Psychopathy isn't a switch, it's a long-tailed distribution curve
Psychopathy isn't an on-or-off switch but a long tail on a bell curve; people who feel no empathy at all are extremely rare, and most are simply suppressed very low.
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The argument · timestamps estimated from transcript position
Psychopathy is three traits, not a single switch
Marsh breaks psychopathy into three groups of traits: a bold, fearless, socially dominant personality; meanness or callousness, meaning a lack of remorse, guilt and sympathy; and disinhibition, difficulty sticking to plans, difficulty keeping commitments, impulsivity. She stresses this is not an on-or-off switch but a bell curve, with most people on the side with ample empathy and the people who feel no empathy at all on a very long tail, small in number. She also notes that the word psychopathy does not appear in the DSM; the closest diagnosis is antisocial personality disorder, but that diagnosis does not capture the full combination of these three trait groups.
— Abigail MarshNearly half of prison populations have psychopathic traits
Marsh says roughly one to two percent of the general population has clinically significant levels of psychopathy, but in prison populations the figure is close to half. She cites the 80-20 rule: a small share of people is responsible for most antisocial behaviour, and some estimates hold that about one percent of the population is responsible for two-thirds of serious violent crime. A large population study from her team, soon to be published, found that the most common antisocial behaviours among highly psychopathic people are dangerous driving, drink-driving, speeding and ignoring traffic rules — the vast majority of highly psychopathic people have done these; about forty percent have committed assault, and a smaller share have been arrested.
— Abigail MarshThey don't fear punishment, so punishment doesn't work on them
Marsh points out that a bold, dominant personality is linked to being fearless, meaning no fear of punishment. This explains why threatening them with prison or harsh punishment rarely works: it isn't that they like prison, it's that they don't fear punishment in advance, so they won't change their behaviour to avoid it. She likens it to different kinds of accelerator and brake: some people are antisocial because their disinhibition is too strong, some because they control anger poorly, some because status goals lead them to not call on empathy. She also notes that many psychopathic people maintain normal family lives and long friendships, but those relationships tend to be instrumental, and once the other person realises they are being used, the relationship doesn't last.
— Abigail MarshAge two to three is the window for observing a fearless temperament
Marsh says ages two to three are statistically the most violent period of a person's life, so the judgement is hard. What parents notice first is often a fearless temperament: the child isn't afraid of big dogs, the dark, being alone, heights, or punishment. But that alone isn't enough to worry about, because fear and passion are two separate axes — Alex Honnold isn't fearless, he simply loves climbing so much that the love outweighs normal fear. What is genuinely worth watching is fearlessness plus indifference to others' suffering: a normal two- or three-year-old asks ‘Mama, are you okay?’ when their mother cries, while a psychopathic child does not, because others' welfare has no intrinsic value to them.
— Abigail MarshThe more parents escalate punishment, the more they push the child toward antisocial behaviour
Marsh describes a developmental loop: mild punishment that works on ordinary children doesn't work on a fearless child, the parents don't understand why it works for other children but not this one, so they keep escalating — from sending the child to their room to shouting to physical punishment. But if the child doesn't fear punishment in advance, none of it works, and the result is a fearless child who feels everyone around them is out to get them and treating them unfairly. She recommends ‘one, two, three magic’: count to three and then enforce a timeout, swiftly, certainly, without needing to be harsh, but making it annoying for the child. For a fearless child you also need extra warmth and physical contact, not less because the child seems not to like it.
— Abigail MarshAbout four percent of executives are clinically psychopathic
Marsh cites a study: among business executives, an estimated four percent have clinically significant psychopathy, two to four times the one to two percent in the general population, but ninety-six percent still do not. She notes that high-risk, high-reward professions — surgery, politics, business — attract more men, and men score slightly higher than women on psychopathy on average, with more men at the extreme high end and more women at the extreme low end, so part of the elevated psychopathy rate in these professions is due to gender composition. Even after correcting for that, there may still be a small effect, because boldness and social dominance are adaptive in these professions.
— Abigail MarshSpotting psychopathy in everyday conversation is nearly impossible
Marsh says psychopathic people are extremely hard to identify in everyday interaction; they are shapeshifters who put on a mask in most interactions, presenting what the other person wants to see, so they often come across as charming, likeable and friendly, and not fake. She believes there is no reliable signal in any casual conversation for judging whether someone is psychopathic, and everyone who studies psychopathy has been fooled at least once. What is actually useful is biographical information: whether they have real friendships and long-term relationships based on mutual affection, whether they had hard-to-control behaviour in childhood, whether there was juvenile delinquency or poor academic performance, and whether dishonest behaviour recurs across different domains.
— Abigail MarshTreating political opponents as psychopaths is a common misjudgement
Marsh says people tend to treat those whose politics are opposite to their own as psychopaths, and she always reminds them: not liking a politician or a voter doesn't mean they are psychopathic — they may sincerely believe they are doing the right thing. She notes that one of the original aims of the Milgram experiment was to refute the idea that ‘Germany is a psychopathic nation’. She also says people who behave in extremely antisocial ways online are more likely to have psychopathic personality traits, and that online behaviour reflects real personality rather than anonymity turning someone into a different person.
— Abigail MarshIn their own words · checked verbatim
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.
Abigail Marsh0:00
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.
Abigail Marsh0:00
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.
Abigail Marsh0:00
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.
Abigail Marsh0:00
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.
Abigail Marsh0:00
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.
Abigail Marsh0:00
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.
Abigail Marsh0:00
Figures
| Clinically significant rate of psychopathy in the general population | about 1-2% | 0:00 |
| Rate of psychopathic traits in prison populations | close to half | 0:00 |
| Share of highly psychopathic people who have committed assault | about 40% | 0:00 |
| Rate of clinically significant psychopathy among business executives | about 4% | 0:00 |
| Correlation between meanness and disinhibition among psychopathic traits | about 0.4 | 0:00 |
| Correlation between a bold dominant personality and the other traits | as low as about 0.15 | 0:00 |
| Share of variation in personality traits attributable to genetic factors | about half | 0:00 |
| Multiple by which the crime rate of highly psychopathic people exceeds the general population | 2 to 10 times | 0:00 |
Glossary
- psychopathy
- A personality disorder characterised by three trait groups: bold/fearless, meanness, and disinhibition.
- TriPM
- Triarchic Psychopathy Measure, a scale assessing the three trait groups of boldness, meanness and disinhibition.
- PCIT
- Parent-Child Interaction Therapy, which trains parents to improve children's behaviour through warmth and structure.
- floor time
- Five to ten minutes a day in which a parent imitates, narrates and positively comments on the child's play to express approval and affection.
- euphemism treadmill
- The process by which a neutral term gradually becomes pejorative because of the negative associations of what it refers to, so people keep coining new words.
How to listen
Founders and investors interested in personality disorders, childhood behavioural intervention and high-risk personalities in organisations; anyone who wants to spot instrumental relationships around them.
The first roughly two minutes of subscription and event announcements, plus the podcast subscription plugs that recur in the middle.