Apparently, Saturday Night Live did too, as they led off this weekend’s episode with a sketch in which this very question is asked.

Now, I am not claiming that George Zimmerman is a psychopath or has any other specific conscience-reducing disorder. I really have no ability to make a judgment on that. However, the conversation about his romantic situation did lead me to explain to my conversation partner that those that are psychopaths or do have certain related disorders are notorious for their ability to attract many romantic and sexual relationships. I mentioned some of the fascinating research, which I cover in my foundational page about psychopathy, about just how successful some of history’s most ruthless killers have been in spreading their genes.

Well, as so often happens after a deep discussion about an intriguing topic, it wasn’t more than a couple of days before a new, highly relevant story emerged in the news.

A 25-year-old woman named Star told Rolling Stone magazine that she plans to marry the now 79-year-old infamous mastermind of numerous murders, Charles Manson, who remains locked up in prison. Apparently, Star moved near the prison 6 years ago, when she was 19, so she could spend more time with Manson.

CNN also covered this story, interviewing the woman (who says her attraction to Manson was initially sparked by his environmentalism, not his crimes, which she only really became aware of later, but which did not dissuade her from her attraction.)

Now, Manson himself denies that they will be getting married. But the interesting thing is that, whether or not the marriage actually happens, a young woman would actually want people to believe it will.

What makes this story meaningful is that it is far from an isolated case. In his heyday, Manson was often surrounded by young women drawn to his charisma and aura. And he isn’t the only person associated with mass murder or serial killing to elicit such admiration. To offer just one more example among many, Ted Bundy was viewed as extremely charming and employed his skill for attracting young women in the course of carrying out his crimes.

This is an important topic. The ability of psychopaths and others with reduced conscience to attract mates has a number of implications and consequences:

1. It reinforces a sense of glamor about such individuals and their value systems.
2. It may increase their social standing.
3. It practically assists them in the commission of some of their crimes.
4. It leads to an increase in the proportion of their genes in the population’s overall gene pool.
5. It causes havoc for the partners and especially the children that must live with the consequences of these relationships.

I realize that there are men who are drawn to ruthless women and that is also an important topic to consider. But the Manson and Bundy examples – and, perhaps, to a lesser extent, the Zimmerman example – raise the question of why women are attracted to men of this kind.

Well, another coincidence that occurred in the wake of my conversation about this topic relates to that question. A few days after the discussion, through a completely different avenue, I ended up on the Wikipedia page for the topic hybristophilia.

Hybristophilia is described as:

“a paraphilia of the predatory type in which sexual arousal, facilitation, and attainment of orgasm are responsive to and contingent upon being with a partner known to have committed an outrage, cheating, lying, known infidelities or crime, such as rape, murder, or armed robbery.”

Apparently the term stems from the Greek word hybrizein, which means “to commit an outrage against someone” (and which, itself, stems from the word hubris) and philo meaning “having a strong affinity/preference for.”

The page even mentions the many female admirers that Bundy and Manson attracted as examples.

After reading that page, I was reminded of yet another relevant example.

As a result of running this website, I was recently sent a copy of the book Survived by One: The Life and Mind of a Family Mass Murderer, which is written, along with Robert Hanlon, a clinical neuropsychologist specialized in working with violent criminals, by a man named Tom Odle, who remains in an Illinois prison (after initially being placed on death row, before Illinois commuted all death sentences) for killing his entire immediate family – his parents and three siblings – in 1985. Odle has been diagnosed with Antisocial Personality Disorder by one forensic psychiatrist and with Borderline Personality Disorder with Anti-social features by another.

At several points in the book, he describes how women have contacted him on death row and in prison, impressed and attracted by what he has done.

“People write me letters, especially girls and women wanting to be my friend and congratulating me on doing something that they had only thought about doing because they were mistreated and abused, also. There was also some kind of fan club for me…I liked the attention I was getting, and I even reconnected with an old friend I had a crush on for years. She wrote to me, so I wrote back, and we found each other in a new light.”

And later…

“I also responded to letters from girls who managed to find my address and wrote to tell me how cool they thought I was because I had murdered my parents. That was one thing I ate up at that time because it diminished my responsibility and guilt.”

Odle had women come visit him in person and begin relationships with him while he was on death row, as well. One of those relationships even led to a short-lived marriage.

So it was fascinating to learn that there is actually a term to describe this behavior – hybristophilia. And the Wikipedia page on that topic was also fascinating because it offers some theories about why such attractions occur.

Then, just this weekend, in the wake of the Manson girlfriend story, Yahoo featured a video by Discovery News about this very topic entitled “Why Psychopaths Turn Women On.” It even mentions the term hybristophilia and Bundy’s admirers, as well as those of other serial killers. It then speculates on some of the reasons behind this attraction or fetish.

Mate selection is a crucial driver of evolution. When a person selects another person as a mate, they are, in essence, voting for that person’s traits to become more prominent in humanity’s future. And they help make sure those traits do become more prominent in more than one way simultaneously.

Biologically, they help the person pass on their genes to their children. Developmentally, they ensure the existence of children shaped by parenting based in that person’s values – or by parental abuse or neglect as a consequence of those values. Socially, they may send a message that such traits are attractive, possibly influencing others to see an incentive in exhibiting them.

This is why, even though such relationships might seem like personal situations separate from our own lives, all of us should care when we see people with reduced empathy and conscience attracting mates. This phenomenon has, historically, had a surprisingly significant impact on the state of our world today. We must live in neighborhoods and communities with people deeply influenced by such relationships. And it may well be one of the mechanisms by which the health and sustainability of humanity continues to be threatened.

One response that has gotten a lot of attention is the one posted on Facebook by comedian and actor Patton Oswalt.

I highly doubt that Oswalt has ever heard of the term ponerology. But his response, more than many others, especially from celebrities, actually comes close to placing the event in a ponerologic context.

So first I want to point out the particular statements that reflect a somewhat-ponerologic perspective in his writing.

Toward the very beginning of his post, Oswalt says:

“I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.”

So he is very quickly zeroing in explicitly on sociopathy as a potential factor.

Just two sentences later he says:

“If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet.”

Here, he is already discussing the damaging act in terms of the statistical makeup of the population as broken down by those who purposefully cause significant harm and those who do not. Considering such statistics is one of the central roles of ponerology. Note that Robert Hare, the world expert on psychopathy (slightly different from sociopathy), estimates that psychopaths make up 1% of the population.

Later Oswalt says:

“…every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.”

I’m not sure if he even realizes how literally relevant his implication of “wiring” in the malice of a certain percentage of people really is. But ponerology is deeply involved in attempts to use neuroscience to discover how neurobiology contributes to harmful behavior and we cover that topic frequently on this site.

Oswalt then proceeds to comment on how those who are not evil vastly outnumber those who are. And he invokes an evolutionary viewpoint when he points out:

“We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.”

Overall, for someone who is not a professional in this area and probably has no specific knowledge of ponerology or related subjects, I think Oswalt’s response if full of valuable insights. While there is nothing wrong with simply expressing one’s emotional reaction to a painful situation, as many have done, it’s nice to see social media used to put forth a response to a damaging act that shares some real wisdom.

However, in addition to sharing and offering a bit of analysis of his response, I’d also like to show how ponerology – at least as Andrew M. Lobaczewski and some others have viewed it – might reveal the situation to be a bit more complicated than Oswalt portrays it to be here.

Oswalt attempts to inject some hope into the situation by pointing out that:

“…the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak.”

and:

“…when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, ‘The good outnumber you, and we always will.’”

Oswalt is correct that, by a huge majority, non-pathological people outnumber the pathological. However, this does not imply that the non-pathological necessarily exercise more power for several reasons:

1. The pathological demonstrate specific skill at rising in hierarchies, which, by definition, afford much greater influence to those in some positions than others. So even though there may be fewer pathological people, they may be in positions where they have enormously disproportionate influence.
2. The constant development of increasingly powerful modern technology enables fewer and fewer people, if willing to employ it inhumanely, to inflict greater and greater damage.
3. As the Milgram experiment showed, a huge percentage of non-pathological people will, despite any qualms, comply with the directives of those they perceive as authority figures, even if those directives involve knowingly inflicting great harm on others.
4. As the Stanford Prison Experiment showed, systemic factors and contexts can influence even non-pathological people to act in sociopathic and sadistic ways. In other words, as systems thinking often points out, structure can create behavior. And, if even a few pathological people are in positions of power, they can shape systems and structures so as to drive much of the rest of the population to act in ways that mirror their pathological values.

So while Oswalt’s response is quite astute and comes close to offering a realistic perspective about how to approach the fact that we live in this world alongside pathological people, I think the work of Lobaczewski, Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo can help modify his advice to make it a little bit more effective.

Outnumbering the pathological isn’t enough. In order to develop a situation in which cooperation overcomes exploitation, non-pathological people must become educated about the dynamics of ponerology so that they can recognize leverage points to resist the influence of even powerful pathological people and reshape systems that otherwise drive them into pathological positions even if they themselves are not pathological.

The real hope comes from the fact that, in Milgram’s experiments, while 2/3 of participants were willing to administer the maximum voltage to a screaming confederate when ordered by the authority figure, and a frightening 90% were willing if they first saw someone else do it, 90% rebelled if they first saw someone else rebel.

That means that, just as pathological people can exert disproportionate influence, so can those who resist them, even when those they resist occupy positions of authority, as their personal resistance generates a ripple effect of resistance.

I hope that Patton Oswalt and those who were moved by his thoughtful response to these bombings in Boston will take the time to do more research about ponerology and the highly relevant work of those mentioned in this article. Perhaps the best tribute we can pay to the people, families and communities suffering in the wake of this event is to use it as a springboard from which to learn more about the actual science of evil. That science may well offer us our best chance for moving beyond relatively helpless hope and prayer to real understanding of how to prevent and mitigate future harmful malicious and neglectful activities.

The interview is of the famed and beloved late iconoclastic author and social critic Kurt Vonnegut, who skewered many aspects of our society in classics like Slaughterhouse-Five and somewhat lesser known, but also brilliant, works like Player Piano. It was originally published in the January 27, 2003 issue of In These Times, amidst an atmosphere rife with apprehension about the imminent United States invasion of Iraq.

I was quite struck by these lines of Vonnegut’s from the interview:

“…those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka ‘Christians,’ and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or ‘PPs.’

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t.”

Consider all of the things Vonnegut got across there in less than four full paragraphs. He explained, to some extent:

• That psychopathy is a real condition about which we have a meaningful scientific understanding
• What psychopaths are like, including their fundamental inability to experience conscience or compassion
• That enormous suffering arises when those with psychopathic personalities infiltrate governments
• That enormous suffering also arises when those with psychopathic personalities infiltrate powerful corporate positions
• That psychopaths – like a microcosm of our infinite-growth-based, unsustainable culture as a whole – have a particular tendency to recklessly go to extremes with little concern for the costs, especially to others
• That psychopaths, engaging in just such reckless risk-taking, may have been involved in the disastrous downfalls of Enron, WorldCom and other corrupt corporations
• That psychopaths who do attain powerful positions are rarely recognized as pathological, but rather admired as leaders
• That the extraordinary (and often misguided) level of certainty that psychopaths bring to their actions is central to their ability to climb modern hierarchies

There it is. In less than four paragraphs, over ten years ago, Vonnegut laid out much of the framework for what I only began to seriously suspect almost ten years later when I finally focused on and ended up writing about it at great length in pages about psychopathy and ponerology.

Vonnegut even emphatically recommends a specific book, The Mask of Sanity by Hervey Cleckley. I ended up discovering this book a couple years ago and now recommend it in many of my writings, as well as in the resources section of this site.

Whenever I come across work by social critics like Vonnegut, I always wonder if they have considered the ponerologic factors that may underlie the dysfunctional symptoms on which they focus. This interview makes clear that, at least toward the end of his life, even though he may not have known about the actual word or field of ponerology, Vonnegut had done just that.

Whatever your view of Vonnegut’s particular politics, it’s hard to deny that he was a singular character with a deep insight into some of the innermost workings of our social systems and a passionate concern for the welfare of humanity. And it’s quite interesting to know that his life experience had brought him to such a level of consciousness about the role psychopathy might play in our culture’s unhealthy and unsustainable state. I believe that if he were alive today and made aware of it, he would be an outspoken advocate for more solidly establishing and promoting the discipline of ponerology.

One of the bonuses of running and promoting this site is that, in the course of doing so, a lot of relevant ideas and people come to my attention. And, once in a while, another whole field of study, related to ponerology, that also brings together many disparate threads, becomes known to me.

This happened recently.

Several weeks ago, I wrote about a study led by criminal justice professor Volkan Topalli. After publishing that piece, I found and followed Dr. Topalli on Twitter. Soon after that, Dr. Topalli retweeted a tweet by the criminology division of the publisher Routledge about a new book, the Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology.

Green Criminology?

The term intrigued me and I was motivated to do a little more research on it. I’ll share with you some of what I found shortly. But first I’d like to provide some context regarding how this topic relates with the wide-ranging audience interested in ponerology.

I know that, among those drawn to ponerology by a desire to understand the roots of what they consider “evil” behavior, there are those of all political stripes holding every possible view on environmental issues.

There are those who believe that:

• Evil is embodied in corrupt corporations and their possibly pathological leaders who rape and pillage natural resources for profit without concern for sustainability
• Stronger government regulation is needed to restrain these out-of-control, environmentally-damaging companies

There are some who:

• Share concern about environmental sustainability
• Believe that governments, expressing themselves through directly destructive activity related to natural resources, crooked politically-motivated subsidies and establishment and enforcement of the very legal structures that prop up corrupt corporations in the first place, are the real seats of “evil” responsible for environmental damage
• Advocate for less government and a laissez-faire, free-market policy that maximizes privatization as the strategy most likely to move us toward sustainability

Others believe that

• We are in no actual danger of running up against natural resource limits or threatening environmental sustainability
• Those claiming we are in such danger are, in reality, either evil people promoting self-serving political agendas or hoaxes or alarmists scared into their views by them
• We should ignore these malicious or misguided voices and continue, unrestrained, an aggressive policy of industrialization without concern for limits

And there are many who hold some combination of these views on the subject or still other views entirely.

In my case, concern about ecological sustainability was very instrumental in propelling me along the path that brought me to ponerology. The work of Daniel Quinn and Derrick Jensen, in particular, influenced me to focus, at a relatively young age, on the damage engendered on many levels by a cultural mindset, sanctioning infinite growth in spite of finite natural resources, that has become the basis for our economic system and both shaped and been shaped by deeply unhealthy psychological attitudes and belief systems – and, quite possibly, by those with pathological conditions.

During the many years spent following up on the ideas Quinn and Jensen helped introduce to me, I explored, from every angle I could, the environmental debates and the many subjects they involve. Over time, I’ve come to a deeper understanding of people who approach environmentalism from a variety of different perspectives.

The epiphany that I experienced upon discovering ponerology sprung in part from the fact that it clarified a mindset regarding questions about the emergence of harm that were woven through myriad areas that concerned me and to which I was having great difficulty formulating an approach. It embodied the idea that our starting point should be to learn all that we can about the scientific facts relating to these questions. While conceding that we will never know everything we need to know to make perfect decisions, it argues that maximizing our systematic, objective knowledge will provide us the firmest basis on which to make them.

When I saw Topalli’s retweet about the Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology, that term – green criminology – provoked in me another similar epiphany.

We may not, in the near future, all come to agree on either what is really happening environmentally or what we should do about it. But hopefully many of us can at least agree that we should establish, to the best of our ability, the facts regarding any egregiously reckless malicious or negligent behavior implicated in ecosystem damage and the people involved in it. Green criminology sounded to me like a field devoted to doing just that from a scientific perspective.

So I did some searching to learn about what green criminology is and what resources are available for people that want to know more or get involved.

One of the first resources I found is the GreenCriminology.org website. This site is run by the International Green Criminology Working Group (IGCWG), which is “a group of academic professionals, students, and others that practice Green Criminology and collaborate on projects and discussions” and was crowdfunded through a Kickstarter campaign that featured the video below.

• “What crimes or harms are inflicted on the environment, and how?”
• “Who commits crime against the environment, and why?”
• “Who suffers as a result of environmental damage, and how?”
• “What are the social, economic and political conditions that lead to environmental crimes?”
• “Which types of harms should be considered as ‘crimes’ and therefore within the remit of a green criminology?”

I then found that University of Colorado Denver, through their School of Public Affairs, supports a research working group on green criminology.

Of course, the Routledge International Handbook of Green Criminology, which was where I first came across the term, looks like a thorough overview of the subject.

And Amazon also features some other books when I do a search for "green criminology". Some of the ones that look interesting include:

It’s somewhat surprising to me that, despite all the investigation I’ve done of pathological conditions and environmental issues, as well as their overlap, I’d never even heard the term “green criminology” before.

Derrick Jensen has explicitly linked our culture’s high level of environmental damage to the influence of psychopathy and has written thousands and thousands of pages and done countless talks on these issues. Yet even in all of his work that I’ve read, seen and heard, I don’t recall him using the term “green criminology.”

I’m thankful that, through promoting this site, I came across people who were able to finally bring it to my attention.

I hope to have more experiences like that in the future. And I am looking forward to learning more about green criminology.

I realize that not everyone interested in ponerology will be similarly interested in this angle on it. Some may even disagree with green criminology’s basic premises for various reasons (though I think, if they take a closer look at some of the writing on GreenCriminology.org, they may find some of their concerns are addressed more openly than they would have expected). And that’s fine. The goal of this site is simply to bring information related to ponerology to people’s attention. From there, they can do with that information what they wish.

But I believe green criminology is a discipline that anyone who cares about ponerology should at least be aware of.  It shines a light on what has often been a blind spot in the consideration of evil. Those who commit “evil” in which the damage is externalized to the broader environment, even if it then indirectly harms a large number of people, have been able, relatively, to escape notice as compared with those who do damage directly to even a small number of others. A tighter integration with green criminology may help correct this imbalance within ponerology’s perspective.

At the same time, I think those interested in green criminology should be aware of ponerology because the information it helps reveal can potentially inspire a more profound level of understanding about why the harmful events that field studies come to pass.

It’s always exciting for me to see connections and relationships develop amongst people with overlapping interests of great depth that pertain to improving health and sustainability. I hope this article will help catalyze some new connections and relationships between the emerging green criminology and ponerology communities. Not everyone in those communities will see eye to eye on every topic. But, surely, there are many within them who will find common ground and can share with each other a good deal of meaningful dialogue and support.

Dr. Kent Kiehl of the Mind Research Network has been one of the more active researchers investigating what we can learn from brain imaging of psychopaths. And he and colleagues have recently published, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, a study entitled “Neuroprediction of future rearrest.”

The study involved having 96 soon-to-be-released male prisoners perform computer tasks that required quick decision-making and inhibition of impulsive responses, while their brains were observed using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The researchers focused in on the brain region known as the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and found that, when controlling for other known risk factors, those prisoners with less ACC activity than their fellow study participants were about twice as likely to be rearrested within 4 years of release as those with higher ACC activity.

We’ve already mentioned, in previous stories, that reduced cingulate cortex function is associated with psychopathy and has been identified in some violent criminal offenders.

The question is, as we zero in on markers like this – whether they be certain anatomical or functional characteristics of the brain, particular genetic features or anything else – what is the most ethical way in which to use this knowledge?

On one hand, it could be considered highly unethical and dangerous to discriminate against, detain or punish anybody – even a previous offender – simply because they happen to exhibit particular biological markers if those markers have not expressed themselves in a specific behavior for which they are being criminally charged. Beginning to do so could open the door to frightening abuses by authorities.

Most of the commenters on the Daily Mail’s story about this study fell on this side of the issue and raised such concerns.

For example, “Dunnyveg” said:

“Actually, low IQ, high testosterone, and a record of previous convictions are the best indicators for recidivism; there is no need for fancy technology. But none of these absolve society from our time-honored principle of innocent until proven guilty. Talk about a potential totalitarian nightmare, this is it….”

“Percival” said:

“Still like technology gullible science fans? Little do you realise these are not to benefit you but to control you, all of it is too control and watch and report back and have you slaves to the system.”

Martin said:

“Well that fills the biggest gap left in achieving the full ’1984 infrastructure’ now they’re rolling out internet TVs that watch you and listen to you (and that some mugs are actually buying) – welcome to the world of ‘thought crime’ ….”

The very idea of predicting and preemptively acting to prevent crimes before they are committed reminds many of the brilliant Philip K. Dick story, later made into a movie by Steven Spielberg, “The Minority Report.”

On the Daily Mail article, “Jeff Pringle” commented:

“Minority Report anyone?”

And Nature began their story on the study with “In a twist that evokes the dystopian science fiction of writer Philip K. Dick…” and, later in the article, mentioned “The Minority Report.”

But, on the other hand, it could be considered unethical not to use our improving predictive ability if failing to do so allows offenders to cause harm and suffering to others that could have, with minimal collateral damage, been prevented. How would you feel if a loved one was harmed by a person who we knew ahead of time, based on various markers and indicators, had an extremely high likelihood of offending but did nothing to stop?

Some may take comfort in the fact that we can, for the moment, postpone fully grappling with these dilemmas. Our predictive ability based on markers like those in Kiehl’s study is still poor enough that it seems clearly unreasonable, at the present time, to base highly consequential legal actions on it alone. Even Kiehl himself concedes as much.

But as our knowledge and technology improve, there may well come a day when the gap between the pros and cons of applying them to predict and prevent crime narrows. Eventually, we may have to decide at exactly which threshold level of predictive reliability it becomes more unethical, even in the face of potential unintended consequences, to allow a person marked as extremely likely to cause harm to act freely than to take action to reduce the threat they pose. The decision about where to draw such a line could arouse furious debate.

One commenter on the Nature article, “Mitch Trachtenberg,” offered a nice middle ground where many of us, despite different viewpoints on the matter, may frequently find ourselves able to meet, when he said:

“This knowledge could be abused by someone refusing to release someone on parole or probation due to “unacceptable-ACC-levels.” But it could really be helpful if the results were used to get someone additional help or even monitoring. Helping people with problems controlling their impulses could be beneficial, and it would be great to have a way of discovering which people in our prison system might well be there for exactly that reason.”

Hopefully Mitch’s idea will prove prescient and we can find a way, at least much of the time, to use this knowledge and these tools in a compassionate way that aims to authentically help people, not just stigmatize or harass them. But it’s hard to imagine a future where we aren’t sometimes faced with incredibly difficult decisions about cases that just don’t allow for any easy middle ground where we can hide.

What are your thoughts on the subject?

How do you weigh the danger of authorities abusing these predictive abilities against the threat posed by individuals with biological markers associated with harming others?

What do you think is the most ethical way to deal with the dilemmas these predictive abilities may one day pose?

Let us know in the comments below.

But, the spate of high-profile examples of white collar corruption in recent years, from the collapse of Lehman Brothers to the Bernie Madoff multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme, has thrust questions about corporate psychopathy to the forefront.

Increasingly, people are recognizing the exponentially greater damage that can be done when “snakes in suits” exert their influence over powerful institutions as compared to when lone individuals commit gruesome, but isolated, acts. In the latter case, several people and families may be tragically affected. In the former, entire economies affecting millions, if not billions of people can be put at risk.

In the wake of this increased awareness, the Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice features a two part review by Angela Dawn Pardue, MS and Matthew B. Robinson, Ph.D. of Appalachian State University and Bruce A. Arrigo, Ph.D. of University of North Carolina entitled “Psychopathy and Corporate Crime: A Preliminary Examination.”

A look at the review’s two parts:

Psychopathy and Corporate Crime: A Preliminary Examination,
Part 1

In this part, the authors:

• “Introduce and discuss the concepts of corporate crime and psychopathy”
• “Examine the leading theories of corporate crime within the discipline of criminology”
• Explain why existing models of corporate crime, which lack sufficient focus on psychopathy, fail to provide adequate understanding.

Psychopathy and Corporate Crime: A Preliminary Examination,
Part 2

In this part, the authors:

• More thoroughly cover psychopathy and its signs and symptoms
• Explain how those signs and symptoms were manifest in many recent cases of corporate crime in a variety of industries
• Advocate that criminology focus more on psychopathy as an important aspect when explaining corporate crime

The review not only calls to mind Snakes in Suits by Robert Hare and Paul Babiak, but also The Corporation, a film in which Hare himself is featured. Since modern corporations, at least in the United States, are afforded “corporate personhood,” the filmmakers asked what kind of person a corporation is. They run down the characteristics of a psychopath, showing how each is displayed in the operations and behavior of today’s corporations.

Because corporations have such enormous power in our world today, it is crucial that public awareness continue to be fostered about the catastrophes that can ensue when pathological people ascend corporate hierarchies. Kudos to the authors of “Psychopathy and Corporate Crime: A Preliminary Examination” and to the Journal of Forensic Psychology Practice for taking on this critical subject, so deeply relevant to ponerology.

And kudos, as well, for reminding us that there is a field – criminology – tasked with investigating why not only shootings and robberies, but also larger-scale economic and political crimes, take place and that, in order to thoroughly do so, criminologists must never ignore the potential role of pathologies like psychopathy and certain personality disorders.

In Political Ponerology, Andrew M. Lobaczewski details an entire process, which he calls ponerogenesis, by which “evil” emerges in human systems. While it’s true, in his model, that various kinds of psychopaths play a central role in that process, he also elucidates how others, including those with what he calls characteropathies – which we would refer to as personality disorders – are essential for it to play out to its destructive potential.

Most commonly, when it comes to this process, those with the Cluster B personality disorders, especially Borderline Personality Disorder, Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Antisocial Personality Disorder, all of which profoundly impact the capacity for empathy, would be expected to be involved to some extent.

But as disproportionate an impact as people with these disorders can have on their surroundings, they still make up too small a proportion of the population by themselves to bring about a system dominated by the pathological. Thus, Lobaczewski details how a certain percentage of non-pathological people must also be coopted to participate in ponerogenesis if such a system, which he calls a pathocracy, is ever to come about.

Every now and then, however, we are reminded that there are still other conditions – beyond psychopathy and the personality disorders – that can play a role in unnecessary harmful events.

Schizophrenia, for instance, was likely involved in motivating Jared Loughner to open fire at a 2011 constituent event for Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, killing six and injuring thirteen, including the congresswoman. A review of research published in 2009 found that “a man with schizophrenia was four to five times as likely to commit a violent act as a man in the general population.” The risks are especially high when a schizophrenic is also abusing substances.

A more recent news event brought to the forefront a less commonly discussed disorder that can also be associated with harmful activity.

Raulie Casteel is accused of shooting at people and motorists, apparently randomly, in metropolitan Detroit and nearby areas over the course of several days in October 2012. Communities in the vicinity remained in a constant state of anxiety and fear until the suspect was finally captured. He is now awaiting arraignment.

Last week, it was reported that Casteel has been diagnosed not with psychopathy or a personality disorder or even schizophrenia. Rather, he has been diagnosed with delusional disorder. A psychology professor quoted in the article explains that someone with this disorder would seem completely normal unless the subject about which they are deluded arises. That would seem to make them potentially difficult for those in their lives to detect as possibly dangerous.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether Casteel’s diagnosis is confirmed as being accurate or if he is found guilty. But regardless, delusional disorder is an existing condition. And it is easy to see how someone suffering from it could, while under sway of certain delusions, do things that cause significant harm.

It’s just another reminder that ponerology is not all about psychopathy. In fact, it isn’t even just about mental illness, as people without mental illness can also be drawn to do things we might consider “evil.” But, even when it does focus on mental illness, ponerology must take into account a range of conditions and disorders.

I shared some of these evolutionary views of psychopathy in previous writings, discussing:

• What a profound evolutionary development the emergence of humans without conscience was
• Whether psychopathy is best understood as an aberration of normal human capacities akin to blindness or deafness or, rather, as a reflection of a different type of human being practicing a different, perhaps detestable to many, but also successful survival and reproductive strategy
• Why some experts view psychopaths as “intraspecies predators” or even a separate subspecies of Homo Sapiens

Recently, a debate has been raging about these very issues.

It began when Canadian researchers published a study in Frontiers in Evolutionary Psychology and Neuroscience called “Nepotistic patterns of violent psychopathy: evidence for adaptation?”

In it, they made the case that the psychopath is indeed not “mentally disordered,” but is enacting “a well-functioning, if unscrupulous strategy that historically increased reproductive success at the expense of others.”

The way they rationalize this conclusion is the following:

They say that evolutionary strategies, since they are aimed at perpetuating one’s genes, would be expected, in addition to whatever else they entail, to help or at least not harm those close relatives who share many of those genes.

Mental disorders, on the other hand, they explain, often disinhibit restraints that typically keep us from harming relatives.

In studying violent offenders, even while controlling for other potentially confounding factors, they found that the higher an offender scored on the Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), the less related they were likely to be to their victim. In other words, in a sense, psychopaths are nepotistic. This, they reason, demonstrates psychopathy is an evolutionary strategy aimed at exploiting non-relatives and not a mental disorder or pathology.

A few months later, psychiatrist Liane J. Leedom, M.D. and Linda Hartoonian Almas, a member of the Board of Directors for Aftermath: Surviving Psychopathy Foundation, responded in an opinion piece.

Writing in the same journal, they argued in “Is psychopathy a disorder or an adaptation?” that the Canadian study and its conclusions were potentially flawed in several ways, namely:

• Just because violent psychopathic offenders are imprisoned more often for victimizing strangers does not tell us whether or not they also victimized kin
• Since most psychopaths are not violent, perhaps they victimize kin more often in non-violent ways
• Even if psychopaths do less often violently harm kin, that is not the same as giving aid to them

They point out that, to the extent we’ve been able to investigate it, which is not nearly enough or in a scientific enough manner, we have found that many family members of psychopaths report significant harm in many areas.

They also make a profound statement regarding the possible impact of nepotism flowing between family members and psychopaths in the opposite direction from that considered in the Canadian study – a statement that has huge implications for those considering the reasons behind our world’s dysfunction and the difficult choices involved in trying to improve it:

Psychopathy may persist in human populations in part because of kin support to (not from) psychopathic individuals.

They then focus in on the issue of whether psychopathy is a mental disorder.

They begin by reviewing a definition of “disorder” that the Canadian researchers cited having to do with “the failure of an internal mechanism to perform a natural function for which it was designed” leading to harmful consequences. Giving as an example psychopaths’ impaired processing of fear and distress cues from others that would otherwise lead them to restrain their behavior, they argue that psychopaths do meet the first part of the definition. And they point out that even the Canadian authors agree that psychopathy does lead to harm to individuals and society. Thus, they maintain that psychopathy does meet the criteria to be considered a mental disorder.

They also take issue with another argument the Canadians put forth that psychopathy lacking some of the neurodevelopmental disturbances seen in other serious mental illnesses further supports an understanding of it as an adaptation. Leedon and Almas dispute this claim and point out studies showing some links between psychopathy and psychoticism.

Finally, they take on the issue of adaptation and its relationship to psychopathy.

They review a model of four systems in primate evolution that have been subjected to adaptive selection, discussing how some of them are expressed in psychopaths.

• Attachment
• Caregiving – Reduced (which they point out could be considered another of the failed mechanisms required by the authors’ cited definition of a disorder)
• Dominance – Aberrant
• Sexual Systems – Hyperactive

They conclude that, rather than an adaptation, psychopathy may have evolved as what is known as a spandrel – an important term in evolutionary science referring to something that arises only as a byproduct of the evolution of something else, almost a side effect, if you will.  In this case, Leedon and Almas make the case that it is dominance that has been selected for and psychopathy is simply a byproduct, with any nepotism psychopaths display simply being reflective of the fact that dominant individuals use such behaviors in an attempt to gain power.

So is psychopathy a mental disorder or an adaptation? Having read these contrasting viewpoints, I will leave it to you to decide what you think. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comment section.

But one thing we can all agree on is that it is a fascinating debate that cuts right to the heart of many questions about some of the core characteristics that make us who we are as a species.