According to new research psychopathic birds of a feather flock together.
The study in the Journal of Personality was led by Dr Ashley Watts from the psychology department of Emory University in Atlanta.
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She says the findings revealed that, despite the predatory tendencies of psychopaths, they tended to prefer their own types.
“This idea that psychopathic individuals pursue in essentially a predatory way, especially women that are that are maybe naïve or a little co-dependent and that psychopathic men engage in predatory tactics. For the most part the data that exists supports the opposite, that psychopathic individuals tend to date or be in relationships or marry people that are similar to them, meaning they tend to flock together with psychopathic individuals.”
The research drew on two samples: the first were female undergraduates at Emory University, Atlanta Georgia and the second a sample of online participants from the general community.
Psychopathy is a highly multi-dimensional construct, Dr Watts says.
“It’s not as simple as are you psychopath or not a psychopath? To be high in psychopathy you have to have high levels of multiple traits.”
The three main ones are boldness, disinhibition, and meanness, she says.
“Boldness is how interpersonally effective, how charming and persuasive you are, disinhibition which is really how lacking in impulse control you are and the third is meanness, how callous, cruel and manipulative you are.”
People are well aware, she says, that psychopaths are charming but also fully aware of their unappealing traits.
“In general, we found that people invariably understand that psychopathic traits are not all that appealing, but there’s more of a relative interest in those traits relative to other sorts of pathological traits we might find ourselves interested in. With psychopathy related features, the people that are most interested in those features tend to be the most psychopathic.”
Psychopathy, she says, is a “constellation of traits” and depending on how dominant these traits are will determine that state of a relationship.
“If you are lacking in boldness, but you are very impulsive and mean, you’re probably going to have a pretty tumultuous relationship. The more bold you are, I think that might protect against some relationship problems, if you are extroverted, outgoing charming, well-liked by other people, that might contribute to relationship satisfaction.”
She says how treatable or otherwise psychopaths are is contentious.
“There’s pretty old study done in the 1970s on how psychopaths respond to treatment and it was a pretty whacky study, it treated psychopaths with LSD, put them in a room together to let them treat each other while they were nude, they were drinking food through straws in the wall - it was a pretty wild study done in Canada.
This study found that psychopathic individuals, once they were released from treatment, were more likely to commit crimes than when they entered treatment.
"So, for a long time there was this idea that psychopathic individuals don’t respond well to treatment and in fact might get worse from treatment. The modern literature disagrees with this idea.”
As to what makes a psychopath, it’s the old nature versus nurture split, she says.
“It’s partly genetic and partly environmental and usually that split is about 50/50, even in studies of child psychopathy we know that these traits are about 50 percent genetically acquired.”
As to whether psychopaths are aware that they’re psychopaths, yes and no she says.
“My take on it is that they probably can report accurately on their traits and experiences; if you ask a psychopathic individual, are you a jerk? They would probably say 'yeah I’m a jerk, yeah I do some bad things', or at least, 'I do bad things that other people think are bad.'
But where there might be a disconnect is if you say ‘how problematic was that?’ they might say 'I’m a jerk, but I don’t really see it as a big deal - that’s other people’s problems'.”
