The Wisdom of Psychopaths Read Online Free

questionnaire. The questionnaire included two items: (1) Have you ever been victimized in the past (yes or no)? (2) If yes, how many times has such victimization occurred?
    Finally, Book presented the twelve videotaped segments to the original forty-seven participants, and issued them a challenge: rate, on a scale of one to ten, how vulnerable to being mugged each of the targets was. The rationale was simple. If Bundy’s assertion held water and he really had been able to sniff out weakness from the way his victims walked, then, Book surmised, those who scored high on the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale should be better at judging vulnerability than the low scorers.
    That, it turned out, was exactly what she found.Moreover, when Book repeated the procedure with clinically diagnosed psychopaths from a maximum-security prison, she found something else. The high-scoring “psychopathic” undergraduates in the first study might’ve been good at identifying weakness, But the
clinical
psychopaths went one better. They explicitly stated it was because of the way people walked. They, like Bundy, knew precisely what they were looking for.
The Men Who Stare at Coats
    Angela Book’s findings are no flash in the pan. Hers is one of a growing number of studies that have, in recent years, begun to show the psychopath in a new, more complex light: a light somewhat different from the lurid shadows cast by newspaper headlines and Hollywood scriptwriters. The news is difficult to swallow. And it goes down the same way here, in this murderous little corner of Florence, as it does nearly everywhere else: with a healthy dose of skepticism.
    “Do you mean,” asks Rossi, incredulous, “that there are times when it isn’t necessarily a bad thing to be a psychopath?”
    “Not only that,” I nod, “but there are times when it’s actually a good thing—when, by being a psychopath, you in fact have an advantage over other people.”
    Rossi seems far from convinced, And looking around, it’s easy to understand why. Bundy and Gacy aren’t exactly the best crowd to fall in with. And, let’s face it, when you’ve got several dozen others knocking about in the wings, it’s difficult to see the positives. But the Museum of Serial Killers doesn’t tell the full story. In fact, it’s not the half of it. As Helen Morrison eloquently elucidated, the fate of a psychopath depends on a whole range of factors, including genes, family background, education, intelligence, and opportunity—and on how they interact.
    Jim Kouri, vice president of the U.S. National Association of Chiefs of Police, makes a similar point. Traits that are common among psychopathic serial killers, Kouri observes—a grandiose sense of self-worth, persuasiveness, superficial charm, ruthlessness, lack of remorse, and the manipulation of others—are also shared by politicians and world leaders: individuals running not from the police, but for office. Such a profile, notes Kouri, allows those who present with it to do what they like when they like, completely unfazed by the social, moral, or legal consequences of their actions.
    If you are born under the right star, for example, and have as much power over the human mind as the moon has over the sea, you might order the genocide of 100,000 Kurds and shuffle to thegallows with such arcane recalcitrance as to elicit, from even your harshest detractors, perverse, unspoken deference.
    “Do not be afraid, doctor,” said Saddam Hussein on the scaffold, moments before his execution. “This is for men.”
    If you are violent and cunning, like real-life “Hannibal Lecter” Robert Maudsley, you might lure a fellow inmate to your cell, smash in his skull with a claw hammer, and sample his brains with a spoon as nonchalantly as if you were downing a soft-boiled egg. (Maudsley, by the way, has been cooped up in solitary confinement for the past thirty years, in a bulletproof cage in the basement of Wakefield Prison in England.)
    Or if