Reviewing: The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson

The Motive:

Crime novelists can’t seem to get enough psychopathy. Crimes of desperation are fine, I guess, and opportunistic villainy certainly has its place. But for a memorable baddie you can’t beat a full-on fava-bean munching psychopath. This book represents what Ronson calls his “journey through the madness industry” and explores, amongst other things what the condition of psychopathy actually is.

The Evidence:

Given his studies of psychic spycraft and extremist conspiracy theory, Jon Ronson was always an ideal candidate to tackle madness and psychopathy. In fact, advanced egomania might well be a minimum qualification to accept an interview request with the man. Although his writing portrays an appealing character, blending anxiety, earnestness and insatiable curiosity, don’t be fooled. His pen is sharp enough to shred a shower curtain. The prospect of a chat with Ronson should be about as welcome as an unexpected lunch date with Ali G (Fun fact: Sacha Baron Cohen’s cousin also writes about psychopathy).

So, to the book in question. Remember Kent Kiehl? In this book, Ronson meets Kiehl’s mentor, Bob Hare, creator of the famous psychopath test, the PCL-R. The great man trains Ronson in how to assess psychopathic traits, and this power both guides and confuses him throughout a narrative journey that takes in death squad leaders, scientologists and TV producers alike. How reliable is the process of diagnosis? How do you apply it consistently?

Kent Kiehl’s book had previously outlined why psychopathy has outsize importance within the criminal justice arena, with research suggesting a condition found in less than 1% of the population at large, was present in from 15% to 35% of the criminal population. Some research in UK prisons found prevalence somewhat lower at just under 8%, but whichever number you take still leaves the majority of offenders outside the diagnosis. However, what happens to those who fail the psychopath test?

One thread running through the book is the story of Tony, who tells Ronson he’d faked madness to soften a GBH sentence. Madness, however, didn’t prove a soft option after all, when he found himself trapped in Broadmoor. It seemed that scoring highly on the questionnaire left him detained as a dangerous psychopath long beyond the term of an ordinary prison sentence. The dystopian potential is clear: incarceration based upon data indicating criminal propensity rather than on criminal activity (Minority Report anyone?) Ronson weighs the troubling aspects of this risk as the book and Tony’s story unfolds.

The author uses his newly gained specialist training to good effect during an interview with Haitian Death Squad leader Toto Constant, uncovers the degree of manipulation inherent in true psychopathy. Constant confesses to wanting people to like him, but when asked if this was a weakness, admits that people who like him can be made to do what he wants. Similarly he admits to being an emotional person, then confesses to selecting the kinds of emotions he wants. He confesses to never feeling empathy (including the claimed rape victims of his militia), while boasting that he uses his strong self-control to stop him attacking fellow inmates. Constant came across as a man capable of doing more or less anything to others and living easily with himself afterwards. Contrasting this with Tony, whose psychiatrist confessed to Ronson that although Tony had very high levels of some psychopathic traits, he wasn’t a predatory offender nor did he set out to do harm for its own sake. That same clinician also claimed discomfort about  the way the term “psychopath” could be used almost as if to discuss a different species.

Hare admits that the group he describes as “psychopaths” are people on a continuum, with the diagnosis dependent entirely on how the test is scored and where the threshold is placed. In different contexts, groups and populations the line may not be drawn at a score of 30 out of 40. In particular Hare worried that the threshold would come down if a drug treatment were ever discovered, and there would be a growing risk of over-labelling. Hare’s own website restricts the use of the PCL-R to the populations where it has been fully validated – essentially this remains within the penal system: adult male and female offenders, adolescent offenders and sex offenders.

Bob Hare confessed to Ronson that he regretting spending his research career in prisons, perhaps seeing that this restricted his understanding of the condition to only where it intersected with extreme criminal behaviour. Others with some of the same traits and patterns of thinking will live more or less law-abiding lives – I do have a book on the list written by one such individual which I’ll get round to later. For his own part, Hare’s book Snakes in Suits examines the impact of psychopathy on the worlds of business and politics. I haven’t read that book, but having spent a good few years in business I imagine I could improvise one or two characters who might score highly on the Hare checklist. Come to think of it, I might have done that already!

The Verdict:

No matter what oddness Ronson tackles, his treatment always strikes me as appealingly humane. That was certainly the case here, but there is no avoiding the fact that such an approach is intrinsically challenging – it becomes difficult to simply put the monster in a box. Aspects of this book reminded me in some ways of Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes, in the sense that it discussed a subset of the human population who think very differently from a neurotypical majority. While a subset of that subset are indeed very dangerous, that does not mean all of them are. So what to do? I guess innocent until proven guilty of a crime has stood the test of time for a reason. Ronson’s admonition against judging people by their maddest edges might not make for the most thrilling crime fiction, but it nevertheless seems a pretty sensible approach for real life.