Corporate Psychopathy: An Interview With One of the Researchers of the Hare Project

I had always felt that there was something not right with one of the higher up bosses I had in a major division of a Fortune 100 company. Now there is little doubt in my mind that he was a psychopath. 

He had the verbal acuity to talk his way in and out of almost anything, and was quite proud of it, and of being hard to pin down. And he gathered a subculture around himself, both above and below, of similar personality types and sycophants, with a few captive enablers who were technically very competent.  His powerful personal style fatally marked everything. 

I left, not because I could not deal with it, but rather because I saw where this all was heading.  The only reason he  lasted as long as he did was because the CEO was hands off and weak, and the board was servile and largely clueless. His reputation caught up with him and I heard he did not fare well, and ended up being indicted and went to prison. He ruined the lives of thousands of people. To this day he admits no guilt and no regrets, except in getting caught.

It should be said here that just because you don't like or understand your boss does not mean that he or she is a psychopath, or even a bad person. There are places where people who don't like their bosses meet to discuss it. They are called bars, and they meet there every Friday night.

I was interested in what the researcher called The Dark Triad of Personality: Machiavellianism, Psychopathy & Narcissism. 

Why is this study of corporate psychopathy more than a morbid concern? Because it drives a spike in the heart of the assumption that on the whole people in business (and politics for that matter) are rational and naturally good, and that this therefore permits us to forge an economic structure based on self-restraint and self-regulation (or little to no regulation at all for that matter), the so called efficient markets hypothesis.  

Anyone who has acted in the real business world knows this is utter nonsense.  The unscrupulous can not only act for many years without hindrance, they can often prosper and thrive, and distort whole sections of an economy through preying on the weaknesses of even the most ordinary of men. 

And yet an economic theory based on this assumption of perfect rationality shaped American culture for the past thirty years, from the days of Reagan at least.

As they say, the devil's greatest success is in convincing people that he does not exist. 

First Study Where Fortune 100 Executives Were Screened For Psychopathy [Podcast] Interview With Dr. Daniel N. Jones, Ph.D. Postdoctoral Researcher for Dr. Robert Hare Ph.D.
Posted on March 2, 2012 by Davos

I Am Fishead caught my eye on Jesse’s Café Américain. In this documentary psychopathy researchers “fish for psychopaths” inside Fortune 100 corporations.

Dr. Robert Hare is in the movie. He was a familiar face. I had remembered him from the documentary The Corporation. In that documentary Dr. Hare analyzes a corporation, a soulless entity given the rights of a person. A person whose DNA makes him put profit above everything else—even his fellow citizens. In The Corporation, the corporation is compared against the WHO’s psychopathic diagnostic checklist. Corporations meet the criteria. I wrote about this problem in Why We Are Totally Finished. The movie is linked within that piece.

The second thing I realized after watching the other documentary that Dr. Hare was in, I Am Fishead, was that I had a ton of questions. ”The Dark Triad’s” negative externalities that we’ve had to endure are pretty apparent after the crash of 2008: Unemployment is 22.5%; 47 million Americans are on food stamps; our children have been saddled with even more debt which went to bailing out insolvent institutions who deserved to fail; prime foreclosures now rival subprime foreclosures; home prices are through the first floor and will be subterranean soon; 25% of kids age 18-34 live in mom and dad’s basements; 46% of kids 18-24 have no job; 12% of homes are vacant; there are schools just for homeless children; tent cities have sprung up; and 60 Minutes now runs stories of children living in cars with their unemployed parents.

So I wasn’t surprised to hear that there was a magnetism between corporations and psychopaths. What caught my ear was that in I Am Fishead, Dr. Hare said he interviewed 203 employees at Fortune 100 companies. He then went on to say that 8 of them had very high scores. Sample the population and you’ll find 1% of them are psychopaths.

Eight out of 203?

I also wondered how this came about. I mean, I just couldn’t picture a Fortune 100 company calling anyone up and saying, “Hey, I think not only is the corporation a psychopath, but I’m concerned many of our executives are as well.”

Dr. Daniel N. Jones, Ph.D.

Here is a summary, of which some of the following is verbatim, some isn’t, quotes were omitted, please listen to audio as it is far more precise, I’m an economic blogger, not a transcriptionist ;-).  The summary is merely for those in a rush who want to tune into what is of interest, and also for the search engines to find.  Not only do I think this is fantastic work, a super cause but I truly feel it is something that should be utilized a lot more.

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Psychopathic Economics Interview: Psychopath Study Conducted at Fortune 100 Companies

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• 0:05 Genesis of Fortune 100 psychopathy study as seen in the movie documentary I Am Fishead.
• 0:16 Dr. Paul Babiak Ph.D, Dr. Crag S. Neumann PhD., Dr. Robert Hare Ph.d got together and worked on that particular project.
• 0:30 Dr. Paul Babiak is a consultant for industrial organizational psychology, does consulting work for various organizations.
• 0:40 They approached Dr. Babiak because they wanted some high-level executives screened.
• 0:48 Dr. Babiak felt it would also be appropriate to screen for psychopathy, in this particular instance, as an informative measure.
• 1:00How the test was administered, he gave the Psychopathy Checklist Revised, the “Gold-Standard” of psychopathy assessments.
• 1:12 Twenty items, standard clinical interview administered to employees being considered for executive level positions.
• 1:39 Individuals are extremely cooperative, very happy to help.
• 1:43 One thing we know about people individuals high in psychopathy, through the literature, they don’t think there is anything wrong with them—it’s just the rest of the world that is screwed up.
• 1:52 If they run into problems it is not their fault.  Or at least that is how they perceive it.
• 2:00 Individuals were extremely happy to help and cooperative.
•  2:15 Individuals who scored high in psychopathy were rated as much more effective in their communication skills and their creativity, so these individuals that were actually, we considered toxic people both in society and corporations, were actually evaluated higher than others in their communications skills and creativity.  Which I find to be kind of a scary thing.
• 2:50 Psychopathy is measured by the psychopathy checklist which breaks into four different aspects.
• 3:00 Aspect 1.)  Being a manipulative person or a liar.
• 3:05 Aspect 2.) Callous, kind of a lack of empathy towards others.
• 3:08 Aspect 3.) Impulsivity, or more specifically a lack of impulse control.
• 3:15 Aspect 4.) Antisocial behavior, some kind of breaking rules, whether it be social rules or legal rules.
• The first two aspects were particularly related to positive overall outcomes in the sense that they were evaluated as more effective leaders and communicators.  They were more creative. 
• 3:44 But what these first two aspects giveth, the second two aspects taketh away.  Evaluations were lower, productivity was lower and their ability to work with others.
• 4:10 Depending on the short or long checklist you consult, you get 4 to 5 percent of these executives that were interviewed meeting the threshold criteria for being a psychopath.
• 4:30 That is quite frightening when you consider that in the general population that you have about 1 percent of people walking among us that are psychopathic.  Maybe 1.5 percent of men and 0.5 percent of women.
• 4:44 So that is startling a 4 to 5 fold increase.
• 4:50 NONE of the CEO’s met the threshold for psychopathy!!!  It was really the up and comers, vice presidents, senior managers, middle managers.
• 5:25 Good theories as to why that is.
• 5:38 All the malevolence doesn’t come from just one type of person.
• 5:50 There is actually a cluster of traits that we refer to as, “The Dark Triad of Personality” called Machiavellianism, Psychopathy & Narcissism. 
• 6:00 Overlap, but are distinct their unique aspects.
• 6:10 Machiavellian’s are liars and callous but they also have a lot of long-term planning.
• 6:30 The narcissist is the spokesperson
• 6:37 The henchmen are the frontment, aggressively climbing his way, that is really the psychopath.
• 6:50 When you get these 3 together in an organization it is a particularly toxic outcome because they feed off each other’s unethical behavior.
• 7:15 Asocial Offenders and Antisocial Offenders.  Asocial Offenders are introverts, socially awkward, unable to communicate.  Antisocial Offenders gets along quite well impersonally.  It’s just they Antisocial Offender has no regard for rules.
• 7:45 B-Scans (Business Scans). How to better equip and inform corporations and other organizations for providing more information.  No one gets fired or disciplined.  It is extremely confidential.
• 8:15 We want to work with corporations to better inform them where there might be problematic areas.  We really try to work at the departmental level if there is a cluster of red flags in finance or you are struggling with personality clashes in HR.  Want to be able to provide corporations with tools to flag problematic  areas and ultimately deal with people at the corporate level who don’t see the mission of the corporation properly.    Helping also screen at the entry level.  Solutions for chronic problems.
• 9:37 The B-Scan is written in business not criminal language.  Context appropriate.  The B-Scan is not divorced from the target audience.
• 12:11 Over 800 stories given.  Individuals higher in psychopathy were less likely to go through the penal justice system.  The higher the score the more they stole and the less they got caught.
• 13:20 Bernie Madoff and average psychopath and the people below Madoff.
• 14:00 Just scratching the surface.  Everything before has been leadership and fostering cooperative work environments.
• 14:19 We’re only now beginning to realize how these clinical and personality research can really form kind of derailing type of behaviors that we see in corporations.  Now never has it been more critical at this juncture.  Forty-three percent of all corporations report some major fraud at some point in the past few years.
• 14:50 There research reports estimating anywhere between $160,000,000,000.00 to $600,000,000,000.00 annually are pumped out of our economy as the result of corporate fraud.  People are loosing their livelihood essentially because of these individuals.
• 15:09 It’s amazing and baffling to me that we are almost starting now to ask these questions.
• 15:17 Corporations are relatively new.
• 15:32 Hervey M. Cleckley and Robert Hare both kind of fed off each other.  It was really late 1970s early 1980s before we really kind of had any working conception of what a psychopath really was.
• 15:50 Startlingly fast considering the history of the organization versus the working conception.

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