My Initial Fascination with Psychopathy

There’s a big difference between what fascinated me about psychopathy when I began my research in 2012 and what fascinates me today in 2025. But I’ll save the present-day version for another time. This story is about the beginning—about what first pulled me in after Robert Hare’s Without Conscience got me hooked.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I stumbled into psychopathy research almost by accident. But once I began reading into it, I was quickly captivated. The field focuses on individuals who have committed horrific acts—violent assaults, sexual offenses, oftentimes homicides. The prevailing idea is that such antisocial behaviors aren’t circumstantial; they’re caused by a deep-seated personality disorder—called psychopathy—that allegedly predisposes people to frequent and extreme moral transgressions without the slightest sense of remorse.

When I first engaged with this research, I wasn’t especially concerned with whether “psychopathy” was a valid diagnosis, nor did I engage much with long-standing issues like whether psychopathic personality resides on a spectrum. I kind of just took it for granted that all these conversations were based on facts. Instead, what drew me in was the behavior itself—the radical break from ordinary moral values. Why would someone do something so brutal, so cold, so utterly out of step with social norms? How can a person harm another human being and not even bat an eyelid?

For most of us, that kind of behavior is hard to fathom. It seems that most people instinctively recoil from causing serious harm to others. At least, that’s what we tell ourselves. We might lash out in anger or say something cruel in the heat of the moment, but sustained cruelty—especially instrumental, physical violence—is alien to a lot of people. Sowhen we encounter those who do it easily, and without apparent remorse, it feels like something fundamentally foreign, perhaps even psychologically deviant.

That feeling—that unsettling sense of moral dissonance—was what initially drew me in. In hindsight, I think it was the mystery of it all. I wanted to understand, and perhaps explain, the psychological distance between “them” and “us” (this is a terrible way of framing it, but it was how I thought about it back then in 2012 and 2013).

This early fascination eventually led me down a detour—or a rabbit hole of sorts—between 2013 and 2015. I became immersed in the scholarly literature on war and, most of all, genocidal violence. I read books like Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, among many, many others...

But it was also during this two-year period that I began to question whether the moral distance between “us” and the so-called psychopathic individuals written about in Hare’s  and others’ work was really as great as they stated. For instance, it was difficult to reconcile Browning’s finding that it was ordinary men like carpenters and store workers who participated in the persecution and execution of thousands of Jews. The executioners, too, did not show much remorse for their abhorrent acts of violence and denigration. Were they all psychopaths, then? That simply seemed impossible, as most of these individuals returned to living ordinary lives with their friends and families after the persecution ended.

Despite these early perplexities, my fascination with psychopathy remained raw, unfiltered—and, I’ll admit, naïve. I was drawn to the extremity of moral deviance—not in a vapid way, as though simply consuming thrilling stories, but out of a desire to understand the outer limits of human moral psychology.

What makes someone go that far? Is it a sign of a disorderly mind, or just humans being humans?

That question still lingers. But today, I’m approaching it from a different angle—and I’ve become very skeptical of framing it in terms of a personality disorder.

More on that soon…

---

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.