There are no psychopaths: Virtually everything you think you know about psychopathy has been thoroughly debunked. Why does this zombie idea live on? (Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen, 2/27/26, Aeon)
Consider one of the most repeated tropes about psychopaths, that they are incapable of mirroring or reading other peoples’ emotions: they lack empathy. The problem with this view is that science tells a radically different story. When people diagnosed with psychopathy participate in empathy experiments, their performance is entirely indistinguishable from normal controls.
The most compelling evidence comes from a recent systematic review of empathy research my team conducted, which included a total of 66 studies involving 5,711 persons clinically assessed for psychopathy. We found that the results were ‘overwhelmingly null findings’ (89.11 per cent of all tests). That is, statistical analyses cannot tell the difference in performance between psychopathic vs non-psychopathic persons. We also found that high-quality studies – those using more rigid statistical methods – had an even higher null-ratio of a whopping 94.77 per cent. In behavioural scientific experiments, where datasets are presumed to be rife with false positives, this is arguably as close as you get to proving a negative: people diagnosed with psychopathy do not have empathy deficits.
Consider another well-trodden claim that psychopaths lack emotions. This claim is as old as the idea of psychopathy itself, however it was the psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley who popularised it through his book The Mask of Sanity (1941). Cleckley hypothesised that psychopathy was essentially a neurological disorder of the affective system, causing abnormally shallow emotions. What made psychopathy peculiar was that those who were affected by the disorder could hide or mask their disability, coming across as if they were normal. But, to Cleckley, this is just a façade covering up a barren inner emotional life. In many ways, the Chigurh character effectively captures this aspect of Cleckley’s conception of psychopathy.
However, most researchers have long given up on this idea too, rendering it little more than a myth. There has never been any clear evidence to support it. A person clinically diagnosed with psychopathy might appear as if they are lacking emotions, but once these patients are subjected to careful analysis using technology capable of measuring physiological markers correlated with emotional reactions – like skin conductance, heart rate, brain activity, etc – the data tell a different story.
