The Psychopath Test

by Jon Ronson

  “Grandiose sense of self-worth?” I said to Al now in his kitchen.

  “No question,” said Al. “If you don’t believe in yourself, nobody else will. You’ve got to believe in you.”

  “Is there another list of good things?” said Judy, quite sharply.

  “Well . . .” I said. We all fell silent. “Need for stimulation/ proneness to boredom?” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Al. “I’m very prone to boredom. I gotta go do something. Yeah. That’s a fair statement. I’m not the most relaxed person in the world. My mind does not stop working all night.”

  “Manipulative?” I said.

  “I think you could describe that as leadership,” he said. “Inspire! I think it’s called leadership.”

  “Are you okay with this list?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sure, why not?” he said.

  And so the morning continued, with Al redefining a great many psychopathic traits as Leadership Positives. Impulsivity was “just another way of saying Quick Analysis. Some people spend a week weighing up the pros and cons. Me? I look at it for ten minutes. And if the pros outweigh the cons? Go!” Shallow Affect (an inability to feel a deep range of emotions) stops you from feeling “some nonsense emotions.” A lack of remorse frees you up to move forward and achieve more great things. What’s the point in drowning yourself in sorrow?

  “You have to judge yourself at the end of the day,” he said. “Do I respect me? And if you do? Fine! You’ve had a great run.”

  “You do feel good about yourself?” I asked.

  “I do!” he replied. “Oh, I do! Looking back at my life is like going to a movie about a person who did all this stuff. My gosh! I did that? And through it all I did it my way.”

  “What about the way you treated your first wife?” I asked.

  “I . . .” Al furrowed his brow. He looked at me. “I’d been at West Point,” he said. “You go from this glamorous lifestyle to being some”—he screwed up his face—“young married lieutenant at some remote base someplace. At that young age it’s an extremely difficult transition. . . .” He trailed off.

  “So you saw your wife as something that was holding you back?” I said.

  Al shrugged and glanced at the floor for a moment. “I was stationed on a nuclear missile site,” he said. “You’re dealing with nuclear weapons. I was there during the Cuban missile crisis. The job’s very serious. You’ve got a mission. If you fail the mission, a lot of people could be seriously hurt. And does that commitment conflict with your family life? Of course it does. . . .”

  Al was referring to the time during the Cuban missile crisis that he left his five-months-pregnant wife home alone with no food or access to money and in desperation she had to call her mother and sister for help.

  “Oh!” I said. “One more thing. When you see a crime-scene photograph—something really grotesque, someone’s face blown apart or something—do you react with horror?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “I think I intellectualize it.”

  “Really?” I said. “It makes you curious? It’s absorbing? Like a puzzle to be solved?”

  “Curious.” Al nodded. “As opposed to, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s frightened me!’ I’m not going to go sit in the corner of the room. What enters my mind is, What happened here? Why did it happen?”

  “Your body doesn’t feel debilitated in response to the shock of seeing the picture?” I said.

  Al shook his head.

  I was leaning forward, peering at him over my glasses, carefully scrutinizing him. He quickly clarified, “Yeah, what enters my mind is, What happened here and how can it be prevented from ever happening again?”

  “How can it be prevented from ever happening again?” I asked.

  “You cannot be a leader and cringe from evil and badness,” he said. “You’ve got to face it.” He paused. “The basic definition of leadership is the person who rises above the crowd and gets something done. Okay?”

  We had lunch before I left. Al seemed in surprisingly high spirits for a man who’d just been questioned on which psychopathic traits most applied to him. He had a little gold ax on his lapel. As we ate, he told me funny stories about firing people. Each was essentially the same: someone was lazy and he fired them with an amusing quip. For instance, one lazy Sunbeam executive mentioned to him that he’d just bought himself a fabulous sports car.

  “You may have a fancy sports car,” Al replied, “but I’ll tell you what you don’t have. A job!”

  Judy laughed at each of the anecdotes, though she had surely heard them many times, and I realized what a godsend to a corporation a man who enjoys firing people must be.

  They took me into their TV room and showed me a speech Al once gave at Florida State University on the subject of leadership. At the end of the tape Judy applauded the TV. She clearly adored her husband, adored his no-nonsense approach to life, his practically Darwinian street smarts. I wondered what sort of woman loved a man like that.

  I said, “Tell me about the Sunbeam years—”

  He cut me off.

  “Sunbeam didn’t work.” He shrugged. “Sunbeam’s a footnote in my career. It wasn’t the biggest corporation. It had products that were a bit fickle. Appliances. I don’t get too disturbed about it. In the scheme of things, it’s inconsequential.”

  And that’s all he would say about Sunbeam. We talked about Lack of Empathy. Al said he did empathize “with people who want to make something of themselves,” but unfortunately that didn’t include his son, Troy, or his sister, Denise.

  For Denise, the relationship ended for good in January 1994, when she called her brother to let him know that her daughter, Carolyn, a college junior, was diagnosed with leukemia.

  “Can I just know that you’ll be there if I need you?” she asked him.

  “No,” Dunlap tersely replied, she recalls.

  —JOHN A. BYRNE, BusinessWeek, DECEMBER 2, 1996

  “I haven’t spoken to my sister in years,” he said. “In high school I was very close to the top of the class. I was an athlete. And then I went off to West Point. And she resented it! To me that makes no sense. If I had a brother or an older sister, I’d be so proud. I’d be, ‘Wow! I want to be like my brother!’ Her attitude was just the opposite. ‘Look what he’s got.’ I earned it!”

  Al’s relationship with Troy was just as frosty.

  “I tried to help him on numerous occasions.” He shrugged. “I tried. Honestly, I tried. It just didn’t work out. And then he made some statements to the press. . . .”

  Upon hearing the news of his father’s sacking [from Sunbeam], Troy Dunlap chortled.

  “I laughed like hell,” he says. “I’m glad he fell on his ass.”

  Dunlap’s sister, Denise, his only sibling, heard the news from a friend in New Jersey. Her only thought: “He got exactly what he deserved.”

  —Business Week, 1998

  I wrote in my notepad, and then turned to a clean page so they wouldn’t spot my thoughts, Feeling no remorse must be a blessing when all you have left are your memories.

  “It’s the tall poppy thing.” Al Dunlap was calling from across the room. “Everyone wants to cut the tall poppy. I’m sure since you’ve achieved a level of success, people are saying nasty things about you. And you’re thinking, ‘Wait a minute. Nobody ever gave a damn before I got to this level.’ Is that true?”

  “Yes. It’s true,” I said.

  “Screw them,” Al said. “They’re just jealous. You do what you have to do. So, you understand?”

  I glanced up at the oil painting.

  Write something about Narcissus, I added on a fresh page. Write something about the moral barrenness of padding around a mansion that’s much too big for just two people, a mansion filled with giant reflections of yourself.

  I smiled to myself at the cleverness of my phraseology.

  “You understand, right?” said Dunlap. “You’ve had some success. You’re like me. When you reach a certain level, je
alous people go for you. Right? They lie about you. They try and cut you down. You did what you had to do to get where you’ve gone. We’re the same.”

  Also write something about the Queen of Narnia, I wrote.

  And so it was that shareholders and boards of directors within the toaster-manufacturing world of the 1990s came to appreciate the short-term business benefits of employing a CEO who displayed many character traits that would, as it transpired, score him high on the Bob Hare Psychopath Checklist.

  Bob Hare was spending the night at the Heathrow Airport Hilton. He e-mailed me to ask how things had gone with Al Dunlap. I replied that I’d tell him in person.

  I met him in the hotel bar. He was more in demand than ever, he said, now that a big study he’d coauthored, “Corporate Psychopathy,” had just been published. In it, 203 “corporate professionals” were assessed with his checklist—“including CEOs, directors, supervisors,” Bob said—and the results showed that while the majority weren’t at all psychopathic, “3.9% had a score of at least 30, which is extremely high, even for a prison population, at least 4 or 5 times the prevalence in the general population.”

  Bob clarified that we don’t have a lot of empirical data for how many psychopaths are walking around in the general population, but the assumption is that it’s a little less than 1 percent. And so, his study showed, it is four or five times more likely that some corporate bigwig is a very high-scoring psychopath than someone just trying to earn an okay living for their family.

  Over a glass of red wine I briefed him on my Al Dunlap visit. I told him how Al had pretty much confessed to a great many of the psychopathic traits, seeing them as business positives, and Bob nodded, unsurprised.

  “Psychopaths say there are predators and prey,” Bob said. “When they say that, take it as factual.”

  “It’s funny you should mention predators,” I said. “Try and guess what his house was filled with.”

  “Eagles,” said Bob. “Bears . . .”

  “Yes!” I said. “Panthers. Tigers. A whole menagerie. Not stuffed. Statues. How would you know that?”

  “I have a few insights here,” he said, pointing at his skull. “I’m a researcher but I have clinical insights.”

  Then I frowned. “But he did tell me he cried when his dog died,” I said.

  “Yeah?” said Bob.

  “Yes,” I said. “We had just had a conversation about Shallow Affect. He said he didn’t allow himself to be weighed down by nonsense emotions. But then I was admiring an oil painting of his dog Brit and he said he cried his eyes out when it died. He said he cried and cried and cried and that meant he couldn’t be a psychopath.”

  I realized I was admitting this to Bob in an almost apologetic manner, as if it was sort of my fault, like I was a casting agent who had put forward an imperfect actor for a job.

  “Oh, that’s quite common,” said Bob.

  “Really?” I said, brightening.

  “Dogs are a possession,” Bob explained. “Dogs—if you have the right dog—are extremely loyal. They’re like a slave, right? They do everything you want them to. So, yeah, he cried his eyes out when his dog died. Would he cry his eyes out if his cat died?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “I don’t think he has a cat,” I said, nodding slowly.

  “He’d probably cry his eyes out if he got a dent in his car,” said Bob. “If he had a Ferrari or a Porsche—and he probably does—and someone scratched it and kicked it, he’d probably go out of his mind and want to kill the guy. So, yeah, the psychopath might cry when his dog dies and you think that’s misplaced because he doesn’t cry when his daughter dies.”

  I was about to say, “Al Dunlap doesn’t have a daughter,” but Bob was continuing. “When my daughter was dying, it was killing me inside. She was dying of MS. I put myself inside her skin so many times and tried to experience what she was going through. And many times I said to my wife, ‘Boy, what an advantage to be a psychopath.’ A psychopath would look at his daughter and say, ‘This is really bad luck,’ and then go out and gamble and . . .”

  Bob trailed off. We ordered coffee. “With corporate psychopathy, it’s a mistake to look at them as neurologically impaired,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to look at them from a Darwinian slant. It all makes sense from the evolutionary perspective. The strategy is to pass on the gene pool for the next generation. Now, they don’t consciously think that. They don’t think, ‘I’m going to go out and impregnate as many women as I can,’ but that’s the genetic imperative. So what do they do? They’ve got to attract women. They like women a lot. So they’ve got to misrepresent their resources. They’ve got to manipulate and con and deceive and be ready to move on as soon as things get hot.”

  “Ah,” I said, frowning again. “With Al Dunlap that really doesn’t hold up. He’s been married for forty-one years. There’s no evidence of affairs. None at all. He’s been a loyal husband. And a lot of journalists have dug around—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” interrupted Bob. “We’re talking in generalities. There are lots of exceptions. What happens outside the marriage? Do you know? Do you have any idea?”

  “Um,” I said.

  “Does his wife have any idea what goes on outside the marriage?” Bob said. “A lot of these serial killers are married to the same person for thirty years. They have no idea what goes on outside the marriage.”

  In the clean, minimalist New York City office of an enormously wealthy moneyman—a man who would talk to me only if I promised to preserve his anonymity—I sat on my hands like a schoolboy and watched as he scrolled through my website, reading out descriptions of my various previous interviewees. There were the Special Forces soldiers in my book The Men Who Stare at Goats who believe they can walk through walls and kill goats just by staring at them. There were the conspiracy theorists in my book Them: Adventures with Extremists who believe that the secret rulers of the world are giant pedophile, blood-drinking reptiles from another dimension who have adopted human form.

  “Wow,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “I feel out of place even speaking with you. Wow. I’m about as boring a person as you’re ever going to chat with.”

  He indicated his office, which was indeed filled with nothing crazy. In fact, it was filled with nothing at all. The desks and chairs were contoured in such a way to suggest they were impossibly expensive.

  This man, whom I will call Jack, witnessed the Al Dunlap affair close up. He was around when a co-owner of the company, the billionaire financier and philanthropist Michael Price—at $1.4 billion the 562nd richest person in the world—lobbied to get Dunlap appointed as CEO, and, Al’s reputation preceding him, everyone knew what that would mean.

  “I disagreed with the job cuts,” said Jack. “I said, ‘Don’t blame the people and the number of people.’ You ever seen what happens to a community when you close a facility?”

  “I went to Shubuta,” I said.

  “I’ve been to these places,” said Jack. “I’ve stayed at little inns. I’ve been to the schools. I’ve been to the training centers and the tech areas. It’s a joy. It really is a joy to go to these places. And then to see Wall Street applaud as they got destroyed . . .” Jack trailed off. “If you look at any research report from the time, it’s so transparent to anyone who understands what’s going on.”

  “What do you mean by ‘research report’?” I asked.

  The “research reports”—Jack explained—are written by hedge funds and pension funds and investment banks, advising their clients on which companies to invest in.

  “Wall Street, or the darker side that writes these research reports, lionized the job cuts in places like Shubuta,” said Jack. “If you look at the community of support—if you were to grab research reports of the time—you’d be amazed at the comments.”

  “Like what?”

  “The level of callous jubilance over what he was doing. You’d probably wonder whether society had gone mad.”

  “I guess thos
e research reports are lost to the sands of time now,” I said.

  “It might be possible to grab some of them,” he said. “It was like in the Coliseum. You had the entire crowd egging him on. So who really is the villain? Is it the one who’s making the cuts? Is it the analysts who are touting it? Is it the pension funds and the mutual funds who are buying?”

  “Of course that was all twelve years ago now,” I said. “Has anything changed?”

  “Not anything,” Jack said. “Zero. And it’s not just in the U.S. It’s everywhere. It’s all over the world.”

  A few weeks passed and then, as he promised, Jack dug up and sent me one of the research reports. He said he hoped I would agree it made for extraordinarily cold-blooded and bullish reading. It was from Goldman Sachs, dated September 19, 1996. It read:We reaffirm our trading buy rating on SOC (Sunbeam) shares based on the company’s pending turnaround/restructuring, with CEO Al Dunlap leading the charge.

  Jack had double underlined the next part to indicate just how shocking it was:Our EPS ests do not reflect SOC’s pending restructuring and are unchanged at 25c for 1996 and 90c for 1997.

  And then, finally, underlined and circled with an exclamation mark:P/E on Nxt FY: 27.5X

  “P/E on Nxt FY: 27.5X” was the cruelest line in the paper, Jack had said. I found it incomprehensible. When I see phrases like that my brain collapses in on itself. But, this being the secret formula to the brutality, the equation that led to the death of Shubuta, I asked some financial experts to translate it.

  “So,” e-mailed Paul J. Zak, of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies in Claremont, California, “the PE is the average price of the stock divided by next year’s forecasted earnings. The increase in the PE means that the stock price was expected to rise faster than the increase in earnings. This means the investment house expected that the Draconian cuts would produce higher earnings for years to come, and next year’s stock price would reflect that higher earnings for years in the future.”