The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton Read Free Book Online Page A

threatening or neutral expression than those who’d gotten the workout sweat.
    All of which raises a rather interesting question: Can we “catch” fear in the same way we catch a cold? Mujica-Parodi and her team certainly seem to think so. In the light of their findings, they allude to the possibility that “there may be a hidden biological component to human social dynamics, in which emotional stress is, quite literally, ‘contagious.’ ”
    Which raises, of course, an even more interesting question: What about immunity? Are some of us more likely to come down with the fear bug than others? Do some of us have more of a “nose” for it?
    To find out, I ran a variation on Mujica-Parodi’s study. First, I showed one group of volunteers a scary movie (
Candyman
) and got a second group on a treadmill. Next, I collected their sweat. Third, I bottled it (so to speak). Finally, I squirted it up the noses of a second group of volunteers as they played a simulated gambling game.
    The game in question was the Cambridge Gamble Task, a computerized test of decision making under risk. The test comprises a sequence of trials in which participants are presented with an array of ten boxes (either red or blue in color) and must guess, on each trial, which of those boxes conceals a yellow token. The proportion of colored boxes varies from trial to trial (e.g., 6 red and 4 blue; 1 blue and9 red), and participants start off with a total of 100 points—a fixed proportion of which (5, 25, 50, 75, or 95 percent) they must bet on the outcome of the first trial. What happens then is contingent on the result. Depending on whether they win or lose, the amount wagered is either added to or subtracted from their initial tally, and the protocol is repeated, with a rolling total, on all subsequent trials. Higher bets are associated with higher risk.
    If Mujica-Parodi’s theory held any water, then the prediction was pretty straightforward. Volunteers who inhaled the
Candyman
sweat would exercise greater caution and gamble more conservatively than those who inhaled the treadmill sweat.
    But there was a catch. Half the volunteers were psychopaths. Would the psychopaths, noted for their coolness under pressure, be immune to others’ stress? Like expert hunters and trackers, might they be hypervigilant for visual cues of vulnerability—as Angela Book discovered—yet chemically impervious to olfactory ones?
    The results of the experiment couldn’t have been any clearer. Exactly as predicted by Mujica-Parodi’s findings, the non-psychopathic volunteers played their cards pretty close to their chests when exposed to the fear sweat, staking lower percentages on outcomes. But the psychopaths remained unfazed. Not only were they more daring to start with, they were also more daring to finish with, continuing to take risks even when pumped full of “fear.” Their neurological immune systems seemed to immediately crack down on the “virus,” adopting a zero tolerance policy on anxiety, while the rest of us just allow it to spread.
Double-Edged Sword
    Glimpsed in passing through a shop window, or more likely, these days, on Amazon, “The Wisdom of Psychopaths” may seem rather an odd conglomeration of words to appear on the front cover of a book. Eye-catching, maybe. But odd, most certainly. The jarring juxtaposition of those two existential monoliths, “wisdom” and “psychopaths,”precipitates, one would have thought, little semantic compromise, little in the way of constructive, meaningful dialogue around the logic-scored scientific negotiating table.
    And yet the core, underlying thesis that psychopaths are in possession of wisdom is a serious one. Not, perhaps, wisdom in the traditional sense of that word: as an emergent property of advancing years and cumulative life experience. But as an innate, ineffable function of their being.
    Consider, for example, the following analogy from someone we’ll be meeting later.
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