Former Steinhoff CEO, Markus Jooste is rumoured to have been asked if he was an ‘effing’ psychopath when it came to light that he had been lying for years to colleagues and close friends. DA MP, David Maynier caused a stir in Parliament when he repeated the question to Jooste who was appearing in front of a Parliamentary committee. Most of us think psychopaths are crazy killers and thankfully not like us, but Heidi Maibom, a professor of philosophy at the University of Cincinnati has researched the actions of psychopaths and says rather than outliers, they reveal important truths about human morality. In an interview with Biznews she explores the relationship between the business world and psychopathy and asks why so many people who are not psychopathic, “do the same things” in modern businesses. – Linda van Tilburg
Markus Jooste #Steinhoff ex-CEO faces a grilling in Parliament. MP David Maynier was very vocal… pic.twitter.com/N6kfD22T91
— Gerard van Niekerk (@tweetgerard) September 5, 2018
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Prof Maibom said one of the biggest puzzles of psychological tests were that psychopaths did so well on so many tests. The expectations were that psychopaths were these extraordinary outliers who had really deep deficits. That was not what she found when experiments were conducted. “So that strongly suggests that what we’re dealing with is sort of a range of smaller impairments or differences that add up.”
Maibom said the core problem with psychopaths appear to be that they had deficient fear. They displayed the same amount of fear from an open-jawed shark as normal humans did, but when confronted with pictures of people who had been maimed or attacked or were in great despair, they did not display a very big reaction. She said psychopaths were also good at focusing on one object or trajectory but not very good at paying attention to contextual information. Even when dealt an electric shock, they would continue to follow a trajectory where other people would shy away from it. Their real deficit appeared to be in defensiveness and fear.
Maibom said humans experience something like a shock when they see people in distress. “We get filled with anxiety, fear and horror… it is a very unpleasant feeling. She said most of the literature was focused on what came along with it; the compassionate warm feeling for people who were in need, not the unpleasant feeling. It was the anxiety and shock response that psychopaths lacked when seeing people in need.
She said people soothe themselves into thinking psychopaths were very different from them and said things like, “they’re so terrible, they are responsible for all the bad things that are happening and then we can feel good about ourselves because we’re not psychopaths.”
She said that when we turned a blind eye to the suffering in the world where “we could do much better than we do”; we display the same characteristics as psychopaths; we can dial down our shock response.
Maibom used the example of factoring farming, particularly in North America, which was extremely ruthless and where animals were kept in horrific conditions so that people could have cheap meat. She said people knew of these conditions; it was easy to find out about it and had been known for a long time and despite this the number of vegetarians had not risen significantly in the US. Ordinary people who loved their dogs and feed the birds; “they go down to the supermarket and buy cheap meat that had been produced under conditions of horrific distress to the animal.” She said there was cultural acceptance of it, and it extended to the business world. “It is much easier for the kind of callous unconcerned short term thinking to flourish in business because of the culture.”
Maibom said there might be a disproportionate number of psychopaths in the business world, but “we also you’ve got to ask yourself; why are there so many people who are not psychopaths who do the same things.” Part of the reason that psychopaths could flourish within the business world was because “the business world was psychopathic in a certain way.” She said it was all focused on short term prospects, doing good to the shareholders and not caring about the environmental impact. “Modern businesses are kind of psychopathic structures.”
Maibom said part of the business structure made it easier to harbour psychopaths in certain areas. “When it comes to firing people, psychopaths might be great at that… may even take pleasure in firing people.” But she said in the longer term, they were not useful. People who were upright and honest were not going to go along and be manipulated as easily. Eventually it becomes a liability to harbour psychopaths.
Maibom said she believed the incentive structure for businesses were driving the psychopathic behaviours of people high up in the business world; the drive to take companies public had increased ruthlessness. There was an exclusive concern with shareholders as opposed to employees or the environment. She quoted the example of Henry Ford in the early automobile industry in the US which used to be the opposite of present day culture. “People had good jobs… people were living in the neighbourhood… there wasn’t a huge divide between rich and poor.” She said subsequently there had been a failure for the super-rich to have any idea of what it was like to be an ordinary human being.
