The classic checklist for psychopathy was developed in 1980 by Prof Robert Hare, who is still the recognised giant of the territory. The 20 traits, which ranged from pathological lying to a lack of empathy, were based entirely on prison populations. This worked because not only did Hare have the benefit of a large sample, with pronounced psychopathic behaviours, but he was able to compare interviews and self-reporting with data collected about the individuals – so inconsistencies could be identified.
However, Hare knew this approach was limited. In 1976, he said that he simply didn’t know to what extent his results could be generalised to non-incarcerated psychopaths, including female ones. Even decades later in the early 2000s, when Hare wanted to look into psychopaths in politics, he still needed to go to prison to find them (Pinochet’s henchmen in Chilean jails).
Research into the higher-functioning psychopath – who doesn’t get caught, or maybe doesn’t even resort to crime – has proved elusive, not least because self-reporting questionnaires don’t work. Psychopaths lie; arguably, that’s their main thing. It wasn’t from a forensic psychology but a business studies background that Dr Karen Mitchell arrived in the territory of high-functioning psychopathy.
By the late 2010s, she’d spent 30 years working as a consultant on large-scale change in corporate culture. Her work tended to be with organisations in crisis: “So it might be market alignment, or deaths or suicides in companies,” she tells me from her home in Australia. Observing the sheer number of problems at work that stemmed from specific individuals with predatory traits, she started to research those same “dark personality” behaviours in other precincts.
We’re bad at recognising them interpersonally, for reasons to be discussed, but we’re also bad at pattern finding in aggregate – mainly because different disciplines have so many different names for these kinds of people. Mitchell lists some of the terms: “Malignant narcissist, dark triad, psychopath, coercive controller, primary psychopath, grandiose narcissist, corporate psychopath, Machiavellian, dark tetrad, covert narcissist, toxic leader.” These are all traits that she argues are part of the same phenomenon, the Dark Personality, or the Persistent Predatory Personality. Mitchell embarked on a PhD, published in 2024, in which she interviewed people who had met persistent predatory personalities professionally – some clinical, but others not, from fields as wide as HR, social work, family courts, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, church leaders, and academics from different fields.
Her method, she says, was unorthodox, being qualitative, not quantitative. And some of her conclusions directly contradict clinical definitions of psychopathy, which rely heavily on impulsivity. Mitchell says this is because other definitions such as Hare’s are derived from the prison population, which is the low-functioning end of the scale.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
