dilemma. It involves those areas of the brain, the prefrontal cortex and posterior parietal cortex (in particular, the anterior paracingulate cortex, the temporal pole, and the superior temporal sulcus), principally implicated in our objective experience of cold empathy: in reasoning and rational thought.

Case 2, on the other hand, is what we might call a personal moral dilemma. It hammers on the door of the brain’s emotion center, known as the amygdala—the circuit of hot empathy.

Just like most normal members of the population, psychopaths make pretty short work of the dilemma presented in case 1. They flip the switch, and the train branches accordingly, killing just the one person instead of five. However—and this is where the plot thickens—quite unlike normal people, they also make pretty short work of case 2. Psychopaths, without batting an eye, are perfectly happy to chuck the fat guy over the side, if that’s how the cookie crumbles.

To compound matters further, this difference in behavior is mirrored, rather distinctly, in the brain. The pattern of neural activation in both psychopaths and normal people is pretty well matched on the presentation of impersonal moral dilemmas—but dramatically diverges when things start to get a bit more personal.

Imagine that I was to pop you into an fMRI machine
¹
and then present you with the two dilemmas. What would I observe as you went about negotiating their mischievous moral minefields? Well, around the time that the nature of the dilemma crossed the border from impersonal to personal, I would see your amygdala and related brain circuits—your medial orbitofrontal cortex, for example—light up like a pinball machine. I would witness the moment, in other words, when emotion puts its money in the slot.

But in a psychopath, I would see only darkness. The cavernous neural casino would be boarded up and derelict. And the crossing from impersonal to personal would pass without any incident.

This distinction between hot and cold empathy, the kind of empathy that we “feel” when observing others, and the steely emotional calculus that allows us to gauge, coolly and dispassionately, what another person might be thinking, should be music to the ears of theorists such as Reid Meloy and Kent Bailey. Sure, psychopaths may well be deficient in the former variety, the touchy-feely type. But when it comes to the latter commodity, the kind that codes for “understanding” rather than “feeling”; the kind that enables abstract, nerveless prediction, as opposed to personal identification; the kind that relies on symbolic processing instead of affective symbiosis—the cognitive skill set possessed by expert hunters and cold readers, not just in the natural environment, but in the human arena, too—then psychopaths are in a league of their own. They fly even better on one empathy engine than on two—which is, of course, just one of the reasons why they make such good persuaders. If you know where the buttons are and don’t feel the heat when you push them, then chances are you’re going to hit the jackpot.

The empathy divide is certainly music to the ears of Robin Dunbar, who, when he’s not reading up on berserkers, can sometimes be found in the Magdalen College Senior Common Room. One afternoon, over tea and cakes in an oak-paneled alcove overlooking the cloisters, I tell him about the railway trolleys and the difference they reveal between
psychopathic and normal brain function. He’s not in the least bit surprised.

“The Vikings had a pretty good run of things back in their day,” he points out. “And the berserkers certainly didn’t do anything to dispel their reputation as a people not to be messed with. But that was their job. Their role was to be more ruthless, more cold-blooded, more savage than the average Viking soldier, because … that was exactly who they were! They
were
more ruthless, more cold-blooded, more savage than the average Viking soldier. If you’d wired up a berserker to a brain scanner and presented him with the trolley dilemma, I’m fairly certain I know what you’d have got. Exactly what you get with psychopaths. Nothing. And the fat bloke would’ve been history!”

I butter myself a scone.

“I think every society needs particular individuals to do its dirty work for it,” he continues. “Someone who isn’t afraid to make tough decisions. Ask uncomfortable questions. Put themselves on the line. And a lot of the time those individuals, by the very nature of the work that they’re tasked to do, aren’t necessarily going to be the kind of people who you’d want to sit down and have afternoon tea with. Cucumber sandwich?”

Daniel Bartels at Columbia University and David Pizarro at Cornell couldn’t agree more—and they’ve got documentary evidence to prove it. Studies have shown that approximately 90 percent of people would refuse to push the stranger off the bridge, even though they know that if they could just overcome their natural moral squeamishness, the body count would be one-fifth as high. That, of course, leaves 10 percent unaccounted for: a less morally hygienic minority who, when push quite literally comes to shove, have little or no compunction about holding another person’s life in the balance. But who is this unscrupulous minority? Who is this 10 percent?

To find out, Bartels and Pizarro presented the trolley problem to more than two hundred students, and got them to indicate on a four-point scale how much they were in favor of shoving the fat guy over the side—how “utilitarian” they were. Then, alongside the trolleyological question, the students also responded to a series of personality
items specifically designed to measure resting psychopathy levels. These included statements such as “I like to see fistfights” and “The best way to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear” (agree/disagree on a scale of one to ten).

Could the two constructs—psychopathy and utilitarianism—possibly be linked? Bartels and Pizarro wondered. The answer was a resounding yes. Their analysis revealed a significant correlation between a utilitarian approach to the trolley problem (push the fat guy off the bridge) and a predominantly psychopathic personality style. Which, as far as Robin Dunbar’s prediction goes, is pretty much on the money. But which, as far as the traditional take on utilitarianism goes, is somewhat problematic. In the grand scheme of things, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the two nineteenth-century British philosophers credited with formalizing the theory of utilitarianism, are generally thought of as good guys.