There is much to learn from psychopaths: often attributed personality and intelligence to them ensure success in life.
The qualities of killer psychopaths are also common among politicians and world leaders. Grossly inflated self-esteem, gift of persuasion, extraordinary charm, lack of feelings of pity and compassion, a willingness to manipulate others - all these traits allow people to do what they like and when they like, without worrying about the social, moral or criminal consequences of their actions.
Imagine that you were lucky to be born under a lucky star: you got the ability to influence the human mind in the same way as the moon affects the tides of the sea, and you would order the destruction of 100 thousand Kurds. When you were taken to execution, you demonstrated your lack of remorse so vividly that even your worst enemies felt a strange semblance of respect for you.
“Do not be afraid, doctor,” Saddam Hussein said a few minutes before his execution. "I did everything for people."
If you got the cruelty and cunning of Robert Maudsley, the real person - the prototype of Hannibal Lector, you could well hold the person hostage, and then crush his skull and indifferently take a sample with a teaspoon, as if you were in front of a soft-boiled egg. (Model has spent the last 30 years in solitary confinement in a special bulletproof cage in the basements of an English prison.)
Or if you were a brilliant neurosurgeon, ruthlessly cold-blooded, capable of staying focused in any situation, you could very well be what I will call Dr. Geraghty. You should try yourself in a different role: working at the forefront of 21st century medicine, where risks grow at a speed of 160 km / h and often there is no time for reflection. “I do not feel compassion for the patients I operate on,” the doctor confessed to me. “This is a luxury that I cannot afford.
In the operating room, I seem to be reborn: I turn into a cold, heartless machine, one with a scalpel, drill and saw. When you cut flesh and cheat death on a scale beyond the comprehension of the human mind, there is no room for feelings. Emotions are entropy. They interfere with business. I fought with them for years until complete extermination."
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Geraghty is one of the UK's best neurosurgeons. Therefore, on the one hand, his words give goosebumps, on the other, they are extremely reasonable. In the depths of our minds, the psychopath appears as a lonely, elusive and ruthless predator, the embodiment of the compelling and unpredictable pace of death. As soon as this word is uttered, images of serial killers, rapists, madmen, terrorists emerge from the depths of our subconscious and rise before our eyes.
But what if I offer you a slightly different picture? What if I told you that the person who set fire to your house could fearlessly rush into a burning building in a parallel universe, under the arches of fire-engulfed ceilings, in order to find and save loved ones? What if a guy with a knife on the last row of a movie theater, years later, could find himself in the middle of an anatomical theater with a completely different blade in his hands?
It is extremely difficult to believe in such words. But they are true. Psychopaths are fearless, overconfident, attractive, ruthless and determined. Despite popular beliefs, they are not always quick-tempered. It is useless to try to determine if you are a psychopath or not. There is no division into psychopaths and normal people; instead, a complex picture is observed, somewhat similar to various subway zones or a map of metropolitan areas. Each of us has our place in a wide range of psychopathies, and only a minority live in the heart.
You can think of every trait of a psychopath as a channel on a sound engineer's console. If all the knobs are turned to the maximum, then you will end up with something unusable. But if the remote control is carefully tuned, strengthened something, weakened something, for example, tighten up fearlessness, determination, lack of empathy and viscous thinking, then you may well get a brilliant surgeon who surpasses all your colleagues.
Of course, surgery is just one area in which the psychopath's "talents" give their owner an edge. There are others. Some studies suggest that psychopaths are particularly good at recognizing a person's vulnerability. This ability can be beneficial to society. In 2009, to test this claim, I decided to do my own research.
Insight caught up with me when I met a friend at the airport. We were both a little nervous going through security checks. And I thought. After all, we were both definitely innocent. How would we feel if we really wanted to hide something? And what if the guards had a chance to notice our feelings?
To find out, I decided to conduct an experiment. It was attended by 30 students. Half of them had high scores on the self-reported psychopathy scale (SRPS), and the rest had low scores. Each of the subjects watched a person walk across the room on a slightly raised podium. There was a catch in the problem. The subjects had to determine whether the person was “guilty” or not: which of the five people who passed them hid the scarlet scarf?
To add drama to the “guilty” situation, we gave each participant with a headscarf £ 100. If the "jury" by voting decided that he was guilty, then he had to return the money. If he managed to hide that he had the scarf, then he kept the money for himself. This reward system fueled general suspicion.
Which student was the most observant "security officer"? Did the predatory instinct help psychopaths perform better than their "normal counterparts"? Or does their sense of vulnerability fail in such situations?
In the group of students with high scores on the psychopathy self-rating scale, 70% of the participants correctly chose the person who covered the headscarf. To the group with a low score, only 30% coped with the task correctly. This attunement to the victim's weakness can be part of the serial killer's toolbox - but it can just as well help airport employees.
Cold? Hot?
Joshua Greene, a psychologist at Harvard University, is studying how psychopaths deal with moral dilemmas. He managed to get interesting results, which I already mentioned in my book Split-Second Persuasion. Empathy can manifest itself in different ways. And there are two main types of it: "hot" and "cold".
Imagine a moral problem (case 1) developed by the philosopher Philippa Foot. The carriage rushes downhill along the railroad. On his way, five people got stuck and couldn't get out. Luckily, you can turn the switch and redirect the car to other tracks. But you have to pay for everything. Then the car will crash into the cart and kill only one person who is in it. Will you translate the arrow?
Most of us make decisions with ease in a situation like this. Despite the fact that the consequences of our actions do not promise anything good (death of one person instead of five), we choose the lesser of two evils, right?
Let's consider another version of the same problem (case 2) proposed by the philosopher Judith Jar vis Thomson. As before, the runaway carriage rushes downhill towards the five victims. But this time, you are standing on a bridge behind an extremely large stranger. The only way to save the five people in the trap is to throw the stranger on the way, as a result of which he will be smashed to death, but his body will block the path of the car and will save five lives. The question is: will you push him along the way?
Here we are faced with a "serious" choice. The life count is exactly the same as in the first example (five to one). But now we are more careful and scared. Why?
Green believes he has found the answer to this question. The answer lies in different areas of the brain.
We can call the first case an impersonal moral dilemma. The solution of the problem involves the work of the prefrontal and posterior parietal cortex of our brain (the anterior paracingular cortex, temporal lobe and superior temporal sulcus, to be more precise). These structures draw on our actual experience and exercise cold empathy based on inference and rational thinking.
The second case is a personal moral dilemma that knocks on the door of the emotional centers of our brain, located in the amygdala, using the basis of "hot" empathy.
Like most ordinary people, psychopaths are quick to solve the dilemma from Case 1. But unlike normal people, they just as easily solve the problem of Case 2. Psychopaths, without batting an eye, will be happy to throw the fat man onto the railroad tracks.
This difference in behavior is clearly reflected in the functioning of the brain. When solving the first dilemma, the patterns of neural activity in psychopaths and normal people do not differ, unlike the situation described in case 2.
Imagine that I shoved you into a functional MRI machine and asked you to solve two moral dilemmas. What will I see as you wander through the minefields of human morality? As soon as the dilemma crosses the border from the impersonal to the personal, your amygdala and related parts of the brain, for example, the orbitofrontal cortex, will flash like a slot machine, as if at that moment the emotion took the right slot in the game and you took the jackpot.
But in a psychopath I will see nothing but darkness. The Predator Brain Casino is abandoned and deserted. The transition from an impersonal to a personal moral dilemma will pass without noticeable change.
Psychopathic mix
Even if we are talking about a profession in which, at first glance, all you need is to deliver products to the right place - and it's ready, everything turns out to be not so simple. In addition to the skills that are strictly necessary to perform certain responsibilities in business, law or any other field, there is also a set of personality traits that allow you to achieve an outstanding result in a particular field.
To find out what allows people to become leaders in business, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon conducted a 2005 study at the University of Surrey in England. They became interested in what kind of personality traits distinguish those who are in line to take off on the plane on the left, and who have to push on the right?
Board and Fritzon surveyed three groups: business managers, psychiatric patients, and hospitalized criminals (some were psychopaths and some had other psychiatric illnesses). All of them filled out personal psychological questionnaires. With their help, scientists evaluated such traits as supernatural charm, egocene-trinity, persuasiveness, lack of empathy, independence and determination.
The analysis showed that businessmen have a higher number and level of psychopathic traits than violent criminals. The main differences between these groups were manifested in the antisocial aspects of the syndrome. If we return to the analogy above, then someone has twisted the handle on the criminals that governs violation of the law, physical manifestations of aggression and impulsivity.
There are other studies that support the soundboard metaphor. Dysfunctional and functional psychopathies are distinguished not by the presence of psychopathic traits as such, but by the level of manifestation of these traits and their combination. Mehmet Mahmut and his colleagues from the University
Macwari in Sydney analyzed patterns of brain abnormalities in psychopaths with and without criminal episodes.
Both groups exhibit specific patterns of activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a gateway through which emotions can influence decision-making. Mehmet Mahmut and colleagues have shown that the differences in brain activity between these two samples are quantitative rather than qualitative. And this, according to Mahmut, means that it is correct to consider the two surveyed groups not as two separate subgroups, but as representatives of a single psychopathic continuum.
Once I asked my first-year students this question: "If you were an employee of a recruiting agency, and a person who is distinguished by ruthlessness, fearlessness, extreme charm, determination and immorality came to you in search of work, what kind of work would you recommend to him?"
Their responses were more than encouraging. CEO, spy, surgeon, politician, military … they all managed to figure out the settings of the console without slipping into a serial killer, hitman or bank robber.
“Intelligence itself is just a sophisticated way to kill time,” one company executive told me. - People will never admit that this is a slippery slope to nowhere. The path to the top is hard. But it’s easier to climb there if you put yourself above others - and if you let them think that they need your advancement for some reason.”
One of the most successful players in the venture capital market, Jon Moulton, would agree with him. In his last interview with the Financial Times, he named three character traits that he values above all: determination, curiosity, and insensitivity.
The first two are clear, but insensitive? “She lets me sleep when others can't,” Moulton explained.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF THE ARTICLE
Kevin Dutton is a psychologist at the Kalyaev Research Center at Magdalen College, Oxford University.