Otherwise no learning takes place.

It is no coincidence that fearful children generally tend to

display grater moral understanding. Many psychopaths, and others who get into trouble with the
law, are extremely impulsive. Many abused children I work with show high levels of fearlessness
alongside impulsive traits, maybe stealing or hurting others on a whim. We know, of course, that
amygdala abnormalities are a common effect of being abused and traumatised.

When they are posed with moral dilemmas, psychopaths and those with damage to
prefrontal areas make logical calculations only (Greence and Haidt 2002). Kevin Dutton describe
a classic experiment. After hitting an iceberg , a boat disintegrates. The 30 survivors cram into a
lifeboat that can only stay afloat with seven people aboard. The captain must decide whether to
throw 23 people off. Using logic, one could state that if they were not thrown over they would
die anyway. When asked whether they would throw 23 people over board, most struggle and
take about nine minutes to decide. Psychopaths have no such qualms. For them it was a ‘no
brainner’., obviously they must be thrown off, and their decisions were made in about nine
seconds, not the nine minutes of most of us. Incidentally Dutton’s psychopaths were not serial
killers, but surgeons, stockbrokers. Special Forces soldiers and CEOs. These all need to make
very tough decisions under pressure, their psychopathy presumably being an advantage in their
professions.

As already suggested, the brains of psychopaths react more slowly to words such as
anguish, upset, terror or rape than nonpsychopaths. In psychopaths such words are processed
not in emotional brain areas but more in left-hemisphere cognitively dominant ones, alongside
non-emotional words like tree or car. They can have conversations as if they understand
emotional language but in the core of their beings they simply do not. When shown pictures of
violence or horrific injuries they have less physiological arousal than most of us, for example
less sweating, or fast breathing. Not surprisingly, the lower the reactivity in brain areas that
register another’s pain, such as the amygdala, the worse the psychopathic traits (Marsh, Finger et
al. 2013). Their prefrontal areas necessary for empathy are also less activated (Decety 2013).
They also seem not to understand the distinction between conventional and moral rules that
Kohlberg (1964) and Turiel (2002) both saw as a crucial sign of moral development, maybe
assuming, for example, that not wearing school uniform is on a par with hitting another child for
pleasure.

Most societies have examples of people with psychopathic qualities. If even a part of
these qualities is genetically inherited, then psychopaths’ ability to be sexually predatory and
spawn many offspring would lead to the reproduction of such traits. Interestingly kunlangeta is a
Yupik Inuit term that Jane Murphy (1976) in her fieldwork found meant ‘a man who …
repeatedly lies and cheats and steals things and … takes sexual advantage of many women-
someone who does not pay attention to reprimands and who is always being brought to the elders
for punishment’. When asked, one local Yupik person said that they would happily throw such a
person off the ice when no one was watching. As Bhoem suggested, such antisocial people
would be unlikely to survive and thrive in smaller culture settings with strong moral codes. It is
perhaps different in our rather anonymous competitive late-capitalist world.

Where are They?

There are disproportionate numbers of psychopaths not only in prisons but also in positions of
power, such as political leaders, CEOs, heads of cults, senior soldiers, conmen and unscrupulous
salespeople. We might be living in a world which values charismatic individual leadership over
cooperative action, logic over emotional connection, in which it is easier for people with
sociopathic tendencies to flourish. As Martha Stout points out, there are higher numbers of
sociopaths in the Western world than in most other cultures and societies. Eastern cultures
seemingly have between 0.03 per cent and 0.14 per cent, which is very different to the 4 per cent
and increasing in America. Cultural factors have a huge effect on downplaying psychopathic and
callous behaviours. Gary Olson argues that if positions of power and leadership in so many
walks of life suit psychopathic tendencies so well, then people who find themselves in such roles
might need to act more psychopathically to be successful (Olson 2013).

People with psychopathic traits are not all serial killers or paedophiles or criminal
extortionists, and most have normal lives. Many seem to have the qualities the modern world
seems to want : fearlessness, the ability to take risks, to confidently assert authority, to be cool
headed under pressure, to be focused and determined to succeed. They certainly seem suited to
the financial industry, so much so that Bob Hare stated that if he could not study psychopaths in
prison, his next choice would be a Stock Exchange (Hare and Babiak 2007). Hare and others
argue that some business models ape those of psychopaths, treating people coldly, as
commodities, as units of labour or consumption, exploiting them, selling unneeded produce
which can be genuinely harmful, all for personal and corporate profit. Tobacco companies hiding
clear evidence of the serious health dangers of smoking, while actively advertising their
products, might be such an example, as might pharmaceuticalcompanies concealing poor long-
term outcomes of drugs on which patients can develop a lifetime dependence (Whitaker 2011;
Goldacre 2012).

Olson and others argue that a social system increasingly based on profit at all costs, on
treating people as commodities, units of labour or as markets for goods might also tilt the
balance towards such tendencies, especially alongside increased competition, job insecurity and
anxiety levels. Non-psychopaths will be pushed into less prosocial behaviours while many with
predominantly psychopathic tendencies will thrive. Bob Hare co-wrote a book called Snackes in
Suits (2007) which described this phenomenon, and we are living in an are where what has been
called ‘situational psychopathy’ can flourish, in part because ruthless practices are often
financially rewarded. Hare estimated that there are four times more psychopaths who are heads
of large corporations than in the general population, their ruthlessness being a huge advante.
 We all have such unempathic tendencies but they are more likely to be turned on in some
environments, such as very competitive and ruthless ones. Changes at a societal level might be
linked to this, such as levels of empathy dropping over several decades, as evidenced by large
studies in America (Konrath, O’ Brien and Hsing 2011), and higher-than-ever rates of
narcissistic character traits (Twenge and Campbell 2009). High inequality levels are also likely
to contribute (Wilkinson 2005)

One study (Piff et al. 2012) found that people from more privileged backgrounds were
there times more likely to cut off a pedestrian about to cross a road. In another test in a school,
when offered the chance to take some sweets from a jar which was later to be given to children,
richer subjects took twice as many as anyone else, were more ruthless and dishonest when
interviewing job applicants and more likely to cheat in games, reporting higher scores in a dice
game than were possible (the dice being loaded). Valuing greed was the best predictor of such
poor behavior. Whether it was their position of power that reduced their empathy, or the lack of
empathy that propelled them to power, was not researched and remains a moot point. However,
we do know that certain contexts and social positions are likely to seriously reduce empathy and
compassion.

Causes

While ruthless, stressful or competitive environments, as well as abuse and trauma, can diminish
empathic capacities, it is less clear why people become full-blown psychopaths, as opposed to
being ordinarily decent people who are nudged by particular pressures into ‘situational
psychopathy’.

About 20 per cent of the prison population are measurably psychopaths, and even worse,
that 20 percent cause most of the violence and trouble there. The million-dollar question is
whether they are born psychopaths or become so. We have seen from Damasio and others how
brain damage can lead to such symptoms. David Eagleman (2011) reported many extraordinary
cases such as Alex, a normal man who suddenly was overtaken by paedophilic desires that he
could not inhibit. A tumour was discovered in his frontal lobe, and on removal his paedophilic
urges disappeared. Eagleman suggests that maybe he, and any of us, might have such desires
lurking in us, desires which are usually inhibited by frontallobe brain areas so central to
executive control.