a completely separate disorder—suddenly deepens.
Is psychopathy just a matter of degree? Or are the big boys in a league of their own?
One Small Step, One Giant Leap
It’s reasonable to assume that the answer to such a question should, by its very nature, be black-and-white. That is, if psychopathy is on a continuum, then the trajectory from low to high, from Mother Teresa to John Wayne Gacy, must be linear, and the road to moral weightlessness smooth. And if not, not: you get the kind of precipitous increments in data patterns observed by Joe Newman. But actually, as anyone who has ever played the lottery will tell you, it’s not that simple. The six winning numbers are certainly on a continuum: a continuum of 1 through 6. But the size of your winnings, from $1,000 to a $1,000,000 jackpot, is a different story entirely. The function is exponential, and the relationship between the numbers on a continuum on the one hand, and how they convert (quite literally in this case) to “real life” currency on the other, is all about probabilities. The chances of snaring all six numbers (1 in 13,983,816) do not divergefrom the chances of snaring five (1 in 55,492) by the same degree that five diverges from four (1 in 1,033). Not by a long way. And so, whereas on one level things progress predictably, what they “boil down to,” in a parallel mathematical universe, doesn’t. What they map onto takes on a life of its own.
Back at the restaurant, I put my theory to Scott Lilienfeld: that actually both he and Joe Newman might be right. Psychopathy might well be on a spectrum. But at the sharp psychopathic business end of it, something ineffably stark seems to happen. A switch just seems to flip.
“I certainly think that’s one way of reconciling the two perspectives,” he reflects. “And it’s undoubtedly the case that those at the extreme end of many distributions seem to run on a different kind of gas from everyone else. But it also depends on your starting point: whether you view psychopathy predominantly as a personality predisposition or as an information-processing disorder. Whether you want to deal in cognitive deficits or variations in temperament. You can see it in the language, in the terminology used: disorder; deficit; predisposition; variation … It would be interesting to hear what Joe has to say. Have you put it to him?”
I hadn’t. But not long afterward, I did. “Is it possible,” I asked Newman, “that the further along the psychopathic spectrum one gets—assuming such a thing exists—the more you start, neurologically speaking, to see gradual changes occurring? Say, differences in the brain’s attentional mechanisms or reward systems, which, the more psychopathic an individual is, become increasingly laser-like in their focus, increasingly primed for immediate gratification? And that although performance on the PPI or PCL-R may be linear, the way that performance manifests itself in low-level brain activity, especially at very high scores, might instead be rather different? That it might, in fact, be spectacularly exponential?”
His eyes narrowed. The wily old gunslinger was in no mood for games. “Sure,” he said. “It’s possible. But the clinical cutoff [on the PCL-R] is 30. And that, in the lab, coincidentally or otherwise, is alsothe point at which most of the empirical shit hits the low-level cognitive fan.”
He smiled and poured some coffee. “At any rate,” he said, “it doesn’t really matter which way up you hold it. A clinical psychopath is a pretty distinct specimen. Either way they’re different. Right?”
1 Factor analysis is a statistical technique used to discover simple patterns in the relationships between different variables. In particular, it seeks to discover whether the observed variables can be explained in terms of a much smaller number of variables, called
factors
. As an example, in Cattell’s model, the superordinate factor “warmth” was distilled
Is psychopathy just a matter of degree? Or are the big boys in a league of their own?
One Small Step, One Giant Leap
It’s reasonable to assume that the answer to such a question should, by its very nature, be black-and-white. That is, if psychopathy is on a continuum, then the trajectory from low to high, from Mother Teresa to John Wayne Gacy, must be linear, and the road to moral weightlessness smooth. And if not, not: you get the kind of precipitous increments in data patterns observed by Joe Newman. But actually, as anyone who has ever played the lottery will tell you, it’s not that simple. The six winning numbers are certainly on a continuum: a continuum of 1 through 6. But the size of your winnings, from $1,000 to a $1,000,000 jackpot, is a different story entirely. The function is exponential, and the relationship between the numbers on a continuum on the one hand, and how they convert (quite literally in this case) to “real life” currency on the other, is all about probabilities. The chances of snaring all six numbers (1 in 13,983,816) do not divergefrom the chances of snaring five (1 in 55,492) by the same degree that five diverges from four (1 in 1,033). Not by a long way. And so, whereas on one level things progress predictably, what they “boil down to,” in a parallel mathematical universe, doesn’t. What they map onto takes on a life of its own.
Back at the restaurant, I put my theory to Scott Lilienfeld: that actually both he and Joe Newman might be right. Psychopathy might well be on a spectrum. But at the sharp psychopathic business end of it, something ineffably stark seems to happen. A switch just seems to flip.
“I certainly think that’s one way of reconciling the two perspectives,” he reflects. “And it’s undoubtedly the case that those at the extreme end of many distributions seem to run on a different kind of gas from everyone else. But it also depends on your starting point: whether you view psychopathy predominantly as a personality predisposition or as an information-processing disorder. Whether you want to deal in cognitive deficits or variations in temperament. You can see it in the language, in the terminology used: disorder; deficit; predisposition; variation … It would be interesting to hear what Joe has to say. Have you put it to him?”
I hadn’t. But not long afterward, I did. “Is it possible,” I asked Newman, “that the further along the psychopathic spectrum one gets—assuming such a thing exists—the more you start, neurologically speaking, to see gradual changes occurring? Say, differences in the brain’s attentional mechanisms or reward systems, which, the more psychopathic an individual is, become increasingly laser-like in their focus, increasingly primed for immediate gratification? And that although performance on the PPI or PCL-R may be linear, the way that performance manifests itself in low-level brain activity, especially at very high scores, might instead be rather different? That it might, in fact, be spectacularly exponential?”
His eyes narrowed. The wily old gunslinger was in no mood for games. “Sure,” he said. “It’s possible. But the clinical cutoff [on the PCL-R] is 30. And that, in the lab, coincidentally or otherwise, is alsothe point at which most of the empirical shit hits the low-level cognitive fan.”
He smiled and poured some coffee. “At any rate,” he said, “it doesn’t really matter which way up you hold it. A clinical psychopath is a pretty distinct specimen. Either way they’re different. Right?”
1 Factor analysis is a statistical technique used to discover simple patterns in the relationships between different variables. In particular, it seeks to discover whether the observed variables can be explained in terms of a much smaller number of variables, called
factors
. As an example, in Cattell’s model, the superordinate factor “warmth” was distilled
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