The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success
Kevin Dutton, 2012
What do a neurosurgeon, a special forces soldier and a serial killer have in common? Psychologist Kevin Dutton shows that a psychopath's fearlessness, charm and cool head can be destructive and can also save lives. The book explains which of these traits are worth turning up in yourself a little, and why the real skill is turning them back down in time.
Who it is for
For anyone who hesitates too long, fears rejection and drowns in worry about the future, and for everyone curious about what a surgeon has in common with a special forces soldier, and a monk with a psychopath.
The problem with psychopaths isn't that they're chock-full of evil. Ironically, it's precisely the opposite: they have too much of a good thing.
A diary without January
London, Petticoat Lane market. Ten-year-old Kevin Dutton is helping his father sell a batch of diaries when he suddenly notices that they only have eleven months. "We can't sell these, there's no January!" His father isn't fazed and calls out to the shoppers: "A unique opportunity: an eleven-month diary!" The whole batch sells out.
Dutton never once saw his father panic or lose his composure. As an Oxford psychologist he would say it plainly: his father was a psychopath: charming, fearless and ruthless, though he was never violent.
The word "psychopath" usually brings to mind a movie maniac. Dutton offers a different picture. We inherited our fear system from ancestors who were hunted by predators, and today it often goes off for nothing, like a nervous driver who keeps a foot hovering over the brake. The author compares psychopathy to the sun: a large dose is deadly, while a moderate one can do you good. He has no intention of glamorising criminals.
Ahead are seven chapters about what surgeons, special forces soldiers, athletes and even the patients of a high-security hospital know about keeping cool, and about how to borrow a little of that coolness without crossing the line. Let's start in the operating theatre.
Not a label but a mixing desk
One of Britain's best neurosurgeons, whom Dutton calls Dr Geraghty, is blunt about himself: he feels no compassion for the people he operates on. In the operating theatre he becomes a cold machine, because feelings get in the way of the job.
Dutton explains that psychopathy does not split people into two groups. It is a scale, and everyone has a place on it. Picture the mixing desk in a recording studio. Push every slider to the top and you get noise nobody wants. But push fearlessness, focus, coolness and mental toughness higher than the rest, and you may get a surgeon who cuts more precisely than his colleagues.
A 2005 study by Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon backs this up. They compared company executives with psychiatric patients and with offenders held in hospital. Superficial charm, persuasiveness, focus and a lack of empathy turned up in the executives even more often than in the offenders. The difference lay elsewhere: in the offenders, impulsiveness, aggression and a tendency to break the law were turned up higher.
Hence the first conclusion. Instead of asking whether someone is a psychopath or not, it is more useful to ask which sliders are up and in what combination. This applies to you too: your own coolness or stubbornness is not a life sentence but a volume you can adjust.
About the author
Kevin Dutton is a research psychologist at the University of Oxford, a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and of the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy. He also wrote a book on instant persuasion, "Split-Second Persuasion".
All books by this author: Kevin Dutton
Terms from the book
- trolley problem
- Holmes
- Jamie
- prisoner's dilemma
- amygdala
- Danny
- Morris
- Petticoat Lane: A famous street market in the East End of London.
- psychopathy: A personality disorder in which a person feels almost no fear, guilt or compassion, yet is often charming and cool-headed. According to Dutton, everyone has psychopathic traits to some degree.
- Geraghty: The name Dutton gives to one of Britain's leading neurosurgeons. He does not reveal the real name.
- Board: Belinda Board, a British psychologist at the University of Surrey who studied the personality traits of business leaders.
- Fritzon: Katarina Fritzon, a psychologist at the University of Surrey and co-author of a 2005 study of the personality traits of business leaders.
- Fecteau: Shirley Fecteau, a researcher in Boston who studied how the brains of people with psychopathic traits respond to another person's pain.
- cold empathy: The ability to understand what another person feels without feeling it yourself. Hot empathy means feeling it with them. The book takes this distinction from the Harvard psychologist Joshua Greene.
- William Brown: A ship that sailed from Liverpool to Philadelphia in 1841 and sank after hitting an iceberg.
- Rhodes: Francis Rhodes, first mate of the William Brown. He decided to lighten the overloaded longboat.
- Broadmoor: A British high-security psychiatric hospital that holds some of the most dangerous offenders in the country.
- Griffiths: Dai Griffiths, a British police officer with twenty-three years of service and an acquaintance of Dutton's.
- Cracknell: Iain Cracknell, a detainee who was brought into the station drunk almost every weekend.
- Leslie: A Broadmoor patient who talked with Dutton about goals and about fear.
- Rilling: James Rilling, an American anthropologist at Emory University who studies how the brain works during cooperative games.
- McNab: Andy McNab, a former British special forces soldier who commanded the Bravo Two Zero patrol in the Gulf War and later became an author.
- SAS: The Special Air Service, Britain's special forces.
- Oosthuizen: Louis Oosthuizen, a South African golfer who won the 2010 Open Championship.
- Queen's Counsel: An honorary title for senior British barristers, awarded in the name of the monarch.
- Kiehl: Kent Kiehl, an American psychologist and neuroscientist who studies prisoners' brains with a scanner mounted in a truck.
- Aharoni: Eyal Aharoni, an American psychologist who studied how often prisoners with different levels of psychopathy managed to escape punishment.
- Cooper: Nick Cooper, a British neuroscientist at the University of Essex and a specialist in magnetic brain stimulation.
- transcranial magnetic stimulation: A method in which magnetic pulses sent through the scalp briefly boost or dampen the activity of particular areas of the brain. It is used in research and in treatment.
All terms
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