NOT IN YOUR BRAIN:

The medicalization of evil--that is, the physician-led diagnosis and management of diseases like "moral insanity" and "criminal psychosis"--stretches back to the early 19th century. Where clerics once drew the line between good and evil, psychiatrists began to take people who engaged in impulsive, self-defeating, or otherwise un-Christian acts into their care. 

Early on,  these doctors-cum-criminal-profilers explained bad apples through theories such as atavism. Proponents believed that, over time, bad breeding led to degeneration of the gene pool, and the concentration of poverty, criminality, and other undesirable traits in certain ethnic groups or social classes. While the theory of degeneration was slowly replaced by a strikingly similar notion of "psychopathy" (literally "soul sickness"), many of the concerns remained the same: deviants who showed a lack of remorse or guilt, exhibited sexual promiscuity, and developed a lengthy rap sheet, perhaps from a young age.

New variations on this theme pop up all the time. The "dark triad," coined in 2002 by Canadian psychologists Delroy Paulhaus and Kevin Williams, aims to describe "offensive but non-pathological personalities," including CEOs, politicians, and bad boyfriends. There are also labels like antisocial personality disorder, a diagnosis given to individuals with severe impulsivity, aggression, and criminal behaviors--in other words, a DSM-approved twist on the old "psychopathic" standard.

At first glance, these attempts at categorization appear to be trending positive. For one thing, researchers are slowly cleaving obvious wrongdoing from the more inadvertent harms of mental illness. Similarly, it's a relief to be able to use the dark triad to acknowledge just how commonplace selfishness really is. 

But the shadow of degeneracy still looms large. In addition to further medicalizing everyday discourse ("jerks," Jalava and Griffiths point out, have become "psychopaths," with all the attendant baggage), these models uphold the dubious belief that every human has an immutable personality--and that those personalities can be easily classified as good or bad. In reality, recent research shows that many people change--and, in some cases, change dramatically--over the course of their lifespan. At the same, many researchers remain critical of the historic characterization of personality disorders, in part because it is stigmatizing and can obfuscate trauma, and even then it doesn't lead to clear directions for treatment.

Many popular ideas about evildoers seem to stem from tabloid news, rather than scientific evidence. For example, Jalava and Griffiths have shown that many experiments that make claims of a genetic or neurobiological basis have not been replicated, and those that have been replicated have produced contradictory results. Soon, they will publish a new review detailing similar problems in studies of psychopathy and fMRI brain imaging. Perhaps most importantly, the husband-wife duo have documented how meta-analyses of psychopathy research, ostensibly the gold standard in scientific research, often ignore published results with null findings. 

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