Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work by Robert D. Hare, Paul Babiak

and enhancing the positive or bright side of our private self and minimizing or controlling the dark side. In fact, to preserve our internal emotional balance and to avoid excessive anxiety, we need to believe that our positive self-evaluations are accurate, and we will invest energy in fighting doubts as they arise.
    The goal for much of the therapy, coaching, and counseling that people seek is to resolve the internal psychological conflicts between the bright and dark sides of the personality. Well-developed and researched psychological tests can help shed some light on our hidden traits. A competent mental health professional can facilitate explor-ing these parts of the psyche, while providing insights that help us integrate the parts into a unified whole. As long as our self-image is mostly positive, and we can accept the less positive side of ourselves as a normal part of being human, we will value our individual “self”
    and conclude that we are okay people. Feeling all right about oneself comes across as self-confidence and inner strength, two traits valued in our society.
    Your public self, or persona, on the other hand, is how you want those around you to see “you.” Your persona is a subset of your private self—a carefully edited version, to be sure, of your private personality that you reveal to others in order to influence how they see (and judge) you. Anyone who has ever tried to make a positive impression on another—perhaps on a date or during a job interview—
    understands how difficult it can be to maximize the positives and minimize the negatives of your personality. Despite our best efforts to control what we reveal to others, we do unintentionally reveal private personality traits to others on occasion, but, overall, our persona reflects the personality we want others to see.
    This brings us to the third view of personality; how others view and describe us. This is the reputation others assign to us based on what they see, hear, and experience when interacting with us. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts to present a positive persona, people will form their own opinions, both correct and mistaken, based on Psychopathic Manipulation
    71
    what we do, how we look, the clothes we choose to wear, and whether they agree with our values and beliefs as filtered through their own biases, stereotypes, likes, and dislikes. The filters other people use to evaluate us can, to varying degrees, distort the picture folks get of who we really are.
    The problem is that all of us form first impressions of others very quickly, perhaps during the first seconds of meeting someone for the first time. Once formed, people solidify their first impressions by filtering out new information that contradicts their early impressions, and preferentially let in information that is supportive. The people we like right off become even more likable, and those we don’t care for remain so. For example, you may feel an affinity for those of a similar religion or political party and generalize this to other aspects of their makeup. Feeling affinity for someone makes us more accepting of the things we like about him or her, and more forgiving of those things that we might dislike. Consistency between a person’s words and deeds also plays an important role in reinforcing his or her reputation. Consistency leads us to see people as honest—
    even if we don’t totally agree with their views—while inconsistencies we notice may leave us wondering about them. All of these filtered perceptions can cause problems, of course, if we misjudged the persona of a person when forming a first impression.
    To summarize our model of personality so far: We have a private self made up of positive traits we value and want others to appreciate, and a collection of negative traits and characteristics we prefer to keep to ourselves. When we interact with others, we present a carefully crafted persona or public self comprised of a selection of traits