RUMS Review Vol. VIII Issue I - January 2023

Feature
The
Flip Side
Of
Psychopathy
What Serial Killers Can
Teach Us About Success
By Ayman Asaria
A cursory scan of the true-crime
series abundant on nearly every media
platform illustrates our obsession with
psychopaths. Thanks to Hollywood,
when we hear the word psychopath
we instantly imagine a knife-wielding
maniac with crazy eyes - think
Hannibal Lecter in ‘The Silence of the
Lambs’. But what about the
archetypal medical student sat
across from you in the Cruciform
library?
The reality of this condition is that it is
far more nuanced than various
stereotypes may lead one to believe.
Whilst it remains true that people with
the condition can display a range of
disconcerting tendencies, it has, in
recent years, been relabelled as a
spectrum disorder, not unlike Autism
Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Mental
health researchers have not had an
easy time homing in on a uniform
definition of psychopathy as for
decades its symptoms have been
examined in communities at somewhat
opposite ends of society: incarcerated
individuals and people in community
mental health settings. In addition, the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Health Disorders (DSM-V) still
lacks the criteria for a psychopathy
diagnosis. Some clinicians were afraid
it would stigmatise people too much;
others assumed a difficulty in
assessing traits such as callousness.
One effort to coordinate thinking in
the field has come from the triarchic
model described by physicians
Patrick, Fowles, & Krueger in 2009.
It was formulated to reconcile
contrasting conceptions of
psychopathy by encompassing three
distinct, but interrelated, phenotypic
dispositions — disinhibition, boldness
and meanness. This model opens the
door to identification of, or further
study into, subtypes of psychopathy,
such as a ‘mean-disinhibited’ style
versus a ‘bold-disinhibited’ style. A
more in-depth examination of the
concept of psychopathy may deepen
our understanding of the potential
adaptive manifestations of a disorder
so often viewed as invariably sinister.
However, it is worth bearing in mind
that it remains difficult to distinguish
successful psychopathy from the
effects of other variables such as
intelligence, effective impulse control
and good parenting.
Although psychopathy was originally
conceptualised as a unidimensional
condition, i.e one where a single trait
is measured, factor analyses revealed
that the most widely used
psychopathy measures, such as the
interview-based Psychopathy
Checklist-Revised, are underpinned by
at least two broad dimensions.
Despite traditional views of
psychopathy as purely maladaptive,
some authors have proposed that
certain features of the disorder can
predispose the person to success in
areas characterised by physical or
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