by Adrian Raine
Gao’s research took the field a lot further than before because she documented that a lack of conscience, which normally gives us that sense of guilt and which puts the brakes on outrageous behavior, has its origins very early in life—well before the onset of childhood conduct disorder, juvenile delinquency, and adult violence. It was also not an obvious by-product of the social environment. It’s likely, therefore, that this autonomic under-responsiveness stems from a neurodevelopmental condition—from the brain that does not develop normally over time.63 What part of the brain is critical for fear conditioning? The amygdala—that part of the brain that we saw in the previous chapter to be burned out in fearless psychopaths.
From the very periphery of the body’s anatomy, the fingertips, we are able to get an insight into the inner workings of the brain and neurobiological dysfunction that partly causes offending. Kids who condition poorly become criminals. Nobody is born bad, but some may develop a bit crookedly.
Yet life is never simple. In the anatomy of violence there are twists and turns as biology ebbs and flows in shaping the people that we are. As we have seen with Raj and Joëlle, the same biology and temperament may result in different life outcomes. And as we saw with Randy Kraft and Antonio Bustamante in the last chapter, there can be different causes for why two different people both end up as killers. Divergent beginnings, shared endings.
This variability is a real lacuna in our knowledge on the biology of violence. Why doesn’t everyone with a slow heartbeat become violent and psychopathic? Can there be two types of adult psychopaths? I believe there can. Rather than showing poor fear conditioning, some psychopaths have surprisingly good autonomic and brain functioning. You likely work with one. One may be a friend or acquaintance. And whether you know it or not, you could even be in a relationship with one. Worse still, you may be one yourself. Let’s take a further look.
SUCCESSFUL PSYCHOPATHS
You’ve had a sense of psychopaths from our discussions of evolutionary cheats and Jolly Jane Toppan. They can be fearless stimulation seekers who are also selfish, charming, and grandiose. As Robert Hare, the world’s leading researcher on psychopathy and the creator of the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, succinctly summed it all up in the title of his book, psychopaths are Without Conscience.64 When you lack a conscience you may gain some psychopathic traits. Yet I do not believe that all psychopaths have poor frontal functioning and autonomic under-arousal. Successful psychopaths—those who are not caught and convicted—may be a different beast that we have to contend with.
My interest in successful psychopaths goes back to my accounting days. After I packed in accounting with British Airways for the cloud-capped towers of Oxford University, I was intellectually rich but financially broke. So during my first summer I went back to London and registered at a temporary-employment agency to earn money. It was there, I believe, that I met my first successful psychopath. I had found work as an auditor, and at the company that hired me I met Mike, who was also a temp. I got to know him over drinks in the pub after work. Charming, witty, engaging, and very quickly liked by the permanent staff, Mike was an impressive and professional young man with fascinating life stories and a thirst for adventure, but he soon revealed to me that he was pilfering what he could at work whenever he had a chance, both at this job and, apparently, other jobs. It’s not that he admitted to a lot, but I got the sense that he was revealing just snippets of his antisocial lifestyle.
There’s nothing more dramatic to say about Mike, except that my memory of him and a few other temps who lived life on the edge stayed with me. I never thought more about Mike until years later as an academic in Los Angeles. I had previously worked with convicted psychopaths in English prisons. I was now working with caught murderers on the verge of execution. I got to wondering whether offenders who were not caught would look the same—biologically, at least—as their caught counterparts. But where would I get “free-range” offenders? Then Mike fleetingly came to mind, along with the answer—temporary-employment agencies.
It was a long shot, but intrigued by the idea, I did a pilot study at the nearby temp agency. I hired temps and paid them to work in my laboratory for three days. The work they did for me? Taking part in experiments. My team and I asked them what crimes they had been committing recently. It sounds a bit naïve. Who would ever tell you about crimes they had committed? And yet before long they were singing like canaries about the robberies, rapes, and even homicides they had committed. My memory of Mike had borne fruit. We quickly got into business, recruiting more temp workers and collecting more data.
To place what I was finding into a research context: the base rate of antisocial personality disorder—lifelong recidivistic offending—is 3 percent in males in the general population. In our temp-agency sample the base rate was an astonishing 24.1 percent—more than eight times the national average.65 Furthermore, a full 42.9 percent met the adult criteria of antisocial personality disorder66—nearly half the sample.67 Temp agencies were antisocial gold mines, and we started to dig deeper.
Those with “antisocial personality disorder” were perpetrating much more than the mischief I got up to in my youth. Forty-three percent had committed rape. Fifty-three percent had attacked a stranger, causing at the least bruises or bleeding. Twenty-nine percent had committed armed robbery. Thirty-eight percent had fired a handgun at someone. And twenty-nine percent had either attempted or completed homicide.68 I was realizing that compared with the tigers among my temp-agency recruits, Mike back in England was just a pussycat.69
You may wonder why the temps would admit their crimes to us. There are a number of reasons. We obtained a certificate of confidentiality from the secretary of health that protected us from being subpoenaed by any law-enforcement agency in the United States. We could not be forced to reveal our data. In fact, if I did so I would be committing an offense, and could end up as an offender in someone else’s study on crime. Our participants therefore were legally protected. Furthermore, they were in a respectable, professional university environment with trustworthy research assistants. Perhaps for the first time in their lives, they could talk about their wrongdoings at length with a professional in full confidence and without risk—even getting into the nitty-gritty of rape and homicide.
Were they fibbing? We think not. There was little or no motivation for such deception, no obvious gain. While some pathological lying cannot be ruled out, we still believe they were antisocial offenders. Put it this way: if they were telling the truth, they were definitely antisocial. If, alternatively, they were lying about their crimes and deceiving us, they were pathological liars and still antisocial. In reality, we believe that rates of criminal offending and antisocial personality disorder are underestimates of the true base rate in this population, rather than overestimates.
We also found unusually high rates of psychopathic personality as assessed by the Psychopathy Checklist, the “gold standard” instrument for assessing psychopathy.70 For males, 13.5 percent had a score of 30 or more—the cutoff used to define psychopathy in many prison studies.71 More than twice that amount—30.3 percent—were above the cutoff of 25 or more that had been adopted in several other studies.72 For the males whom we focused on in our research, about a third were defined as psychopathic.
How could there be so many more psychopaths in temporary-employment agencies? The answer is that temp agencies are wonderfully safe havens for psychopaths—almost a breeding ground. Psychopaths gain in life by ferociously exploiting others. To begin with, their superficial charm allows them to succeed with their parasitic lifestyle, but ultimately they get caught out by those around them. Once detected, they can pack up and move on to the next social group of victims that they will suck dry. Temporary-employment agencies allow this freedom of movement. They also conduct more limited background checks compared with companies hiring full-time employees. Furthermore, psychopaths are impulsive and unreliable—they only rarely hold down a permanent job. Temporary jobs, in contrast,
limit the time that their flaws can be detected by employers. Psychopaths are also stimulation-seekers and love to be on the move for new experiences, and temp agencies give them that freedom, even to move from city to city. Of course, not all people at temp agencies are psychopaths. After all, I was a temp once. But putting all this together, it’s no small wonder that we found as many psychopaths as we did.
So now we had our psychopaths. We searched court records to see which ones had been convicted of an offense. Those with a conviction were delineated “unsuccessful” psychopaths. Those without a conviction were the “successful” psychopaths. We did not have many—sixteen unsuccessful psychopaths, thirteen successful psychopaths, and twenty-six controls. But it was a beginning.
Up until this point there had been no empirical research on these individuals except for a seminal, creative investigation conducted by Cathy Widom. From November 1974 to July 1975 she placed an ad in a “counterculture” Boston newspaper that read as follows:
Wanted: charming, aggressive, carefree people who are impulsively irresponsible but are good at handling people and at looking after number one.73
Using a neuropsychological measure, she found that the non-institutionalized psychopaths who responded to her ad did not show the frontal-lobe deficits that one would expect. She went on further to speculate that “autonomic differences found between psychopaths and others may only characterize the institutionalized, unsuccessful psychopath.”74 Teaming up with Joe Newman, a leading psychopathy researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, Widom went on to replicate and extend her original findings.75 Widom’s original study had its limitations. It did not have a control group, and because 46.4 percent had been incarcerated at some point in their lives, they could not be exactly classified as “successful” psychopaths. Furthermore, there were no psychophysiological data to back up her speculative hypothesis.
We, however, did have a psychophysiological laboratory and we set about testing Widom and Newman’s ideas. We put all our participants through a social stressor. They were seated in our psychophysiology laboratory. They had electrodes placed on their fingertips to measure skin conductance, and on their arms to measure heart rate. They were acclimated to the setting in what we call a “resting state”—or as near to “rest” as one can get. We made a careful note of their levels of autonomic arousal.
We then sprung on them the social stressor task. They were told that they had to give a speech about their worst faults. They had two minutes to prepare the speech, and two minutes to give it while being videotaped. If the participant hesitated or came to a stop, a research assistant in the room with them would push them to give more details to increase the stress level. The first two preparatory minutes are “anticipatory fear,” or what Robert Hare has termed “quasi-conditioning.”76 As in fear conditioning, the question is whether the psychopaths will autonomically respond, both in anticipation of the stressful speech, and also during the speech itself.
The findings are shown in Figure 4.2. The controls show what we all expected—increases in heart rate and sweat rate throughout most of the task. The unsuccessful psychopaths also show what we would expect based on prior research with institutionalized psychopaths, a blunted autonomic stress response—only small increases in sweat rate and heart rate from the resting baseline. The successful psychopaths, in sharp contrast to their unsuccessful counterparts, show significant increases in heart rate and skin conductance relative to their resting state.77 Essentially there is no difference between the successful psychopaths and the normal controls. Widom’s almost prophetic claim, made twenty-three years earlier, had received some initial support.
We also tested our psychopaths and controls on a measure called “executive functioning.” It involves all the cognitive functions that you would like in a successful business executive—planning, attention, cognitive flexibility, and, importantly, the ability to change plans when given feedback that one course of action was inappropriate. How did our three groups do? You can see in Figure 4.3. The controls performed significantly better than unsuccessful psychopaths—that’s something you might expect. But take a look at how the successful psychopaths performed. They not only outperformed the failed psychopaths—they also performed significantly better than the normal controls.78
Figure 4.2 Autonomic stress reactivity in successful psychopaths, unsuccessful psychopaths, and controls
What are we to make of the surprising findings for the successful psychopaths? To answer this we have to step from the anatomy of violence to the anatomy of decision-making and a different perspective from the discipline of neurology. Antonio Damasio, in his groundbreaking book Descartes’ Error, put forward his innovative “somatic marker” hypothesis, which brings together emotion and cognition in the formation of good decision-making.79 He argues that Descartes made a fundamental error, summarized in the famous phrase cogito ergo sum, in believing that there is a fundamental separation of the mind from the body.
Figure 4.3 Superior executive functioning in successful psychopaths
Damasio, in contrast, argues for an intimate mind-body connectedness. A good mind makes good decisions, and to do so it has to rely on “somatic markers” produced by the body. These somatic markers are unpleasant autonomic bodily states produced when one is contemplating a risky action or a difficult decision—the pounding heart and the perspiration. These somatic markers have flagged negative outcomes in the individual’s past, and are stored in the somatosensory cortex. This input is then transmitted to the prefrontal cortex, where further evaluation and decision-making takes place. If the current situation has been previously linked to a negative outcome, the somatic marker for that past event will sound an alarm bell to the decision-making areas of the brain—no action will be taken. This process may act at either a conscious or a subconscious level and can be thought of as helping to reduce the range of options in decision-making. It is similar to classical conditioning and the anticipatory fear that deters us from conducting an antisocial act previously associated with punishment.
We had always assumed that in order to make good decisions, we need to be removed from our emotions—to be cool, calm, and collected. The revolution Damasio made in cognitive and affective neuroscience was to argue that instead, emotions importantly guide good decision-making. Without emotions and somatic markers, we will not make good decisions.
Now let’s turn back to our unsuccessful psychopaths. They have blunted emotions and lack the appropriate autonomic stress response. We can think of that as reduced somatic markers—a relative disconnection between mind and body. That mind-body dualism, according to Damasio, would result in bad decision-making, and certainly incarcerated offenders make many bad life decisions.
Turning to the successful psychopaths, we see that they show intact autonomic stress reactivity and anticipatory fear. They have a mind-body connectedness that allows for somatic markers to help form good decision-making. That translates into superior executive functioning. And I would argue that that is why successful psychopaths are successful.
Recall that we define success here in terms of not being convicted for an offense. Imagine that the successful psychopath is on the street, contemplating robbing a 7-Eleven store. His brain—consciously and also subconsciously—is processing the scene. He’s consciously checking up and down the street for specific signs of surveillance—but his subconscious is also forming a gestalt of the whole scene and putting it together. He’s about to proceed—but at the last minute he pulls back. There was something about the whole setup that he did not like the look of. He cannot put his finger on it, except that it just did not “feel good.”
A somatic marker warning bell had been rung, warning him that previously in a similar situation he was nearly caught. Perhaps it was the same time of day, the same number of people in the shop, the fact that he had also just had a couple of drinks, or a combination of these visual and somatic cues that triggered the warning bell. The heightened autonomic r
eactivity is giving him an edge over his unsuccessful psychopathic counterpart who does not hear the somatic warning-bell sound and instead ends up hearing the police siren.
So the failed psychopath has reduced autonomic reactivity to cues that signal danger and capture. The successful psychopath has relatively better autonomic functioning and hence is better able to escape detection by the authorities.80 He also has better executive functioning. But if the successful psychopath does not have the autonomic impairments that haunt failed psychopaths, what made him psychopathic in the first place?
Our original study gives us two initial clues. First, if you look back at Figure 4.2, you can see that in the resting state prior to the social stressor, both psychopathic groups show a low resting heart rate. The successful psychopaths are six beats per minute slower than the control group, and slightly below the level of the unsuccessful psychopaths. So, successful psychopaths have the low resting cardiovascular arousal that we argued earlier may result in stimulation-seeking, a cardinal feature of the psychopath. Second, the successful psychopaths evidenced a psychosocial impairment not shown by the other two groups—being raised by people other than their natural parents or being brought up in a foster home or other institution. Parental absence and a lack of bonding may have helped shape the lack of close social connectedness and the superficiality that typifies psychopathic relationships.