The classic checklist for psychopathy was created in 1980 by Professor Robert Hare, who is still seen as the leading expert in this field. The checklist includes 20 traits, from pathological lying to a lack of empathy, and was based entirely on studies of prison populations. This approach worked well because Hare had access to a large group of people with clear psychopathic behaviors, and he could compare interviews and self-reports with official records, making it easier to spot inconsistencies.
However, Hare knew this method had limits. In 1976, he admitted he didn’t know how well his findings applied to psychopaths who weren’t in prison, including women. He concluded that more research was urgently needed on “socially successful psychopaths.” Even decades later, in the early 2000s, when he wanted to study psychopaths in politics, he still had to look in prisons—like Pinochet’s henchmen in Chilean jails. Research on higher-functioning psychopaths, who don’t get caught or may not even commit crimes, has been hard to do, partly because self-report questionnaires don’t work. Psychopaths lie; that’s arguably their defining trait.
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Hare studied Pinochet’s henchmen. Photograph: AP
It wasn’t from forensic psychology but from a business background that Dr. Karen Mitchell entered the study of high-functioning psychopathy. By the late 2010s, she had spent 30 years as a consultant on large-scale corporate culture change. Her work often involved organizations in crisis: “So it might be market alignment, or deaths or suicides in companies,” she tells me from her home in Australia. Noticing how many workplace problems came from specific individuals with predatory traits, she began researching similar “dark personality” behaviors in other areas. “Child sex abuse in religion, coercive control in human trafficking and domestic violence and terrorism,” she says. “When you look at all our global knowledge on human predators, there are so many fields and none of them interact.”
This matters because predatory personalities cause an enormous amount of harm. We’re bad at recognizing them in person, for reasons we’ll get into, and we’re also bad at spotting patterns across large groups—mainly because different fields use so many different names for these people. Mitchell lists some of the terms: “Malignant narcissist, dark triad, psychopath, coercive controller, primary psychopath, grandiose narcissist, corporate psychopath, Machiavellian, dark tetrad, covert narcissist, toxic leader.” She argues these are all part of the same phenomenon: the Dark Personality, or the Persistent Predatory Personality.
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Predatory personalities are hard to recognize, but they can cause an enormous amount of harm. Photograph: Victor Dyomin/Getty Images
Mitchell completed a PhD, published in 2024, where she interviewed people who had encountered persistent predatory personalities in their professional lives—some in clinical settings, but others not, from fields as varied as HR, social work, family courts, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, church leaders, and academics from different disciplines.
Her method, she says, was unconventional, using qualitative rather than quantitative approaches. Some of her findings directly challenge clinical definitions of psychopathy, which often emphasize impulsivity. Mitchell says this is because definitions like Hare’s come from prison populations, which represent the low-functioning end of the spectrum. “People try and put Hare’s stuff into workplaces and domestic violence spheres, but there’s no way you can overlay something so blunt, built from criminal offenders, on to sophisticated CEO-type behaviors.”
Mitchell’s interviews are striking. People from very different fields say alarmingly similar things.There’s one question about whether the interviewees had ever been scared of a persistent predatory personality—remember, these weren’t victims, they were seasoned professionals—and the answers came back: “I constantly worry that he will ruin my career” (from an HR person); “I worry that they will want to seek revenge” (from a social worker); “I am pretty sure there are no lengths to which this man would not go to, to see that I am destroyed” (an expert practitioner from the charity sector). These, and arguably every statement from the interviews, are so extreme that you can’t imagine saying them in social settings because you’d sound crazy—which some testimonies directly address. “People can’t get it. People who don’t work in our fields often don’t hear about or see the kind of evilness perpetrated on others, and just can’t believe it. Whereas, unfortunately, it’s commonplace in my work.” (That’s from one forensic expert practitioner).
From this research, which took her five years, Mitchell built a template of 20 attributes, divided into four clusters, and 25 tactics that would identify a high-functioning persistent predatory personality type. Cluster one includes a need for control; a grandiose sense of self; a pathological inner response to challenge; vengefulness; and a refusal to compromise. Cluster two includes being predatory or exploitative; sadistic and cruel; having a low regard for laws, agreements, social and moral codes; no boundaries in sexual relationships; and unreasonable expectations of others. Cluster three relates to the truth: Dark Personalities cultivate a façade of normality; they are chameleon-like; dishonest; devious and manipulative; and unwilling to accept responsibility for the negative impacts they cause. Finally, cluster four is about the Dark Personality’s own inner life: their emotions are acted, and they don’t experience affinity or the joy that comes with it; they are callous and devoid of empathy; unremorseful; self-interested; and brazen.
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‘Across the ages, we’ve had people who exploit other people’s altruism.’ … Essi Viding Photograph: John Moloney
Essi Viding, a professor of developmental psychopathology at UCL, is a leading figure from the classic research sphere, co-director of the Developmental Risk and Resilience Unit, and in many ways Hare’s natural successor. “I often think of these individuals as having an in-group of one,” she says. “In social psychology, we talk about people that we care about, and most of us, because we’re group-living animals, collaborate, do altruistic acts, and behave in ways that across the ages have increased our survival. But across the ages, we’ve had people who exploit other people’s altruism, and when the chips are down, only care about themselves.”
Viding focuses on the traits that leave society extremely bad at protecting itself against predatory behavior. We all know that people lie, but we instinctively think we know when we’re being lied to. “These individuals almost short-circuit our ability to detect the danger signals until it’s too late,” Viding says. “The majority of us, if we get caught lying, look deeply uncomfortable. It’s not nice to get caught lying; we worry about our reputation, it’s embarrassing. But these individuals are not embarrassed when they’re caught lying. This hasn’t been formally tested, but one might hypothesize that they take people in much more readily, precisely because they display these characteristics of extreme confidence and do not seem nervous.” She cites a 2019 paper in the Journal of Personality Disorders which developed the idea that behaviors which don’t normally go together in the human population—for example, absolute confidence and total untruth—tend to go together in Dark Personalities. This, Viding says, is why these people are so effective at deceiving others.People can often cause a lot of damage before anyone catches them. This creates far more chaos outside prisons than inside them. While Mitchell says she avoids politics, her methods, once you see them all together, are clearly visible on the world stage. In fact, the first time I came across the term “dark triad” was when Donald Trump was first elected.
The idea of a “pathocracy” — a democracy of ordinary people taken over by psychopaths — was introduced by an obscure Polish psychologist named Andrew Lobaczewski, who lived under both the Nazis and later the Soviet-era communists. His ideas never gained traction because, as editor and blogger Harrison Koehli puts it, “the psychology publishers thought it was too political, and the political publishers thought it was too psychological.” In psychiatry and psychology today, it’s considered unfashionable, almost taboo, to label public figures with personality disorders. “One of the perils of bringing psychology into politics is that it’s very easy for anyone with any given political perspective to look at their political enemies or rivals and say: ‘OK, well, they’re all psychopaths,'” says Koehli. There’s also the Goldwater Rule, which established a psychiatric principle that professionals cannot diagnose public figures they haven’t had clinical contact with or met (this came after 1,189 psychiatrists declared Barry Goldwater unfit to be president in the 1964 election). Viding, however, thinks the focus on diagnosis might be beside the point here. “I always find the obsession with diagnosing these people interesting. You don’t need to diagnose them — there are a set of personality traits, and you can recognize individuals with those traits. If someone’s in political power, you can see those traits shown in their behavior, and most people are perfectly capable of making an assessment of what that means.”
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A ‘pathocracy’ is when a democracy is taken over by psychopaths. Photograph: Connect Images/Getty Images
Brazen lying in public life is a tactic Lobaczewski recognized — he called it the “reversive blockade.” Koehli describes it as: “When you tell a lie convincingly and it’s such an absurd lie, most people’s automatic reaction is that they can’t comprehend a lie told on that scale, so they try to find the ‘golden mean’ between the statement and the reality. But that, Lobaczewski says, is the intention of the big lie. They know it will sow confusion.” The impact on the population over which a dark personality presides is huge: some will try to find that golden mean; others will remain steadfast in calling it a lie and fall out with the first group; others will try to adjust their own reality to make the lie true; while others will become used to the new normal — that we all just lie now.
On an interpersonal level, this brazenness is even more mind-boggling. Often both predator and victim know it’s a lie, or the predator is accusing the victim of exactly the thing he or she just did, or the lie has been expressed using the victim’s own language. Reverse attribution is so common in the domestic-abuse sphere that it has its own acronym — Darvo, for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender — yet it still completely confuses victims, who feel their credibility is permanently in doubt. In the workplace, the effects are also devastating, because there tend to be onlookers who themselves have a decisive impact on the outcome. As Mitchell says about one of her interviewees who worked in HR: “People were genuinely convinced the dark personality was the victim and the victim was the dark personality. It destroyed the life of the victim, even though they had an excellent professional track record.”
The reality is that the higher the levels of these traits, the wider the harm caused. Mitchell describes one of her research participants, “The head ofA large Catholic diocese was responsible for handling child sex abuse cases. She had a terrible job, didn’t she? Her credentials were outstanding and spotless—she had been CEO of several children’s organizations. She would go to the Holy See and say, “Look, this person has been abusing children,” and they’d respond, “Really? But he’s such a nice guy.”
In the non-criminal, non-violent realm of ongoing harassment—like what might happen in a workplace—there are layers of disbelief. People can’t grasp that the Dark Personality is truly dark; they can’t accept that anyone would deliberately cause harm, and they can’t even recognize that harm occurred at all. It was striking to hear Mitchell mention workplace suicides as a factor that partly drove her research, since in the mental health field, it’s completely taboo to blame someone else’s behavior for a person’s suicide. Yet in 2019, a landmark ruling in France did exactly that, finding that “torment” in the workplace, linked to several executives, had fostered a culture at France Télécom where, between 2006 and 2009, 19 employees took their own lives, 12 attempted suicide, and eight suffered from severe depression. Jane Monckton-Smith, a professor of public protection at the University of Gloucestershire, has previously said that if provoked suicides were included, domestic homicide statistics could be multiplied “five, six, or seven times.”
In Hare’s study of Pinochet’s lieutenants, which spanned 20 years and was published in 2022, “when they looked at individuals who were commanding officers, this top brass had very high levels of psychopathic traits, especially a lack of empathy for others,” says Viding.
Mitchell delivers her conclusion with blunt, businesslike clarity: “These are completely boundary-less, dangerous people with very different brains—it’s like the difference between a domestic cat and a wild cat. Millions and millions of people have been hurt because we haven’t known the warning signs, so we have to put them out there and then teach people to be discerning.” Viding, using different words and taking a different path, reaches the same conclusion. “As I’ve done this research for over 20 years now, I’ve increasingly started to think we really need to understand more about how we can protect people from being victimized. Because based on the literature, and what little I know about evolutionary and cross-cultural psychology, we are very unlikely to eliminate these traits.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Here is a list of FAQs based on the house cat vs wild cat analogy for spotting a psychopath
Beginner Questions
1 What does the house cat vs wild cat analogy actually mean
It means both a house cat and a wild cat are cats but they operate on completely different instincts A house cat is domesticated and plays by human rules A psychopath is like a wild cat they look human but they dont have the same emotional domestication or empathy that most people do They are driven by their own primal needs not by a social conscience
2 So is a psychopath just a bad person or are they actually different
They are fundamentally different A bad person usually knows right from wrong but chooses to do wrongthey often feel guilt or shame A psychopath typically knows the rules intellectually but doesnt feel the emotional weight of them Its not that they ignore the rules its that the emotional leash that stops most of us doesnt exist for them
3 Can you spot a psychopath just by looking at them
No Thats the scary part Unlike a wild cat that looks different from a house cat a psychopath looks and sounds perfectly normal They are masters of masking You spot them by observing their behavior over time not by their appearance or initial charm
4 What is the biggest red flag to look out for
The lack of genuine empathy They can understand your emotions to manipulate you but they dont feel them If you are crying and they seem to be going through the motions of comforting you without any real warmth or if they seem bored by your pain thats a huge sign
5 Are all psychopaths violent criminals
No Thats a movie myth Many are successful psychopathsthey might be CEOs salespeople or politicians Their lack of empathy and fear can make them ruthless and decisive The wild cat doesnt always attack sometimes it just stalks prey for the fun of it which in real life looks like ruining a coworkers career for sport
Advanced Questions
