PCL-R: The Test of Success

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Recommended: Psychopathy nurture vs nature

“People fake a lot of human interactions, but I feel like I fake them all, and I fake them very well,” admits Dexter, the infamous television serial killer. Thoughts and statements similar to this may be seen as morally reprehensible or repugnant, but gasps and frowns on those behaviors don’t rule out significantly plausible benefits.

Psychopathy has long been labeled a personality disorder; a disorder believed to be serious enough of a threat to society to be treated using methods of sedation, incarceration, and climaxing at lobotomization. But could the worry have been that these psychopaths would just become too successful? The following analyzed documents support the hypothesis that psychopathic personality traits lead to success.

A psychopath is one who tests above 30 on the Psychopathy Checklist- Revised (PCL-R). This test contains 20 components, each question is assigned a 1 to 3 rating on personality traits such as: superficial charm, pathological lying, cunning/manipulative behavior, lack of remorse, lack of empathy, criminal versatility, etc. In an environment, where the majority of society adopts a strategy of cooperation, it is easy to see how an individual with the previously mentioned traits could employ them to one’s advantage. These advantages have been widely examined, from evolutionary perspectives to business environments, and will be summarized in the following reviews.

The basics will start it off: evolution. From an evolutionary point of view, psycopathy is a collection of adaptations that have proven successful enough to continue being naturally selected for. A profuse number of evolutionary theories all pose very similar questions as to why there are psychopaths; however, the study Evolution...

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...d, stock manipulation, and having lower ranking workers’ jobs seen as meaningless, may not seem so appealing to those possessing empathy. However, success is being measured as monetary rewards for this review, and cold-hearted decision-making seems to be the culprit of raking in those rewards. How the psychopaths or the other employees in question feel about making decisions required to gain higher corporate status is just a mediator variable.

After reviewing many articles on psycopathy, there is little room for doubt that they will be more successful. Whether or not they mimic the cheater hawk or the warrior hawk (two current hypotheses on how psychopaths function according to the Department of Psychology at Queen’s University) hypothesis, most can blaze through restrictions and force everyone to consider if there ever was a line between genius and insanity.

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