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Think of a psychopath and any number of Hollywood villains might come to mind, from charming killers like Hannibal Lecter to Anton Chigurh, portrayed with chilling menace by Javier Bardem in the film No Country for Old Men. But the traits and symptoms of psychopathy run along scales that range from weak to strong. So, someone may be mildly psychopathic or severely so. There could be a psychopath sitting next to you right now.
Some psychologists argue that the focus on violent and criminal psychopathic behavior has marginalized the study of what they call “successful psychopaths”—people who have psychopathic tendencies but who can stay out of trouble, and perhaps even benefit from these traits in some way. Researchers haven’t yet reached a consensus on which traits distinguish successful psychopaths from serial killers, but they are working to clarify what they say is a misunderstood branch of human behavior. Some even want to reclaim and rehabilitate the concept of psychopathy itself.
“Most of what people think about psychopaths is not what psychopathy actually is,” says Louise Wallace, a lecturer in forensic psychology at the University of Derby, in England. “It is not glamorous. It is not a spectacle.” Psychopathic traits exist in everyone to some degree and shouldn’t be glorified or stigmatized, she says.
In some ways, the study of successful psychopaths takes the field back to the beginning. In his 1941 book, The Mask of Sanity, the influential US psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley set out the personality profile of a psychopath: a superficially charming but egocentric and untrustworthy person who conceals an antisocial core.
Cleckley (who later identified the notorious serial killer Ted Bundy as a psychopath) drew his insights from people he saw in psychiatric centers. Among his descriptions of psychopaths were people who could keep a lid on the worst of their behavior. He sketched the profile of a psychopathic businessman, for instance, who worked hard and appeared normal except for bouts of marital infidelity, callousness, wild drinking, and risk-taking.
Over the following decades, researchers who wanted to study psychopathy often did so in prisons. And so, fueled by lurid depictions in books and films, the psychopathic profile originally envisioned more broadly by Cleckley became tightly associated with dangerous and violent criminals in both the public and academic spheres.
That view is now being challenged. In the last 15 years or so, psychiatry has embraced what’s called a dimensional approach, based on the idea of scales and spectrums of trait and symptom severity. That replaced the categorical approach, which took a more binary view of mental syndromes and assessed whether conditions were present or not.
Seeing psychopathy through this different lens opened new doors to researchers. They no longer needed to work in prisons to study psychopathy. Instead, they could recruit groups from the general population, screen them for psychopathic traits and investigate the behavior and biology of “normal” people with successful or mild psychopathy. “Most psychopathic individuals just live around us,” says Désiré Palmen, a clinical psychology researcher at Avans University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands.
Balanced by boldness
Psychopathy is a composite of several interacting traits. The traditional model of a psychopathic mind focuses on meanness and disinhibition. In psychological terms, meanness is aggressive resource-seeking without regard for others. Disinhibition shows itself as a lack of impulse control. People high in both traits feel little or no empathy and find it hard to control their actions, with often violent consequences.
As part of the recent rethink, psychologists have introduced a new factor: boldness, which they define as a mix of social dominance, emotional resiliency, and venturesomeness.
“You can think of boldness as fearlessness expressed in the realm of interactions with other people where you’re not intimidated easily, you’re more assertive, even dominant with other people,” says longtime psychopathy researcher Christopher Patrick, a clinical psychologist at Florida State University, who highlighted the role of boldness in a 2022 article on psychopathy in the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology.
A bold person is not necessarily a psychopath, of course. But add boldness to high degrees of meanness and disinhibition, Patrick says, and you could have a psychopath who’s more able to use their social confidence to mask the extremes of their behavior and so excel in leadership positions. In fact, it may be that the degree of boldness correlates closely with whether someone with traditionally psychopathic traits can make their life a success.