Stepping onto a Path of Skepticism

Psychopathy Unmasked is the first book ever to offer a sustained, critical examination of both the scientific research and forensic application of the psychopathy construct. In one of the final chapters, I lay out the reasons why I no longer believe that psychopathy or Psychopathic Personality Disorder is a valid diagnosis. I’ll write more about that in a later post. Here, I want to focus on how I stepped onto that path of skepticism: the moment I first sensed that something in the field wasn’t quite right.

To be clear, I didn’t start off as a skeptic. Quite the opposite. First, I was hooked. Then fascinated. Then fully immersed in the research. I was addicted to the literature and drawn deeper into the apparent mystery of the so-called "psychopathic mind.” And it’s easy to see why:

The research is full of captivating claims. Psychopathic individuals are callous, cold, and completely lacking in empathy. They are incapable of moral reasoning. They feel no emotions. Their brains are wired differently from the rest of us. It may be caused by genetic aberrations. These claims are dramatic, sweeping, and—on the surface—something that scientists should prioritize investigating: If psychopathy can be “cured,” if would all but eradicate crime on our societies. What a payoff!

However, at some point, probably during the spring of 2015, a strange feeling began to set in. I don’t think I could put my finger on it at first. But the more I read into the research literature, the more I noticed a recurring pattern: the evidence behind many of these striking claims about psychopathy was surprisingly thin.

Take, for instance, the 2005 book The Psychopath: Emotion and the Brain by James Blair and colleagues. I was at first intrigued by discovering a book like this. It was highly cited, and Blair was one of the central figures in neuropsychological and psychophysiological research on psychopathy. But as I read it, I was puzzled by how little empirical backing the authors provided for many of their strongest claims. In a section on moral reasoning, for example, they argue that individuals with psychopathy show "considerable difficulties" on what’s known as the moral/conventional task.

For those unfamiliar, the moral/conventional task was developed by psychologist Elliot Turiel. It tests whether subjects can distinguish between moral transgressions (harm-based actions, like hitting someone) and conventional transgressions (rule-based violations, like speaking before raising your hand in class). In general, people—even very young children from the age of three—recognize that moral rules are authority-independent and perceived as more serious than mere social conventions. The task has historically been used to assess basic moral cognition (though today, it’s not as popular as it once was).

Blair’s group cites four studies as evidence that psychopathic individuals fail this task. But I had already read those studies, and the results were not as clear as the authors claimed. The most cited of these studies was based on a sample of just 20 participants (of which only 10 were clinically psychopathic), and it had attracted criticism for a number ofserious methodological flaws. In any case, none of the cited studies, in my view, justified the strong conclusions Blair and colleagues drew in their book. The disconnect between conclusion and evidence was hard to ignore.

So, I began to wonder: if psychopathic individuals are as behaviorally, morally, and neurologically deficient as claimed—a kind of wildpsychological aberration—why is it so difficult to capture these differences in an experimental setup? Why are the experimental results so flimsy and the conclusions so forceful, especially when researchers seem convinced they’re testing something glaringly obvious?

By mid-2015—about three years into my graduate work—I began to see what I would later come to recognize as a systemic issue in the field: the extraordinary claims made about psychopathy had serious evidential shortcomings.

As someone trained in philosophy of science—and not psychology—I had at least been routinely spoon-fed ad nauseum Carl Sagan’s famous maxim: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Or, more plainly: your claims must be proportionate to your evidence.

Again and again, I saw this standard being circumvented over and over by psychopathy researchers.

At that time in 2015, I wasn’t sure how to deal with this growing realization. I still believed the field could be improved with stronger theory and better methods. But in hindsight, I had noticed a crack in the polished and fascinating mainstream narrative about psychopathy. And once you see it, you can’t “unsee” it. The story I was being told about psychopathy was perhaps a bit too simple.

I see now more clearly how this was a deep-seated skepticism that was starting to kindle. And this is perhaps the true starting point in the making of Psychopathy Unmasked.

PS: It’s a curious thing, how one ends up stepping onto—and walking down—a path of skepticism. You can only really get there if you’ve done your homework, so to speak; if you’ve read and understood enough research to recognize reasons fordoubt, tosense that something “doesn’t add up.” However, once you do see that something is off, it can take years to fully internalize and endorse your own skepticism. In my case, I was biased to thecore when the sense of skepticism hit.I wanted so badly for the idea of psychopathy to be “real” (because it’s such a fascinating idea, I suppose), and so it took me several years before I truly acknowledged just how poor the state of the research really was.

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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.