In our recent piece about Dr. James Fallon, we discussed the three ingredients that Fallon believes are required for the creation of a psychopathic killer.

These included:

• Certain structural and functional characteristics of the brain
• Certain variants of particular genes
• An environment that triggers the expression of these biological predispositions

While psychopathic killers can cause great harm to a certain number of people, they are relatively rare. The greater danger, from the perspective of society at large, is the emergence of “evil” on a broader scale within systems. And, as Andrew M. Lobaczewski makes clear in Political Ponerology, for that to happen, not only must people with disorders other than psychopathy be drawn into harmful activities, but so must some percentage of biologically healthy, normal people.

Zimbardo’s work has primarily focused on investigating how this latter event occurs – how everyday, average people can end up participating in destructive events.

Zimbardo has been a psychology professor at Stanford University for over forty years. He is best known for leading the team that conducted what has come to be known as the Stanford prison experiment back in 1971.

The study was actually funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research because they wanted to understand more precisely why military guards and prisoners come into conflict.

In the study, part of the basement of the Stanford psychology building was set up to resemble a dungeon. 75 participants were considered and, out of these, 24 male college students who were assessed as the most psychologically stable and healthy of the bunch were chosen. They were then randomly assigned to one of two roles – prisoner or guard.

Once divided into these roles, the participants were treated very much as their assigned role would normally entail.

• “Prisoners” were suddenly arrested by actual city police at an unexpected time, taken to the mock prison, fingerprinted, photographed, searched and dressed in uniforms, just as might take place in a real prison.
• “Guards” were dressed in professional uniforms, complete with batons, and instructed to do what it takes to maintain order.

Then the drama was allowed to unfold.

Zimbardo’s original hypothesis was that the conflicts in the scenario would arise due to the inherent personalities of the “guards” and the “prisoners.”

But instead, the study showed that these relatively healthy, normal participants quickly and deeply internalized their assigned roles within a system that justified and supported them in doing so.

• “Guards” began to treat prisoners poorly, with a third of them acting in genuinely sadistic ways.
• “Prisoners” became subdued and submissive, even turning against fellow prisoners who resisted the guards’ abuse.

Even Zimbardo himself was surprised by how extreme some of the situations became.

At its inception, the study was expected to last for two weeks. But some participants were so upset that they quit early and, after only six days, the entire experiment had to be shut down because of the excessive emotional trauma being manifested.

Decades later, during the Iraq War, when the abuse of prisoners by American personnel at Abu Ghraib prison came to light, many recognized the relevance of Zimbardo’s research to the case. So did Zimbardo himself. In fact, so much so that he became an expert witness for the defense of one of the accused Americans, Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Chip Frederick. In that role, he attempted to show that Frederick and some of the other perpetrators were not inherently evil people, but that, just as in the Stanford prison experiment, the systemic and situational forces involved played a significant role in generating the horrific activities that took place.

Zimbardo discusses the lessons of the Stanford prison experiment and his experience with the Abu Ghraib trials in his book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. The book uses the story of Lucifer, God’s favorite angel who fell and was transformed into Satan, as an allegory about how good people can, in certain situations or if intoxicated with power, become corrupted.

Zimbardo’s work is somewhat controversial. Some have criticized his methodology, while others have conducted similar studies using different methodologies and come to different conclusions. But Zimbardo himself is a strong advocate for the need to take into account systemic and situational factors when analyzing why harmful activities occur.

Now, the reason that all of this came up at this time is that, as mentioned earlier, Zimbardo was just featured by The Huffington Post.

The page, posted last Friday, features his 2008 TED talk entitled “The psychology of evil”, seen below:

The talk’s relevance to ponerology is immediately evident, as it begins with Zimbardo telling the audience:

“Philosophers, dramatists, theologians have grappled with this question for centuries: what makes people go wrong?”

while standing in front of an image of an ominous looking face superimposed with the words “Evil: What Makes People Go Wrong?”

In the talk, he discusses:

• How his early life experiences taught him that the line between a “good” and an “evil” person is not as fixed as some would like to believe
• His view that the world will always be filled with a yin/yang mixture of good and evil
• The paradox of the fact that, mythologically, God created Hell as a place to store evil, including His once favorite angel, Lucifer
• His definition of “evil”
• His experience working as an expert witness for the defense of Abu Ghraib perpetrator Staff Sgt. Chip Frederick
• The individual (dispositional) vs. situational vs. systemic factors involved in the abuses of Abu Ghraib
• The famous Milgram experiment, in which a surprisingly large percentage of participants were – if told to do so by a supposed authority figure as part of an ostensible “learning experiment” – willing to administer shocks to another person, even up to a dangerous degree of voltage. This experiment is often paired with the Stanford prison study as a famous example of the power of situational factors in the generation of harmful behavior.
• The relevance of the Milgram experiment to the Jonestown tragedy, in which hundreds committed suicide or were murdered as a consequence of their obedience to the People’s Temple founder and cult leader Jim Jones
• His Stanford prison study
• How anonymity changes behavior amongst warriors
• “7 social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil”
• Why harmful behavior must be studied using a public health model that assesses systemic and situational aspects rather than just focusing on individuals
• How we can promote heroism, especially by recognizing everyday heroes

The video is accompanied by a blog post written by Zimbardo entitled “Journeying From Evil to Heroism,” in which he covers much of the same material, but also tells the story of the TED talk itself, which was, apparently quite dramatic. Zimbardo says he ran over the strict time limit just as he was about to launch into the uplifting conclusion of his speech. Only after a special exception was made for him, because of the moderator’s belief in the importance of his message, was he able to complete his talk, explaining why it is so important that we not only study evil, but also focus on the other side of the coin, heroism, so as to better understand and promote it.

The enthusiastic response to this conclusion of his TED talk helped inspire and support Zimbardo in scaling up his current endeavor, the Heroic Imagination Project. This is a non-profit organization, of which he is president, “dedicated to promoting heroism in everyday life.” They also conduct investigations into how reformed people, who were previously involved in violent activities, were motivated and able to change.

Few people have made more of a name for themselves when it comes to the study of “good” and “evil” than Dr. Philip Zimbardo. And even at almost 80 years old, he is still continuing to do so. His work does not focus as much on the very important biological aspects of ponerology. But when it comes to thinking about the non-biological influences relevant to the field, Zimbardo has given us a lifetime of work to consider.

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.

A new study in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence reinforces the fact that, under certain conditions, this might be the case.

The Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), the current gold standard test for psychopathy, assesses a person on a variety of elements that are classified into two main categories called “factors.” The first, Factor 1, consists of the person’s interpersonal or affective traits, basically measuring the extent to which they have an aggressive narcissistic personality. The second, Factor 2, consists of the person’s actual behavior and measures the extent to which they exhibit an antisocial or socially deviant lifestyle.

Previous research has shown that certain aspects of body language, including walking style, are characteristic of victims and that those scoring high on the Factor 1 measures of the PCL-R are more accurate than others in judging someone’s vulnerability simply from watching them walk.

Now, in “Psychopathy and Victim Selection: The Use of Gait as a Cue to Vulnerability,” researchers Angela Book, Kimberly Costello and Joseph A. Camilleri studied 47 inmates at a maximum security penitentiary in Ontario, Canada and found that not only, as expected, do the inmates scoring high on PCL-R Factor 1 more accurately than others judge people’s vulnerability by observing their gait, but they are also more likely to actually explicitly mention the victim’s gait in explaining why they perceived them as vulnerable.

Book is an associate professor at Brock University specializing in forensic psychology whose “research interests focus on psychopathy and its relationship with a number of variables that relate directly to victim selection.”

Costello is a Ph.D. candidate at Brock whose “research focuses on the development and reduction of prejudice and discrimination.”

Camilleri is an assistant professor at Westfield State University specializing in the study of “the etiology of interpersonal conflict” with a special interest in psychopathy.

As such, all work in critical areas related to ponerology, seeking answers to some of the most vexing and important questions that must be confronted as we pursue a healthier, more sustainable world.