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He or she just might wind up a CEO.
The hallowed halls of business have more than a fair share of successful psychopaths, many of them CEOs and top executives, research shows.
A recent wave of interest in testing children for psychopathy is shining a light on the biology and psychology of psychopaths. University of Pennsylvania criminologist and psychopathy expert Adrian Raine believes medical tests might help determine whether a child will be a psychopath when he or she grows up.
But that doesn't mean he or she will end up a serial killer or in prison. It could be the corner office for them instead - the incidence of psychopathy in the business world is four times that of the general population, according to a recent report.
Psychopathy is a grouping of personality characteristics including glibness, manipulation, callousness, lack of emotion, irresponsibility, impulsivity and aggression.
Earlier this year an article in CFA Magazine by Sherree DeCovny stated an estimated 10 per cent of people in the financial services industry are psychopaths.
Maybe.
Robert Hare, the University of British Columbia expert on psychopathy she quoted, posted a statement on his website following the furor that resulted from DeCovny's piece.
"As things stand, we do not know the prevalence of psychopathy among those who work on Wall Street," he wrote. "It may be even higher than ten per cent, on the assumption that psychopathic entrepreneurs and risk-takers tend to gravitate toward financial watering-holes, particularly those that are enormously lucrative and poorly regulated. But, until the research has been conducted, we are left with anecdotal evidence and widespread speculation."
A 2010 study by Hare and colleagues found that four per cent of a sample of 203 corporate professionals met a clinical threshold for being described as psychopaths.
The prevalence in the general population is about one per cent.
It's long been known that a segment of top executives and CEOs in the mainstream workforce can have psychopathic personality traits. A 2009 article by Joseph P Cangemi and William Pfohl called "Sociopaths in High Places" featured seven individuals with psychopathic personalities in leadership roles, among them a Fortune 500 executive, a university professor and a venture capitalist.
Gao and Raine caution that limited literature on non-incarcerated psychopaths have produced mixed feelings among researchers.
I think the prevalence of psychopathy in society is much higher than suggested by the article. Unfortunately, ruthlessness and the "win at all costs" mentality has guided human history from the beginning. What makes modernity unique from other time periods is that psychopathy became socially conditioned and revered (starting in colonial times) and really got rolling through the rise of materialism after the Industrial Revolution. And what makes post 9/11 even more interesting is that we're now witnessing a tsunami of all the negative consequences of years of greed, environmental and social disregard, and violence stemming from the "win at all costs" and "me, me, me" way of thinking.
One famous psychopath and founder of the National Education Association (NEA), John D. Rockefeller, was instrumental in pushing for a public school system in America. He was quoted as saying: "I don't want thinkers, I want workers". In other words, he didn't want people to critically think about feelings, concern for others, or question the larger world around them. He just wanted people to be like robots and follow authority without question and work until they drop. Or like Nike says, "Just Do It!" Is it any wonder that education in America is so substandard with so much violence in the schools? Standardization in schools will never go away because its about teaching conformity, not critical thinking. In addition, young people are bombarded since infancy that the promise of happiness through consumption is the only thing to strive for in life. The only goal in life for most people today seems to be simply making more money in order to buy more stuff because it will "make me happy" if "I do it by any means necessary". This model of "success" is anything but that and is doomed to fail in a huge way. Speaking of Nike, they're another corporation that's famous for exploiting poor laborers in third world countries. If I was to carry a pair of Nike's to any public area and give them away for free but then tell the receiver that the person who made the shoes was an Indonesian village woman who was repeatedly raped at the factory by managers, I GUARANTEE, 99 out of 100 people would take the shoes and not give a damn about the poor Indonesian woman who got raped. Not only that, but they would probably brag to their friends about the free pair of Nike's they picked up. My point is that psychopathic behavior is as much or more about social conditioning than genetics. Unfortunately, its the genetically psychopathic people that are running the world and will keep doing so until everything crashes.