Just 1 percent of the overall population qualifies as psychopaths; in prison, that number skyrockets to 25 percent. Robert Hare developed the Hare Psychopathy Checklist in the 1980s, and it’s since become a tool widely used for assessing and diagnosing the condition. Contrary to popular notions, lots of psychopaths aren’t raging lunatics or violent criminals; in fact, most of them get along perfectly well in society. As Scientific American explains:
Superficially charming, psychopaths tend to make a good first impression on others and often strike observers as remarkably normal. Yet they are self-centered, dishonest and undependable, and at times they engage in irresponsible behavior for no apparent reason other than the sheer fun of it. Largely devoid of guilt, empathy and love, they have casual and callous interpersonal and romantic relationships. Psychopaths routinely offer excuses for their reckless and often outrageous actions, placing blame on others instead. They rarely learn from their mistakes or benefit from negative feedback, and they have difficulty inhibiting their impulses.
Kevin Dutton, an Oxford psychologist and the author of The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers Can Teach Us About Success, believes that psychopathy can actually be advantageous in some careers. Using (not the most scientific) survey, he compiled a list of careers in which psychopaths are overrepresented. Mostly, they’re fields where the hallmarks of psychopathy allow people not just to get by but to thrive and succeed. (It’s been suggested more than once, for example, that corporate psychopaths caused the most recent financial crisis.)
In keeping with Dutton’s findings, here’s a list of the top 10 careers with the most psychopaths working in them. There are some surprises—the biggest of which is that politician isn’t number one.
1. CEO.The corporate lexicon is full of bloodthirsty metaphors. Business is cutthroat; those who succeed are sharks; and they make a killing. What better place for a psychopath to really shine? Lots of CEOs are perfectly lovely, I’m sure, but study after study suggests that 4 percent of them—four times as many people as in the general population—qualify as psychopaths.
The characteristics that define psychopathy, “being [a] risk seeker, impulsive and fearless,” also help entrepreneurs lead and succeed. But as Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry points out, the other markers of psychopathy—lacking “empathy, remorse” and personal accountability—can result in CEOs whose reckless behavior leaves corporate carnage in their wake.
2. Lawyer.Almost every joke about lawyers relies on the stereotype that they are, essentially, psychopaths: liars and cheats, bereft of morals, obsessed with profiteering at any cost.
If I may interject here, I must say that more than once in my career as a child protection worker, where I was in court almost daily, I never ceased to be amazed at lawyers who came in cold on cases, but managed to come off as sincerely invested in finding the truth about the case, and speaking to the judge as though they had just finished an exhaustive study of the facts involved, when in actuality, they knew absolutely nothing. One lawyer who was like that is now a judge handling family law cases!
4. Salesperson. In his book, Working With Monsters: How to Identify and Protect Yourself from the Workplace Psychopath, John Clarke highlights how having a psycho on the sales team can be a real asset. “The psychopath is very likely to be a good salesperson, if they are intelligent as well as glib and superficial,” Clarke writes. “In fact, a study done in 2001 by Marc Hamer found that superior sales performance was associated with higher levels of narcissism (egocentric and grandiose), sociopathy and cognitive empathy.”Read the author's comments on each of these points here.
5. Surgeon.Interestingly, while doctor and nurse made the list of careers with the fewest psychopaths, surgeons were among the most psychopathic. ...psychoanalyst Carl Sword recounted a conversation with an anonymous neurosurgeon who makes the callousness of psychopathy sound like just what the, uh, surgeon ordered, saying, “I have no compassion for those whom I operate on.... In the theater I am reborn: as a cold, heartless machine, totally at one with scalpel, drill and saw. When you're cutting loose and cheating death high above the snowline of the brain, feelings aren't fit for purpose. Emotion is entropy, and seriously bad for business. I've hunted it down to extinction over the years.”
6. Journalist.
7. Police officer. But I was fascinated to learn about Diane Wetendorf’s Police Domestic Violence: Handbook for Victims, which finds that “women suffer domestic abuse in at least 40 percent of police officer families.”
8. Clergy. The Catholic Church’s child sexual abuse scandal has cost the church a staggering $3 billion in payouts to victims. The Church’s efforts to hide abuse, often moving sexual predators from parish to parish, is now well known, and is a stain on the church’s reputation that will likely never be erased.
9. Chef.
10. Civil servants.
1 comment:
I've met them and mostly they are screw-ups. But chef? I'd never guess.
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