The mind.
I remember talking about this 3 years ago in the EAC office, about guilt, conscious, and following the rules of the society. People who cannot contain their urges to
harm (or kill) people repeatedly for no apparent reason are assumed to suffer from some mental
illness. However, they may be more cruel than crazy, they may be choosing not to control
their urges, they know right from wrong, they know exactly what they’re doing,
and they are definitely NOT insane, at least according to the consensus of most
scholars (Samenow 2004). In
such cases, they usually fall into one of three types that are typically considered
aggravating circumstances in addition to their legal guilt — antisocial
personality disorder (APD), sociopath, or psychopath — none of which are the
same as insanity or psychosis. APD is the most common type, afflicting about 4% of the
general population. Sociopaths are the second most common type, with the American Psychiatric Association estimating that 3% of
all males in our society are sociopaths and Stout (2005) estimating 4% of the
population. Psychopaths are rare, found in perhaps
1% of the population.
Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD)
is practically synonymous with criminal behavior. It’s so synonymous, in fact,
that practically all convicted criminals (65-75%) have it, with criminologists
often referring to it as a "wastebasket" category. Antisocials
come is all shapes and sizes, but psychologists
consider the juvenile version of it to be a juvenile conduct disorder. The main
characteristic of it is a complete and utter disregard for the rights of others
and the rules of society. They seldom show anxiety and don’t feel guilt. There’s
really no effective treatment for them other than locking them up in a secure
facility with such rigid rules that they cannot talk their way out.
Profile of a Sociopath Religion of the mind, and the destoryers.
One of the most provocative ideas about business in this decade so far
surfaced in a most unlikely place. The forum wasn’t the Harvard
Business School or one of those $4,000-a-head conferences where Silicon
Valley’s venture capitalists search for the next big thing. It was a
convention of Canadian cops in the far-flung province of Newfoundland.
The speaker, a 71-year-old professor emeritus from the University of
British Columbia, remains virtually unknown in the business realm. But
he’s renowned in his own field: criminal psychology. Robert Hare is the
creator of the Psychopathy Checklist. The 20-item personality
evaluation has exerted enormous influence in its quarter-century
history. It’s the standard tool for making clinical diagnoses of
psychopaths — the 1% of the general population that isn’t burdened by
conscience. Psychopaths have a profound lack of empathy. They use other
people callously and remorselessly for their own ends. They seduce
victims with a hypnotic charm that masks their true nature as
pathological liars, master con artists, and heartless manipulators.
Easily bored, they crave constant stimulation, so they seek thrills
from real-life "games" they can win — and take pleasure from their
power over other people.
On that August day in 2002, Hare gave a talk on psychopathy to
about 150 police and law-enforcement officials. He was a legendary
figure to that crowd. The FBI and the British justice system have long
relied on his advice. He created the P-Scan, a test widely used by
police departments to screen new recruits for psychopathy, and his
ideas have inspired the testing of firefighters, teachers, and
operators of nuclear power plants.
According to the Canadian Press and Toronto Sun
reporters who rescued the moment from obscurity, Hare began by talking
about Mafia hit men and sex offenders, whose photos were projected on a
large screen behind him. But then those images were replaced by
pictures of top executives from WorldCom, which had just declared
bankruptcy, and Enron, which imploded only months earlier. The
securities frauds would eventually lead to long prison sentences for
WorldCom CEO Bernard Ebbers and Enron CFO Andrew Fastow.
Scientific consensus says that only about 50% of personality is
influenced by genetics, so psychopaths are molded by our culture just
as much as they are born among us.
But wait, you say: Don’t bona fide psychopaths become serial
killers or other kinds of violent criminals, rather than the guys in
the next cubicle or the corner office? That was the conventional
wisdom. Indeed, Hare began his work by studying men in prison. Granted,
that’s still an unusually good place to look for the
conscience-impaired. The average Psychopathy Checklist score for
incarcerated male offenders in North America is 23.3, out of a possible
40. A score of around 20 qualifies as "moderately psychopathic." Only
1% of the general population would score 30 or above, which is "highly
psychopathic," the range for the most violent offenders. Hare has said
that the typical citizen would score a 3 or 4, while anything below
that is "sliding into sainthood."
On the broad continuum between the ethical everyman and the
predatory killer, there’s plenty of room for people who are ruthless
but not violent. This is where you’re likely to find such people as
Ebbers, Fastow, ImClone CEO Sam Waksal, and hotelier Leona Helmsley. We
put several big-name CEOs through the checklist, and they scored as
"moderately psychopathic"; our quiz on page 48 lets you try a similar
exercise with your favorite boss. And this summer, together with New
York industrial psychologist Paul Babiak, Hare begins marketing the
B-Scan, a personality test that companies can use to spot job
candidates who may have an MBA but lack a conscience. "I always said
that if I wasn’t studying psychopaths in prison, I’d do it at the stock
exchange," Hare told Fast Company. "There are certainly more people in
the business world who would score high in the psychopathic dimension
than in the general population. You’ll find them in any organization
where, by the nature of one’s position, you have power and control over
other people and the opportunity to get something."
But how can we recognize psychopathic types? Hare has revised his
Psychopathy Checklist (known as the PCL-R, or simply "the Hare") to
make it easier to identify so-called subcriminal or corporate
psychopaths. He has broken down the 20 personality characteristics into
two subsets, or "factors." Corporate psychopaths score high on Factor
1, the "selfish, callous, and remorseless use of others" category. It
includes eight traits: glibness and superficial charm; grandiose sense
of self-worth; pathological lying; conning and manipulativeness; lack
of remorse or guilt; shallow affect (i.e., a coldness covered up by
dramatic emotional displays that are actually playacting); callousness
and lack of empathy; and the failure to accept responsibility for one’s
own actions. Sound like anyone you know? (Corporate psychopaths score
only low to moderate on Factor 2, which pinpoints "chronically
unstable, antisocial, and socially deviant lifestyle," the hallmarks of
people who wind up in jail for rougher crimes than creative
accounting.)
This view is supported by research by psychologists Belinda Board
and Katarina Fritzon at the University of Surrey, who interviewed and
gave personality tests to 39 high-level British executives and compared
their profiles with those of criminals and psychiatric patients. The
executives were even more likely to be superficially charming,
egocentric, insincere, and manipulative, and just as likely to be
grandiose, exploitative, and lacking in empathy. Board and Fritzon
concluded that the businesspeople they studied might be called
"successful psychopaths." In contrast, the criminals — the
"unsuccessful psychopaths" — were more impulsive and physically
aggressive.
The Factor 1 psychopathic traits seem like the playbook of many
corporate power brokers through the decades. Manipulative? Louis B.
Mayer was said to be a better actor than any of the stars he employed
at MGM, able to turn on the tears at will to evoke sympathy during
salary negotiations with his actors. Callous? Henry Ford hired thugs to
crush union organizers, deployed machine guns at his plants, and
stockpiled tear gas. He cheated on his wife with his teenage personal
assistant and then had the younger woman marry his chauffeur as a
cover. Lacking empathy? Hotel magnate Leona Helmsley shouted
profanities at and summarily fired hundreds of employees allegedly for
trivialities, like a maid missing a piece of lint. Remorseless? Soon
after Martin Davis ascended to the top position at Gulf & Western,
a visitor asked why half the offices were empty on the top floor of the
company’s Manhattan skyscraper. "Those were my enemies," Davis said. "I
got rid of them." Deceitful? Oil baron Armand Hammer laundered money to
pay for Soviet espionage. Grandiosity? Thy name is Trump.
In the most recent wave of scandals, Enron’s Fastow displayed many
of the corporate psychopath’s traits. He pressured his bosses for a
promotion to CFO even though he had a shaky grasp of the position’s
basic responsibilities, such as accounting and treasury operations.
Suffering delusions of grandeur after just a little time on the job,
Fastow ordered Enron’s PR people to lobby CFO magazine to make him its
CFO of the Year. But Fastow’s master manipulation was a scheme to loot
Enron. He set up separate partnerships, secretly run by himself, to
engage in deals with Enron. The deals quickly made tens of millions of
dollars for Fastow — and prettified Enron’s financials in the short
run by taking unwanted assets off its books. But they left Enron with
time bombs that would ultimately cause the company’s total implosion –
and lose shareholders billions. When Enron’s scandals were exposed,
Fastow pleaded guilty to securities fraud and agreed to pay back nearly
$24 million and serve 10 years in prison.
1% of the world population are screened to become hitman, snipers, and perhaps now corporate execs. Even screening mayer briggs / Jung typo is not going to get these out of the way.
However, it’s extremely important to identify early on, if your partner, investor, go to man, client, is or have one of these personalities especially in entrepreniural projects. At the same time, one also don’t want Sainthood, unless you operate an nonprofit NGO.
