𝗗𝗼 “𝗣𝘀𝘆𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗵𝘀” 𝗟𝗮𝗰𝗸 𝗘𝗺𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗵𝘆?

The short answer is: No…

That might sound surprising, because the idea that “psychopaths lack empathy” is deeply baked into the public imagination of psychopathy—as often reinforced by popular films and TV shows.

One of the more jarring examples is Javier Bardem’s portrayal of the assassin Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. Devoid of emotional resonance, Chigurh drifts through the arid Texas landscape, slaughtering innocent people like cattle.

Of course, the claim that psychopaths lack empathy is also routinely expressed in academic articles and university textbooks. If you have studied psychology, you know what I’m talking about.

But here’s the problem: when researchers actually study individuals assessed with clinical levels of psychopathy, they don’t find consistent evidence of empathy deficits.

The most definitive evidence comes from a systematic review we published last year, which examined 66 empathy studies involving 5,711 individuals clinically assessed for psychopathy (link below). The results? An “overwhelmingly null” pattern: 89.11% of all statistical tests showed no significant differences between psychopathic and non-psychopathic individuals. We also found that high-quality studies (e.g., those using more stringent statistical methods) had an even higher null ratio of 94.77% (i.e., just at the alpha-level in a probability test).

Since the publication of our 2024-review of empathy research, I’ve been asked many times by students and professionals: Why don’t we find empathy deficits in people diagnosed with psychopathy?

The most straightforward—and, I think, intuitive—answer is this: because they don’t have empathy deficits. When we have large volumes of consistent evidence, we should trust what the data tell us.

But this realization raises a deeper issue: Have we conceptualized psychopathy around a trait that doesn’t hold up empirically? And if so, what does that mean for the construct itself? Should we revise it—or even abandon it?

These are difficult questions—ones I explore in detail in Psychopathy Unmasked.

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