Snakes in Suits: Subcriminal Psychopaths [Book Review]

[Stormchild]

Write put up a thought-provoking post on the Cognitive Dissonance Question thread:

On the subject of the psychopath, I have worked with young people who were diagnosed 'anti-social perosnality disorder' for their inability to comply to any kind of imposed structure; they have gone on to do extremely unpleasant things then they attract an NPD label. Whereas NPD people can often be extremely successful and charming and able to comply with social norms some of the time. I can only speculate as to whether the two kinds of people are the same kind of psychopath!

which reminded me of a book I purchased recently - titled "Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work."

Here are excerpts from a book review - link here: http://www.beyondbullying.co.nz/snakes_in_suits_spot_the_true_ps.htm

At the end of a talk on organised crime, Dr. Robert Hare mentioned his belief that some of the year's worst accounting scandals could have been avoided if all chief  executives were screened for psychopathic tendencies. He was quoted everywhere, not so much because of the sensational implication that some  of America's best-known companies had been run for most of the 1990s by people with a major mental disorder, as because of who he is.

Hare defined psychopathy for modern scientists with an exhaustive questionnaire, sold only to  clinicians, called the Psychopathy Checklist, or PCL-R. It was introduced in 1980 and has become an internationally recognized instrument for identifying psychopaths. It means that when a subject scores 30 (out of a possible 40) in a prison in Dundee, an expert in Detroit will have a good idea of his proclivities.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the PCL-R revealed that psychopaths are everywhere. Most are non-violent, but all leave a trail of havoc through their  families and work environments, using and abusing colleagues and loved ones, endlessly manipulating others, constantly reinventing themselves.

Hare puts the average  North American incidence of psychopathy at one per cent of the  population, but the damage they inflict on society is out of all proportion to their numbers, not least because they gravitate to high-profile professions that offer the promise of control over others, such as law, politics, [medicine, and corporate management].

By the Hare definition there are 300,000 in Canada alone.

Despite this, spotting psychopaths is hard, though it may be about to get easier. Next year Hare and a New York-based colleague, Paul Babiak, will publish a book  called Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work, that will at least alert the average office worker to the possibility that her amusing but exasperating - and, frankly, narcissistic and untrustworthy - colleague  may be clinically psychopathic. Hare and Babiak will also produce a new diagnostic tool based on the PCL-R but designed to help businesses to keep their recruits and senior management psychopath-free.

Enter the B-Scan. It won't be available to everyone, and it won't be free. Slightly jarringly, one is reminded that its authors are businessmen as well as  academics. But they insist that it will do a better job of raising warning flags than traditional screening techniques such as CVs (routinely falsified and seldom checked) and interviews and role-playing ("Psychopaths love this stuff," Hare says. "It's like a game to them.").

If you are B-Scanned, it won't be you answering the questions. It will be your colleagues, grading your personal style, interpersonal relations, organisational  maturity and antisocial tendencies according to 16 buzz words, none of  them uplifting. They include the following: insincere, arrogant, insensitive, remorseless, shallow, impatient, erratic, unreliable, unfocused, parasitic, dramatic, unethical and bullying.

Yikes. Who isn't most of these things, at least some of the time?

I meet Hare in a London hotel and find him used to such anxieties.

"I know, I know," he says. "People read this stuff and suddenly everyone around them is a psychopath. They pick up on three or four of the characteristics and say, 'yeah, he's one.' But it's not like that. It's  a medical syndrome. You've got to have the whole package."

And when you do, what does it look like? Hare gives an example, and not just any example. He first gave it to Nicole Kidman in a private meeting requested by her to help her prepare for her memorably chilly role in Malice.

"I gave her a  scene," he says. "You're walking down the street and there's been an accident. A child has been hit by a car and is lying on the ground. There's a crowd around him. The mother's kneeling down there  crying and emoting. You're curious but not appalled. You look at the  child momentarily and then you look at the mother. You walk towards her, step in some blood and then study the mother's facial expressions for a  minute or two. Then you walk back to your apartment or hotel room, walk into the bathroom and stand in front of the mirror practising those expressions. I said, 'If you did that, people would see that you don't  understand emotion, you have no idea at all, you're a colour-blind person trying to explain colour.' They didn't use the scene, but they could have."

In the workplace such a person might resemble 'Dave', a real individual studied by Babiak who cut a swath of disruption through a highly profitable American electronics company in the mid-1990s. Dave was good-looking, well spoken and  impressive in the interview that led to his recruitment. He was also a skilled and shameless liar, rude to subordinates, scheming towards his boss and quickly friendly with the firm's top management. Already on his third marriage by his mid-thirties, he was short tempered, happy to ignore assignments that he felt were beneath him, and quick to change  the subject if challenged on a lie or asked to produce some real  evidence of work.

When his boss summoned the courage and evidence to make a complaint to the company president, he found that Dave had got there first and secured for himself the status of "high-potential employee."

The boss ended up sidelined. Dave ended up promoted, swaggering and "in love with  himself." He scored 19 on the PCL-R, lower than you would expect  for a psychopathic murderer but much higher than your average working non-psychopath. He or she would score a five at most.

People such as Dave can be spotted early. Babiak recommends checking CVs exhaustively and auditing expenses - psychopaths like to indulge. It all seems obvious, but for the past 10 or 12 years, for most of corporate America, it hasn't been.

These have been tumultuous years in the world of business, with dot-coms booming and collapsing, older firms merging or shrinking to catch up, and hierarchies everywhere flattening faster than the boss can say: 'Hey, c'mon in, my door is always open.' In short, it has been a high old time for psychopaths.

"When you see what has happened with Enron and WorldCom and all these other big corporations, and you ask how the hell could this guy get in that position, well, there are answers," Hare says.

"When the structure's not there, when charisma is extremely important and style wins over substance, and one person ends up with three or four hundred million pounds in an offshore bank account, I start to get suspicious.  And when the whole thing breaks and people are losing their pensions and livelihoods, these people give nothing back.

"Many of the high-level executives now being charged knew exactly what they were  doing. They had no concern for anybody else, and you have to say they aren't warm, loving guys."

Likewise in politics. "Think what happened in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. The old rules went by the board. Structure vanished and all the ethnic tension that had been held in check by central government  began to emerge. It was the perfect set-up for an opportunist, a thug or a psychopath to enter and take over."

That takeover usually has three stages. First, the psychopath identifies those who can help him and cultivates them with all his considerable charm. Then he pinpoints those who can harm him and outflanks them or stabs them in the back.  Finally he makes a sycophantic but ultimately devastating beeline towards the source of power (one thinks of Hitler and Hindenburg, but also of the irrepressible Eve Harrington in All About Eve).

Psychopaths necessarily have victims, and Hare's drive to expose the "subcriminal" ones in our midst is at least partly personal. He speaks of an old college friend, now gravely ill, who lost $500,000 in a mortgage scam to a white-collar crook who got off with a $100,000 fine and a six-month trading ban. Society still labels such people rogues at worst. Hare calls them natural- born predators.

There is a difficulty approaching all this from outside academe: it can seem as if the experts are using jargon to force a thousand shades of grey - for there are  surely at least that many degrees of psychopathy - into convenient boxes for personnel managers, employment tribunals and courts.

Babiak certainly counsels caution. Being psychopathic is not a sin, let alone a ground on its own  for dismissal. But underpinning the PCL-R is hard science, hard to ignore. Before he published it, Hare performed two now-famous studies which suggest that psychopaths really are different from the rest of us. In the first, subjects were told to watch a timer counting down to zero, at which point they felt a harmless but painful electric shock.  Non-psychopaths showed mounting anxiety and fear. Psychopaths didn't even sweat.

In the second, the two groups had their brain activity and response time measured when asked to react to groups of letters, some forming words, some not. Words such as rape and cancer triggered mental jolts in nonpsychopaths. In psychopaths they triggered precisely nothing.

That research is decades old now. The man behind it, instead of retiring, tours the world helping to nail the psychopaths among us and trying to make sure that his instruments are not misused.

Part of his mission is to stay serious. He won't appear on Oprah, and he won't name names.  Instead, when he sees someone in the news he thinks might be a psychopath, he says: "I'd sure as hell like to study this guy."

Write, I think you're asking about the difference between criminal and subcriminal psychopaths. And it sure seems as though the subcriminal psychopaths look a lot like what we refer to as Ns.

I'm fascinated by the B-scan, too. Look at the implications. The world's expert on psychopathy is basically telling us that we laypeople are sufficiently good observers and reporters that our pooled observations can accurately portray an individual as psychopathic when they are. It's interesting, too, that Hare goes to the people affected by the potential psychopath, and collects their experiences, and doesn't go to the psychopath himself... because of their gameplaying ability.

I've known more than a few Daves. At school, at work, even in ministry... I think we all have.

This is an incredibly good book. And it is far more encouraging than discouraging.

[Stormchild]

I also find it comforting that not all of Dr. Hare's energy and enthusiasm for this branch of forensic psychology comes from academic interest only. That he is using his knowledge, skills, and abilities to educate people about this phenomenon partly because he knows firsthand how damaging it is, and cares.

That is truly inspiring.

[Stormchild]

Amen. And all corporate executives, ministers, counselors, teachers, doctors, and childcare workers, too.

[James guest]

Hey all, that was a very interesting read. I feel these psychopaths are just another part of human nature that perhaps we shouldnt explore too deeply, they are the bogey man under the bed so just skirt around it sort of thing. Without these psychopaths would the human race be where it is today, would we have even survived pre civilisation and the ice ages? doubtful as these nutters whilst evil are probably a necessary evil to ensure that the rest of us can stay strong enough to survive the trials of life and evolution. They have evolved for a reason , perhaps so the rest of us can live happy lives knowing that these poor sods live among us and are to be avoided once noticed. I for one am happy they these people are keeping the human race strong although I am damn glad im not one of them as it must be a very brutal existence, soulless even, like a shark perhaps cold blooded, although thats probably being a bit mean to the shark   

[Stormchild]

But James -

if these people are so nifty,

why are so many of the people who post here unhappy?

[dandylife]

James,
I understand your post - Darwinism/adaptation...yes, very important survival of the fittest. What an interesting and intelligent comment, however chilling. I get what you're saying (with a wink).

Stormchild, very interesting post. Thanks for the book referral. I'm adding it to my amazon cart!

Dandylife

[James73]

Hey Storm, theyre not really nifty just necessary, I suppose you could argue that they are the result of a growing population where isolation is more the norm than say a community or tribal group when world population was under a million say back in the day of the big n hairy dudes with clubs, although they were probably smaller dudes with clubs but still hairy nonetheless  Anyway whatever their purpose whether its to make us stronger as a collective species or just to bugger everyone up mentally and physically they are still part of the human race no matter how far from the norm they go in terms of their own perspective and desires. Anything a human does no matter how far from the norm is in fact natural, part of human nature, maybe twisted to the nth degree but still human nonetheless.

People on here maybe unhappy but thats because we've been put in situations beyond our control like being born to an N and God saying "...well what are you do now eh?" or perhaps we've grown up but haven't grown strong enough to deal with these N's and so we've been subjected to their evil ways because we were basically too dumb or blind to see what they really were, or maybe we had or have personality defects of our own that we have to address before we move on to be happy again. Whether there is a God who dishes out these things or whether it is just sheer luck (good or bad) that these things happen to us, we can either a) live in denial b) live in fear c) struggle to get out of our current dilemma or d) struggle and succeed to change our selves so that we can be a happy and productive part of society. Anyone thats on here is struggling and/or succeeding to be happy again and to better themselves, I will take the struggle any day of the week than denial or fear as those are the emotions that feed the N's among us.

Thanks Dandy, I think ive got too much time on my hands and I love to think about this stuff - life the universe and everything  Survival of the fittest as you say is chilling when looking at things from an individual and personal perspective although the human race as a whole operates as a large collective much like ants, we breed and build and progress until we fall back a few paces and start again. I suppose the ultimate goal is to get off the planet and spread out although I wouldnt fancy being an Alien who gets in our way as we wont really be that nice to meet as a whole, hopefully they'll be far more intelligent than us and just pat us on the head, sigh and let us go on our merry yet twisted way. Until we evolve into a new species we will always have "evil" among us and even in us all to some degree, its a sad fact of life but also quite possibly the key for some of us to live in happiness, and this happiness or any happiness must be cherished as whilst others suffer we cannot feel bad to be happy as we have struggled to get there, happiness can definitely be earned, thank goodness! 
James