Hitting the Proverbial Wall: Too much Research with Overwhelmingly Complexity

At some point, anyone who ventures into the study of psychopathy hits a wall. I see it happen to my students today, and it happened to me as well. My moment came a couple of years after I got interested in psychopathy, probably around 2014.

It wasn’t necessarily the sheer volume of research that did me in (though there’s no shortage of it). Instead, it was the complex interdisciplinarity of the research, combined with the inherent difficulty of conducting and interpreting empirical research on mental disorders.

Students (myself included) usually get hooked on psychopathy by reading popular works like Robert Hare’s Without Conscience, Kent Kiehl’s The Psychopath Whisperer, or Martha Stout’s The Sociopath Next Door. These books are well-written and tell a fascinating tale about psychopathy—a mysterious disorder that renders people incapable of empathy and prosocial behavior: the rotten apples of our society. The narrative told in these books may be captivating, but it is also purposely superficial and doesn’t engage seriously with the empirical research. They are meant for easy consumption, without too much intellectual friction.

In short, it’s easy to get hooked. And perhaps just as easy to be fooled into thinking you have a pretty good idea of “what’s going on” in the field of psychopathy research.

Another related problem is that if you open any mainstream university textbook in forensic psychology, much of this popular and digestible narrative is retold. Again, without getting into the weeds of actual empirical research (btw, this is a huge problem, but a discussion for another day).

So, once you begin engaging in earnest with the real research (not just the popular books and university textbooks), you start to realize that things are more complicated—and not nearly as accessible as your favorite books suggested. You begin to see that psychopathy research draws from just about every corner of academia: psychology, psychiatry, criminology, sociology, biology, neurology, genetics. You name it, it’s probably in there. This makes the field intellectually attractive, but since no graduate program trains you across all of these disciplines (at best, you might touch on a couple), the field becomes unmanageable and impenetrable, even for the most industrious students.

I recall that as a graduate student, every time I thought I was getting a handle on things, I’d come across yet another study using methods, technologies, and concepts I only half understood. Some people ignore the fact that they have only imperfect insight and go on to pay lip service to superficial, digestible narrative (which is disastrous in the long run for the advancement of science). Others hit that proverbial wall, where they acknowledge their own insufficiencies.

Let me illustrate. Take, for example, the popular book Psychopathy: An Introduction to Biological Findings and Their Implications by Glenn and Raine (2010). As a student, I could follow the basic argument well enough: the book claims that psychopathy is associated with discrete biological markers, such as structural and functional aberrations in the brain. But for obvious reasons, I wasn’t equipped—as a graduate student—with the necessary skills to truly evaluate the evidence presented across the chapters. What the heck did I know about magnetic resonance imaging? Sure, I could read the authors stating that psychopathy is associated with abnormal brain activity in the prefrontal cortex, but did I really know what was going on in the neuroimaging studies they wrote about? To truly understand these studies requires years of training in neurobiology, neuroimaging, and advanced statistics. Naturally, the gap between comprehension and genuine understanding felt vast when reading a book like Glenn and Raine’s.

So, how do you climb over this wall of incomprehension?

Personally, I took perhaps the worst imaginable approach. Instead of dealing head-on with the complexity and the aspects I didn’t understand, I set out to gain an overarching—but superficial—grasp of the research literature. Not by carefully unpacking its complexity, but by attempting to read everything. A foolish project, to say the least. I thought: if I know a little bit about everything, then all will be fine (this attitude borders on the idiotic as there’s no cheating in science: either you have sufficient understanding or you don’t!).

This ridiculous project of mine went something like this: I began building a personal database of every study, chapter, and book on psychopathy published since 1980. It didn’t take long before that archive ballooned past 5,000 entries. An impossible amount of material for one person to digest. Think about it: if you read one item every day, it would take 5,000 days, a little over 13 years. Naturally, I didn’t succeed. I remember feeling completely paralyzed, convinced that there was no way I could meaningfully contribute to a field so large, so scattered, and so complex.

That’s the wall I’m talking about. And when you hit it, the easiest thing to do is give up. Throw in the towel.

Fortunately, that’s not what I did (though I was damn close!). Eventually, I found my way out of that paralysis. I repositioned myself by asking a different question: What are the primary texts that have shaped how the field thinks about psychopathy? The goal was no longer to read every paper and every contribution—just the ones scholars return to again and again. I gathered the most cited papers and anthologies and started from there, slowly gnawing my way through. A big help was Christopher Patrick’s Handbook of Psychopathy from 2006 (now in its second edition, 2018).

In many ways, the process that led to writing Psychopathy Unmasked began in earnest with that decision; a decision made more out of desperation and luck than scholarly foresight. And Psychopathy Unmasked is essentially my attempt to offer an all-encompassing overview of what I see as the most important research on the most pressing issues.

As such, one of the many goals of the book was to create a resource that future students and scholars could “begin with,” so to speak, if they want to venture into this sprawling, fascinating mess of a field.

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This blog is part of the series “The Making of Psychopathy Unmasked,” which shares behind-the-scenes stories about how the book came together and the experiences that shaped my thinking on psychopathy.