Inside the mind of a psychopath

TIM WATKIN talks to the man who knows how the real Hannibal Lecters think.

When Dr Robert Hare starts a seminar he likes to play a simple name association game. "What's the first thing you think when I say psychopath?" he asks. The answers are almost always the same; names, both real and created, are recited time and again. Hannibal Lecter, Ted Bundy, Charles Manson, Norman Bates.

They are the public face of psychopathy and, says Hare, each fits the type. But it worries him that they limit people's idea of psychopaths to extreme examples.

"It makes them more likely to ignore the psychopath next door or at work," he explains, pausing for the implication of what he's said to sink in.

"The majority of psychopaths are not in prison. They could be a psychiatrist, used-car salesman, a mechanic. And they function pretty well from their own perspective, but people generally suffer from them. One way or another, you suffer."

Hare knows his psychopaths better than just about anyone. Professor emeritus in psychology from the University of British Columbia, and author of Without Conscience: The disturbing world of the psychopaths among us, he has spent a long career peering into the cool darkness of their minds. At the crux of his study was the publication in 1991 of the Psychopathy Checklist, now a standard tool worldwide used to both diagnose psychopaths and assess their risk of offending by criminal justice authorities, including the Department of Corrections in New Zealand.

While his warnings of psychopaths in our midst might seem terrifying, given that popular culture and the media typically talk about psychopaths and serial killers in the same breath, he's keen to dispel that illusion. Although most, though not all, serial killers are psychopaths, most psychopaths do not kill. They are neither necessarily violent nor criminal.

Imagine instead the worst heart-breakers, the con-men, the ruthless businessmen. He estimates that psychopaths make up about 1 per cent of the population.

"If they've got the breeding, the intelligence, know how to dress and talk, many of these people don't have to break the law to get what they want. There might be circumstances when violence is required, but for them that's just part of the repertoire," he says.

He defines psychopathy as "a personality disorder characterised by a cluster of personality traits and associated behaviours, including lack of empathy or remorse, a grandiose approach to the world, superficiality, concern with number one, impulsivity, things of that sort".

Other core characteristics are shallow emotions, lying, glibness and great skill at manipulation.

Hare's checklist rates a person according to 20 such characteristics - carefully defined - scoring them with either 0 (definitely not like that), 1 (sometimes), or 2 (mostly). Those who score 30 or more out of 40 are regarded as psychopaths; the people who frighten and fascinate us because their cruelty is not born of insanity or rage, but comes from a shrugging lack of empathy, clinical reasoning and self-obsession.

"Many are like Clint Eastwood in the Dirty Harry movies. He goes out, shoots three or four people, and goes on like nothing's happened," Hare says. "That doesn't happen. Unless you're a psychopath."

In Without Conscience, he writes, "They selfishly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt."

The book offers examples, such as Jack Abbott, the murderer famous for writing the best-seller In the Belly of the Beast, based on letters he wrote from prison to author Norman Mailer.

"There are emotions - a whole spectrum of them - that I know only through words, through reading and in my immature imagination. I can imagine I feel these emotions ... but I do not," Abbott wrote.

Or Kenneth Taylor, a dentist who beat his wife, cheated on her, then battered her to death. "I loved her so deeply. I miss her so much," he said afterwards. "Why doesn't anybody understand what I've been going through?"

"These are essentially people with a lack of conscience," Hare says. "They intellectually work out how you feel, but really they have no idea of emotion at all. They're a colour-blind person trying to understand colour."

But before you start labelling your glib, uncaring neighbour a psychopath, be warned that to meet the criteria these characteristics need to dominate behaviour and you need them in spades.

In the same way that a cough doesn't mean you've got pneumonia, the odd lie or manipulation doesn't make you a psychopath.

The Canadian's latest research has taken him into the corporate world, developing a checklist he calls the b-scan as a way to find psychopaths in the office.

"We're going to smoke them out," he grins. He points to Andrew Fastow, the former head of Enron, and the destruction he and other CEOs caused through their cold-blooded greed. "We could probably have prevented most of that if they had been screened beforehand."

A book, Snakes in Suits, due out next year, will push the b-scan as a way to help businesses screen psychopaths out. Or in.

"You might find that some companies want a lot of psychopathic traits," he says. Some are useful in certain jobs - detached emotions in surgeons, for example - but the whole cut-throat package seems most valued in business. If Hare couldn't do research in prisons, he says his next choice would be the Vancouver Stock Exchange.

Hare was in Auckland this week training Corrections staff how to use his checklist, which began to be used sporadically here in 1996 and became a standard tool in 2000 when it was validated by senior adviser Dr Nick Wilson. It's not used to diagnose psychopaths, but to predict re-offending.

Essentially, the higher your score, the more likely you are to re-offend on release from prison, Wilson's studies have shown. So serious offenders are tested and their results used by the parole board as one of the main indicators to whether they should be released or not.

Those imprisoned before last year's Sentencing Act are almost guaranteed parole after two-thirds of their sentence, unless Corrections can prove they pose an especially high risk. The checklist provides them with that proof, Wilson says.

"This is actively protecting people now, and enabling those of high risk, the ones we need to intervene with, to get that intervention."

Hare has something of the Hercule Poirot about him. He is a compact, tidy man with a compact, tidy beard, given to lacing his fingers together when he speaks; an unlikely champion against the coldest minds.

Yet his research since the early 60s has helped to define the term psychopath and shown that psychopaths' brains work differently from others. In one study, he measured the brainwaves of psychopaths and others as they were shown both neutral and emotional words.

Non-psychopaths responded with more speed and brain activity to emotion-charged words such as rape or cancer than to neutral words such as tree. To psychopaths, there was no difference.

For all the research, two crucial questions remain unanswered. No one knows whether psychopaths are created by their genes or by their environment. Hare can only say he's sure it's a mix of both.

What research has shown is that psychopathic characteristics have been identified in children as young as 13 and they "look exactly the same" as in adults.

There's also no clear treatment or rehabilitation programme. The few studies that have been done show psychopaths benefit little from traditional therapy sessions. They may even make things worse. Being part of a group where others reveal deep emotions may, like a drunk in a brewery, simply encourage their behaviour and teach them how to better play their victims.

Psychopaths are what they are, he continues. "We aren't going to change a flabby conscience into a strong one."

But he won't dismiss them as a lost cause. Some characteristics, such as impulsivity, do ebb with age, so psychologists have to find ways of treating those and teaching psychopaths self-management skills.

Yet Hare's talk of treatment, his diagnosis by checklist and his description of psychopathy as "a medical syndrome" is still hotly disputed by psychologists.

Despite the Greek meaning of psychopathy, literally mental illness, most countries consider psychopaths mentally sane. Some consider Hare's checklist a flawed tool - itself grandiose - that turns mere bad behaviour into symptoms and diagnoses a disorder that doesn't exist.

Psychopathy can't be treated because it can't be isolated - the characteristics, from lack of empathy to glibness, are just part of human behaviour.

"And human behaviour just is," says Richard Howard, associate professor at Victoria University's school of psychology. "You can't be cured of it. To put a quasi-medical label on it and call it psychopathy is dangerous."

Psychopathy is just a label for "the extreme end of bastardry", not a tangible disease like cancer.

"It's just a social construct. It's a medicalisation of what we call, not just bastards, but complete and utter bastards."

Hare is frustrated by critics, insisting they have social agendas that see all people as inherently good and able to be cured with a hug. It's nothing new, measuring something we can't see, he says. Look at gravity. And blood pressure. A complex mix of blood volume, heart-rate and more is distilled down to two numbers.

"It's the same with psychopathy. I don't see lack of empathy, but I can look at a range of behaviours and say the only way to explain this is to assume an underlying trait. We call that lack of empathy."

Howard describes the comparison with blood pressure as "at best naive, at worst utterly foolish".

"The blood and circulation are measurable. You're taking a reading, not inferring things. When you're making judgments about whether a person is a psychopath and is glib or charming you are making an inference."

Howard describes the 30 out of 40 score as a measure of psychopathy as "arbitrary" and is nervous about the stigma associated with labelling people psychopaths.

Jeffrey Archer, for example, would surely score high on the test, "but he's just a bad egg. Does he deserves the stigma?"

Left-handers, he adds, have different brain patterns from others - that doesn't mean they have a disorder.

But Hare insists that unless we identify psychopaths we will always be vulnerable to their machinations.

"The social and financial costs to society of failing to solve the deadly mystery of the psychopath will be staggering," he concludes in Without Conscience.

One last question before he goes. Of the thousands of people tested worldwide, has anyone ever scored 40?

"Nine or ten," he replies. "They're not drooling monsters the way you might think, but there's certainly something there that's scary."