Credit: James Boulette
A decade ago, when I was an undergraduate at Duke University, athletes in the top sports programs—lacrosse, soccer, basketball (we were never very good at football)—had a certain swagger. It was not necessarily a bad thing, but in their prouder moments, the attitude smelled a little like narcissism and contempt for everyone around them—local residents and fellow students alike. Sadly, it probably seemed inevitable to many in the Duke community that some of its athletes would eventually find themselves in serious trouble with the law.
Whether the young men that have been accused of raping an exotic dancer at a rowdy party are found guilty or not, the whole ugly episode stands as a product of a privileged, consequence-less environment that allowed the lacrosse team (unlike the heavily scrutinized basketball team) to adopt dangerous masculine attitudes. According to many accounts, the team regularly ignored university rules, local laws and the rights of other people, but was never seriously disciplined. But a moral compass so skewed that it can move from arrogance and beer to kidnapping and rape may have roots deeper than the team's apparently foul culture. It may be more closely associated with the psychopathic mind.
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"[Classically,] true psychopaths were not successful," said Chris Patrick, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota and editor of the recently published Handbook of Psychopathy. "For the most part, they were major screw-ups."
Still, some people could score reasonably high on the Psychopathy Checklist, or PCL—a clinical tool most often used to study seriously hardened criminals—without being "screw-ups."
As researchers tease apart the pieces of the psychopathy puzzle, a new category, the "successful psychopath," has emerged. Some consider the successful variety to be criminal psychopaths who manage to stay out of jail due to intelligence, luck or rich parents, while others use the term to refer to highly successful people who display psychopathic traits.
But identifying and studying a group like this is difficult.
"These people have never been successfully studied, even if they exist," said Kent Kiehl, a psychologist at Yale University.
Hervey Cleckley first described psychopathy—an illness typically associated with serial killers and maniacal dictators—through case studies of regular people collected in his 1941 book The Mask of Sanity. Refined by Robert Hare of the University of British Columbia, who authored the PCL, in the 1980s, the behavior encompasses two broad factors: One is aggressive narcissism characterized by glibness, superficial charm, callousness, fearlessness, social dominance and lack of empathy. The other is a socially deviant lifestyle characterized by being antisocial, hotheaded, habitually unreliable and impulsive. In addition, psychopathic individuals also appear to lack anxiety and be largely free of depression.
Comparing the grandiosity and social dominance of Duke lacrosse players against the traits on the PCL shows some significant overlap. However, the Duke lacrosse players implicated in the case, even if guilty, would probably not qualify as full psychopaths.
The latest view of psychopathy—successful or otherwise—is that it is dimensional, less a disorder than a perfect storm of unpleasant but natural traits.
"It's more a confluence of factors that all people have in different degrees," said Neil Malamuth of UCLA, who studies sexual aggression in college students and other populations.
If a person is high in some of the narcissistic traits but relatively low in the antisocial ones, they may typify the successful psychopath.
"Ruthless, strategic in their behavior, exploitive of other people, but not reckless," Patrick said, describing the social construct's character. "Not self-destructive, capable of maintaining an occupation, capable of achieving wealth or status."