No, There Are No Benefits to Psychopathy

Most people would agree that psychopathy consists of qualities that have no redeeming value. If you’ve ever had a psychopath take advantage of you, then you’re already familiar with their lack of empathy, tendencies to act in their own self-interest, and eagerness to exploit you.

Perhaps you have a boss or relative who seems to have no problem using you to advance their own cause. In the case of a boss, this might involve behaving in ways inconsistent with company policies, forcing you to get things done regardless of who gets hurt or what the consequences might be. That relative might be someone who constantly brags about their feats of cheating in everything from reporting their taxes to having sold a counterfeit item on an online auction site.

As you run through in your mind the behaviors you associate with these potentially psychopathic individuals, you undoubtedly focus on their undesirable features. They challenge your own values of honesty, sincerity, and respect for others. It would just as undoubtedly cause you to wonder at the possibility raised by one stream of psychological research suggesting that psychopaths aren’t really all that bad.

What Could Be the Redeeming Features of Psychopaths?

The potentially redeeming features of psychopathy take the form, according to a position put forth by Emory University’s now-deceased Scott Lilienfeld and colleagues, of “fearless dominance,” or “boldness” (e.g. Lilienfeld et al. 2012). From this perspective, as you can read about here, psychopaths can become leaders in areas ranging from business to politics because they have no qualms about asserting themselves, leading others to find them attractive and deserving of the power they seek to achieve. They use boldness as a cover-up, or “mask of sanity” for their underlying darkly antisocial tendencies.

According to a study conducted by Simon Fraser University’s Dylan Gatner and colleagues published in 2016, however, boldness has nothing to do with psychopathy, standing on its own as a separate personality dimension. The successful individuals who get ahead because of bold actions do so not because they are so ruthless, Gatner et al.'s findings suggest, but because of their willingness to think outside the box. Rather than being exploitative when it comes to others, they show a healthy dose of extraversion.

As a way to settle the issue, the editors of the journal Personality Disorder: Theory, Research, and Treatment themselves took the bold step of inviting the University of Georgia’s Brinkley Sharpe and colleagues (2021) to conduct a “preregistered replication” of the Gatner et al. (2016) study, meaning that the authors would make all their procedures openly available to public scrutiny, including their predictions. In this replication, which also used a larger sample than the original, the authors used the dual rationale of melding "interest in testing the role of boldness in relation to maladaptive outcomes with the promotion of open and replicable scientific practices” (p. 2).

The U. Georgia authors' test of the boldness model took the form of examining its relationship, both alone and in combination with the clearly psychopathic traits of meanness and disinhibition, to a wide range of maladaptive outcomes including drug abuse, violence and victimization, aggression, and rule-breaking, impulsivity, organizational and interpersonal deviance, and risky behavior. On the positive side, the authors tested the outcomes of healthy social and emotional functioning, and prosociality or the desire to behave well toward others.

Boldness Doesn’t Help the Psychopath After All

The Sharpe et al. replication study involved a similar population of undergraduate students as the original Simon Fraser U. research. Screened for inattentive or otherwise invalid responses, the 1,015 participants (from the original 1247 recruited) completed the 3-part measure of psychopathy that included subscales for boldness (e.g. “I’m a born leader’), disinhibition (“I have taken money from someone’s purse or wallet without asking”), and meanness (“I do not mind if someone I dislike gets hurt”).

The findings indeed replicated the Gatner et al. work, showing that disinhibition and meanness, on their own, accounted for a relatively large proportion (20%) of the variation in scores on the maladaptive outcome variables. Boldness added practically nothing to the prediction equation involving these other 2 psychopathic indices. However, high scores on boldness on their own predicted high scores on the two measures of adaptive functioning; namely, prosociality and high social and emotional functioning.

An intriguing implication of these findings is that, diagnostically, there is a set of criteria in the psychiatric diagnostic manual (the DSM-5) involving boldness that “puts the field at odds with decades of work suggesting that psychopathy was a rare and more severe disorder than antisocial personality disorder” (p. 9). Having boldness in the set of criteria for antisocial personality disorder, then, could result in actual misdiagnosis or at least a misunderstanding of what constitutes true psychopathy.

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How the Study’s Findings Can Benefit You

Knowing that there’s no “mask” over the personality of the psychopath means that when you’re trying to protect yourself from someone whose spitefulness and willingness to act out are aimed at you, what you see is likely to be what you’ll get. Furthermore, by recognizing that the qualities of boldness are distinct from those of psychopathy you can feel more comfortable placing your trust in someone who doesn’t seem afraid to take strong action. Maybe it’s worth getting on board with that boss who tries imaginative ways to solve old problems. Fortune may, for good reason, “favor the bold.”

Apart from the practical implications of the Sharpe et al. study, the findings reinforce the original impetus of the investigation by the journal editors to resolve a theoretical debate by turning to replication. What the journal authors refer to as a “replicability crisis” is becoming more and more evident by the increased attention now being paid to the phenomenon of retraction in science, including some very famous ideas. Retractions may never disappear completely, but by ensuring that the scientific method is followed right down to this last step of the process, the research community will have a better chance of providing results in which the public can feel confident.

To sum up, the Sharpe et al. study suggests that taking boldness out of the equation helps clarify the true nature of the psychopathic individual. For better or worse, people high in meanness and disinhibition are best viewed as individuals on separate life pathways from those whose boldness helps shape their lives with a higher purpose.

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