Could someone be a psychopath and
have no clue?
Probably not. I think most people on
the spectrum of psychopathy know
on some level that they’re different
from others—they likely realize they
don’t have a conscience or feel remorse,
and can do bad things and usually still
sleep fine at night.
That said, it is possible. In 2013’s
The Psychopath Inside, neuroscientist
James Fallon writes about how he was
looking at brain scans of
psychopaths and realized
that his own brain had
similar patterns of neuro
activity. He was shocked,
but recalled that, in his
youth, he’d been adven-
turous, reckless and thrill
seeking—psychopathic
traits that often taper off
with age. And he was still
good at lying and could
talk his way out of tight situations. The
difference with Fallon is that he was
able to reign in these attributes and
channel them prosocially.
How does that positive adaptation
happen? Is psychopathy more nurture
than nature?
Genes alone are usually not going to
launch someone into psychopathy—
it’s more a genetic predisposition that
may or may not be expressed, depend-
ing on the person’s environment. So
maybe a child demonstrates callous
and unemotional traits, but they’re
brought up in a loving home, they go
to school, they receive discipline from
parents and have good role models.
That prosocial upbringing will teach
them to play the game of life, and
they’re not likely to turn out robbing
and hurting people.You mentioned a spectrum of psy-
chopathy. How does that work?
It used to be that authorities in the
field saw psychopaths as
something you were or
you weren’t. Now we use
the Psychopathy Check-
list to determine where
someone falls on a con-
tinuum. In it, there are
20 questions on each of
which you can get a
score of zero, one or two.
A total of 30 has been
established as character-
istic of psychopathy, but that’s some-
what arbitrary. It’s not like someone
who scores 29 is very different from
someone who scores 30. The average
prison inmate in North America is a
22, whereas your typical citizen who
can hold down a job, maintain rela-
tionships and handle responsibility
will probably be in the single digits.What kinds of traits determine if a
person will score high?
There are two main dimensions to psy-
chopathy. The first is the interpersonalIT USED
TO BE YOU
EITHER WERE
OR WEREN’T A
PSYCHOPATH.
NOW IT’S A
SPECTRUM.rd.ca 103