The Psychopath Test: A Journey through the Madness Industry

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Two years ago I drove the legendary Canadian psychologist Robert Hare through the Welsh countryside so he could catch his train to the airport. We saw a car crash. Someone had been thrown clean through the window. The shock of it sent my amygdala into overdrive. It shot signals of fear and distress up and down to my central nervous system like there was no tomorrow. I started swerving all over the road.

"Psychopaths would see that crash and their amygdalae would barely register a thing," said Bob.

The way he described the amygdalae of psychopaths reminded me of one of those Hubble photographs of a dead planet. My amygdala, conversely, was like one of those Hubble photographs of solar flares. I was, in my over-anxiety, the neurological opposite of a psychopath.

Then Bob said, almost to himself, “I should never have done all my research in prisons. I should have spent my time inside the Stock Exchange as well.”

I looked at Bob. “Really?” I said.

He nodded.

“But surely stock market psychopaths can’t be as bad as serial killer psychopaths,” I said.

“Serial killers ruin families,” shrugged Bob. “Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.”

This – Bob was saying – was the straightforward solution to the greatest mystery of all: why is the world so unfair? Why all that savage economic injustice, those brutal wars, the everyday corporate cruelty? The answer: psychopaths. That part of the brain that doesn’t function right. You’re standing on an escalator and you watch the people going past on the opposite escalator. If you could climb inside their brains you would see we aren’t all the same. We aren’t all good people just trying to do good. Some of us are psychopaths. And psychopaths are to blame for this brutal, misshapen society. They’re the jagged rocks thrown into the still pond.

It seemed such an extraordinary thought – almost the wild supposition of a conspiracy theorist. But Bob Hare and his fellow psychologists, who believe much the same thing, weren't conspiracy theorists. They were thoughtful and reflective and clever. Their statistic was this: a little under 1% of regular people are psychopaths, meaning an absolutely absence of empathy. 25% of the prison population are psychopaths (and are responsible for 60% of prison unrest). And nearly 4% of people at the top of the corporate tree are psychopaths. You're four times more likely to be ruled by a psychopath than you are to have one as your subordinate.

"But getting access to people like that can be difficult," Bob said. "Prisoners are easy. They like meeting researchers. It breaks up the monotony of their day. But CEOs, politicians…”  Bob looked at me. “It’s a really big story,” he said. “It’s a story that could change forever the way people see the world…”

That was the conversation that convinced me I had to journey, armed with my new psychopath-spotting abilities, into the corridors of power.

It's two years later, and my book, The Psychopath Test, is finished. The conclusion I came to is that Bob is right. Capitalism, at its most ruthless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy. Theirs is the brain anomaly that shapes our world.

But I learned someone else – there is a terrible seductive danger in spotting psychopaths everywhere. In fact becoming a psychopath spotter turns you a little psychopathic. You start to dehumanize people, define them by their maddest edges, wedge people into the box marked psychopath. Almost every journalist I meet asks me, Is Donald Trump a psychopath? Is Dominique Strauss-Kahn? This morning I got an alarming email from a reader. She wrote, “Damn, how many people miss the point? I was just listening to Sean Hannity and he began quoting you, referencing in all seriousness the list of psycho criteria. And then he went on (in TOTAL seriousness, mind) to explain that president Obama fits the facts and qualifies. How easy it is to marginalize (and lock up) anyone who doesn't agree with us.”

I couldn't have put it better.

— Jon Ronson

Janet Maslin

…[Ronson] retains his own paranormal ability to locate and befriend wing nuts of every stripe…his winning style pervades most of The Psychopath Test…
—The New York Times

Lloyd Rose

Though the book has its share of sensational anecdotes, these aren’t Ronson’s primary interest. His focus is on the way in which medicine and the media reduce a personality to nothing more than “its extreme, outermost aspects.”
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

In this engrossing exploration of psychiatry's attempts to understand and treat psychopathy, British journalist Ronson (whose The Men Who Stare at Goats was the basis for the 2009 movie starring George Clooney) reveals that psychopaths are more common than we'd like to think. Visiting Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, where some of Britain's worst criminal offenders are sent, Ronson discovers the difficulties of diagnosing the complex disorder when he meets one inmate who says he feigned psychopathy to get a lighter sentence, and instead has spent 12 years in Broadmoor. The psychiatric community's criteria for diagnosing psychopathy (which isn't listed in its handbook, DSM-IV) is a checklist developed by the Canadian prison psychologist Robert Hare. Using Hare's rubric, which includes "glibness," "grandiose sense of self-worth," and "lack of remorse," Ronson sets off to interview possible psychopaths, many of them in positions of power, from a former Haitian militia leader to a power-hungry CEO. Raising more questions than it answers, and far from a dry medical history lesson, this book brings droll wit to buoy this fascinating journey through "the madness business." (May)

From the Publisher

"Engrossing.... This book brings droll wit to buoy this fascinating journey through 'the madness business.'" —-Publishers Weekly

Kirkus Reviews

From the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats (2005), another readable, entertaining excursion into extreme territory.

London-based journalist Ronson delves into the realm of mental illness, traveling to the notorious British facility Broadmoor to meet "Tony," who claimed to have successfully "faked" madness—he feigned a disorder to avoid jail for a violent assault, and has been held ever since despite his protests. Psychiatrists assured Ronson that Tony was not insane, but psychopathic, a distinction that led the journalist to Canadian psychologist Robert Hare, who developed a "checklist" of personality traits to reveal psychopaths (who are by definition glib and deceptive). Ronson interviewed Hare and took his seminar. Hare contends that "psychopaths are quite incurable" due to brain abnormalities, and that his research provides the best methods for rooting them out. Hare's seminar suggests that the detached sadism and lack of empathy which criminal psychopaths demonstrate can be seen in the wider world, where they cause great harm despite being only 1 percent of the population. "Serial killers ruin families," he says. "Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies." With this notion in mind, Ronson experienced chilling encounters with a Haitian death-squad leader and with Al Dunlap, a corporate raider who took great joy in firing people. Although the book's various strands don't fully coalesce, they remain engaging; Ronson is skilled at handling disturbing subject matter and difficult interview subjects with breezy insouciance. Yet the undertones are disturbing: While society seems unable to stop true psychopaths before they inflict major damage, Ronson argues that disturbed people like Tony essentially become "nothing more than a big splurge of madness in the minds of the people who benefit from it." The author's critique of these individuals within the mental-health industry will surely attract controversy.

Bizarrely captivating look at the terrifying mental disorder of psychopathy, the difficulty of its treatment and the professional infrastructure surrounding it.