Abigail Marsh is a professor in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program at Georgetown University.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Abigail Marsh explore what to do if a child you know might be psychopathic, whether psychopathy is linked to charisma and success, and how to protect yourself.
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This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: How should we think about what a psychopath—or do you prefer sociopath—actually is?
Abigail Marsh: That is a great question. There is this weird dichotomy in how people talk about the disorder. The term sociopath is vastly preferred in the media and literature. There are a couple of very famous memoirs that came out about people who were self-described sociopaths. It is not a term that is used anymore by clinicians or researchers. We primarily use the term psychopathy. I do not even use the term psychopath anymore, mainly because it occurred to me that we do not refer to any other people by their disorder anymore. We do not refer to somebody as “a schizophrenic” or “an anorexic” anymore. We have switched to a kind of person-first language, and I have thought that people with psychopathy probably deserve the same.
All that said, psychopathy is a personality disorder. It is not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the DSM, that is used to define and diagnose other personality disorders, for complicated reasons. It is a clinical disorder, and it is characterized by three main types of traits. One, a bold, fearless, dominant and socially dominant personality. Meanness or callousness is probably the trait people most closely associate with it: lack of remorse, lack of guilt, lack of compassion, etc. Finally, disinhibition, difficulty sticking to a plan, difficulty keeping promises, irresponsible behavior, sometimes very spontaneous, clearly poorly planned antisocial behavior that lands people in trouble.
Mounk: I once had somebody explain to me the difference between a sociopath and a psychopath as being that a psychopath is somebody who has, I guess in your language, all three of those sets of traits, who is disinhibited, who wants to dominate the world, and who ends up doing really bad acts. A sociopath may be somebody who does not have fellow feeling, who does not feel remorse if they have hurt somebody, who does not feel bad about things they have done in the world, but who may be relatively well adjusted, who may think that it is in their interest not to hurt others because they might go to jail or other bad things might happen, but is still lacking that dimension of fellow feeling.
You are saying that there is not this principled distinction between the term sociopath and the term psychopath. Is there a distinction between those two types of people? Would you say that there are some people who have this one set of traits quite strongly but not the other sets of traits, or are they really correlated with each other?
Marsh: Such good questions. That is a really interesting description that you were given about the difference between the two. That is even a new one. I have heard probably 20 different descriptions, including clinicians and researchers describing the two terms and what distinguishes them. You will get many different explanations.
First, it is totally possible for people to be persistently antisocial but not because they lack the capacity for empathy or remorse. I would say that for most people with psychopathy, it is not that they totally lack the capacity for empathy or remorse, but it is very suppressed. They feel these emotions very mildly or very rarely, maybe only with reference to one or two people.
Mounk: That is interesting because I think we do also tend to think about it like it is a switch. Most people have it, and then some people do not have it at all, whereas you are talking about it nearly as a normal distribution. Most people have it to a relatively typical degree, and then a bunch of people have it less than others, but they might still feel it for their mom or for their best friend or for the person they love, but not for anybody else. They might feel it more dimly than others. What do you think is the distribution? Is it something like a normal distribution, or how should we think about this?
Marsh: I think it is certainly a distribution. It has that classic bell-curve shape. It is probably shifted so that most people are on the plenty-of-empathy side of the distribution. The tail of people who experience very little empathy and compassion is a long tail, but a very small number of people are down there. I have worked with people who say they have never experienced anything like what most people describe as empathy or remorse or compassion. They exist, but that is a small percent of people, much smaller than the percent of people who say they wish that they could experience less empathy and compassion for others.
Mounk: Interesting, because that too can be debilitating if you inadvertently step on a bug and you are so empathetic for the natural world that you are terribly guilt-ridden about having inadvertently done that. That also seems like a kind of ill-adjustedness.
Marsh: It can be. Empathy, compassion, and guilt swim together. That is the downside of being a compassionate, empathic person: you often feel guilt about not having done even better, even though you are probably a nicer person than average.
Mounk: Let us get back to empathy and what people who have really strong empathy feel as part of a conversation as well. Sticking with the other end of the spectrum, obviously one reason why we are interested in this topic is that it drives bad behavior. A lot of criminals, people who are serial killers, and perhaps some politicians who do terrible things seem to suffer from some form of psychopathy. What drives bad behavior here? Is it primarily this question of whether you have empathy for others? Or is it whether you have empathy for others plus those other ingredients? What do you think is predictive with the patients you work with? When do you think, oh dear, I’m worried for the people in their life? Is it just how little empathy they have for others, or is it that plus some other thing about them?
Marsh: Each one of these prongs that makes up psychopathy—the bold, socially dominant personality; the low empathy and compassion; and the disinhibition—can drive antisocial behavior for different reasons. I think of them as different kinds of gas or brakes. You can be a very antisocial person who has at least the capacity for empathy and compassion simply because you are so disinhibited: you see something, you want it, you act. Or you may be very bad at controlling your anger. You may have something like intermittent explosive disorder, where it is easy for things to get under your skin and you blow up in a disproportionate way, and afterward you feel awful. Each time this happens you think, I cannot believe I did this again, but it is too hard to control those emotions.
There are also people driven by status goals. People who are very bold and socially dominant often like having higher status than others. Sometimes those goals can drive antisocial acts even though the person has the capacity for empathy but chooses not to deploy it. They may view certain people as unworthy of empathy or compartmentalize their empathy.
There are many people who are functional in their normal social lives. They have a normal family life and long-term friendships—relationships that typically do not emerge in people who are truly, pathologically psychopathic, because it is very hard to maintain friendships when you view others as instrumental means to achieve your goals.
Mounk: At some point they’re gonna figure that out, feel used and won’t want to be your friend.
Marsh: Right, because in people who are highly psychopathic, the “friendship” was only ever based on a desire to get something out of it. It is not a typical way of bonding with others. But there are people who can form close bonds while still being so driven by their need to dominate or to acquire that their empathic capacity gets switched off or suppressed by those goals.
Mounk: I’m trying to think about what this model looks like. One perhaps overly simple way of describing it is that we have desires in the world, and we act in order to serve those desires. Then we have inhibitions. One obvious inhibition is empathy for others: I’m not going to do this because it will upset someone. Is the relationship between desire and inhibition something like one minus the other? How should we think about that relationship?
You can imagine someone who is highly empathetic but has uncontrollable rages and therefore behaves badly, or someone who has very little—perhaps no—compassion for others but is so impassive, so lacking in strong desires, that they calculate it is in their rational self-interest never to break the law or cause drama because they prefer a quiet life of sitting at home watching Netflix.
Marsh: There are plenty of psychopathic people exactly like that who do not particularly care about other people. They just want what they want. The stuff that they want is pretty easy for them to get for whatever reason. Maybe because they have particular cognitive skills and talents that make having a pretty easy life not that big of a challenge for them. I will say the other thing that makes psychopathy such a challenge is that the bold, dominant personality is associated with being fearless, which means being unafraid of being punished. The other thing that keeps people who are psychopathic from behaving in pro-social ways is that they do not fear the punishment that comes from behaving antisocially, so it is very difficult to contain their behavior using threats of jail or other serious punishments. They just want what they want.
Mounk: What is it that makes them unresponsive to that fear of punishment? Is it that they do not care that if they end up in jail for 20 years, they are just as happy in jail as they would be somewhere else? Or is it that they do not have mechanisms of self-control, that they basically fail the marshmallow test? How should we think about what drives that behavior?
Marsh: Many of them would definitely fail the marshmallow test. That is true of people who end up in jail in general. Even in a typical jail or prison, only a minority of people would be considered clinically psychopathic. Close to half, but not most people. Disinhibition and failure to control impulses or difficulty balancing risks and rewards is a major factor that puts people in detention. That is true of people with psychopathy too.
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They do not like jail. It is not that they want to be there. There does seem to be neurodevelopmental differences in them such that in their very early life they do not fear the punishment ahead of time. They do not like it when they get it, but they do not fear it ahead of time, and they do not do things to avoid the threat or the punishment even if they will not like it when they get it.
Mounk: You just mentioned a stat by the by that is striking. You said close to half of people in prison, as far as we know, have those psychopathic traits. How does that relate to the general population?
Marsh: Yeah, because psychopathy is a continuum. It is hard to put a clear marker on exactly what proportion of the population has psychopathy because it depends on where you decide to draw the clinical line. Most people estimate it is about one or two percent of the population that has clinically significant levels of psychopathy. That is in the general population. Of course, it is much higher in populations where people are doing enough antisocial things that they have ended up punished for it.
Mounk: It is, to the tune of 25x or 50x, more likely for someone who is psychopathic to end up in jail. Do we know something about what percentage of people with psychopathy will be imprisoned at some point in their lives?
Marsh: We do not know this at all. We do know there is something called the Pareto Principle, the 80-20 rule. For example, 20% of people are responsible for 80% of absenteeism in the workplace. That is true for all antisocial behavior. A small minority of the population is responsible for most antisocial acts. When you look at violent crime, some people have estimated that maybe 1% of the population is responsible for two thirds of all serious violent crime.
We do not know the odds that any particular person with psychopathy will offend over their lifetime. It is definitely higher than the average person. We did recently a big population study of psychopathy, and rates of offending were twice as high to 10 times as high as the general population, depending on the specific antisocial behavior in question. This is a paper that is about to come out. We found that the most common kinds of antisocial behavior that very high psychopathic people engage in, in terms of what they are most likely to have done, is risky, reckless driving.
Driving under the influence, not obeying traffic laws, driving way too fast, et cetera. The vast majority of highly psychopathic people have done that. Somewhat smaller percentages have been convicted or punished for it, but they all do it. A much smaller percent have committed assault, maybe 40%. Smaller proportions have been arrested for it.
Mounk: If we think again of these three different classes of character traits that are necessary according to the DSM to classify someone as psychopathic, are they correlated with each other? If you have one of these three character traits, does that make it more likely that you have the other two as well? Or are we simply saying that 15% of the population have each of those character traits, and the people who end up having psychopathy are the ones who happen to have 0.15 x 0.15 x 0.15, you probably end up with a little bit lower, so you would say 20% of each, and they are not correlated with each other? Does having one of these sets of character traits also drive the other or is it genetically related in some kind of way or related in terms of your upbringing? Or are they independent of each other?
Marsh: The top question is whether these three clusters of traits are correlated with each other. Yes, to some degree. The meanness and callousness and the disinhibition are strongly correlated with each other, maybe 0.4. Not 0.7 or they would be the same thing. The bold, dominant personality less so, as low as 0.15 probably. Although when you do the developmental studies that follow kids over time, that does seem to be the core trait. That is the first trait that we see emerging early in childhood that puts the child at risk for all the other sequela of psychopathic traits.
I will also mention that this triad of traits is not in the DSM diagnosis that is closest to psychopathy, which is antisocial personality disorder. Why they changed the name when they put it in the DSM, who is to say. I am sure you are aware of what a book created by committees the DSM is, and it has some flaws. A lot of these traits are in there, but you will not find this exact triad of traits in the DSM, nor will you find the term psychopathy.
Mounk: I would venture that a term invented by, I believe, your doctoral advisor, Steven Pinker, and a former guest on this podcast has something to do with this, which is a “euphemism treadmill.” If you find a term for something that has negative associations, the term itself will start to be negatively charged over time. Therefore people will say there is something offensive about the term, so let us not go with it. Even if something like psychopathy or sociopathy was invented as a relatively neutral term, over time we associated it with the underlying behaviors. It comes to seem like a slur word. Perhaps someone in the committee said, “We cannot call people that. Let us find a new term.”
Marsh: Yes, Steven Pinker was on my dissertation committee. I should mention he was not my advisor, but I appreciated his fantastic advice then. I appreciate this term, “euphemism treadmill,” which is a huge problem for psychopathy because it is an incredibly common disorder, and it is antisocial behavior. I should reinforce that the psychopathic traits that we see in adults are almost without exception present in adolescents and childhood in people who develop psychopathy. It is a disorder that occurs throughout the lifespan. It is the most common reason that children are referred to psychiatric care in childhood, antisocial behavior problems, not all of which is related to psychopathy, but a big chunk of it is.
Yet there is very little help for the affected kids and families out there. There is so little in the way of resources or clinical training devoted to helping clinicians help these kids. On top of that, the clinician and researcher community does the population of patients a double-diservice by coming up with 8,000 terms that all mean more or less the same thing. “Sociopathy” was in part a remedy to the stigma that the term “psychopath” had. “Antisocial personality disorder,” same thing. It is, “Let us try to get the stigma away from having a disorder that causes you to do antisocial things all the time.” The reality is you are never going to take the stigma away from the disorder. Of course, if you do antisocial things persistently, that is going to be stigmatized. There is no getting around it.
The way we get rid of the stigma is by finding treatments for it so that people do not continue to perceive this as some sort of a “bad seed” moral disorder that is a permanent stain and we should just lock you up forever. That is how to get rid of the stigma.
Mounk: You mentioned that one of the first things you can diagnose in children is this desire to dominate, and that is the predictor of the other character traits emerging. At what age in a child’s development do we start to see warning signs, and how predictive are they? If you go and visit some relative of yours or the child of some friend, and they have some concerning set of behaviors, at three years old, at seven years old, at 10 years old, at what point can you say, hey, I am not a trained psychologist, but I am starting to be concerned here, and I am not being crazy?
Marsh: It is hard because the age two to three is statistically the most violent period of the lifespan because it is typical for little kids to have terrible tantrums and be quite violent in some cases, biting and doing things that do not happen later in life. It is hard. The thing that you are looking for in kids who are two to three years old, which most parents of kids who develop psychopathic traits will say is when they started noticing something was different, is this fearless personality, which mostly manifests in the kid not seeming scared of things that other kids are scared of: Big dogs, the dark, being alone, very high places, doing things that are unusually risky, and that includes not being afraid of punishments.
Mounk: But some of those might be good traits. How do you know? Where is the line? You want your kid to be happy-go-lucky and relatively fearless. It is a big dog, but it is our friend’s dog. You don’t have to be worried about it. You’re going to be proud if your kid says, hello, big doggy. What makes you know where the line is between having a kid that loves the world and has not had anything bad happen to them, and so they do not have a lot of fear, versus thinking, my God, perhaps I’m raising a little psychopath?
Marsh: This trait by itself is probably not enough to worry you. I will say that being afraid of something and loving something are two different axes so that people who love something will override their fear for it, even if they have a normal amount of fear. Alex Honnold, the free solo climber, is a famous example of this. He is not a fearless guy at all. He talks about how terrified he was before giving his TED Talk. People assume he must be fearless because of the climbs he does. The reality is he loves to climb. It gives him so much joy, he is so driven to do it that that overwhelms the regular amount of fear. That is how I am about dogs. Big dogs, small dogs, barking dogs, whatever. When I was a little kid, I would throw myself at all of them. It was not fearlessness; it was love.
You are looking for fearlessness across the gamut, including when it comes to punishment. For many little kids, having mom or dad get mad at you when you have done something you should not do is enough to make that behavior less likely going forward. Some kids might need a more structured reinforcement system like the “one, two, three magic” system, which I highly recommend, which results in timeout. One, Two, Three Magic is a book about how to use principles of behavioral psychology to help kids manage their behavior in a way that does not involve arguing or yelling or harsh punishment. It is behaviorism. When a child does something disruptive that they should not do, you count them. “That is one.” The first time they do it. “That is two.” The second time they do it, and on three, they have a mandatory timeout. No talking, no arguing, no explaining. They have a timeout. Kids hate timeouts. It is boring. That works.
Mounk: This is true in discussions of criminal law as well. When punishment is certain and immediate, that is the most likely deterrent, and this is applying the same thing to kids. Do not shout at the kid, but make sure you punish the kid.
Marsh: Yes, it should be swift, it should be certain, it does not need to be harsh. It should be annoying. Punishment has gotten a bad name. Punishment is any response that reduces the likelihood of that behavior in the future. When you are a parent, there is no possible way to only use reward and reinforcement to shape your kid’s behavior. Kids will do things they should not do sometimes. Using simple, swift, certain, annoying consequences like a timeout, for most kids that is plenty and that will shape their behavior fine. For kids who have this bold, fearless personality it will not. One of the problems is that most parents have no idea what they are dealing with. They think, I do not understand, I have other kids and this worked fine for them, why is this kid not responding to these mild punishments? Unfortunately, what happens is the parents ratchet up the punishment. The timeout did not work, now I am going to lock you in your room. Locking you in your room did not work, now I am going to start screaming at you. Maybe I am going to use physical punishment. The problem is if the kid does not fear the punishment in advance, none of that is going to work.
Now you have a kid who is fairly fearless and thinks that everybody around them is a jerk. They are being treated unfairly. They are being treated differently than the other kids around them, including their siblings. The reason is their behavior is different, but a little kid is not going to put that together. This is the developmental cycle it leads to. The fearless temperament sometimes is coupled with low affiliative desires. We do not know if those two things are intrinsically linked or if having both is extra bad. Low affiliation means they do not find affection as rewarding as other people.
Parents sometimes try to be respectful of the child and dial back on the affection. Not as many hugs, giving them their space, not snuggling with them because they do not seem to like it as much. That is the opposite of what you should do. Kids do not always know what they need. Kids who are not that sensitive to affection need extra of it. You do not want to lock them into bear hugs while they struggle. You use big warm smiles, lots of affectionate touches because that is what it takes to get through to them.
Mounk: Just to go back to how you are facing this three-year-old and you are trying to figure out, is a three-year-old just an asshole like many three-year-olds are assholes, or is it a special asshole? One thing I have observed with kids, friends and family members, et cetera, is that kids at that age, terrible twos, will behave in horrible ways. They will bite their parents and whatever. They will afterward feel obvious remorse. They will look crestfallen, they hurt mommy or daddy, and they will be hurt by the punishment, and you will see that they are thinking, what did I do? Is the absence of that a reliable indicator at that age? Is that something that even at that young age you can observe, or is that not a key thing to look out for?
Marsh: I would say it is a slightly less reliable indicator because that is something you also might see in a child with autistic traits. You might not see as much of that attention to other people’s sadness or anxiety or stress. If you couple that fearless personality with the lack of seeming to care if you have hurt somebody, it is normal for a two- or three-year-old who one minute is a screaming terror, if mom starts crying or seems sad, to say, oh, mommy, are you okay? Not in the middle of a tantrum necessarily, but most of the time you should see a little of that. That means the child is coming to intrinsically value other people’s welfare.
That is a normal human trait that should develop. When the people you love are doing well, that should bring you joy automatically. When they are in distress, that should bring you distress automatically. Children need to develop that. Kids with psychopathy do not have that. Other people’s welfare does not have intrinsic value to them.
Mounk: You are starting to speak about how some parents understandably step back from expressing affection for kids who do not seem to value affection in the same way, but that is the wrong thing to do. How much agency is there? If by the age of a two- or three-year-old there is something wrong and you do everything right, you take the kid to a doctor first and a specialist, and they are diagnosed with, this kid is in danger of developing psychopathy or they may have inclination toward that, what can you do and how much of a difference is that going to make? If kids are born without that sense of empathy for others, is that something you can give them through treatments and therapy and the right behavioralism, or is the best you can hope for to manage that condition so that the outcomes are not as terrible as they often turn out to be?
Marsh: It is treatable. You are not going to bring a kid’s personality from one end of the spectrum to the other. If you are a parent of a child who is three, four, five years old and you are noticing punishment does not seem to do anything to your kid’s behavior when you punish them consistently, swiftly, and not too harshly for their behavior, they do not seem to care, they do not seem affectionate, they are misbehaving more than their peers, they are lying more often than usual, they might be starting to steal things, what do you do? Most people start out taking their kid to a pediatrician. It is likely the pediatrician will have no clue what is going on. They have not been trained to assess behavior problems in children, but hopefully they will assess. This is something. I co-founded an organization called the Society for the Prevention of Disorders of Aggression to try to work on some of these problems, but the problems are big. Hopefully they will recommend a child psychologist or social worker to assess the child next.
They may or may not know how to assess these problems in kids. They may, even if they recognize that your child probably qualifies for a diagnosis of conduct disorder, which is the child equivalent of psychopathy, or at least some of it is, or oppositional defiant disorder. Those are the major disorders names that we give kids who look like they are on a trajectory toward persistent antisocial behavior. They may deliberately give you a different diagnosis because there is fear of stigma, there is fear that families will reject these diagnoses. There is a misperception among many clinicians that they are untreatable. They may want to give a diagnosis like autism because resources will come your way if you have that diagnosis. They may give ADHD because it is a light definition and it is not offensive. Maybe even depression. They may decide the reason that this kid seems cold and unemotional is because they are depressed. It is common that parents get a wrong diagnosis. Even if you do get a right diagnosis, the odds of finding somebody trained to use a therapy that works is not high.
There is therapy that works. PCIT, Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, is therapy where the parents are trained in techniques that will bring out the best in the child, that will over time eliminate their antisocial behavior, show the kid warmth, more warmth than you think you need to show them, to develop a bond between you and the child so they care about you and they care what you want and they care what you think.
Mounk: Without going into too much detail, what kind of behaviors are there? What can you do as a parent? You were saying one thing is to show even more warmth to your kid. Most parents give a lot of warmth to most of their kids, right?
Marsh: I am sure you are familiar with the pop psych book about love languages, which has a kernel of truth. Sometimes parents fail to realize that the way they are showing their children love is not as interpretable to the child as they might think. For example, taking your kid to swim lessons and piano lessons and doctor’s appointments and PCA stuff is love. That is very much love. It does not feel like it to the kid. Being taken to the doctor is not feeling love. Making sure their clothes are clean and that they have had breakfast and get out the door on time are things loving parents do, but to a kid it feels like being harassed and nagged.
One of the things that PCIT entails, and many good behavioral therapy programs involve, is something called floor time, where you set aside five to ten minutes every day with your child to engage in behaviors that show that you care about your child, that you like them, that you approve of them, and that you feel positively about them. They involve things like, while your child is playing on the floor, imitating what they are doing, playing alongside them, narrating what they are doing, and positively commenting on what they are doing.
It feels simple and dumb, but in reality that is a moment when you are not nagging your child, you are not hustling them from one thing to another, you are not telling them what to do, you are not asking them questions, which many parents interpret as a sign of care, which it is, but to a child being endlessly peppered with questions—what did you do in school today? What did you have for lunch? Who did you sit next to?—feels like an interrogation. Floor time is an isolated time when you are showing approval and positive regard. It is amazing how much just ten minutes of that a day will do. A seven-minute workout does not seem like it should be enough to improve health, but it does. Ten minutes of floor time can do wonders for a child.
That is the baseline. Then there is a separate set of behaviors that parents engage in that help their child learn to avoid bad behaviors and adopt good ones through reinforcement.
Mounk: Interesting. In the best case, you can take a kid that has a tendency toward psychopathy and avert the worst kinds of outcomes. Tell us about how the life of a kid like that is likely to go. Then tell us what happens if you do not intervene in that kind of way and how the problems of misbehaving when you are three years old turn into the problems of misbehaving when you are 13 or 23.
Marsh: I will say that parents of kids with these problems are blamed and shamed routinely for their kid having this callous, remorseless personality. It sometimes does not help to say the solution is parenting management training, which reinforces the idea that you must be a really bad parent. That is not true. In general, the kids who develop these traits who are raised by parents who get them into some kind of therapy, or sometimes just figure out a way to manage their behavior, end up as kids who are not going to be the warmest, most cuddly people in the world.
They usually have learned good habits and strategies to get what they want that do not involve overtly breaking rules or hurting other people. They may end up in professions that attract extroverted people that are high risk, high reward, and offer a lot of status. There is evidence that jobs in finance and banking might attract a higher proportion of people with psychopathy than teaching, for example, just to name a quite different job.
Mounk: This is one of the questions that my producer Leo tasked me with asking, which is that there is a stereotype in our culture that certain kinds of successful people may be more likely to have traits of psychopathy, whether that is banking or surgeons or CEOs. Is there something to that, that having psychopathic traits makes you less likely to be successful, but that among some subsection of highly successful people the share of psychopaths is higher? Politics?
Marsh: My sense is that there is not a ton of great data on this. There is at least one very good study that found that among executive-level people in the business world, the proportion of people estimated to have clinically significant psychopathy, that top one or two percent, is about four percent. So double the regular population, maybe four times the regular population, but that is also 96 percent of them who do not have clinical psychopathy.
Mounk: Among the prison population you said it is close to 50%, and among these people it is 4%.It is a little elevated, but not enough to look at your cousin who is a CEO and say, you’re probably a psychopath; that is why you’re a CEO.
Marsh: People who go into high-risk, high-reward professions—surgery, politics, business—are more likely to be men for various reasons. Men score a little higher in psychopathy than women on average. There are more men than women at the very high end and more women than men at the very low end, but the average psychopathy scores of men and women are not that different. Professions that attract more men will have a higher level of psychopathy because they have more men. Even if you correct for that, there is probably a small effect.
A lot of those professions attract people who are high in the boldness trait that is characteristic of psychopathy: boldness, social dominance. That is sometimes called the adaptive arm of psychopathy or the adaptive feature of psychopathy that may help explain why some level of these traits persists in the population over evolution.
Mounk: Right. Risk-taking, bold, fearless. Someone who is a rock star performing for 150,000 people is going to be more fearless than the average person, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. It would explain some of that statistical correlation.
Marsh: Most personality variation is what makes the world go round. It is what makes life colorful. Most personality traits have a wide range that can be adaptive in particular contexts. Some contexts make it more adaptive to be introverted and some extroverted. That is true for psychopathic traits until you get to the very high end. That is not adaptive in almost any context because you burn bridges with everybody everywhere by mistreating them and using them for instrumental purposes. Bernie Madoff is an example of someone who, based on what is available biography-wise, was probably a psychopath. He was using people to meet his instrumental goals.
Mounk: What is the evidence for that? From my understanding of it, at the beginning he was running a relatively normal investment business. Then he made promises that were bigger than they should have been. Then he thought, damn, in order to keep this going, I have to take in more money, and it turned into a Ponzi scheme.
I do not know the details of the case, so I am probably missing elements of it. That seems like something an average asshole might end up in. He did not set off saying, I’m going to perpetuate the biggest financial fraud in history. He thought, I’m going to invest these people’s money and make a lot of profit. Then he thought, shit, either I go bankrupt now or I fudge the numbers. Ten years later, he’s in way over his head. What element of what he did indicates that there was more to it than that?
Marsh: It is a good question. I will say it has been a while since I dug into his biography. What you are looking for is never one thing, because you are right. It is plausible that someone leveraging the money they have to invest and trying to build up a bigger portfolio could get in over their head, not because they are trying to use people, but because they were trying to do the right thing and ended up getting people bankrupt. That could happen.
Information you look for to distinguish between someone who did one bad thing, even if it is a big bad thing, and someone who is truly psychopathic is patterns of behavior throughout different parts of their life. Here I am not talking about Bernie Madoff in particular because I am not confident enough about my memory of his biography. If you are looking at someone’s life to assess psychopathy on the basis of some antisocial thing they have done, you first want to look at their relationships over time. Do they have evidence of real friendships, friendships based on mutual affection and reciprocally benefiting one another? Romantic relationships, relationships with their children. Do those seem to be characterized by sincere affection? When something bad happens to someone you love, are you truly upset about it?
You want to look over time biographically. For people who are psychopathic, there is almost always evidence in early childhood that their behavior was difficult to control. For example, children who were sent to special schools that were trying to manage their behavior might indicate their behavior was unmanageable to their parents. It is not the only reason kids get sent to special schools, but it is a characteristic thing you might see. Was there evidence that they engaged in juvenile delinquency? Were they underperforming in school?
Those sorts of biographical details are helpful to look at. It is rare that people who are doing fraudulent, dishonest things in the business realm are not also doing things like that in the personal realm, maybe in romantic relationships. You want to look at multiple prongs to get an overall portrait of someone who does not care about other people’s welfare and is using other people to get what they want.
Mounk: We have another set of questions from Leo. One part of this is whether it is true that psychopaths are often particularly charismatic, that they have an ability to manipulate people that goes beyond that of the average person. Relatedly, we have the holidays coming up. If you go to your Christmas gathering or whatever your favorite holiday may be, and your cousin’s significant other that they are bringing over for the first time seems to have behaviors that may be indicative of psychopathy, how do you think through whether you are talking yourself into a rage and need to touch grass, or whether you have to be concerned for the well-being of your relative?
Marsh: This is what is confounding about psychopathy: how hard it is to detect in a casual interaction. It is impossible. I do not think any psychopathy researcher says there is any tell in casual conversation that reliably indicates someone is psychopathic because people who are psychopathic are shapeshifters. This is not true of everybody, but most of the psychopathic people I have worked with will say that they mask in most interactions. They present the face to the people they are interacting with that they think those people want to see. That often results in their being some of the most charming, likable, friendly people you will ever interact with. They do not seem fake. Most of us have too much confidence in our ability to detect deception in regular life. We are not good at it. Everybody I know who works with psychopathy has found themselves duped at least once.
You are out of luck when it comes to detecting psychopathy in your cousin’s new boyfriend unless you know someone who knows him and can say, that guy is not trustworthy. He talks a big game, and half the stuff he says is not true, and it is not clear why he was making it up. He has had six different jobs in the last two years, and nobody knows why. He cheated on his last girlfriend. That is the kind of biography you are looking for.
Whether people who are psychopathic are usually charismatic is hard to say. There is not good data on this. They certainly report that they are. They will say, yes, I am. That is not satisfying. It is possible that if you want to manipulate people, being charismatic is a good tool to do it. Many people who are psychopathic may develop a more charismatic demeanor in an effort to do that. It may also be the case that it is people who are very psychopathic and charismatic who cause trouble. Those are the ones you do not detect.
Mounk: Right. It is an availability bias where if there are a hundred people with psychopathy, the ninety who are not particularly charismatic are less successful, less likely to become celebrities, less likely to become elected office holders. The subset of psychopaths we think about when we consider the condition are the ones who are charismatic. That is a very good point.
Marsh: That is possible. There is not as much good data as I would like on whether having a conversation with the average person who is high in psychopathy makes them come across as more charismatic. What they come across as is a genuinely likable person who does not seem particularly antisocial. I have done a little research on this, not published, that people tend to conflate how nice a person is, how good a person is, with whether they personally like them. For example, we are overwhelmingly likely to assume that political figures on the opposite side of the aisle from ourselves are psychopathic. That is why I always urge people: just because this person has politics you do not like, whether they are a national politician or a voter, that is not a sign they are psychopathic. You do not like them, and I get that, but they may think they are doing the right thing sincerely and honestly.
Mounk: That is true for ascriptions of psychopathy. It is broadly true for ascriptions of moral evil. It is tempting to think that my way of seeing the world politically is so obviously true that anyone who disagrees with me must be stupid or a bad person. That is an assumption I see people make all the time. One of the things you get from attending focus groups and listening to people of very different political points of view is that they seem genuinely to be struggling to think about what is right. In a different way, one of the things you get from reading the most brilliant political thinkers of the past, who lived in different moments and therefore had different political assumptions and different values, is that there are many well-intentioned, smart people who have views that are very different from those that I have. That is the core to beginning to have any productive form of politics.
Marsh: Exactly. People can do things that you dislike, have beliefs that you dislike, and be a sincerely well-intentioned person who is trying to be moral and is being moral according to what they view as moral. That is important when trying to explain what psychopathy is and is not. It is not everybody who disagrees with you politically.
I have had more than one conversation with academics who say, well, I will tell you where you can find all the people with psychopathy. They are on the Republican side of the aisle. That is not how it works. The most famous social psychology experiment of all time, the Milgram study, was designed to dispel the idea that Germany was a nation full of psychopaths. The belief at the time was that you could never have had such a thing happen in Germany as what happened in World War II unless German people were unusually callous and heartless and cruel. That was not true at all.
Mounk: Well, obviously there is the historical point that it is hard to understand why Germans in 1925 were not psychopaths, and in 1943 they were all psychopaths, and by 1970 they were back to having normal psychologies. It is not a convincing explanation. You spend a lot of time with psychopaths. You spend time studying them in research setups where there are layers of confidentiality so that you elicit honest responses. Tell us what it is like, as best you can tell from speaking with those people, to be a psychopath. How do people think about their own condition? How do people think about the world?
Marsh: One thing I should mention is that there are a couple members of the organization I created who have been diagnosed with psychopathy. They have written well-known memoirs in the last couple of years. One is Patric Gagne and the other is Amy Thomas. I have valued them as colleagues. Part of the interactions I have with people with psychopathy is as colleagues. I come at this from different angles. The first work I did in people with clinical psychopathy, or callous unemotional traits, which is the euphemism we use for children, was in my postdoctoral research when we were doing brain imaging research trying to understand the neural basis of psychopathy. We interviewed kids from all over the greater Washington, D.C. area and interviewed their parents to get a better sense of what made these kids tick.
One of the interesting discrepancies we found was that there was a wide range in how aware the kids were that there was anything different about them. This is true of adults with not only psychopathy but conditions like bipolar disorder or stroke. Some people recognize that there is something different about them, and some people think there is nothing different about them and that everybody else is just like them. That makes a big difference when it comes to treatment. If someone has no idea there is anything different about them, it is hard to convince them to get treated.
The kids who recognized there was something different about them had reasonably good insight about the fact that they found themselves doing antisocial things repeatedly that other kids did not do. Some of them said they wished they knew how to stop because they could tell that it was not working out for them in the long term.
Mounk: They did not say, I wish I knew how to stop because it makes mommy and daddy sad. They said things like, I realize I keep getting punished for it, or, nobody seems to like me. What is it that bothers them?
Marsh: They say, this is not the life I want. I have talked to adults who say the same thing. They say, this is not the life I want. I want to have friends. I want to have a regular job. I want to do well in my life.
For many of the kids I worked with, they had been kicked out of multiple schools. This was not the life they wanted. Many of them had an image of what a good life looks like, and that was not it for almost anybody. Some of them did not care. There was a subset of kids who did not care. They found school boring. They did not see the point in doing well. Getting kicked out of multiple schools would hopefully end with no school, and they would have been happy. People who are psychopathic and in their teens or twenties are the least likely to appreciate that they are the source of their own problems and want to change. As time goes on, it is more common for people to say, I’m the problem. It’s me, to paraphrase Taylor Swift, and to have some sense that they could learn how to do better. Some of them do learn how to do better.
Some of the people I have talked to, out of a desire to not lose a romantic partner they realize has been a lucky outcome for them, have said things like, I was a way worse person before I started dating this woman. I do not want to lose her. I tried to act like a nice person for a year and a half, and then it started to click, and I started to want to be a nice person. It is almost like they gave themselves therapy, exactly what a therapist would tell you to do. You need to start acting like a nice person. Do the things a nice person would do. Learn how rewarding and beneficial that is, and eventually it becomes a habit and feels natural.
Mounk: When they succeed at that, do they now genuinely love their partner and genuinely have remorse when they act in ways that upset their partner? Or is it that they have, in a way Aristotle would have described, developed a habit of acting in a certain way until it becomes an automatism, and they have gotten out of the habit of acting in ways that upset or hurt the partner? But deep down, when the partner is upset, it still does not create the wrenching feeling that you and I have when we have done something to make somebody sad.
Marsh: I have talked to people for whom both are true. Some are one and some are the other. I have talked to people who said that the only time in their life they have felt something that approached love was when something bad happening to this person made them feel emotional, and they felt bad about it in a way they had never felt about anybody else. I think there are some people with psychopathy for whom there is a lingering latent capacity to experience something akin to real love. It just takes a lot. That person has to be very nice and a kind, affectionate partner. Other people never approached what I would call love, but there was mutual understanding and reciprocity in the relationship. It was a stable relationship where both people were glad they were in it. This person was motivated to keep up their end of the bargain, something like loyalty. I have talked to people who are psychopathic who say that over time they learned to feel something like loyalty, even if not love in a more emotional way. Are these people the norm? It is hard to say, maybe not. They give some cause for optimism about what is possible.
Other people with psychopathy who are less insightful will say, I just want to get what I want. All of my relationships with people are aimed at getting what I want and figuring out what they want from me. I give them what they want to the degree that I have to in order to get what I need. I do not like my job. I do not like people. I take a lot of drugs to feel something, to feel some sense of enjoyment. I engage in risky behavior like reckless driving to feel something. This is a crappy life, but this is the way I am.
Mounk: How honest and open are people about the lack of remorse for bad actions or some of the things they have done? I understand this is a context in which they know you are not going to report what they say to the police. What are the things they would tell you in that context? What are some of the shocking things people have told you?
Marsh: I cannot tell the details. Pretty shocking things. I have been shaken by some of the things I have heard in conversations. I wish I could tell the details, but I cannot. The research that we do is protected by a certificate of confidentiality from the NIH that protects us from having to reveal what we are told under subpoena, because we would never be able to do this research if the people we work with thought that we were going to reveal what they told us. We are mandatory reporters if they tell us about something they are going to do, if they are planning on hurting somebody else or themselves, or if there is any indicator of child or elder abuse. We have to report that. We tell them that. We say, if you tell us anything about these kinds of items, we are mandatory reporters, just like many professionals are. If it is something they did in the past, we would never be able to do this research if we could not guarantee that.
Mounk: If they have confessed to terrible crimes in this context, what do they sound like? Do they tell that to you the way I would say, oh yeah, today for lunch I went to a Japanese restaurant? What is the tone?
Marsh: Casual is the best way to describe it. Yes, this is something that I have done, because there is always a reason. One of the things that people with psychopathy are good at is externalizing blame. It was not, I did it because I wanted to. It was, they put me in this position. The classic line of abusive partners in domestic settings is, they made me do it. They pushed me to it. Domestic violence is something that people with psychopathy are more prone to. It is never your fault if you are psychopathic. Everything is somebody else’s fault. You get explanations like, they put me in this position. They told me they were going to tell on me, so I had to do what I had to do.
I have worked with people who explain what they do through a moral framework they created, where a “good person” will only physically hurt people who do racist things. I only hurt people who say or do things that are racist. It is an interesting moral framework because it channels their antisocial impulses in ways that are, in their view, relatively prosocial.
Mounk: That is interesting. There is some research suggesting that people with dark triad personality traits are attracted to political extremes because those are a cover or an excuse for engaging in these kinds of behaviors. The explanation would be the other way around because those extremes give an excuse for saying, most Americans are terrible human beings. That allows someone to engage in wanton cruelty online, participate in cancellation campaigns, or other kinds of things. It is a way to live out this desire within a socially sanctioned sphere.
Marsh: I have not talked about politics much with most of the participants we brought through, but it fits with what we know. We know that people who are very antisocial online are more likely to have psychopathic personality traits. It is not that you become a different person when you go online. That would have been a reasonable hypothesis, but it seems that people’s online behavior is a reflection of their real personality, even if they put on a more prosocial front in in-person settings and act under the cloak of anonymity online.
Mounk: I know that you also are interested in altruism, and we have talked about it a little earlier in the conversation. It strikes me from what we have talked about so far that the problem of altruism is somewhat ill-posed in philosophy and in biology. The basic paradox of altruism is why we evolve to have altruism. You could expect people who serve their own interests to be the most successful at passing on genes to the next generation. Over time, altruism would be selected out in a population. There are various ways of trying to explain that, group-level selection versus individual-level selection, et cetera. It strikes me that what you are describing is that if you have somebody who is not altruistic at all, who has no sense of care for others, the life outcomes end up being poor. Perhaps some amount of altruism is necessary for success, which seems paradoxical but gives a more straightforward explanation for why altruism has evolved as a human trait.
Marsh: Absolutely. I think that is a good way of putting it. To me, one of the strongest arguments for the idea that humans on average have the capacity for altruism is the existence of psychopathy. Psychopathy fundamentally boils down to not caring about other people’s welfare for its own sake. That is the trait that is important.
Mounk: One way of being skeptical about the existence of altruism is to say, well, people seem like they care about others all the time, but because you can get things out of seeming like you care for others, perhaps deep down we are not altruistic. You can make the same argument about pets. Your dog seems like he loves you, but he has realized this is a smart way of getting food and does not care about you. What you are saying is that if that were what everybody was like, everybody would suffer from psychopathy. That is what this would be, but we clearly see in the population that psychopathy is rare. Interesting.
Marsh: I will say that a cynical, untrusting personality tends to go along with being relatively untrustworthy and callous yourself. When I talk about my research with altruism in general audience settings and people ask questions that reveal fundamental disbelief in the possibility that people could be altruistic, I usually give an answer along the lines of, this question does not say much about what people are like as a whole. There is a spectrum of altruistic capacities in people, but your question has told me a lot about you.
Every so often, if they push me, because some people are very cynical about whether it is possible for people to genuinely care about other people, many of those people do not have that experience themselves. They do not care about other people. Some of them may live lives that are ordinary enough or prosocial enough that it has not occurred to them that there is something unusual about them. They think they are like everybody else. “We are all like this to some degree.”
Mounk: If anybody in the audience now thinks, oh my God, I am skeptical about altruism. Am I a psychopath?, how can people self-test whether they are or are not?
Marsh: Yes. You can go to my organization’s website, disordersofaggression.org, and there is a link you can click on for some screeners for psychopathy, totally anonymous.
Mounk: What kind of screeners or questions do you ask?
Marsh: The psychopathy screener we have for adults is called the TriPM, the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure, and it assesses those three bins of traits we asked about before. There are questions along the lines of, I have the ability not to let my emotions dictate my behavior, I like to do risky and dangerous things for fun, I am more competent and capable than the average person. It is questions that get at all the traits we have been talking about.
Mounk: I realize the pull of psychopathy is such that we have gone away from altruism again. One of the questions to ask about both of these traits is whether it is nature or nurture. Is there something in the constellation of the particular genes that a child has that makes them more likely to display these psychopathic traits, or on the other hand to be an ultra altruist, somebody who is particularly altruistic? Or is it something about the early childhood environment that triggers this in some way?
Marsh: I would say the best estimates are that about half the variation in these personality traits is genetic, which is true for most personality traits. The estimates always end up about there. About half the variation is genetic factors and about half is environmental factors, although not in a simple way, as you know, like shared environments. The socioeconomic status of your family and what kind of school you went to and whether your mom worked are none of the things that are terribly predictive of life outcomes in general, mostly because different kids respond differently to the same environmental variable. They do not affect every kid the same way, and you cannot make simple predictions. There is a strong genetic component to psychopathy, which I think is hopefully a relief to parents of kids who have these traits, that it is not like you caused the kid to have these traits.
Because there is a big non-genetic component, there is the capacity for environmental variables to help treat them. That is the good and the bad news.
Mounk: Sometimes the idea of genetic traits seems harsh or mean, but in a sense it is not. If we said this is all about upbringing, then if somebody has psychopathy it is probably that the mom was not loving enough or whatever sexist tropes you can immediately bring out. If there is a strong genetic component, and it is a polygenic trait, it is not one gene where you have one thing that is passed down and because of this gene you are a psychopath. It is a combination of many genes, and some of those combinations are more likely to result in these traits. You can have one sibling that does not have any inclination toward that at all and another sibling that does by random combination of genes. In a sense that is a less harsh view of the world, or at least a less harsh view of the responsibility of parents.
Marsh: I completely agree. Parents give themselves more credit and blame than they deserve. Children are agents of their upbringing in a way that is not clear in parenting books. Children elicit parenting from parents. They are not passive receptacles of things done to them. Children are also fairly robust. This is not an invitation for people to treat their children harshly. Your child will be attracted to certain kinds of outcomes, and they will want certain kinds of behavior from parents in ways that shape you in a complicated dance. Your job as a parent is not to shape your child to turn out some particular way.
There is the analogy of the gardener and the carpenter by the psychologist Alison Gopnik that I like. Parents think of themselves as carpenters too often, that they are trying to build a chair, and if they do this and they do that, then the chair will have a nice sturdy frame and strong back. That is not it. Throw away the wood. You are a gardener. Your child is a seed that could be a geranium seed or a marigold seed or a zinnia seed, and you have no idea what they are going to be. Your job is to try to help foster and let that seed grow as best you can. They are going to turn out the way they are going to turn out to some degree because genetics are powerful.
Mounk: That is a lovely analogy. I have a dear friend who is an avid listener to this podcast who studied sociology and used to ideologically believe that most outcomes are due to culture and social factors. Now, as she has children, she told me recently, I was wrong. Kids just come out one way or the other. Bringing them up in the right way, nurturing them, is important, but they are different from each other, and it is not because you treat one one way or the other another way.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Abigail discuss what to do if someone in your life may be psychopathic. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
