📅 Thought for today:

‘All the reading in the world cannot immunize you from the devastating effects of psychopaths. Everyone, including the experts, can be taken in, conned, and left bewildered by them.’

— Robert Hare

#thoughtfortoday #RobertHare #psychologist #psychopath #psychopathy #conned #bewildered

The topic of psychopaths and psychopathy have come up in conversations this week. With clients in one-on-one sessions and in a workshop.

A common question I get from business leaders is along the lines of “Is there a correlation between psychopathic tendencies and business success?”

This probably stems from Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s book “Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?”

The book draws on research and includes character traits, concluding that 20% of business leaders demonstrate psychopathic traits.

This doesn’t make them psychopaths.

Then the book also points out that the system rewards the “bad” behaviours and has traditionally promoted men over women.

The end result is that in general, male business leaders are outperformed by women.

I often get the question about “whether the role makes people psychopathic or being a psychopath makes people better suited to the role” in reference to business leaders.

Robert Hare developed a checklist, call the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (Google it – you can take it yourself if you want to) which should be administered by a clinician and researched – one trait is systematic (compulsive) lying so don’t expect a genuine psychopath to answer the questions honestly.

I am not thinking of anything, or anyone, in particular when I formulated this post.

By the way, if you score zero on the checklist, that doesn’t bode well – everyone exhibits some of the traits!