I’m O.K., You’re a Psychopath

By PAUL BLOOM

Do psychopaths enjoy reading books about psychopaths? In his engagingly irreverent new best seller, The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (Riverhead, $25.95), the journalist Jon Ronson notes that only about one in 100 people are psychopaths (there is a higher proportion in prisons and corporate boardrooms), but he wonders if this population will be overrepresented among readers of his book. After all, people do enjoy learning about themselves, and psychopaths in particular have an enhanced sense of their own importance. And they might like what Ronson has to say. He approvingly quotes experts who argue that psychopaths make “the world go around.” Despite their small numbers, they cause such chaos that they remold society — though not necessarily for the better.

If you aren’t sure whether you are a psychopath, Ronson can help. He lists all the items on the standard diagnostic checklist, developed by the psychologist Robert Hare. You can score yourself on traits like “glibness/superficial charm,” “lack of remorse or guilt,” “promiscuous sexual behavior” and 17 other traits. As one psychologist tells Ronson, if you are bothered at the thought of scoring high, then don’t worry. You’re not a psychopath.

One of the traits on the checklist is “callous/lack of empathy.” This is the focus of another new book, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (Basic Books, $25.99), by Simon Baron-Cohen, a Cambridge psychologist best known for his research on autism. Baron-Cohen begins by telling how, at the age of 7, he learned that the Nazis turned Jews into lampshades and bars of soap, and he goes on to provide other examples of human savagery. To explain such atrocities, he offers an ambitious theory grounded in the concept of empathy, which he defines as “our ability to identify what someone else is thinking or feeling and to respond to their thoughts and feelings with an appropriate emotion.” For Baron-Cohen, evil is nothing more than “empathy erosion.”

Now, one might lack empathy for temporary reasons — you can be enraged or drunk, for instance — but Baron-Cohen is most interested in lack of empathy as an enduring trait. Once again, you might want to know where you stand, and Baron-­Cohen ends his book with a 40-question Empathy Quotient checklist.

For Baron-Cohen, psychopaths are just one population lacking in empathy. There are also narcissists, who care only about themselves, and borderlines — individuals cursed with impulsivity, an inability to control their anger and an extreme fear of abandonment. Baron-Cohen calls these three groups “Zero-Negative” because there is “nothing positive to recommend them” and they are “unequivocally bad for the sufferer and those around them.” He provides a thoughtful discussion of the usual sad tangle of bad genes and bad environments that lead to the creation of these Zero-Negative individuals.

People with autism and Asperger’s syndrome, Baron-Cohen argues, are also empathy-deficient, though he calls them “Zero-Positive.” They differ from psychopaths and the like because they possess a special gift for systemizing; they can “set aside the temporal dimension in order to see — in stark relief — the eternal repeating patterns in nature.” This capacity, he says, can lead to special abilities in domains like music, science and art. More controversially, he suggests, this systemizing impulse provides an alternative route for the development of a moral code — a strong desire to follow the rules and ensure they are applied fairly. Such individuals can thereby be moral without empathy, “through brute logic alone.”

This is an intriguing proposal, but Baron-Cohen doesn’t fully elaborate on it, much less address certain obvious objections. For one thing, if people with autism can use logic to be good without empathy, why can’t smart psychopaths do the same? And what about the many low-functioning individuals on the autism spectrum who lack special savant gifts and don’t spontaneously create moral codes? On Baron-Cohen’s analysis, they would be Zero-Negative. But this doesn’t seem right. Such individuals might be awkward or insensitive, but they are not actively malicious; they are much more likely to be the targets of cruelty than the perpetrators.

I think there’s a better approach, one that involves breaking empathy into two parts, understanding and feeling, as Baron-Cohen himself does elsewhere in his book. Individuals with autism are unable to understand the mental lives of other people. Psychopaths, by contrast, get into others’ heads just fine; they are seducers, manipulators, con men . . . and often worse. (Ronson tells how one psychopath — “good-looking, neatly dressed,” with “a bit of a twinkle in his eye” — encountered a troubled teenager and decided to provoke the kid into attacking his family with a baseball bat, killing one person.) The problem with psychopaths lies in their lack of compassion, their willingness to destroy lives out of self-interest, malice or even boredom.
Baron-Cohen intends his theory of evil to extend broadly, not just to genocides and massacres but to criminal acts like assault and murder. He discusses a 2007 case in which a woman killed her two daughters to make her ex-husband suffer, and concludes that she must be psychologically abnormal. After all, plunging a knife into your own children surely requires a shutdown of empathy. He is well aware that this isn’t the way the current diagnostic system works, but he would change that. “To me,” he writes, “the obvious conclusion is that the medical and psychiatric classification system is crying out for a category called ‘empathy disorders.’ ”If evil is empathy erosion, and empathy erosion is a form of illness, then evil turns out to be nothing more than a particularly awful psychological disorder.

This goes too far, I think. First, it misses the fact that empathy erosion can be the result of choice. Muggers, rapists, pedophiles and killers have diminished feeling toward their victims, but this is often because they have decided to ignore the suffering of others in pursuit of their own goals.

Second, it overlooks the fact that our empathy is often eroded by the situation we find ourselves in. Psychologists have run many experiments showing how social behavior can be manipulated by subtle cues. For example, people are more willing to help others if there is the smell of fresh bread in the air, and they are more likely to be rude if they just read words like “assertive” and “interrupt.” Then there are the not-so-subtle demonstrations of the power of the situation, like Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments showing that ordinary New Haven residents were willing to give people electric shocks because an authority figure in a white coat told them to. Or Philip Zimbardo’s study at Stanford in which normal students were transformed into brutal torturers simply by being given the part of prison guards. (Milgram saw his study as helping to explain the Holocaust. Zimbardo has argued that his experiment explains the events in Abu Ghraib.) In such cases, the situation is to blame: focusing on the individual is the wrong type of explanation.

But what about those individuals whose empathy is always diminished, not by choice and not by the situation, but because of their genes and their early upbringing? These are harder cases. At a psychopath-spotting class, Ronson learns about studies suggesting that a particular part of the psychopath’s brain is unusual. He later approaches a fellow attendee, and says, “You have to feel sorry for psychopaths, right? If it’s all because of their amygdalae? If it’s not their fault?” There are many answers that one could give, but it’s tempting to agree with the man’s response: Why should we care about psychopaths? They don’t care about us.

Paul Bloom is a professor of psychology at Yale and the author of “How Pleasure Works.” He is currently writing a book about moral psychology.