Dan is a psychopath. But he is smart, charming, and successful. You would not know from first meeting him that he feels pride rather than remorse when he regularly plays the system, deceives people, and exploits others to get what he wants.
But does Dan have a psychological disorder?
Lesleigh Pullman and colleagues recently set out to assess the hypothesis that psychopathy might not be a mental disorder, but rather an effective life strategy. To do so, they analyzed a surprising sign of mental disorders: handedness.
Defining psychopathy and mental disorders
Psychopathy is characterized by emotional and interpersonal deficits such as callousness, grandiosity, and a lack of empathy and remorse. It sometimes involves deviant behavior like aggression and violence. Diagnosis is generally based on interviews or self-reported questionnaires that assess selfishness, remorseless use of others, and lifestyle.
Though the term is often used for run-of-the-mill jerks, less than 5 percent of the population — maybe even less than 1 percent — is selfish and remorseless enough to qualify as a psychopath.
Pullman and her colleagues take an evolutionary perspective on what constitutes a mental disorder, specifying that it must be a harmful dysfunction. To add up to a mental disorder, in other words, behavior cannot just fall outside of the norm. Instead, the behavior must constitute a failure to perform a function that evolution selected because it helps a person.
In other words, psychopathy must harm a person’s functioning or wellbeing if we are to consider it a disorder.
It might seem obvious that psychopathy is in fact harmful. Psychopaths struggle to maintain relationships. They are more likely to die prematurely and to be incarcerated. Hart and Hare, for example, argue that given its negative impact on society, psychopathy is perhaps second only to schizophrenia as a public health concern. READ MORE...
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