Weird’s Deep Thoughts (Saturday Noon Edition): Is Your CEO A Psychopath?

Psychopaths lack empathy, are pathological liars, have an enormous sense of self-worth, are impulsive, irresponsible and won’t accept responsibility for their own actions.  They make up 1% of the total population, 25% of the criminal population and, by some accounts, 4% of corporate boardrooms.

Of course, someone who believes that the only role of business is to maximise profits, regardless of the human cost, is only following the mantra of standard economic theory.  On the other hand, an academic discipline that provides covert justification for a behavior pattern that would get you locked up outside corporate HQs may just have reached the end of its natural lifespan.

The absolute standard of psychopathic tests is that invented by Bob Hare, a Canadian who’s made it his life’s work to figure out how to identify the conniving devils.  He first realized that they were wired differently from other people when he started giving prisoners electric shocks.  He warned them first, and discovered that psychopaths displayed no fear at all at the impending pain.  Even more remarkably when he did this again they still weren’t bothered – unlike their terrified non-psychopathic fellow inmates.

Perhaps the bottom line is that psychopaths don’t have a conscience.  For anyone who does this is almost as puzzling as the alternative is to a psychopath.  But put this in context – imagine you’re dealing with a person who is superficially normal but actually has no fellow feeling whatsoever.  Remove all of those trust mechanisms that you rely on and consider only that you’re dealing with someone who simply doesn’t care. Basic economic transactions rely on common standards of trust, remove those and you have an imbalance that's dangerous for all normal people.

Of course the intrinsic traits of a psychopath are much like those of the modern corporation.  We touched on this in Frankenstein’s Corporations, the idea that if you test the modern firm for psychopathic tendencies they score very highly.  Which means, ultimately, that the people running these companies must behave in a similar fashion…..

Find out more at http://www.psyfitec.com/2012/05/is-your-ceo-psychopath.html