What Explains the Lack of Progress in Psychopathy Research?

Psychopathy research is a rich interdisciplinary field, with scientists pursuing a wide range of important questions. However, as I outline in Psychopathy Unmasked, the field has nevertheless made remarkably little progress in recent decades. In fact, we are today facing a sort of impasse where almost all of the common claims about psychopathy have either been difficult to corroborate or outright falsified

So, what explains this lack of progress?

Before answering this main question, consider first how peculiar this situation really is:

If individuals diagnosed as “psychopathic” are really as behaviorally, morally, and neurologically deficient as claimed—a kind of wild psychological aberration—it should be relatively straightforward to confirm this in experimental studies. But results are always flimsy and ambiguous.

In the final chapter of Psychopathy Unmasked, I take up this conundrum. The most persuasive answer I’ve been able to formulate is this: psychopathy, or the idea of “the psychopath,” is not a real phenomenon at all. It is, I argue, probably an example of what scientists call a "zombie idea."

Like a zombie, the idea of "the psychopath" continues to wander the halls of science, repeatedly animating new generations of innocent researchers to believe in the reality of it. And with this uncritical acceptance begins yet another cycle where new researchers carry out a throve of studies that still fail to confirm the reality of psychopathy. And so on, and so on...

This claim is, of course, bound to be very controversial. When I first thought of the idea, I questioned myself for even proposing it (and some of my colleagues have, in good humour, shaken their heads at me for saying it out loud).

But I'm no longer sure whether this proposal should at all be seen as controversial by working scientists. As I write in the closing chapter of Psychopathy Unmasked:

“This [zombie idea proposal] should not necessarily be a point of controversy, because one crucial aspect that makes the zombie-idea explanation reasonable is exactly that it is a falsifiable explanation. Indeed, to those who find my speculations wrong or even controversial, there is a straightforward way to show that psychopathy is not a zombie idea: simply find and present a real-life example of a truly psychopathic person, a person who meets all the common descriptors of stereotypical psychopathy (e.g., moral colorblindness, lack of emotions, poor impulse control, and so on), and a person where there could not possibly be a simpler or more established explanation of that person’s behavior and personality other than the idea of psychopathy. This would be the most direct way to overcome skepticism about psychopathy. If psychopathic persons are real—and, for instance, make up around 1% of the entire population as commonly claimed—it should also be a relatively easy thing to do.”

Now ask yourself this: Why have forensic psychologists who advocate for the value of psychopathy research never been able to present such kind of evidence to the rest of us "skeptics" out there...?

In this question, you find the reason why I used the following subtile for my book: The rise and Fall of a Dangerous Diagnosis.

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