What is the latest research on psycopaths?

Answer 1

"Psychopath! psychopath!"

I'm alone in my living room and I'm yelling at my TV. "Forget rehabilitation -- that guy is a psychopath."

Eversince I visited Dr. Robert Hare in Vancouver, I can see them, thepsychopaths. It's pretty easy, once you know how to look. I'm watchinga documentary about an American prison trying to rehabilitate teenmurderers. They're using an emotionally intense kind of group therapy,and I can see, as plain as day, that one of the inmates is apsychopath. He tries, but he can't muster a convincing breakdown, can'tfake any feeling for his dead victims. He's learned the words, as BobHare would put it, but not the music.

Theincredible thing, the reason I'm yelling, is that no one in thisdocumentary -- the therapists, the warden, the omniscient narrator --seems to know the word "psychopath." It is never uttered, yet itchanges everything. A psychopath can never be made to feel the horrorof murder. Weeks of intense therapy, which are producing realbreakthroughs in the other youths, will probably make a psychopath morelikely to reoffend. Psychopaths are not like the rest of us, andeveryone who studies them agrees they should not be treated as if theywere.

I think ofBob Hare, who's in New Orleans receiving yet another award, and wonderif he's watching the same show in his hotel room and feeling the samefrustration. A lifetime spent looking into the heads of psychopaths hasmade the slight, slightly anxious emeritus professor of psychology atthe University of British Columbia the world's best-known expert on thespecies. Hare hasn't merely changed our understanding of psychopaths.It would be more accurate to say he has created it.

Thecondition itself has been recognized for centuries, wearing evocativelabels such as "madness without delirium" and "moral insanity" untilthe late 1800s, when "psychopath" was coined by a German clinician. Butthe term (and its 1930s synonym, sociopath) had always been a sort ofcatch-all, widely and loosely applied to criminals who seemed violentand unstable. Even into the mid-1970s, almost 80 percent of convictedfelons in the United States were being diagnosed as sociopaths. In1980, Hare created a diagnostic tool called the Psychopathy Checklist,which, revised five years later, became known as the PCL-R. Popularlycalled "the Hare," the PCL-R measures psychopathy on a forty-pointscale. Once it emerged, it was the first time in history that everyonewho said "psychopath" was saying the same thing. For research in thefield, it was like a starting gun.

But forHare, it has turned out to be a Pandora's box. Recently retired fromteaching, his very last Ph.D. student about to leave the nest, Hare,sixty-eight, should be basking in professional accolades and enjoyinghis well-earned rest. But he isn't.

The PCL-Rhas slipped the confines of academe, and is being used and misused inways that Hare never intended. In some of the places where it could dosome good -- such as the prison in the TV documentary I was yelling at-- the idea of psychopathy goes unacknowledged, usually because it'spolitically incorrect to declare someone to be beyond rehabilitation.At the opposite extreme, there are cases in which Hare's work has beenoverloaded with political baggage of another sort, such as in theUnited States, where a high PCL-R score is used to supportdeath-penalty arguments, and in England, where a debate is underwayabout whether some individuals with personality disorders (such aspsychopaths) should be detained even if they haven't committed a crime.

So, afterdecades of labour in peaceful obscurity, Bob Hare has become a man witha suitcase, a passport, and a PowerPoint presentation, a reluctantcelebrity at gatherings of judges, attorneys, prison administrators,psychologists, and police. His post-retirement mission is to be a goodshepherd to his Psychopathy Checklist.

"I'mprotecting it from erosion, from distortion. It could easily becompromised," he says. "I'm a scientist; I should just be doing basicresearch, but I'm being called on all the time to intervene andmediate."

And it'sreally just beginning. Psychopathy may prove to be as important aconstruct in this century as IQ was in the last (and just assusceptible to abuse), because, thanks to Hare, we now understand thatthe great majority of psychopaths are not violent criminals and neverwill be. Hundreds of thousands of psychopaths live and work and preyamong us. Your boss, your boyfriend, your mother could be what Harecalls a "subclinical" psychopath, someone who leaves a path ofdestruction and pain without a single pang of conscience. Even moreworrisome is the fact that, at this stage, no one -- not even Bob Hare-- is quite sure what to do about it.

Bob harehas to meet me in the lobby of the UBC psychology building, since he'snot listed in the directory. He's had threats, by e-mail and in person.An ex-con showed up one day, angry that a friend of his had beendeclared a dangerous offender thanks to Hare's checklist. Othercharacters have appeared in his lab doorway, looking in and sayingnothing.

Weimmediately find ourselves discussing the criminal du jour, thejet-setting French con man Christophe Rocancourt, notorious for passinghimself off as a member of the Rockefeller family, who has just beenarrested in Victoria.

"I'd sure as hell like to have a close look at him," Hare muses.

Likeevery scientist, Hare likes a good puzzle, and that was reason enoughto make a career out of psychopaths. "These were particularlyinteresting human beings," he says. "Everything about them seemed to beparadoxical. They could do things that a lot of other people could notdo" -- lie, steal, rape, murder -- "but they looked perfectly normal,and when you talked to them they seemed okay. It was a puzzle. Ithought I'd try and unravel it."

Harearrived at UBC in 1963, intending to follow up his doctoral research onpunishment. Certain prisoners, it was rumoured, didn't respond topunishment, and Hare went to the federal penitentiary in NewWestminster, British Columbia, to find these extreme cases. (He foundplenty. In his chilling 1993 book on psychopathy, Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us,he quotes one specimen's memories: "[M]y mother, the most beautifulperson in the world. She was strong, she worked hard to take care offour kids. A beautiful person. I started stealing her jewellery when Iwas in the fifth grade. You know, I never really knew the bitch -- wewent our separate ways.")

For hisfirst paper, now a classic, Hare had his subjects watch a countdowntimer. When it reached zero, they got a "harmless but painful" electricshock while an electrode taped to their fingers measured perspiration.Normal people would start sweating as the countdown proceeded,nervously anticipating the shock. Psychopaths didn't sweat. They didn'tfear punishment -- which, presumably, also holds true outside thelaboratory. In Without Conscience, he quotes a psychopathic rapistexplaining why he finds it hard to empathize with his victims: "Theyare frightened, right? But, you see, I don't really understand it. I'vebeen frightened myself, and it wasn't unpleasant."

In anotherHare study, groups of letters were flashed to volunteers. Some of themwere nonsense, some formed real words. The subject's job was to press abutton whenever he recognized a real word, while Hare recorded responsetime and brain activity. Non-psychopaths respond faster and displaymore brain activity when processing emotionally loaded words such as"rape" or "cancer" than when they see neutral words such as "tree."With psychopaths, Hare found no difference. To them, "rape" and "tree"have the same emotional impact -- none.

Hare madeanother intriguing discovery by observing the hand gestures (calledbeats) people make while speaking. Research has shown that suchgestures do more than add visual emphasis to our words (many peoplegesture while they're on the telephone, for example); it seems theyactually help our brains find words. That's why the frequency of beatsincreases when someone is having trouble finding words, or is speakinga second language instead of his or her mother tongue. In a 1991 paper,Hare and his colleagues reported that psychopaths, especially whentalking about things they should find emotional, such as theirfamilies, produce a higher frequency of beats than normal people. It'sas if emotional language is a second language -- a foreign language, ineffect -- to the psychopath.

Threedecades of these studies, by Hare and others, has confirmed thatpsychopaths' brains work differently from ours, especially whenprocessing emotion and language. Hare once illustrated this for NicoleKidman, who had invited him to Hollywood to help her prepare for a roleas a psychopath in Malice. How, she wondered, could she show theaudience there was something fundamentally wrong with her character?

"I said,'Here's a scene that you can use,' " Hare says. " 'You're walking downa street and there's an accident. A car has hit a child in thecrosswalk. A crowd of people gather round. You walk up, the child'slying on the ground and there's blood running all over the place. Youget a little blood on your shoes and you look down and say, "Oh shoot."You look over at the child, kind of interested, but you're not repelledor horrified. You're just interested. Then you look at the mother, andyou're really fascinated by the mother, who's emoting, crying out,doing all these different things. After a few minutes you turn away andgo back to your house. You go into the bathroom and practice mimickingthe facial expressions of the mother.' " He then pauses and says,"That's the psychopath: somebody who doesn't understand what's going onemotionally, but understands that something important has happened."

Hare'sresearch upset a lot of people. Until the psychopath came into focus,it was possible to believe that bad people were just good people withbad parents or childhood trauma and that, with care, you could talkthem back into being good. Hare's research suggested that some peoplebehaved badly even when there had been no early trauma. Moreover, sincepsychopaths' brains were in fundamental ways different from ours,talking them into being like us might not be easy. Indeed, to this day,no one has found a way to do so.

"Some ofthe things he was saying about these individuals, it was unheard of,"says Dr. Steven Stein, a psychologist and ceo of Multi-Health Systemsin Toronto, the publisher of the Psychopathy Checklist. "Nobodybelieved him thirty years ago, but Bob hasn't wavered, and noweveryone's where he is. Everyone's come full circle, except a smallgroup who believe it's bad upbringing, family poverty, those kinds offactors, even though scientific evidence has shown that's not the case.There are wealthy psychopaths who've done horrendous things, and theywere brought up in wonderful families."

"There'sstill a lot of opposition -- some criminologists, sociologists, andpsychologists don't like psychopathy at all," Hare says. "I can spendthe entire day going through the literature -- it's overwhelming, andunless you're semi-brain-dead you're stunned by it -- but a lot ofpeople come out of there and say, 'So what? Psychopathy is amythological construct.' They have political and social agendas:'People are inherently good,' they say. 'Just give them a hug, a puppydog, and a musical instrument and they're all going to be okay.' "

If Haresounds a little bitter, it's because a decade ago, Correctional Serviceof Canada asked him to design a treatment program for psychopaths, butjust after he submitted the plan in 1992, there were personnel changesat the top of CSC. The new team had a different agenda, which Haresummarizes as, "We don't believe in the badness of people." His plansank without a trace.

By thelate 1970s, after fifteen years in the business, Bob Hare knew what hewas looking for when it came to psychopaths. They exhibit a cluster ofdistinctive personality traits, the most significant of which is anutter lack of conscience. They also have huge egos, short tempers, andan appetite for excitement -- a dangerous mix. In a typical prisonpopulation, about 20 percent of the inmates satisfy the Hare definitionof a psychopath, but they are responsible for over half of all violentcrime.

Theresearch community, Hare realized, lacked a standard definition. "Ifound that we were all talking a different language, we were ondifferent diagnostic pages, and I decided that we had to have somecommon instrument," he says. "The PCL-R was really designed to make iteasier to publish articles and to let journal editors and reviewersknow what I meant by psychopathy."

ThePsychopathy Checklist consists of a set of forms and a manual thatdescribes in detail how to score a subject in twenty categories thatdefine psychopathy. Is he (or, more rarely, she) glib and superficiallycharming, callous and without empathy? Does he have a grandiose senseof self worth, shallow emotions, a lack of remorse or guilt? Is heimpulsive, irresponsible, promiscuous? Did he have behavioral problemsearly in life? The information for each category must be carefullydrawn from documents such as court transcripts, police reports,psychologists' reports, and victim-impact statements, and not solelyfrom an interview, since psychopaths are superb liars ("pathologicallying" and "conning/manipulative" are PCL-R categories). A prisoner mayclaim to love his family, for example, while his records show no visitsor phone calls.

For eachitem, assessors -- psychologists or psychiatrists -- assign a score ofzero (the item doesn't apply), one (the item applies in some respects),or two (the item applies in most respects). The maximum possible scoreis forty, and the boundary for clinical psychopathy hovers aroundthirty. Last year, the average score for all incarcerated maleoffenders in North America was 23.3. Hare guesses his own score wouldbe about four or five.

In 1980,Hare's initial checklist began circulating in the research community,and it quickly became the standard. At last count nearly 500 papers and150 doctoral dissertations had been based on it.

It's alsofound practical applications in police-squad rooms. Soon after hedelivered a keynote speech at a conference for homicide detectives andprosecuting attorneys in Seattle three years ago, Hare got a letterthanking him for helping solve a series of homicides. The police had asuspect nailed for a couple of murders, but believed he was responsiblefor others. They were using the usual strategy to get a confession,telling him, 'Think how much better you'll feel, think of the familiesleft behind,' and so on. After they'd heard Hare speak they realizedthey were dealing with a psychopath, someone who could feel neitherguilt nor sorrow. They changed their interrogation tactic to, "So youmurdered a couple of prostitutes. That's minor-league compared to Bundyor Gacy." The appeal to the psychopath's grandiosity worked. He didn'tjust confess to his other crimes, he bragged about them.

The moststartling finding to emerge from Hare's work is that the popular imageof the psychopath as a remorseless, smiling killer -- Paul Bernardo,Clifford Olson, John Wayne Gacy -- while not wrong, is incomplete. Yes,almost all serial killers, and most of Canada's dangerous offenders,are psychopaths, but violent criminals are just a tiny fraction of thepsychopaths around us. Hare estimates that 1 percent of the population-- 300,000 people in Canada -- are psychopaths.

He callsthem "subclinical" psychopaths. They're the charming predators who,unable to form real emotional bonds, find and use vulnerable women forsex and money (and inevitably abandon them). They're the con men likeChristophe Rocancourt, and they're the stockbrokers and promoters whocaused Forbes magazine to call the Vancouver Stock Exchange (now partof the Canadian Venture Exchange) the scam capital of the world. (Harehas said that if he couldn't study psychopaths in prisons, theVancouver Stock Exchange would have been his second choice.) Asignificant proportion of persistent wife beaters, and people who haveunprotected sex despite carrying the AIDS virus, are psychopaths.Psychopaths can be found in legislatures, hospitals, and used-car lots.They're your neighbour, your boss, and your blind date. Because theyhave no conscience, they're natural predators. If you didn't have aconscience, you'd be one too.

Psychopathslove chaos and hate rules, so they're comfortable in the fast-movingmodern corporation. Dr. Paul Babiak, an industrial-organizationalpsychologist based near New York City, is in the process of writing abook with Bob Hare called When Psychopaths Go to Work: Cons, Bullies and the Puppetmaster. The subtitle refers to the three broad classes of psychopaths Babiak has encountered in the workplace.

"Thecon man works one-on-one," says Babiak. "They'll go after a woman,marry her, take her money, then move on and marry someone else. Thepuppet master would manipulate somebody to get at someone else. Thistype is more powerful because they're hidden." Babiak says psychopathshave three motivations: thrill-seeking, the pathological desire to win,and the inclination to hurt people. "They'll jump on any opportunitythat allows them to do those things," he says. "If something bettercomes along, they'll drop you and move on."

How canyou tell if your boss is a psychopath? It's not easy, says Babiak."They have traits similar to ideal leaders. You would expect an idealleader to be narcissistic, self-centred, dominant, very assertive,maybe to the point of being aggressive. Those things can easily bemistaken for the aggression and bullying that a psychopath woulddemonstrate. The ability to get people to follow you is a leadershiptrait, but being charismatic to the point of manipulating people is apsychopathic trait. They can sometimes be confused."

Onceinside a company, psychopaths can be hard to excise. Babiak tells of asalesperson and psychopath -- call him John -- who was performing badlybut not suffering for it. John was managing his boss -- flattering him,taking him out for drinks, flying to his side when he was in trouble.In return, his boss covered for him by hiding John's poor performance.The arrangement lasted until John's boss was moved. When hisreplacement called John to task for his abysmal sales numbers, John wasa step ahead.

He'dalready gone to the company president with a set of facts he used toargue that his new boss, and not he, should be fired. But he made acrucial mistake. "It was actually stolen data," Babiak says. "The onlyway [John] could have obtained it would be for him to have gone into afile into which no one was supposed to go. That seemed to be enough,and he was fired rather than the boss. Even so, in the end, he walkedout with a company car, a bag of money, and a good reference."

"A lot ofwhite-collar criminals are psychopaths," says Bob Hare. "But theyflourish because the characteristics that define the disorder areactually valued. When they get caught, what happens? A slap on thewrist, a six-month ban from trading, and don't give us the $100 millionback. I've always looked at white-collar crime as being as bad or worsethan some of the physically violent crimes that are committed."

The bestway to protect the workplace is not to hire psychopaths in the firstplace. That means training interviewers so they're less likely to bemanipulated and conned. It means checking resumés for lies anddistortions, and it means following up references.

PaulBabiak says he's "not comfortable" with one researcher's estimate thatone in ten executives is a psychopath, but he has noticed that they areattracted to positions of power. When he describes employees such asJohn to other executives, they know exactly whom he's talking about. "Iwas talking to a group of human-resources executives yesterday," saysBabiak, "and every one of them said, you know, I think I've gotsomebody like that."

By now,you're probably thinking the same thing. The number of psychopaths insociety is about the same as the number of schizophrenics, but unlikeschizophrenics, psychopaths aren't loners. That means most of us havemet or will meet one. Hare gets dozens of letters and e-mail messagesevery month from people who say they recognize someone they know whilereading Without Conscience. They go on to describe a brother, asister, a husband. " 'Please help my seventeen-year-old son. . . .' "Hare reads aloud from one such missive. "It's a heart-rending letter,but what can I do? I'm not a clinician. I have hundreds of thesethings, and some of them are thirty or forty pages long."

Hare'sbook opened my eyes, too. Reading it, I realized that I might haveknown a psychopath, Jonathan, at the computer company where I worked inLondon, England, over twenty years ago. He was charming and confident,and from the moment he arrived he was on excellent terms with theexecutive inner circle. Jonathan had big plans and promised me that Iwas a big part of them. One night when I was alone in the office,Jonathan appeared, accompanied by what anyone should have recognized astwo prostitutes. "These are two high-ranking staff from the Ministry ofDefence," he said without missing a beat. "We're going over the detailsof a contract, which I'm afraid is classified top secret. You'll haveto leave the building." His voice and eyes were absolutely persuasiveand I complied. A few weeks later Jonathan was arrested. He hadembezzled tens of thousands of pounds from the small firm, used thecompany as a mailing address for a marijuana importing business he wasrunning on the side, and robbed the apartment of the company's owner,who was letting him stay there temporarily.

Likeeveryone who has been suckered by a psychopath -- and Bob Hare includeshimself and many of his graduate students (who have been trained tospot them) in that list -- I'm ashamed that I fell for Jonathan. But hewas brilliant, charismatic, and audacious. He radiated money and power(though in fact he had neither), while his real self -- manipulative,lying, parasitic, and irresponsible -- was just far enough under hissurface to be invisible. Or was it? Maybe I didn't know how to look, ormaybe I didn't really want to.

I saw hisname in the news again recently. "A con man tricked top sports carmakers Lotus into lending him a £70,000 model . . . then stole it anddrove 6,000 miles across Europe, a court heard," the story began.

Knowing Jonathan is probably a psychopath makes me feel better. It's an explanation.

Butaway from the workplace, back in the world of the criminally violentpsychopath, Hare's checklist has become broadly known, so broadlyknown, in fact, that it is now a constant source of concern for him."People are misusing it, and they're misusing it in really strangeways," Hare says. "There are lots of clinicians who don't even have amanual. All they've seen is an article with the twenty items --promiscuity, impulsiveness, and so forth -- listed."

In court,assessments of the same person done by defence and prosecution"experts" have varied by as much as twenty points. Such drasticdifferences are almost certainly the result of bias or incompetence,since research on the PCL-R itself has shown it has high "inter-raterreliability" (consistent results when a subject is assessed by morethan one qualified assessor). In one court case, it was used to label athirteen-year-old a psychopath, even though the PCL-R test is onlymeant to be used to rate adults with criminal histories. The testshould be administered only by mental-health professionals (like allsuch psychological instruments, it is only for sale to those withcredentials), but a social worker once used the PCL-R in testimony in adeath-penalty case -- not because she was qualified but because shethought it was "interesting."

Itshouldn't be used in death-penalty cases at all, Hare says, but U.S.Federal District Courts have ruled it admissible because it meetsscientific standards.

"Bob andothers like myself are saying it doesn't meet the ethical standards,"says Dr. Henry Richards, a psychopathy researcher at the University ofWashington. "A psychological instrument and diagnosis should not be adeterminant of whether someone gets the death sentence. That's more ofan ethical and political decision."

And intothe ethical and political realm -- the realm of extrapolation, ofspeculation, of opinion -- Hare will not step. He's been asked to be aguest on Oprah (twice), 60 Minutes, and Larry King Live. Oprah wanted him alongside a psychopath and his victim. "I said, 'This is a circus,' " Hare says. "I couldn't do that." 60 Minutes also wanted to "make it sexy" by throwing real live psychopaths into the mix. Larry King Livephoned him at home while O. J. Simpson was rolling down the freeway inhis white Bronco. Hare says no every time (while his publisher gentlyweeps).

Even inhis particular area, Hare is unfailingly circumspect. Asked if hethinks there will ever be a cure for psychopathy -- a drug, anoperation -- Hare steps back and examines the question. "The psychopathwill say 'A cure for what?' I don't feel comfortable calling it adisease. Much of their behaviour, even the neurobiological patterns weobserve, could be because they're using different strategies to getaround the world. These strategies don't have to involve faulty wiring,just different wiring."

Are thesepeople qualitatively different from us? "I would think yes," says Hare."Do they form a discrete taxon or category? I would say probably -- theevidence is suggesting that. But does this mean that's because theyhave a broken motor? I don't know. It could be a natural variation."True saints, completely selfless individuals, are rare and unnaturaltoo, he points out, but we don't talk about their being diseased.

Psychopathyresearch is raising more questions than it can answer, and many of themare leading to moral and ethical quagmires. For example: the PCL-R hasturned out to be the best single predictor of recidivism that has everexisted; an offender with a high PCL-R score is three or four timesmore likely to reoffend than someone with a low score. Should a highPCL-R score, then, be sufficient grounds for denying parole? Or perhapsa psychopathy test could be used to prevent crime by screeningindividuals or groups at high risk -- for example, when police get afrantic "My boyfriend says he'll kill me" call, or when a teacherreports a student threatening to commit violence. Should societyinstitutionalize psychopaths, even if they haven't broken the law?

The UnitedKingdom, partly in response to the 1993 abduction and murder oftwo-year-old James Bulger by two ten-year-olds, and partly in responseto PCL-R data, is in the process of creating a new legal classificationcalled Dangerous and Severe Personality Disorder (DSPD). As it stands,the government proposes to allow authorities to detain people declaredDSPD, even if they have not committed a crime. (Sample text from one ofthe Web sites that have sprung up in response: "I was diagnosed with anuntreatable personality disorder by a doctor who saw me for tenminutes, he later claimed I was a psychopath. . . . Please don't letthem do this to me; don't let them do it to anybody. I'm not a dangerto the public, nor are most mentally ill people.")

Hare is aconsultant on the DSPD project, and finds the potential for abuse ofpower horrifying. So do scientists such as Dr. Richard Tees, head ofpsychology at UBC, a colleague of Hare's since 1965. "I am concernedabout our political masters deciding that the PCL-R is the silverbullet that's going to fix everything," he says. "We'll let people out[of prison] on the basis of scores on this, and we'll put them in. Andwe'll take children who do badly on some version of this and segregatethem or something. It wasn't designed to do any of these things. Theproblems that politicians are trying to solve are fundamentally morecomplicated than the one that Bob has solved."

So many ofthese awkward questions would vanish if only there were a functioningtreatment program for psychopathy. But there isn't. In fact, severalstudies have shown that existing treatment makes criminal psychopathsworse. In one, psychopaths who underwent social-skills andanger-management training before release had an 82 percent reconvictionrate. Psychopaths who didn't take the program had a 59 percentreconviction rate. Conventional psychotherapy starts with theassumption that a patient wants to change, but psychopaths are usuallyperfectly happy as they are. They enrol in such programs to improvetheir chances of parole. "These guys learn the words but not themusic," Hare says. "They can repeat all the psychiatric jargon -- 'Ifeel remorse,' they talk about the offence cycle -- but these arewords, hollow words."

Hare hasco-developed a new treatment program specifically for violentpsychopaths, using what he knows about the psychopathic personality.The idea is to encourage them to be better by appealing not to their(non-existent) altruism but to their (abundant) self-interest.

"It's notdesigned to change personality, but to modify behaviour by, among otherthings, convincing them that there are ways they can get what they wantwithout harming others," Hare explains. The program will try to makethem understand that violence is bad, not for society, but for thepsychopath himself. (Look where it got you: jail.) A similar programwill soon be put in place for psychopathic offenders in the UK.

"The ironyis that Canada could have had this all set up and they could have beenleaders in the world. But they dropped the ball completely," Hare says,referring to his decade-old treatment proposal, sitting on a shelfsomewhere within Corrections Canada.

Even ifHare's treatment program works, it will only address the violentminority of psychopaths. What about the majority, the subclinicalpsychopaths milling all around us? At the moment, the only thing Hareand his colleagues can offer is self-protection through self-education.Know your own weaknesses, they advise, because the psychopath will findand use them. Learn to recognize the psychopath, they tell us, beforeadding that even experts are regularly taken in. Afterthirty-five years of work, Bob Hare has brought us to the stage wherewe know what psychopathy is, how much damage psychopaths do, and evenhow to identify them. But we don't know how to treat them or protectthe population from them. The real work is just beginning. Solving thepuzzle of the psychopath is an invigorating prospect -- if you're ascientist. Perhaps the rest of us can be forgiven for our impatience tosee the whole thing come to an end.