Murderous Minds (7 page)

Among academics, a big part of the controversy surrounding psychopathy centers on the influence this test still has on researchers’ views about the nature of psychopathy and the influence it has on the fate of criminal psychopaths.

As Spiegel reported it: “And so Dixon found himself sitting across a table from a no-nonsense female psychologist, answering a series of questions about his family and troubled youth.

“The woman, Dixon says, didn’t look at him. Instead, she stared at the computer, methodically entering his answers, her face dimly lit by the screen.

“They talked for over an hour. Then the psychologist thanked him, closed her computer and went away.”

The report doesn’t mention that the evaluation, to be valid, should have included a review of his criminal record and past history. Diagnosing someone as a psychopath using the full PCL–R requires more than a pencil (or a computer) and a list of 20 items. (Some writers like Jon Ronson, the author of
The Psychopath Test
, journalists, and bloggers oversimplify the process of identifying a psychopath to a misleading degree when they lightheartedly, and at times without a clue, do exactly this and with far fewer than 20 items.) Competent, qualified professionals are trained to administer the PCL–R interview and taught to observe the subject. They should review court and other institutional records as well. Ideally, they should interview people who know the subject and can provide evidence of his or her behavior. In addition, the subject’s home life and upbringing, as well as behavior during childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, in school, at work, and toward friends and lovers, should be considered. Even someone’s hobbies and how they spend their “off ” time may factor into the final diagnosis. All this information should then be integrated into the total psychological assessment before assigning a score.
²²
More than one interview may be necessary to accumulate all the information, and the process may take as little as two hours or as many as six to complete.
²³
But this, of course, is the ideal. It takes time and costs money to conduct a series of interviews, if that is required. There is always concern that unqualified examiners might cut corners.

Although it would be unconscionable to skimp when administering a

test that has such significant implications for a person facing sentencing or parole, the quality control lies with the test administrator, who should be certified. While this tool for measuring psychopathy was developed for research purposes, it has become highly influential in court systems in many parts of the world, including North America and Europe. Incompetent administration of the PCL–R or other tests of psychopathy is as serious as incompetent medical care or failure to follow legal due process.

Improper application or administration of the test by unqualified personnel has raised concerns, like those expressed in Spiegel’s report, that the test could be used improperly. “I feel ambivalent about it,” Hare told Spiegel on air, referring to how the test may be used in the judicial system.
²⁴

Spiegel may have wanted more from Hare. He formed the impression over the two days Spiegel interviewed him that the NPR correspondent had an agenda to get him to repudiate the use of the test in the judicial system.

Spiegel denied she had an agenda but, according to Hare, “It turns out she was trying to get me to say that I was really concerned about how the PCL–R is being used and misused in criminal justice. Now, I am; I’m very concerned about it. But the way it was presented somehow indicated that it should not be used at all, which is clearly inappropriate. The real gist of the program was to take up the case of the California lifers [prisoners serving life terms in California prisons]. These are people who are very unlikely to get out for a very long period of time. They are in for murder and other serious crimes.”
²⁵
Hare concluded that Spiegel was trying to make the point that these convicts are never going to get out of prison because of their high PCL–R test results.

“Well, in fact, the PCL–R is never, ever the sole instrument used for parole purposes,” Hare said. “In fact, it is not a risk assessment tool at all. It just measures a personality condition or disorder, as most people would say, although I don’t think it is a disorder.” (Hare later explained that “Disorder in psychiatry has several meanings, and does not necessarily imply deficit or malfunction.”
²⁶
After more than half a century studying psychopaths, he believes that they “have an intellectual understanding of the rules of society and the conventional meanings of right and wrong, and know enough about what they are doing to be held accountable for their actions.”)
²⁷

Forensic psychologist Stephen Porter, Ph.D., of the University of British

Columbia also questions the widely held view that high PCL–R scores routinely condemn criminals to serve their prison time with little chance of parole.

Porter and his collaborator found “that when given the opportunity to speak to a parole board, high PCL–R scores were associated with likelihood of release.
²⁸
I think the finding relates specifically to this context in which an offender has been granted the opportunity to speak (and perhaps put on an acting job) in front of observers. Yes, the [Canadian] parole board would have been fully aware of the offenders’ PCL–R scores prior to the hearing. In a more recent study we found that psychopathy was associated with the ability to effectively simulate/fake facial expressions.”
²⁹

“I wonder,” Porter continued, “if there is good evidence that high PCL– Rs actually keep people in prison longer in the U.S. It is possible that U.S. courts are more punitive and/or their parole boards are less liberal, such that people get longer sentences and then have stricter criteria to be eligible for parole in the U.S. than Canada.”
³⁰

“Because high PCL–R scorers are such effective actors and manipulators,” he added, “I would predict you’d find the same pattern in the U.S., such that IF provided the opportunity to speak to a parole board and express remorse, high PCL–R scorers would have an advantage over low scorers.”

Dixon’s lawyer, Charles Carbone, doesn’t agree. After reading the psychologist’s conclusion that “Mr. Dixon obtained a total score on the PCL–R which placed him in the high range of the clinical construct of psychopathy,” he told Spiegel, “I remember reading the report and feeling heartbroken because I knew no matter how hard I worked from that day forward, that when I brought him back to the board, we were going to get denied.”

One example of the fallout following Spiegel’s broadcast was that psychologists in California became concerned that the report gave the impression that the PCL–R is unfairly keeping people in prison.

Hare’s concern is that unqualified people may be administering and interpreting the test results. Anytime a tool or instrument is misused, whether it is a screwdriver or a test of personality traits, damage can occur. The rhetoric surrounding the use of the test can become strong inside, and outside, academia.

“
One of my former students, Stephen Hart, said the PCL–R
kills
people,”

Hare recalled with traces of disappointment, resentment, and pain in his voice. Hart is the lead author of the short version of the PCL–R,
The Hare Psychopathy Checklist: Screening Version (PCL: SV)
.
³¹
“Well, I don’t know where it kills people,” Hare said. “I don’t know of anyone who’s ever been condemned to death because of the PCL–R.”

The short version of the test, which Hart developed with David Cox and Hare, takes about half as much time to complete as the full version. It allows a screener to determine if someone has a score high enough to justify spending the time and money to administer the full version.

If Dixon was evaluated by a qualified examiner using the most recent, full version of the PCL–R, he would have provided information concerning 20 different items, each rated 0, 1, or 2 during a semi-structured interview. The evaluation also would have included a review of his written records. He would have received a rating of “0” for any trait he lacked, a “1” when there was some indication he had the trait, and a “2” if there was abundant evidence he had it. His potential maximum score was thus 40, but a score of 30 and above in North America was sufficient to get him a diagnosis of psychopathy. In Europe, a score of 25 or higher would have secured him the same diagnosis.
³²

Most of the items—18 out of the 20—included among the PCL–R measures fall into one of four related categories or clusters.
³³
Psychologists often refer to them as Factors.

It is not possible to measure a concept like psychopathy directly any more than it is possible to measure directly a concept such as intelligence. You can’t heft it in your hand, weigh it on a scale, or set it next to a ruler. One of the reasons psychology is such a challenging field is because it deals with intangibles, concepts like personality, emotions, mental states,
etc.
We know they are real because we experience them and observe their effects, but they are impossible to measure physically. This is why some scientists in fields like physics and chemistry, and later biology, once referred to psychology and social science as “soft sciences” while they, with a bit of snobbishness and feeling of superiority, regarded their fields of study as “hard sciences.”

Psychopathy research has entered the interesting in-between realm of social psychology and neuroscience. Neuroscience is bringing aspects
of “hard science” to the field—for example, as we’ll see, measurement of brain activity, volume, and structure—but at the same time psychologists are still arguing over what psychopathy is, who is a psychopath, and—as one can see with the debate surrounding the PCL–R—how this knowledge should be used in our society. Many researchers devoted to studying the neurobiological basis—the “hard science” aspect—of psychopathy still rely on the PCL–R, as they have for decades. It is a proven, reliable indicator of something that distinguishes the criminal psychopath who lacks a conscience from a person who has a conscience.

Because they can’t measure psychopathy directly, psychologists use a statistical method called factor analysis to evaluate the features of psychopathy. It indicates to them whether or not a collection of variables, such as the behaviors or traits we associate with psychopathy, are in fact actually related to a smaller number of unknown factors. Smaller is better; it gets you closer to the source and eliminates false leads. Factor analysis in the past has yielded two-factor, three-factor, and four-factor models of psychopathy based on PCL scores.

Some statisticians are fans of factor analysis, and others think it can be used to show whatever a user wants it to show. The generally accepted view is that, like many statistical techniques, it can be used or misused. Used properly, it can identify useful patterns hidden in large, messy piles of data. Used properly, it can reduce the number of variables researchers have to deal with as they struggle to better understand complicated human behaviors. Used improperly, it could mislead.

Questions in the PCL–R
³⁴
designed to detect Glibness and Superficial Charm, Grandiose Sense of Self-Worth, Pathological Lying, and Conning/Manipulative Behavior fall into the category of Interpersonal factors. Some people with considerable psychopathic traits are good at manipulating others with smooth talk. They often are good at persuading others and talking their way out of trouble, as Eric Harris did on many occasions while growing up. The glibness and confidence make these people effective persuaders and sometimes come across as overconfidence or arrogance. As with the other factors or dimensions of psychopathy, these traits are not obvious or apparent in all psychopaths all the time. Some show stronger traits in some of these areas than in others. It’s possible
these differences may reflect different subtypes of psychopaths, although that remains unresolved.

A second category of factors, Affective, includes features related to feelings or emotions: Lack of Remorse or Guilt, Shallow Affect, and Callous Lack of Empathy. Psychopaths do not feel the way other people do, and these differences show up in the laboratory. They do not respond physiologically to images that make most people cringe, even other criminals. Show most folks a picture of someone crushing their fingers in a car door, for example, and they will react almost as if they feel the pain. This is not so with psychopaths. They also differ in the way they process and use language. For example, words that have emotional connotations for most people—slaughter, rape, death—subtly grab people’s attentions more than neutral words—air, float, walk. Robert Hare and his colleagues saw this back in 1991 when they compared the time it took psychopaths and non-psychopaths to decide if a group of letters represented a word or not.
³⁵
They also used EEG (electroencephalography) to measure the subjects’ brain waves (called event-related potentials) during the task. They found that non-psychopaths identified emotion-laden words faster than psychopaths and they showed greater brain wave changes while doing so. People with high psychopathy scores respond to the two sets of words as if they were the same. These deficits may be related to the inability of people who score high on the psychopathy checklist to relate to, care about, or appreciate others’ emotions.

A third category on the PCL–R concerns the psychopathic lifestyle: Parasitic Lifestyle, Lack of Realistic Long-Term Goals, Impulsivity, and Irresponsibility. Many criminal psychopaths have trouble sticking with long-term projects or commitments, including jobs and relationships. Perhaps because they lack much of the ability to feel the way others do, they seek stimulation by dropping what is boring and looking for new experiences. Sometimes this means a regular job is too boring and they may find someone to exploit instead, a strategy that evokes no feelings of guilt; it is simply a means to an end.