Psychopathic Spectrum

Where do you fall?

Psychopathy is on a spectrum. On one end is the “not psychopathic at all” individual. From there to the middle and to the psychopathic cutoff, are people that have psychopathic traits, but do not reach criteria, then there are psychopaths, and even then there is a spectrum.

Psychopathy has a diagnostic cutoff. What it is described as, is psychopathy. Within the distance between standard psychopathy and the ‘A’-listers or “above the snowline” psychopaths there is a lot of difference in the volume the traits are turned up or down. An ‘A’-lister will have all the traits turned all the way up. They are toxic to themselves and the world.

A precision engineered psychopath is a psychopath that has the traits in balance and functions well in life.

You also have the idea of high functioning psychopaths, moderate functioning psychopaths, and low functioning psychopaths. These aspects will rely on the difference between the individuals in regards to intelligence, ability to predict consequences for actions, and impulse control.

Kevin Dutton speaks about the psychopathic traits and how they can be dialed in for success or failure;

It’s probably fair to say that the one question I’ve been asked more than any other since I wrote The Wisdom of Psychopaths is this:

Do psychopathic personality traits really help us get ahead in life?

And, of course, it’s true, isn’t it? Whenever most of us hear the word ‘psychopath’ it’s images of Ted Bundy and Hannibal Lecter that flash across our minds. Not scalpel-wielding surgical geniuses, silver-tongued secret agents or super-cool Special Forces soldiers.

The reality, however, is rather different.

In stark contrast to the headline-grabbing soundbites thrown out by the media pundits and the film industry moguls, when psychologists like myself use the word ‘psychopath’, we’re actually referring to a specific subgroup of individuals with a distinct subset of personality characteristics.

These characteristics include:

Ruthlessness

Fearlessness

Impulsivity

Self Confidence

Focus

Coolness under pressure

Mental toughness

Charm

Charisma

Empathy-low

Conscience-low

Now, if we imagine each of these characteristics as being the dials on a personality ‘mixing desk’ which may be twiddled up and down in various combinations, we arrive at two conclusions:

1. There is no one-size-fits-all, objectively ‘correct’ setting at which these mixing-desk dials may be tuned. Instead, the most effective alignment will invariably depend on TIMING, and on the particular set of CIRCUMSTANCES you may happen to find yourself in.

2. By the same logic, there will be various jobs and professions which, by their very nature, demand that some of these mixing-desk dials are cranked up a little bit higher and a little bit lower than normal – that demand a degree of what we might call ‘PRECISION-ENGINEERED PSYCHOPATHY’.

In other words, none of the knobs and sliders on the mixing desk are ‘bad’.

Far from it.

All of them have their place on it because:

Dialed up at the right LEVEL
Mixed and sequenced in the right COMBINATION, and
Deployed in the right CONTEXT and with the right INTENTION

. . . each of them adds to the quality of the overall soundtrack.

However, they are still psychopaths. They reach the diagnostic cutoff. There isn’t a more “mild” form of a psychopath before the diagnostic cutoff. There are psychopaths, and there are people with psychopathic traits. This would be a borderline psychopath, not a psychopath. It is these types that have emotional experiences that psychopaths can not. Those experiences remove them from the diagnostic cutoff of bearing the label of “psychopath”.

Psychopath is the mildest form of psychopathy. Otherwise the person wouldn’t have that label. You have to reach that criteria in order to have the name. You may earn a designator like “severely antisocial”, “criminally minded” etc, but those are still dealing in all the same traits, just in different balances in accordance to one another.

You aren’t going to get a psychopath that can feel empathy in slight amounts, fear, love, depression, anxiety, etc, because those are against criteria. Those factors remove the person from being able to be given that label. If they are given that label, the person doing the diagnostics does not know what they are doing. The best the person would be is a borderline psychopath.

A borderline psychopath is someone that likely has some of the neurological changes in the brain, but not all of them. It is still genetic, and it is still present from birth. My guess is that it is less of the formation than a full psychopath. Perhaps in these cases, instead of an eighteen percent smaller amygdala, you have an eleven percent smaller one. I’m not sure that it is known at this point exactly how the brain structures are different.

When you are dealing with someone that rides the line of neurotypical and psychopathic, you have a very interesting dichotomy. You may have it turn out quite well, and you may have it turn out like a nightmare.

Pure psychopathy—meaning having the brain formation and having all the traits—is one thing. Then, you get into how precisely dialed in you have the traits and if they are healthy or unhealthy. “Turn all the knobs up to ten,” as Dutton says, and you will have a person that is toxic to everyone around them.

Getting into the mixture is a different animal, though, if you think about it. Neurotypical traits mixed with psychopathic could result in someone that is basically at war with themselves in terms of actions, thoughts, feelings—basically everything—making them a person off-kilter.

Now I am thinking about this in terms of environment as well. Bear with me; as I am writing, I am working this out in my own head. If someone has NT traits and psychopathic traits, I imagine that the environment that they are raised in would be incredibly important in terms of their ability to manage these traits.

Psychopathic traits could easily serve to be almost protector traits in a bad environment. You would have a person that can be emotionally harmed but is capable of possibly being entirely unempathetic or very cold. This could make anger take forefront and the more vulnerable emotions sink into the background.

This may well be the basis for the poor understanding of a psychopath. Where is the cutoff to consider a person so? Rage apparently is something that a good number of clinicians identify in psychopathy, but those of us that actually are psychopathic don’t have issues with it. Would it be more likely that this is because it is a person that is a mixture and not a psychopath in a true sense.

I wonder if the issues lie with some that are in the middle of the scale in terms of being mixed, while the more pure psychopaths have a different issue all together, that being how our dials are tuned in. Criminal psychopathy is certainly a thing, but most high-functioning psychopaths aren’t going to be bothered with something like prison. It simply doesn’t suit. We are more precision-engineered psychopaths.

I think that there are those like Fallon that do quite well. He had a great family environment and good direction. He nurtured good traits but still has the psychopathic ones. He may not be the most considerate or modest man, but he is certainly an accomplished one, an affable one, and one that maintains a marriage of thirty or forty years. I think he is an example of the good results, but if a child had a different upbringing, I can imagine that the emotions and the traits could be hell on earth in that person’s life.

How do you get yourself together, if your own brain is plotting against you, in a way? I would imagine that this would require very personalized intervention working with the emotions that the person does indeed have and using the traits to give them the building blocks to begin the sorting process.

What you are referring to is what people have come to term “borderline psychopathy”, not to be confused with borderline personality disorder. This is quite different and not able to be present with psychopathy at all.

Psychopathy exists on a spectrum. There are different degrees of it.

This is well described by Kevin Dutton. If you go to the time stamp of two minutes and fifty six seconds he goes into what psychopathy is, and how the spectrum comes into play.

Now in his book he also speaks about what he terms “above the snowline” psychopaths, or the “A-listers”. These are not precision engineered psychopaths, but rather they have all the dials of the psychopath mixing board set at ten. You will understand these reference points after watching the video.

Why would there be dispute about psychopathy being an all or nothing presentation? That would be because psychopathy is studied in prisons. This would be low functioning, and often “above the snowline” or “A-Lister” psychopaths. These psychopaths are going to be very detrimental to anyone they are around, just like any hardened criminal of any brain function.

This is the benchmark that a lot of clinicians use, and as such, psychopathy is imagined to be the worst of the worst, and that it only has one setting. That would be criminal, and that would be entirely toxic. You either are like that or you are not.

This is entirely accurate. You are either like that or not as an individual, but psychologists like Kevin Dutton, who is a research Professor at Oxford University, has a more leveled understanding of psychopaths, and the fact that these traits are on a spectrum, and how it presents can be quite varied.

Two minutes, fifty six seconds will get you there, but the whole video is really worth a watch.

People tend to be very confused when the notion of a psychopathic spectrum is spoken about, so it seemed to be relevant to make it a bit more clear. There are some fun online tests you can take to see where you fall, but keep in mind that they are not meant to be anything other than a curiosity, not diagnostic at all.

http://www.kevindutton.co.uk/the-psychopath-mixing-desk/

http://personality-testing.info/tests/LSRP.php

https://www.counseling-office.com/surveys/test_psychopathy.phtml

https://www.drkevindutton.com/features/the-psychopath-challenge/