Is Psychopathy a “Real” Disorder…?

The idea that psychopaths are real—that some people are born with a morally dysfunctional psychological makeup—can seem almost self-evident.

After all, when we look around society or browse through human history, we find individuals whose cruelty, violence, and lack of remorse seem otherworldly. It’s tempting to believe that their behavior flows from an “abnormal” and “disorderly” psychology.

This is the view held by many forensic psychologists. They see such individuals not simply as morally corrupt, but as suffering from a condition known as psychopathy: a personality disorder that renders them incapable of conscience, empathy, and remorse. As far back as 1786, Benjamin Rush described these individuals as “contrary to nature.” That is, their psychology deviate from how a normal human psychology looks like.

So, in 2016, when I first encountered critical voices like those of Stephanie Griffiths and Jarkko Jalava, I was taken aback by their unrestrained skepticism about psychopathy. They essentially denied the existence of something that appeared self-evident to me.

To be sure, they didn’t deny the existence of senseless violence or cruelty. Instead, they argued that there was no compelling evidence to suggest that such behaviors stem from a mental disorder known as ”psychopathy.” As such, their position was a direct challenge to the explanatory claim: that people act this way because of a clinical condition—something innate and measurable that renders them morally deviant from the rest of humanity.

When I began to meet Steph and Jarkko on a regular basis, I wasn’t ready to accept that pure form of skepticism. Like many others, I was fascinated (and disturbed) by figures like Ted Bundy or Adolf Hitler. These seemed like textbook cases of people whose minds were “wired differently” (to use a trodden but popular metaphor). Maybe we hadn’t yet proven psychopathy’s biological underpinnings, but surely the phenomenon was real—wasn’t it?

From 2016 to 2019, I worked within this ambiguity. I focused much of my energy on clarifying and criticizing the dominant theory of psychopathy: that it stems from a neurological deficit in emotional processing. The reasoning behind this so-called emotion-theory of psychopathy goes something like this: if you don’t feel emotions, you won’t develop empathy, guilt, or moral concern. And without those, you are likely to behave in ways that violate social and moral norms.

At first glance, this line of reasoning made intuitive sense to me. But the research, I came to believe, didn’t. Much of it involved selecting participants already clinically diagnosed with “psychopathy” and then testing whether they had emotional impairments. Across literally all the published  research, these study participants simply didn’t have such emotional impairments—at least not to the extent predicted by the theory. And more problematically, I often saw researchers stretch the inferences they drew from the evidence, as if they so dearly wanted the emotion-theory to be true and couldn’t accept that the empirical data pointed elsewhere (I write much more about that in Psychopathy Unmasked).

So, I began to speculate that perhaps the problem was not so much with the theory, but with how the research was conducted—especially regarding how samples were selected. Perhaps the samples were contaminated with false positives (i.e., individuals who had been wrongly diagnosed with psychopathy).

One of my early contributions to the field was to propose a different sampling strategy when conducting research: What if we selected individuals based on emotional deficits, rather than their clinical diagnosis of psychopathy? We could select individuals based on measures of low fear, blunted affect, limited emotional resonance, etc., and then test whether they lacked moral capacities like empathy or remorse. That, I thought, would offer a cleaner test of the theory.

However, the more I pursued this line of thought, the more the emotion-theory of psychopathy began to unravel. Notice that the theory assumes there are people with no or substantially flattened emotions. But is it even biologically plausible for a human being to feel no emotion at all?

I started to realize that this is not how the human nervous system works. And when I revisited case studies that supposedly exemplified psychopathy, I saw something even more striking: these individuals were not emotionally empty—not even close.

Seriously, try to pick your favorite real-life example of a stereotypical psychopathic person. Now ask yourself: Is there any evidence that they have no emotions?

Take Ted Bundy, for example. He was volatile, rageful, and full of what I can only describe as “real” emotions. Hardly a prime example of affective poverty. Similarly, Hitler was animated by a toxic ideology and a passionate commitment to his vision of a German Reich. These were not emotionally void figures; they were engines of destruction powered, above all, by human emotion.

I know, I know. Some psychopathy researchers (like Robert Hare and others) will tell you that these stereotypical characters are only mimicking real emotions—that they don’t actually feel them. But to me, that makes no sense whatsoever. How would we even tell the difference between real and fake emotions? And is it even a serious argument to claim that Bundy and Hitler were “faking it”?

In any case, by 2019, I was arriving at the conclusion that not only was the emotion-theory of psychopathy poorly supported by empirical evidence—it also seemed conceptually wrongheaded. Like getting the most basic part of the story wrong.

Once I realized that, the whole framework began to collapse—like a house of cards. Though, in slow motion.

Admittedly, it took time, but I eventually came around to the full weight of Steph and Jarkko’s skepticism. And over the years, I’ve spent countless hours putting words to that skepticism—much of it captured in Psychopathy Unmasked.

My goal with the book was to build a systematic and critical investigation of how science, law, and culture converged to invent the figure of the “psychopath.” Eventually, I also wanted to show how this invention has caused unjustified harm to the hundreds of thousands of individuals clinically labeled with “psychopathy” in our criminal justice system.

All these ambitions began with interrogating a simple question: Are psychopaths real?

I no longer think they are—at least not in the way the idea has historically been conceptualized.

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This article 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. To read more entries in the series, follow my profile or visit https://www.psychopathyunmasked.com/blog