But not the only one. Indeed, a psychopath’s profile reads like Machiavelli’s personal shopping list: callous, parasitic, cunning, grandiose, shallow and lacking in empathy. Psychopaths are also manipulative, irresponsible, easily bored, lacking in self-control, promiscuous and unwilling to accept blame. Sadly, those traits remain invisible until after the psychopath has already ensnared you with charisma, lies and glib chatter.
Not that every deceitful and egocentric person that crosses your path is a psychopath – but there’s a good chance he is. Although approximately one per cent of the population meets enough criteria to earn the label, a further one or two per cent (up to another 600,000 Canadians) are borderline; they can be dynamic, fearless, focused and highly successful, but lack other key qualities of a true psychopath. Either way, they are born with "significant genetic factors involved in the development of [psychopathic] traits," says Hare. With assessed psychopaths, however, nurturing takes over from nature "to mould, change and modify [them]."
Psychopathic behaviour
And since North American culture celebrates aggressively successful characteristics seen in people like Conrad Black or Donald Trump, psychopaths are also getting tougher to spot. "Psychopathic behaviour is more common, but it’s not psychopathy," says Hare. This is, he says, "actually making it easier for real psychopaths to function and look normal, while making it harder to detect them from people who are just unprincipled."
That was the situation with Michelle Ann Drake. The Dartmouth, N.S., woman made headlines last March when convicted of stealing in scams of breathtaking mendacity. In one case, Drake, then 37, faked being pregnant with triplets. Shortly before a planned caesarean, she told her boyfriend’s family the babies died in labour and were cremated. They borrowed $19,000 to help her sue the hospital, only to discover they’d been set up.
The key to telling the difference, says Martha Stout, a clinical psychology instructor at Harvard Medical School and author of The Sociopath Next Door (Broadway, 2005, $14.28), is an utter lack of conscience. Sociopaths have one, but it’s full of holes and works on their own set of rules. Narcissists have one, too, but are so self-interested it’s hard to tell. "What distinguishes [psychopaths] from the rest of us is an utterly empty hole in the psyche, where there should be the most evolved of all humanizing functions," she says.
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