ANITA COBBY

FEATURE
WWW.WSBA.COM.AU
10 professions
with the
most
psychopaths
Is your job on the list?
OCCUPATIONS
WHAT comes to mind when you
picture a psychopath? A crazy axemurderer?
Psychopaths don’t always
fit that mould.
The clinical diagnosis is a person who has
shallow emotions or lacks empathy. Sounds
like corporate America is loaded with them!
Kevin Dutton, a research psychologist at
the University of Oxford, has dedicated much
of his life to studying the brains of psychopaths
and he’s been able to piece together a list
of the most likely professions psychopaths end
up in. Is your career on the list?
1. CEOs
Corporate America is loaded with brutal
metaphors. When you succeed, it’s because
you were cutthroat and ended up making
a killing, and now you’re known as a shark.
Doesn’t that just sound like a wonderful place
for a psychopath? I’m sure plenty of CEOs are
great people, but several studies suggest that
4% of CEOs qualify as psychopaths. That’s 4x
as many people as in the general population.
2. Lawyer
There are lots of heartless lawyer jokes, but
there may be some credence to them. Many
lawyers exhibit signs of psychopathy, which
makes lying, cheating, and obsessing with
profit nothing to bat an eye at. As one lawyer
he interviewed said: “Deep inside me there’s a
serial killer lurking somewhere. But I keep him
amused with cocaine, Formula One, booty
calls, and coruscating cross-examination.”
3. Media (Radio/TV)
How could one be attracted to a job
involving the limelight and/or the admiration
of one’s work without having an over-inflated
ego? If a person did not have a big ego to begin
with, would this be possible to avoid after
spending time pursuing such a career path?
The career attracts people who like their faces
and voices to be recognized. It’s important
in this line of work to be able to make light
conversation on a regular basis (read shallow
and insincere), to not have (or at least not
exhibit) fear, to be overly confident, and to
Celebrity chef, Gord on Ramsey as depicted at one of his restaurants.
have somewhat of a narrow focus to the task at
hand, each job being very particular. Obviously,
not everyone in the media industry scores
high on the psychopath meter, but if you think
of some of the most prominent psychopathic
personalities in our world right now, it all
seems to make sense.
4. Sales People
In Working With Monsters: How to Identify
and Protect Yourself from the Workplace
Psychopath, John Clarke says that having a
psychopath on your team can be a really good
thing. “The psychopath is very likely to be a
good salesperson, if they are intelligent as well
as glib and superficial,” Clarke writes. “In fact,
a study done in 2001 by Marc Hamer found
that superior sales performance was associated
with higher levels of narcissism (egocentric
and grandiose), sociopathy and cognitive
empathy.” The drawback there is that you’re
bound to run into their self-centered attitude.
They’re also more likely to exploit the system
in which they work.
5. Surgeons
This one really surprised me. Doctors
and nurses landed on the list of careers with
the fewest psychopaths, but surgeons are one
of the most psychopathic around. In a 2014
piece in Pacific Standard, Wen Shen states
“the trouble with surgeons [is]...[m]any are
abrasive, abusive, and wildly self-centered—
so much so that observers have speculated
that they suffer from psychiatric disorders.”
She thinks this can be traced back to when
surgery was performed without anesthesia.
Being a surgeon meant you had to operate to
“a soundtrack of screams” and keeping it cool.
There’s an active push for kinder surgeons
today.
6. Journalists
Jeff Cash, a freelance writer, once wrote
that, “a hint of psychopathy is actually a
prerequisite for public purpose journalism.”
“Psychopathy can creep in all too easily in the
world of journalism, as any reporter who’s had
an after-hours fight with some obnoxious public
relations officer can attest to. (That’s pretty
much all of them, by the way). Seeing your
name in a national newspaper on a daily basis
is enough to turn even the most humble being
into a fountain of narcissism. And if you think
that’s bad, just imagine how much appearing
on national television would contribute to
one’s superiority complex.” I can see that being
the case.
7. Police officer
Most disturbingly, the people charged
with keeping the peace may be the most
likely ones to shatter it. According to Police
Domestic Violence: A Handbook for Victims,
“Women suffer domestic abuse in at least 40
percent of police officer families.” Additionally,
“Police families are two to four times more
likely than the general population to experience
domestic violence.”
8. Clergy
This one is pretty amusing to me. The
clergy is supposed to promote the gospel and
make the world better, but as we saw with the
Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandals,
psychopathy was at play. First in the act of
molesting these children, then in the church’s
desire to cover it all up. Psychopaths may be
attracted to the clergy because of easy access
to victims. Many televangelists and preachers
have been accused of megalomaniacal behavior,
like Ted Haggard, Bill Gothard, Creflo
Dollar, and Geronimo Aguilar.
9. Chefs
Chef Gordon Ramsay once told Vanity
Fair that “Chefs are nutters. They’re all
self-obsessed, delicate, dainty, insecure little
souls and absolute psychopaths. Every last one
of them.” It seems like such a strange profession
for that kind of behavior, but Anthony
Bourdain perhaps correctly chocked it up to
a combination of working with assholes and
being a perfectionist. “Some chefs borrow
money, they do everything they can, they kill
themselves, it’s the culmination of a career
working 100 hours a week or more. They
finally open a place and within eight minutes
of opening, some asshole has posted on Yelp,
‘Worst meal ever.’ You can understand why
they go insane, and do everything they can to
ameliorate that.”
10. Civil Servants
It certainly isn’t out of the realm of possibility
that a DMV worker might be kind of
a psychopath. There’s power in the roles of
civil servants, and psychopaths often singlemindedly
crave power. Dennis Rader, who
was the self-dubbed BTK killer, was a census
field operations supervisor in Kansas. He was
later a dogcatcher. From wikipedia: “neighbors
recalled him as being sometimes overzealous
and extremely strict; one neighbour
complained that he euthanized her dog for no
reason.”
THIS ARTICLE WAS FIRST PUBLISHED AT WWW.HIGHERPERSPECTIVE.COM.AU
28 WESTERN SYDNEY BUSINESS ACCESS JANUARY 2016