Why are we so fascinated by psychopaths? I have just watched the second series of Killing Eve, a story with the central character as a woman who is a psychopath even though I don’t like any blood and gore TV or movies. Are we intrigued by psychopaths because we fear that somebody you know may be one, that you may come across one or that we are scared that there are psychopathic traits lurking in us. I, for one don’t want my daughter to marry one. The business world is apparently littered with psychopaths. Every now and then a headline props up like, One in five CEOs display psychopathic tendencies and Psychopathic leaders are rife in Silicon Valley. If the image you conjure up of a psychopath is a cold-blooded killer like Ted Bundy or Hannibal Lecter, professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, Heidi Maibom writes on the Aeon website that psychopaths may be more like you and me than we care to admit. She says our reaction towards other humans in distress may not be attributed to some warm fuzzy feeling called empathy. – Linda van Tilburg
By Thulasizwe Sithole
The image of a psychopath that we all conjure up is that of a cold-blooded killer or if he/she/they does not have killing instincts; a very cold person inclined towards egotisms, often clever but heartless. But Heidi Maibom says more and more researchers are of the view that psychopaths are ill, not evil. Taking the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, she names a few of their main characteristics: selfish, glib, irresponsible, poor impulse control, anti-social from a young age and they lack empathy, guilt and remorse. They lie, steal, cheat, have no respect for other people or laws, fail to take responsibility for their actions and blame others. It is calculated that in the US, 90% of male psychopaths are in prison.
When you look at these characteristics it could be reassuring for most of us. “Psychopaths are sick, deranged, lacking in moral conscience. In other words; they are nothing like you or me.” Maibom says this is however not true. She says they do not lack the capability to tell right from wrong, “making the good decisions or experiencing empathy for other people.” And this is the chilling part: she believes that like psychopaths we can adjust our empathy. She believes that it is not a “warm and fuzzy fellow-feeling”; it is much closer to a self-preservation instinct.
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When it comes to testing psychopaths for empathy; they “fare strangely well on tests” which is not that surprising as they are prone to lying but when it comes to skin conductance tests like sweating or fear, “they show less skin conductance reactivity than do non-psychopaths.” Studies have also shown that psychopaths can emphasise, if it is related to them. “When psychopaths imagined that they were in a painful situation, they showed something very close to the typical empathic brain response – but when they imagined someone else was in that very same situation, their empathy related brain areas didn’t activate much.”
Maibom says psychopaths “aren’t total outliers”, they look a lot like ordinary people especially with regard to empathy with other people in distress. She says most people avoid the emotion that goes with seeing others in distress like when a television channel is changed not to see others in pain in a conflict or disaster; we feel helpless to really make a difference to the plight of the people.
But according to Maibom the justification for lack of engagement is not “because we can’t but because we’re unwilling to expend the time and resources that would be required. So, psychopaths might not be so aberrant in their refusal to feel for those who suffer. Perhaps they are simply at an extreme end of a spectrum on which most of us find ourselves.“
She says psychopaths force us to think about why we react to distress in others and why we avoid situations and actions and she believes it is not due to some understanding of morality as “warm, expansive and essentially other-directed… The fact that I care about what happens to you, is based on the fact that I care about what happens to me.”
