The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

by Jon Ronson

  Behind the counter at the Binibon was a twenty-two-year-old aspiring actor named Richard Adan. Abbott asked to use the toilet. Adan said it was for employees only. Abbott said, “Let’s go outside and settle this like men,” and so they did, and Abbott got out a knife and stabbed Richard Adan to death. Then he walked away, vanishing into the night.

  “What happened?” Scott Meredith said to The New York Times. “Every conversation I had with Jack we talked about the future. Everything was ahead of him.”

  What happened, Bob explained to us now, although we didn’t need telling, was that Jack Abbott was a psychopath. He couldn’t bear being disrespected. His self-worth was too grandiose for that. He couldn’t control his impulses.

  “When the police finally caught up with him, you know what he told them about the guy he stabbed?” Bob said. “He said, ‘Oh, but he would never have made it as an actor.’ ”

  “These motherfucking psychologists and psychiatrists are going to tell the administration and the police what you are going to do next. Even Jesus Christ could not predict what the fuck his apostles were going to do.”

  These were the words of another of Bob’s videoed case studies—Case Study J. We laughed shrewdly when we heard him say this, because we did now know. That cryptic, powerful knowledge of how to decipher and identify psychopaths and anticipate their next move, even when they were feigning normalcy, was ours now. What we knew was that they were remorseless monsters and they would do it again in a heartbeat.

  As I sat in the tent, my mind drifted to what I could do with my new powers. If I’m being honest, it didn’t cross my mind at that point to become some kind of great crime fighter, an offender profiler or criminal psychologist, philanthropically dedicated to making society a safer place. Instead I made a mental list of all the people who had crossed me over the years, and wondered which of them I might be able to expose as having psychopathic character traits. Top of the list of possibilities was the Sunday Times and Vanity Fair critic A. A. Gill, who had always been very rude about my television documentaries and had recently written a restaurant column for The Sunday Times in which he admitted to killing a baboon on safari.

  I took him just below the armpit. A soft-nosed .357 blew his lungs out. I wanted to get a sense of what it might be like to kill someone, a stranger. You see it in all those films. What does it really feel like to shoot someone, or someone’s close relative?

  “Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy,” I thought.

  I smiled to myself and zoned back in to Bob. He was saying that if he were to score himself on his checklist, he’d probably get a 4 or a 5 out of the possible 40. Tony in Broadmoor told me that on the three occasions they scored him, he got around a 29 or a 30.

  Our three days in West Wales came to an end. On the last day Bob surprised us by unexpectedly flashing onto the screen a largescale, close-up photograph of a man who’d been shot in the face at very close range. This came after he’d lulled us into a false sense of security by flashing photographs of ducks on pretty lakes and summer days in the park. But in this picture, gore and gristle bubbled everywhere. The man’s eyes had bulged all the way out of their sockets. His nose was gone.

  “Oh GOD,” I thought.

  An instant later my body responded to the shock by feeling prickly and jangly and weak and debilitated. This sensation, Bob said, was a result of the amygdalae and the central nervous system shooting signals of distress up and down to each other. It’s the feeling we get when we’re suddenly startled—like when a figure jumps out at us in the dark—or when we realize we’ve done something terrible, the feeling of fear and guilt and remorse, the physical manifestation of our conscience.

  “It is a feeling,” Bob said, “that psychopaths are incapable of experiencing.”

  Bob said it was becoming clearer that this brain anomaly is at the heart of psychopathy.

  “There are all sorts of laboratory studies and the results are very, very consistent,” he said. “What they find is that there are anomalies in the way these individuals process material that has emotional implications. That there’s this dissociation between the linguistic meaning of words and the emotional connotations. Somehow they don’t put them together. Various parts of the limbic system just don’t light up.”

  And with that our psychopath-spotting course was over. As we gathered together our belongings and headed toward our cars, I said to one attendee, “You have to feel sorry for psychopaths, right? If it’s all because of their amygdalae? If it’s not their fault?”

  “Why should we feel sorry for them?” he replied. “They don’t give a shit about us.”

  Bob Hare called over to me. He was in a hurry. He had to get the train from Cardiff to Heathrow so he could fly back to Vancouver. Could I give him a lift?

  He saw it before I did. A car was upside down. The driver was still in his seat. He was just sitting there, as if good-naturedly waiting for someone to come and turn him right way up again so he could continue on his journey. I thought, “He looks patient,” but then I realized he wasn’t conscious.

  His passenger sat on the grass a short distance away. She was sitting cross-legged, as if lost in her thoughts. She must have been thrown clean through the window a moment or two earlier.

  I saw the scene only for an instant. Other people had already parked their cars and were running toward them, so I kept going, pleased that I didn’t have to be the one to handle it. Then I wondered if I should worry that my relief at not having to deal with the unpleasant responsibility was a manifestation of Item 8: Callous/Lack of Empathy—“He is only concerned with Number 1.”

  I glanced in my rearview mirror at the good Samaritans rushing over and surrounding the overturned car and continued on my way.

  “Jon?” said Bob, after a moment.

  “Mm?” I said.

  “Your driving,” said Bob.

  “What about my driving?” I said.

  “You’re swerving all over the road,” said Bob.

  “No, I’m not,” I said. We continued in silence for a moment. “It’s the shock of seeing the crash,” I said.

  It was good to know that I had been affected after all.

  Bob said what was happening was my amygdala and central nervous system were shooting signals of fear and distress up and down to each other.

  “They certainly are.” I nodded. “I can actually feel it happening. It’s very jarring and jaggedy.”

  “You do realize,” said Bob, “that psychopaths would see that crash and their amygdalae would barely register a thing.”

  “Well then, I’m the opposite of a psychopath,” I said. “If anything, my amygdala and my central nervous system shoot far too many signals up and down to each other.”

  “Can you concentrate on the road, please,” said Bob.

  “I came to you,” I said, “because of this guy called Tony. He’s in Broadmoor. He says they’re falsely accusing him of psychopathy and he hopes I’ll do some campaigning journalism to support his release. And I do have warm feelings for Tony, I really do, but how do I know if he’s a psychopath?”

  Bob didn’t seem to be listening. It was as if the crash had made him introspective. He said, almost to himself, “I should never have done all my research in prisons. I should have spent my time inside the Stock Exchange as well.”

  I looked at Bob. “Really?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “But surely stock-market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial-killer psychopaths,” I said.

  “Serial killers ruin families.” Bob shrugged. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”

  This—Bob was saying—was the straightforward solution to the greatest mystery of all: Why is the world so unfair? Why all that savage economic injustice, those brutal wars, the everyday corporate cruelty? The answer: psychopaths. That part of the brain that doesn’t function right. You’re standing on an escalator and you watch the people going past on the opposite esc
alator. If you could climb inside their brains, you would see we aren’t all the same. We aren’t all good people just trying to do good. Some of us are psychopaths. And psychopaths are to blame for this brutal, misshapen society. They’re the jagged rocks thrown into the still pond.

  It wasn’t only Bob who believed that a disproportionate number of psychopaths can be found in high places. In the days after Essi Viding had first mentioned the theory to me, I spoke to scores of psychologists who all said exactly the same. One was Martha Stout, from the Harvard Medical School, author of The Sociopath Next Door. (You may be wondering what the difference is between a psychopath and a sociopath, and the answer is, there really isn’t one. Psychologists and psychiatrists around the world tend to use the terms interchangeably.) They are everywhere, she said. They are in the crowded restaurant where you have your lunch. They are in your open-plan office.

  “As a group they tend to be more charming than most people,” she said. “They have no warm emotions of their own but will study the rest of us. They’re the boss or the coworker who likes to make other people jump just for the pleasure of seeing them jump. They’re the spouse who marries to look socially normal but inside the marriage shows no love after the initial charm wears off.”

  “I don’t know how many people will read this book,” I said to her. “Maybe a hundred thousand? So that means around a thousand of them will be psychopaths. Possibly even more if psychopaths like reading books about psychopaths. What should my message to them be? Turn yourselves in?”

  “That would be nice,” Martha said. “But their arrogance would hold up. They’d think, ‘She’s lying about there being conscience.’ Or, ‘This poor dear is restrained by conscience. She should be more like me.’ ”

  “What if the wife of a psychopath reads this?” I asked. “What should she do? Leave?”

  “Yes,” said Martha. “I would like to say leave. You’re not going to hurt someone’s feelings because there are no feelings to hurt.” She paused. “Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there’s not much left except the will to win.”

  “Which means you’ll find a preponderance of them at the top of the tree?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said. “The higher you go up the ladder, the greater the number of sociopaths you’ll find there.”

  “So the wars, the injustices, the exploitation, all of these things occur because of that tiny percent of the population up there who are mad in this certain way?” I asked. It sounded like the ripple effect of Petter Nordlund’s book, but on a giant scale.

  “I think a lot of these things are initiated by them,” she said.

  “It is a frightening and huge thought,” I said, “that the ninety-nine percent of us wandering around down here are having our lives pushed and pulled around by that psychopathic fraction up there.”

  “It is a large thought,” she said. “It is a thought people don’t have very often. Because we’re raised to believe that deep down everyone has a conscience.”

  At the end of our conversation she turned to address you, the reader. She said if you’re beginning to feel worried that you may be a psychopath, if you recognize some of those traits in yourself, if you’re feeling a creeping anxiety about it, that means you are not one.

  Everyone in the field seemed to regard psychopaths in this same way: inhuman, relentlessly wicked forces, whirlwinds of malevolence, forever harming society but impossible to identify unless you’re trained in the subtle art of spotting them, as I now was. The only other way would be to have access to some expensive fMRI equipment, like Adam Perkins does.

  Adam is a research fellow in clinical neuroscience at the Institute of Psychiatry, South London. I had visited him shortly after meeting Essi because he’s an expert in anxiety, and I wanted to test out my theory on him that suffering from anxiety is the neurological opposite of being a psychopath when it comes to amygdala function. I imagined my amygdala to be like one of those Hubble photographs of a solar storm, and I imagined psychopaths’ amygdalae to be like those Hubble photographs of dead planets, like Pluto. Adam verified my theory, and then to demonstrate, he strapped me up to some wires, put me into a dummy fMRI scanner, and without any warning, gave me a very painful electric shock.

  “Ow!” I yelled. “That really hurts. Would you please turn down the level of the electric shock? I mean, I thought that had been outlawed. What was that level?”

  “Three,” said Adam.

  “What does it go up to?” I asked.

  “Eight,” he said.

  Adam performed various tests on me to monitor my anxiety level, and for much of it I glared suspiciously at the button that administered the electric shock, sometimes letting off little involuntary spasms, and when it was over, he confirmed from his EEG readings that I was indeed above average on the anxiety scale.

  “Ooh!” I thought, unexpectedly pleased to hear that there really was something identifiably wrong with me. Then I said, “I suppose it probably isn’t a great idea for a man like me who suffers from excessive anxiety to chase after people who have a pathological deficit of anxiety.”

  Adam nodded. He said I really had to be careful. Psychopaths are truly dangerous, he said. And they’re often the people you least expect them to be.

  “When I was doing my Ph.D.,” he said, “I devised this personality test, and I advertised for volunteers amongst the student population. I put notices on the notice board, and a girl turned up. Young girl. She was a second-year student. About nineteen. She said, ‘This is a personality test, isn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘I’ve got a bad personality. I like to hurt people.’ I thought she was winding me up. I said, ‘Okay, fine.’ So we went through the tests. When she was looking at the photographs of the mutilated bodies, the sensors showed that she was getting a kick off of them. Her sexual reward center—it’s a sexual thing—was fired up by blood and death. It’s subconscious. It happens in milliseconds. She found those things pleasant.”

  I looked over at Adam. Describing the moment was obviously making him feel uncomfortable. He was an anxious man, like me, hence, he said, his decision to dedicate his life to the study of the relationship between anxiety and the brain.

  “She told me she’d tried to join the RAF,” he said, “because they’re the only part of the Ministry of Defence that allows women to operate weapon systems, but they sussed her out and rejected her. So she ended up doing history. Hers wasn’t psychopathy in terms of being a manipulative con man. She told me about her homicidal desire the minute she met me, which suggests she wouldn’t score high on the trait of smooth deceptiveness. But at the core of psychopathy is a lack of moral restraint. If a person lacks moral restraint and also happens to get turned on by violence, then you end up with a very dangerous serial-killer type who lusts after killing and doesn’t have any moral hang-ups about doing so. There must be people in the population who get turned on by killing but have moral restraints that prevent them from acting out their fantasies, unless they’re drunk or tired or whatever. I guess she falls into this category, which is why she tried to join the RAF, so she could obtain a socially respectable opportunity to gratify her homicidal urges.”

  “So what did you do about her?” I asked. “Did you call the police?”

  “I was put in a difficult position,” he said. “She hadn’t done any crimes. My hands were tied. There are no mechanisms in place to stop her.”

  Adam and Bob and Martha seemed sure that, with psychopaths, chaos was a foregone conclusion. This girl, forbidden from killing in a socially acceptable way, will probably end up as “one of those angel-of-death nurses or something,” Adam said. Someone who just has to murder.

  I wondered if it ever crossed Adam’s and Bob’s minds that the logical solution to the psychopath problem would be to lock them up before they’d actually done anything wrong—even if proposing such a measure would make them the villains from an Orwell novel, which isn’t something anyon
e imagines they’ll be when setting out on their career path.

  “Where is this woman now?” I asked Adam. “Maybe I could meet her for my book? In a busy café or something.”

  “I’ve no means of tracking her down,” Adam said. “Participants in my studies are recorded only by numbers, not by name.” He fell silent for a second. “So she’s gone,” he said.

  Adam’s point was that now I was in the psychopath-spotting business, I should be very vigilant. This was a perilous game. I had to trust nobody. These people were unsafe to be around. And sometimes psychopaths were nineteen-year-old women studying history in a London university.

  “They come in all shapes and sizes,” he said.

  Now, as Bob Hare and I neared Cardiff, I considered his theory about psychopathic CEOs and psychopathic politicians and I remembered items 18 and 12 on his checklist—Juvenile Delinquency and Early behavior problems—An individual who has a history of serious antisocial behavior.

  “If some political or business leader had a psychopathically hoodlum childhood, wouldn’t it come out in the press and ruin them?” I said.

  “They find ways to bury it,” Bob replied. “Anyway, Early Behavior Problems doesn’t necessarily mean ending up in Juvenile Hall. It could mean, say, secretly torturing animals.” He paused. “But getting access to people like that can be difficult. Prisoners are easy. They like meeting researchers. It breaks up the monotony of their day. But CEOs, politicians . . .” Bob looked at me. “It’s a really big story,” he said. “It’s a story that could change forever the way people see the world.”

  Suddenly Tony in Broadmoor felt a long way away. Bob was right: this really could be a big story. And my desire to unearth it outweighed any anxieties that were bubbling up inside me. I had to journey, armed with my new psychopath-spotting abilities, into the corridors of power.