How to Spot a Psychopath? Listen to How He Talks
Emotionally speaking, psychopaths know the map — but not the territory.
It struck me several months ago that a great deal of true crime documentaries seem to take a very particular shape. Woman meets charming man; man tells woman outlandish yet oddly credible stories; man makes bizarre request of woman; soon, half the town is dead and she is paying for his petrol while he does laps of Rotherham in a battered old Ford Fiesta. Fine, I exaggerate—but not that much. For the psychopath—that callous and shallow individual who thinks so little of ruining lives—is a predictable sort of creature. And though we might be drawn to the thought of being free of stress, highly charismatic, full of self-belief and all the rest of it, we would likely be bored for much of the time if we could inhabit his world.
I know this partly from studying Cleckley and Dutton and Robert Hare (creator of the eponymous Psychopath Checklist), but also from personal experience. For some years ago, I worked for a very psychopathic man, and that period has furnished me with so many anecdotes that I am still going strong years later. This man’s behaviour was so predictable that it became a running joke among his staff. We could virtually set our watches to his habits. We could certainly play Bingo to his catch-phrases. It is ironic, in a way, since people like him love to keep others off guard. But as for his own way of doing things, it was repetitive. (The psychopath is repetitive in respect of his crimes, too.)
This man’s behaviour was so foreseeable that it became a running joke among his staff.
You might say, reader, that this is common. We ourselves might have a storehouse of stories we roll out from time to time if it reliably gets a laugh: that time we got trapped in a lift, or woke up in a field dressed as Lucrezia Borgia. But, as Robert Hare sets out in Without Conscience, the psychopath has a kind of script he leans on, typically as a means to manipulate others and get something he wants out of them; and much of the time he repeats himself to the very same person; for a psychopath, people are more or less exchangeable.
Then there is the ‘yes’ ladder, so beloved by unscrupulous salespeople, pick-up artists and hucksters the world over. It works like this: you choose something you want someone else to do, but that it is unlikely that someone will agree to do. Say you want someone to lend you £825 so you can buy a pair of crystal-embellished heels. It is (sadly) unlikely that this person will say ‘yes’ to your proposal. So you start by asking him a series of questions to which you know he will say ‘yes’. ‘Could you pass me my glass of wine?’ ‘Do you mind if I sit next to you?’ ‘Would you go and fetch my feather boa?’ and so on. You ramp things up, and when he has said ‘yes’ enough times, you pop the question. (I was once in a cab in Boston with the psychopath I mentioned earlier, and watched him make a series of tiny and trivial requests — ‘Could you turn up the air conditioning?’ ‘Could you turn down the volume?’, etc. — just to establish control. He got the driver to play personal chauffeur for him for several hours.)
Then there is the ‘yes’ ladder, so beloved by unscrupulous salespeople, pick-up artists and hucksters the world over.
There are subtler ways that the psychopath reveals himself in the way he talks. Anyone who has seen The Tinder Swindler, in which an Israeli conman manipulates women into funding his rather trashy and tasteless lifestyle, will have been struck by the way this man, Simon Leviev, spoke in his WhatsApp voice notes. ‘I love you, I miss you’. (You can, incidentally, now buy Valentine’s Day cards with this message on the front.) But Leviev’s tone was all wrong. He just as well could have been reading from an instruction manual. He uttered highly emotive words such as love with the same dull indifference with which we might say napkin or chair. It was as if he ‘knew the words, but not the music,’ as the researchers Johns and Quay described a psychopath they studied in the sixties. Emotionally speaking, psychopaths have the map, but they do not know the territory.
This is not hugely surprising since the psychopath, as someone with ‘low empathic concern’, as psychologists say, struggles to process emotion from spoken and written language. Those among us with little empathy are not moved by a word like murder, which in a healthy person elicits a different reaction to, say, daffodil, or granola. It is because of his lack of empathy that the psychopath can understand the literal or symbolic meaning of a word, but neither feel its emotive force nor detect implied meaning. He has what is called ‘semantic aphasia’ or ‘semantic dementia’. Do not expect a psychopath to make a good poet, then.
Those among us with little empathy are not moved by a word like murder, which in a healthy person elicits a different reaction to, say, ‘daffodil’.
What makes this all more interesting (at least to your humble correspondent, dear reader) is that the psychopath tends to make a good storyteller, and conveying emotion, generally through emphasis, is part of what makes a story engaging. More still: some analyses have shown that the psychopath is highly inarticulate, if fluent. His speech is ‘organised poorly and incoherent’, as an article on the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin put it. What helps him sound persuasive is his power of faking emotion, such as laughing and crying, with similar skill to a healthy person. And then there is the psychopath’s distracting (yet effective) non-verbal communication — wild gesturing and so on — which draws the other person’s attention from what he is saying, just as a magician uses sleight of hand to pull off her trick. The bigger the lie, the more zany these gestures can be; and psychopaths do not just lie just to get away with things: there is something called ‘duping delight’: the thrill of getting away with a fib.
In ‘Politics and the English Language’, Orwell argued that clear writing and clear speech were closely linked. Since 1949, when he wrote this, we have gathered even more evidence that indicates that, in fact, language to a great extent shapes our reality, changing how we perceive time, colour and direction. But our reality also shapes our language. And listening to how others talk casts light on what is going on behind their eyes. The narcissist, it will not surprise you, uses I, me and mine a great deal. And the psychopath, as we have discussed, has his own particular habits. So be wary of those unmoved by the beauty and feeling of words. You do not want to end up stuck doing laps of Rotherham in the back of a Ford Fiesta.
