Anyone who wants to be prime minister should have a course of therapy first

Our toxic political system rewards all the wrong traits and produces the worst possible leaders writes George Monbiot in The Guardian 

 

‘Toxic personalities thrive in toxic environments.’ John Bercow (centre) mediates during a Commons debate on the EU withdrawal bill. Photograph: Mark Duffy/AFP/Getty Images


Who in their right mind would want the job? It is almost certain to end, as Theresa May found, in failure and public execration. To seek to be prime minister today suggests either reckless confidence or an insatiable hunger for power. Perhaps we need a reverse catch-22 in British politics: anyone crazy enough to apply for this post should be disqualified from running.

A few years ago, the psychologist Michelle Roya Rad listed the characteristics of good leadership. Among them were fairness and objectivity; a desire to serve society rather than just yourself; a lack of interest in fame and attention; and resistance to the temptation to hide the truth or make impossible promises. Conversely, a paper in the Journal of Public Management and Social Policy has listed the characteristics of leaders with psychopathic, narcissistic or Machiavellian personalities. These include: a tendency to manipulate others; a preparedness to lie and deceive to achieve your ends; a lack of remorse and sensitivity; and a desire for admiration, attention, prestige and status. Which of these lists, do you think, best describes the people vying to lead the Conservative party?

In politics, almost everywhere we see what looks like the externalisation of psychic wounds or deficits. Sigmund Freud claimed that “groups take on the personality of the leader”. I think it would be more accurate to say that the private tragedies of powerful people become the public tragedies of those they dominate. For some people, it is easier to command a nation, to send thousands to their deaths in unnecessary wars, to separate children from their families and inflict terrible suffering, than to process their own trauma and pain. What we appear to see in national politics around the world is a playing out in public of deep private distress.

This could be a particularly potent force in British politics. The psychotherapist Nick Duffell has written of “wounded leaders”, who were separated from their families in early childhood when they were sent to boarding school. They develop a “survival personality”, learning to cut off their feelings and project a false self, characterised by a public display of competence and self-reliance. Beneath this persona is a profound insecurity, which might generate an insatiable need for power, prestige and attention. The result is a system that “consistently turns out people who appear much more competent than they actually are”.

The problem is not confined to these shores. Donald Trump occupies the most powerful seat on Earth, yet still he appears to seethe with envy and resentment. “If President Obama made the deals that I have made,” he claimed this week, “the corrupt media would be hailing them as incredible … With me, despite our record-setting economy and all that I have done, no credit!” No amount of wealth or power seems able to satisfy his need for affirmation and assurance.


Those who should be least trusted with power are most likely to win it

I believe that anyone who wants to stand in a national election should receive a course of psychotherapy. Completing the course should be a qualification for office. This wouldn’t change the behaviour of psychopaths, but it might prevent some people who exercise power from imposing their own deep wounds on others. I’ve had two courses: one influenced by Freud and Donald Winnicott, the other by Paul Gilbert’s compassion-focused approach. I found them both immensely helpful. I believe almost everyone would benefit from such treatment.

The underlying problem is the system through which such people jostle. Toxic personalities thrive in toxic environments. Those who should be least trusted with power are most likely to win it. A study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that the group of psychopathic traits known as “fearless dominance” is associated with behaviours that are widely valued in leaders, such as making bold decisions and bestriding the world stage. If so, we surely value the wrong characteristics. If success within the system requires psychopathic traits, there is something wrong with the system.

In designing an effective politics, it could be useful to work backwards: to decide what kind of people we would like to see representing us, then create a system that would bring them to the fore. I want to be represented by people who are thoughtful, self-aware and collaborative. What would a system that elevated such people look like?

It would not be a purely representative democracy. This works on the principle of presumed consent: “You elected me three years ago, therefore you are presumed to have consented to the policy I’m about to implement, whether or not I mentioned it at the time.” It rewards the “strong, decisive” leaders who so often lead their nations to catastrophe. A system that tempers representative democracy with participative democracy – citizens’ assemblies, participatory budgeting, the co-creation of public policy – is more likely to reward responsive and considerate politicians. Proportional representation, which prevents governments with minority support from dominating the nation, is another potential safeguard – though no guarantee.

In rethinking politics, let us develop systems that encourage kindness, empathy and emotional intelligence. Let us ditch systems that encourage people to hide their pain by dominating others.

What do we mean when we say a cricketer is mentally tough?

Paddy Upton in Cricinfo

At this juncture, it is worth having a conversation about the concept of 'mental toughness', which is currently the most overused and least understood concept in sports psychology. I neither agree with nor use the term.

When helping the Indian players to develop better mental resolve and manage their emotions in preparation for the World Cup, we were not attempting to create 'mentally tough' athletes. Because there is no such thing as mental toughness, and even if there was, the idea of striving to be mentally tough is flawed.

There's no such thing

I contend that mental toughness is like Batman and Superman. We all know them. But they're not real and don't actually exist.

In a review of over thirty published academic papers on mental toughness involving forty-four world-class researchers, it emerged that there is no agreement on the definition of mental toughness. Sport psychologists cannot agree on what mental toughness is. In trying to define this concept, they broke it down into subcomponents like grit, resilience, focus, emotional control, mental control, hardness and so on. Collectively, those thirty-plus papers present as many as seventy-five subcomponents that supposedly make up mental toughness!

Of all the instruments available to measure mental toughness, there are only two that have been validated: The Australian Football Mental Toughness Inventory (AFMTI) and Mental Toughness Q48 (MTQ48). These are the only two instruments that reliably measure what they are supposed to measure.

However, there is no agreement on whether these instruments are relevant for both men and women. There is disagreement about the relevance to different age levels, different experience levels, different levels of competitiveness and, importantly, there is no transfer between sporting codes. Thus, the Australian Football instrument does not necessarily apply to other sports.

Further, when 'mentally tough' players assess themselves, and coaches, who know them well, also assess them, the results are fundamentally different. There isn't even agreement over how players see themselves and how a coach sees those same players. There is also no agreement on whether mental toughness is to do with nurture (something we're taught), or nature (something we are born with).

What becomes patently clear from a review of these academic papers and literature on mental toughness is that sport psychologists, who are supposed to be the experts, cannot define and don't even understand the concept. And yet, as coaches and parents, we continue to use the term and judge players based on it. Players also use it to judge each other and commentators apply it liberally in their descriptions of players.

How then should we ordinary sportspeople interpret the findings and subcategories in those thirty-odd research papers on mental toughness? Let's have a closer look.

The following is what, and who, some of these researchers studied: 160 elite athletes, ten international performers, twelve mentally tough UK cricketers, eight Olympic champions, and thirty-one elite coaches. In other words, what the world's academics are trying to tell us is that they've studied the world's best.

Psycho-what? 

When we study the best of the best, consider the following as a list of definitions associated with mental toughness: massive belief in self and one's ability; emotional control; clear thinking under pressure; ruthless pursuit of goals; operating well in chaos; not intimidated by others; unaffected by loss and failure; easily spots weakness in opponents; inspirational, popular, influential; and compulsive liar.

I would bet that, until you got to the last point, you were in agreement that this was a pretty accurate list of mental toughness attributes.

However, the list I provided above is not a list of definitions of mental toughness - those are character traits of psychopaths taken from an article on psychopathy.

At this juncture, you'd be perfectly justified in asking why on earth I would include this list of psychopathic traits in a discussion on mental toughness. What if I told you that the academics who studied mental toughness amongst elite athletes might unknowingly have unearthed their psychopathic traits and prescribed these as characteristics of mental toughness? Barring only one or two, the traits are the same.

Okay, so who are these people, and how many of them are out there?

Psychopaths are born with brain functioning that is different from 'normal' people, and this is not reversible. As luck would have it (for them), these brain differences manifest outwardly in that individual possessing many of those performance assets mentioned earlier - all of which are highly sought-after qualities for success (and leadership), and of so-called mental toughness. This is the reason for so many psychopaths achieving such high levels of success in business, as well as in politics and sport.

Prof. Clive Boddy from Middlesex University suggests that one out of every hundred people is born a psychopath. He suggests that one in twenty managers in corporate America is a psychopath, called a 'corporate psychopath' because they thrive in business environments. In industries like the media, the legal fraternity, finance, banking and politics, Boddy suggests one in five top executives or CEOs are in fact psychopaths. Research has not yet been conducted on the prevalence of psychopaths in sport, but do the math.

If this is the first time you've encountered the concept of corporate psychopaths, you may be struggling to join the dots between serial killers and successful businessmen (and athletes). The only difference between a corporate psychopath and Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs) and Co. who torture animals as children and end up as jailed serial killers as adults, is their propensity for violence. Illustrating this point, one study at the University of Surrey on thirty-nine high-level British executives compared their psychopathic traits to those of criminals and psychiatric patients. They found that business executives were more likely to be superficially charming, egocentric, insincere and manipulative, and just as likely to be grandiose, exploitative, and lacking in empathy as criminals and psychiatric patients. The criminals only scored higher than these executives on being impulsive and physically aggressive.

If you're still not quite joining the dots, remember Lance Armstrong, the cancer survivor and seven-times Tour de France champion who put both cycling and the fight against cancer on the world map! A study of Armstrong the cyclist will reveal possibly all you need to know about what mental toughness looks like.

This is the same person that the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) called 'the ringleader of the most sophisticated, professionalised and successful doping programme that sport has ever seen'. He cheated, lied and bullied his way to those seven titles, and when threatened with exposure, he covered his tracks, intimidated witnesses and lied to hearing panels and to the world. When the prosecution presented irrefutable evidence of his doping from twenty-six people, including eleven of his own teammates, he still vehemently denied having ever doped. The prosecution went on to suggest that some of the most shocking evidence had to do with Armstrong's vindictive, mendacious and vicious character. One report suggested, 'He comes across less like a cyclist, more like a psychopath.'

Without going too far down this rabbit hole, the following is worth noting: What sport psychologists, coaches, parents and players are prescribing as a model of mental toughness is equally likely to be the success-producing traits of highly successful and highly functional psychopaths. I have worked with a few psychopaths. I've seen the so-called attributes of mental toughness in them, which help deliver results on the field. I have seen how fans, friends and the media adore these people. But I have also seen what it looks like when their mental toughness is unmasked as psychopathic behaviour. They come across as being narcissistic and entirely self-serving, compulsive (and clever) liars, manipulators without any remorse and an inability to take responsibility for their errors. These are not qualities we should encourage as general conditions for performance.

In short, psychologists themselves cannot agree about what mental toughness is. At best they have provided a list of seventy-five subcomponents to describe the concept. There's also a case to suggest that researchers have inadvertently identified the success-producing traits of a sports version of the 'corporate psychopaths', and are prescribing those as a model of mental toughness. Although only a recently detected (and initially confusing) phenomenon, there are already a few papers published and books written on corporate psychopathy, which we might hear more about in the time to come. One final note is that corporate psychopaths exhibit degrees of psychopathy, with some possessing a greater number of psychopathic traits than others, both positive and negative.

Mental toughness as a failed concept

The second reason Gary and I were not trying to create mentally tough players relates to the judgement directed at athletes based on this. It's sad that someone is either mentally tough, or not. And if they're not mentally tough, they're 'fragile', 'weak', 'soft', 'they crumble under pressure', 'they can't handle the heat', 'they're insecure', 'they're vulnerable' or 'they're doubting'. That's how we label athletes who make mistakes under pressure.

Here's the rub. Except for out-and-out psychopaths, all other athletes, professional and amateur, make mistakes, often under pressure, and all of these so-called mistakes are frequently labelled as 'weak' and 'soft'. Almost every one of us has doubts and insecurities. I have hardly ever worked with an athlete who is fully confident, secure and ever positive. Sure, I have worked with some who are good at hiding their doubts, but their vulnerabilities and insecurities still gnaw away at them from the inside. They try really hard to protect themselves from the public perception that these normal human fragilities are in fact unforgivable weaknesses. But they all have them. The 'mentally weak' labels we place on those who fall short of our unrealistic expectation of perfection are harsh, unfair and I'd say, uneducated.

I did some of my best and least effective mental conditioning work with Gautam Gambhir, the International Test Cricketer of the Year in 2009. I worked with him up until that time, but I had little to do with him being named the world's best cricketer.

Often, when I got onto the Indian team bus, Gautam would invite me to sit next to him. What followed was predictable: 'Paddy, man, I know I just scored 100, but I should have got 200. I mishit too many balls, I struggled in the beginning, I hit the fielder too many times ... It just wasn't good enough. I need to sort things out.' He would be in mental agony about losing his wicket and about needing to fix things.

He was so riddled with insecurities, doubts and vulnerabilities. He was one of the most negative people I have ever worked with. I tried everything I knew to at least try to get him to be a bit more positive, become more optimistic, and to at least get some perspective.

We must have had fifteen sessions on the bus in one year, but I just couldn't help Gautam shift. Until I came across some research that could potentially help me understand why. It was either that I lacked the skill or knowledge to help Gautam (which could have been the case), or there were some lessons to be learned from Martin Seligman's work on positive psychology.

Positive self-talk, being positive, is very important, especially when we want people to 'believe'. It's the 'Yes, we can' attitude that defined President Barack Obama's first presidential election campaign.

However, research suggests that most people sit somewhere on a continuum between being an optimist and being a pessimist, with 100 standing for über-optimistic and 0 for pessimistic. Gautam was definitely wired towards the 'lower' end of the optimism/pessimism scale; let's say his range was from 20 to 40, with 30 being his normal. When he scored 150, he would be disappointed at not scoring 200. And when he got the ICC Test Cricketer of the Year award, he shifted to about 40, but he very soon moved back to his set point at around 30. When he didn't score runs in 2 or 3 consecutive innings, he'd drop down to 20.

No matter what we did, Gautam was negative and pessimistic. In his remarkably honest interview after receiving the ICC award, he said, 'The award does nothing to help overcome my insecurity. I can't help it.' I'm not letting out any of Gautie's secrets here either; he has openly acknowledged his insecurities and doubting mindset.

Using the popular notion of mental toughness, he was one of the 'weakest and mentally most insecure' people I have ever worked with. But at the same time, he was undoubtedly one of the best and most determined, and successful, Test batsmen in the world. Something he would prove, yet again, in the 2011 World Cup final.

So, when we tell people to have positive self-talk - this pillar or subcomponent of mental toughness - it would probably work for about 50 per cent of them, those who are lucky enough to be wired on the optimistic side of the scale.

When a great athlete who also happens to be wired as an eternal optimist has an accident, breaks their body or worse, is paralysed, they might go from being 95 on the scale to about 75. That is their low end. But they're still very high on the 'positive' side of the scale. And as soon as they accept and then reconcile with their situation, they shift back to 90 or 95 on the scale. And those people are the ones who are generally admired for being mentally tough; the eternal optimists. They become the shining light we all have to aspire to, and they are often encouraged onto the public speaking circuit where they share their optimism in an attempt to help others become as positive as they are. Audiences are inspired and motivated, but only temporarily, before the vast majority return to their normal set point, often the very next day.

Trying to engage in positive self-talk for people who naturally have more negative thoughts can be frustrating, and because they often can't get it right, can cause them to further think negatively about themselves.

In Oliver Burkeman's book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, he suggests taking a radically different stance towards those things most of us spend our lives trying hard to avoid, like failure, negativity and death. He makes a case for learning to enjoy uncertainty, embracing insecurity and becoming familiar with failure. We're often told to 'face your fear', to embrace it rather than run or hide from it. It turns out, we might also benefit from facing and experiencing negative emotions - or, at the very least, by not running quite so hard from them. Fear of failure is one of the world's most prominent negative thoughts. Failure will happen, so why not rather face and embrace it?
After all those sessions of trying to get Gautie to be more 'positive', which never worked, at least not for any length of time, I changed track and got him to try and accept exactly how he felt.

We made it okay to feel frustrated, negative and disappointed. Once these thoughts and feelings were acknowledged, we'd say, 'Okay. So, what do you need to do to get even better?'

Seligman contends that it is possible to learn to be more optimistic about a negative situation; he calls it 'learned optimism'. Let's use the example of a batsman scoring three low scores in a row. An optimistic approach would be to attribute it to external circumstances. 'It was unlucky', rather than the pessimistic approach of turning the mirror inward and blaming yourself by saying, 'I'm not good enough'. Next is to see it as a setback in one small area of your life: 'It's just my batting, but so much else about my game and life is great', rather than an all-encompassing negative perspective of 'I'm a failure'. Finally, and not necessarily in this order, is to see that the failures are temporary. 'This will soon pass and I'll be back to scoring runs', rather than 'I don't know if I'll ever get out of this slump', which is the more permanent worldview of the pessimist.

Because of the way they view problems, pessimists suffer 'poor form' for longer than optimists. In fact, Seligman's work suggests pessimists are eight times more likely to become depressed when bad things happen, they do worse at school, in sport and at their jobs than their talent suggests, have poorer health, shorter lives and rockier relationships. This is a tough pill to swallow, considering that over 50 per cent of people are wired on the pessimist side of the continuum. The good news is that optimism can be learned, by attributing the problem to external factors, seeing it happening in only a small area of your life, and as being temporary.

It's also worth mentioning that a dose of pessimism is healthy, especially in situations where mistakes may have significant consequences. Where optimists will charge ahead with full (sometimes unfounded) confidence and without much considered thought, pessimists will think through everything that can go wrong, take necessary precautions and come up with contingency plans. Pessimism helps by preventing us from taking unnecessary risks or acting recklessly. Any athlete engaging in a dangerous sport needs to have a healthy dose of pessimism. Too much, and they'll never get out of the starting blocks; too little, and they may not reach the finish line. George Bernard Shaw famously said, 'Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.'

Because people are different, the concepts of being mentally tough, positive and optimistic, or of being in control of one's emotions, at least outwardly, are unrealistic for everyone. M.S. Dhoni, as an example, has incredible emotional control. He never shows emotion, and he is lauded for that. Just as with being openly optimistic as opposed to being pessimistic, 'having emotional control' is sometimes seen as evidence of a player's mental toughness. But I would go as far as to say, with the greatest respect for MS the man and the cricketer, that it is not emotional control, but lack of access to emotions. MS is not wired as an emotional type. It's almost as if he doesn't have them; a performance-enhancing gift from birth. Imagine taking that trait as the ultimate characteristic of a 'mentally tough' athlete, and then try to prescribe that to someone who is very emotionally wired, like his successor Virat Kohli. Virat uses his visible and overt emotional charge to drive his success, whereas MS's success is facilitated by his lack of emotional charge.

The emotional and mental side of the game does not have generic prescriptions for performance. 'Mental toughness' is perhaps not even a generic drug. It's closer to being a placebo prescribed by coaches, psychologists and academics who don't really appreciate the art, beauty and complexity of working with athletes as individual human beings first, and as high performers second. When the placebo doesn't work, the athlete gets blamed.
Judging athletes who are not 'mentally tough', optimistic and positive, inhibits us from effectively dealing with the legitimate mental side of the game -specifically when instruction-based coaching is the preferred method.

I honestly believe that we should do away with the concept of mental toughness and replace it with something that is more real and relevant to most people. It has to be authentic to the individual and something he or she can relate to. The overwhelming majority of players lack confidence, have insecurities, doubts and vulnerabilities. So do most of us. We're human and this is normal. Let's keep it real.
With this in mind, our strategy with the Indian team was not to convince the players of how special and tough they were. The media and fans tried to convince them of that 24/7. Our job was to convince the players that they were actually human, and thus to keep things real. Enclosed in that acknowledgement were relief, understanding of the self, and the tremendous power that flowered in conditions that could otherwise easily see self-proclaimed superstars choke up.

Neoliberalism has brought out the worst in us

An economic system that rewards psychopathic personality traits has changed our ethics and our personalities

• 
• • Paul Verhaeghe
  • theguardian.com, Monday 29 September 2014 09.00 BST

'We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited.' Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

We tend to perceive our identities as stable and largely separate from outside forces. But over decades of research and therapeutic practice, I have become convinced that economic change is having a profound effect not only on our values but also on our personalities. Thirty years of neoliberalism, free-market forces and privatisation have taken their toll, as relentless pressure to achieve has become normative. If you’re reading this sceptically, I put this simple statement to you: meritocratic neoliberalism favours certain personality traits and penalises others.

There are certain ideal characteristics needed to make a career today. The first is articulateness, the aim being to win over as many people as possible. Contact can be superficial, but since this applies to most human interaction nowadays, this won’t really be noticed.

It’s important to be able to talk up your own capacities as much as you can – you know a lot of people, you’ve got plenty of experience under your belt and you recently completed a major project. Later, people will find out that this was mostly hot air, but the fact that they were initially fooled is down to another personality trait: you can lie convincingly and feel little guilt. That’s why you never take responsibility for your own behaviour.

On top of all this, you are flexible and impulsive, always on the lookout for new stimuli and challenges. In practice, this leads to risky behaviour, but never mind, it won’t be you who has to pick up the pieces. The source of inspiration for this list? The psychopathy checklist by Robert Hare, the best-known specialist on psychopathy today.

This description is, of course, a caricature taken to extremes. Nevertheless, the financial crisis illustrated at a macro-social level (for example, in the conflicts between eurozone countries) what a neoliberal meritocracy does to people. Solidarity becomes an expensive luxury and makes way for temporary alliances, the main preoccupation always being to extract more profit from the situation than your competition. Social ties with colleagues weaken, as does emotional commitment to the enterprise or organisation.

Bullying used to be confined to schools; now it is a common feature of the workplace. This is a typical symptom of the impotent venting their frustration on the weak – in psychology it’s known as displaced aggression. There is a buried sense of fear, ranging from performance anxiety to a broader social fear of the threatening other.

Constant evaluations at work cause a decline in autonomy and a growing dependence on external, often shifting, norms. This results in what the sociologist Richard Sennett has aptly described as the “infantilisation of the workers”. Adults display childish outbursts of temper and are jealous about trivialities (“She got a new office chair and I didn’t”), tell white lies, resort to deceit, delight in the downfall of others and cherish petty feelings of revenge. This is the consequence of a system that prevents people from thinking independently and that fails to treat employees as adults.

More important, though, is the serious damage to people’s self-respect. Self-respect largely depends on the recognition that we receive from the other, as thinkers from Hegel to Lacan have shown. Sennett comes to a similar conclusion when he sees the main question for employees these days as being “Who needs me?” For a growing group of people, the answer is: no one.

Our society constantly proclaims that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough, all the while reinforcing privilege and putting increasing pressure on its overstretched and exhausted citizens. An increasing number of people fail, feeling humiliated, guilty and ashamed. We are forever told that we are freer to choose the course of our lives than ever before, but the freedom to choose outside the success narrative is limited. Furthermore, those who fail are deemed to be losers or scroungers, taking advantage of our social security system.

A neoliberal meritocracy would have us believe that success depends on individual effort and talents, meaning responsibility lies entirely with the individual and authorities should give people as much freedom as possible to achieve this goal. For those who believe in the fairytale of unrestricted choice, self-government and self-management are the pre-eminent political messages, especially if they appear to promise freedom. Along with the idea of the perfectible individual, the freedom we perceive ourselves as having in the west is the greatest untruth of this day and age.

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman neatly summarised the paradox of our era as: “Never have we been so free. Never have we felt so powerless.” We are indeed freer than before, in the sense that we can criticise religion, take advantage of the new laissez-faire attitude to sex and support any political movement we like. We can do all these things because they no longer have any significance – freedom of this kind is prompted by indifference. Yet, on the other hand, our daily lives have become a constant battle against a bureaucracy that would make Kafka weak at the knees. There are regulations about everything, from the salt content of bread to urban poultry-keeping.

Our presumed freedom is tied to one central condition: we must be successful – that is, “make” something of ourselves. You don’t need to look far for examples. A highly skilled individual who puts parenting before their career comes in for criticism. A person with a good job who turns down a promotion to invest more time in other things is seen as crazy – unless those other things ensure success. A young woman who wants to become a primary school teacher is told by her parents that she should start off by getting a master’s degree in economics – a primary school teacher, whatever can she be thinking of?

There are constant laments about the so-called loss of norms and values in our culture. Yet our norms and values make up an integral and essential part of our identity. So they cannot be lost, only changed. And that is precisely what has happened: a changed economy reflects changed ethics and brings about changed identity. The current economic system is bringing out the worst in us.

Why psychopaths are more successful

Andy McNab and Oxford psychology professor Kevin Dutton in The Telegraph reveal how acting like psychopaths could help us in work, life and love

Behaving like a psychopath could help you in your career and love life. It’s counterintuitive – who, after all, would hire Hannibal Lecter or want to date Norman Bates – but that’s the idea behind The Good Psychopath’s Guide to Success, part popular science book, part self-help guide fromAndy McNab and Oxford psychology professor Kevin Dutton.

“I wanted to debunk the myth that all psychopaths are bad,” says Dutton, who has explored this subject before. “I’d done research with the special forces, with surgeons, with top hedge fund managers and barristers. Almost all of them had psychopathic traits, but they’d harnessed them in ways to make them better at what they do.”

It was through this research that he met retired SAS sergeant and bestselling author McNab, who in tests exhibited many of these psychopathic traits, including ruthlessness, fearlessness, impulsivity, reduced empathy, developed self-confidence and lack of remorse.

“There’s no one thing that makes a psychopath,” Dutton explains. “You want to think of those traits being like the dials on a studio mixing desk, that you can turn up and down in different situations – if they’re all turned up to maximum, then you’re a dysfunctional psychopath. 

As one dysfunctional psychopath – who was serving a life sentence for multiple murders – put it to Dutton: “It’s not that we’re bad, it’s that we’ve got too much of a good thing.”

How, then, can you act more like a psychopath in your everyday life?

IN BUSINESS

Focus

“If I’m in a hostage situation I’d rather have a psychopath coming through the door than anyone else because I know he’s going to be completely focussed on the job in hand,” says McNab.

The ability psychopaths have to turn down their empathy and block out other concerns make them the best operators in high-pressure environments, he says. “If I was on trial, I’d want a psychopath [to represent me] too. I want someone who’d be able to rip people apart in the witness box, go back to their family and not think anything more about it, because it’s just a job for them.”

Fearlessness

The lack of fear which characterises psychopaths could also help people in the work place, says Dutton, who asks of the book’s readers: “What would I do in this situation if I wasn’t afraid?” (It matches, almost word for word, a sign which greets visitors to Facebook’s California HQ, “What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid?” though Dutton insists this is coincidental.)

“If it’s asking for a raise or picking up the phone to call someone you wouldn’t otherwise, functioning psychopaths have a natural advantage in that they can turn this fear down.”

Lack of empathy

But it’s important, McNab says, not to turn down the ‘empathy dial’ completely when doing business. “You don’t want to be a Gordon Gekko character, screwing people over all the time. They get hurt once but you get hurt forever because they’ll never trust you again. That’s the difference between a good and a bad psychopath: knowing when to turn that up and when to kill it.”

IN RELATIONSHIPS

Fearlessness

One dysfunctional psychopath Dutton worked with used to have a competition when out with his friends: not to see who could get the most phone numbers from women but see who could get the most rejections. “It’s something anyone could learn from,” Dutton says.

“Once you get used to being rejected it doesn’t hurt, you realise it doesn’t matter. Then your confidence gets up and you start approaching everyone – you’re coming across as less confident, less worried and your hit rate starts going up. It’s a great example of how you can turn this fear down if you work on it.”

Ruthlessness

“A lot of the problems in relationships come from the fact that people stick in them when they’d be better off out,” says McNab, who had been married five times – though has been with his current wife for 14 years. “You have to know when to cut loose.”

Self-confidence

Psychopaths never mind striking out on their own – and this is a good example to follow, Dutton says, if you start feeling constrained by your friends. “Your friends might be smoking and drinking all the time while you’ve decided to get fit. You have to be prepared to stand apart sometimes. It doesn’t mean ditching them, it’s just healthy to be your own person once in a while.”

When it comes to self-confidence, as with all the psychopathic traits the pair explore, the most important thing is to be able to strike a balance. To anyone worrying that the book will create a wave of unfeeling monsters, Dutton says: “We are absolutely not aiming to turn people into psychopaths.

“It’s for people who have those mixing dials turned down too low and need to get them up.”

A convincing study shows that business leaders and serial killers share a mindset

The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton – review

• 
• • Tim Adams
  • The Observer, Sunday 7 October 2012

Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in the 2000 film adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho. Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Rex

Do you think like a psychopath? It has been claimed that one quick way of telling is to read the following story and see what answer to its final question first pops into your head:

1. The Wisdom of Psychopaths
2. by Kevin Dutton
3. 
4. Buy it from the Guardian bookshop

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While attending her mother's funeral, a woman meets a man she's never seen before. She quickly believes him to be her soulmate and falls head over heels. But she forgets to ask for his number, and when the wake is over, try as she might, she can't track him down. A few days later she murders her sister. Why?

If the first answer that springs to your mind is some variation of jealousy and revenge – she discovers her sister has been seeing the man behind her back – then you are in the clear. But if your first response to this puzzle is "because she was hoping the man would turn up to her sister's funeral as well", then by some accounts you have the qualities that might qualify you to be a cold-blooded killer – or a captain of industry, a nerveless surgeon, a recruit for the SAS – or which may well make you a commission-rich salesman, a winning barrister, a charismatic clergyman or a red-top journalist. The little parable purports to reveal those qualities – an absence of emotion in decision making, a cold focus on outcomes, an extremely ruthless and egocentric logic – which tend to show up in disproportionate degrees in all those individuals.

There is a problem though. When Kevin Dutton, the author of this compulsive quest into the psychopathic mind, tried the question on some real psychopaths, not one of them came up with the "second funeral" motive. As one commented: "I might be nuts but I'm not stupid."

The admirable quality of this book is Dutton's refusal to accept easy answers in one of the more sensational fields of popular psychology. He comes at the challenge of deconstructing the advantages and dangers of psychopathic behaviour with two distinct motivations. First, the academic rigour of a research fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford. Second, with the more human need to understand the character of his late father, a market trader in the East End, a man with an "uncanny knack of getting exactly what he wanted", who could sell anything to anybody, because to him "there were no such things as clouds, only silver linings". Psychopaths, we learn, are the ultimate optimists; they always think things will work in their favour.

Dutton's curiosity takes him from boardrooms and law courts to neurological labs. He tries in different ways to get inside the heads of those individuals for whom killing has been a way of life – from Bravo Two Zero's Andy McNab to the video game-obsessed inmates of Broadmoor's secure wards. In his effort to get to their truths he has a tendency to write with the one-tone-fits-all breeziness of the excited enthusiast; at certain points his insistent chattiness jars. Though he demonstrates few of the characteristics of psychopaths himself, none of the limited range of cold fury of Viking "berserkers" or the wilful icy detachment of brain surgeons, he is in thrall to their possibilities. Perhaps, he argues, we all are.

Dutton's book at any rate supports the idea that to thrive a society needs its share of psychopaths – about 10%. It not only shows the value of the emotionally detached mind in bomb disposal but also the uses of the psychopath's ability to intuit anxiety as demonstrated by, for example, customs officials. Along the way his analysis tends to reinforce the idea that the chemistry of megalomania which characterises the psychopathic criminal mind is a close cousin to the set of traits often best rewarded by capitalism. Dutton draws on a 2005 study that compared the profiles of business leaders with those of hospitalised criminals to reveal that a number of psychopathic attributes were arguably more common in the boardroom than the padded cell: notably superficial charm, egocentricity, independence and restricted focus. The key difference was that the MBAs and CEOs were encouraged to exhibit these qualities in social rather than antisocial contexts.

As Dutton details this relationship, part of you is left wondering if the judge who recently praised a housebreaker for his courage and resourcefulness, and expressed the hope that in the future he might use his energies in more constructive directions, might have had Dutton's book by his bedside. Certainly you are left wondering if corporations that really want to find driven leaders might be as well to conduct their recruitment round in the juvenile courts as the universities. In this sense it is hard to know which is more chilling: the scene in which Dutton weighs a serial killer's brain in his hands and reveals it to be in no way tangibly different from yours or mine, or the research that shows the ability of American college students to empathise with others has, in the past 30 years, reduced by 40%…

Beware of Corporate Psychopaths

Brian Basham in The Independent

Thursday, 29 December 2011

Outlook Over the years I've met my fair share of monsters – rogue individuals, for the most part. But as regulation in the UK and the US has loosened its restraints, the monsters have proliferated.

In a paper recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics entitled "The Corporate Psychopaths: Theory of the Global Financial Crisis", Clive R Boddy identifies these people as psychopaths.

"They are," he says, "simply the 1 per cent of people who have no conscience or empathy." And he argues: "Psychopaths, rising to key senior positions within modern financial corporations, where they are able to influence the moral climate of the whole organisation and yield considerable power, have largely caused the [banking] crisis'.

And Mr Boddy is not alone. In Jon Ronson's widely acclaimed book The Psychopath Test, Professor Robert Hare told the author: "I should have spent some time inside the Stock Exchange as well. Serial killer psychopaths ruin families. Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies."

Cut to a pleasantly warm evening in Bahrain. My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.

He then makes an astonishing confession: "At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles."

Here was one of the biggest investment banks in the world seeking psychopaths as recruits.
Mr Ronson spoke to scores of psychologists about their understanding of the damage that psychopaths could do to society. None of those psychologists could have imagined, I'm sure, the existence of a bank that used the science of spotting them as a recruiting mechanism.

I've never met Dick Fuld, the former CEO of Lehman Brothers and the architect of its downfall, but I've seen him on video and it's terrifying. He snarled to Lehman staff that he wanted to "rip out their [his competitors] hearts and eat them before they died". So how did someone like Mr Fuld get to the top of Lehman? You don't need to see the video to conclude he was weird; you could take a little more time and read a 2,200-page report by Anton Valukas, the Chicago-based lawyer hired by a US court to investigate Lehman's failure. Mr Valukas revealed systemic chicanery within the bank; he described management failures and a destructive, internal culture of reckless risk-taking worthy of any psychopath.

So why wasn't Mr Fuld spotted and stopped? I've concluded it's the good old question of nature and nurture but with a new interpretation. As I see it, in its search for never-ending growth, the financial services sector has actively sought out monsters with natures like Mr Fuld and nurtured them with bonuses and praise.

We all understand that sometimes businesses have to be cut back to ensure their survival, and where those cuts should fall is as relevant to a company as it is, today, to the UK economy; should it bear down upon the rich or the poor?

Making those cuts doesn't make psychopaths of the cutters, but the financial sector's lack of remorse for the pain it encourages people to inflict is purely psychopathic. Surely the action of cutting should be a matter for sorrow and regret? People's lives are damaged, even destroyed. However, that's not how the financial sector sees it.

Take Sir Fred Goodwin of RBS, for example. Before he racked up a corporate loss of £24.1bn, the highest in UK history, he was idolised by the City. In recognition of his work in ruthlessly cutting costs at Clydesdale Bank he got the nickname "Fred the Shred", and he played that for all it was worth. He was later described as "a corporate Attila", a title of which any psychopath would be proud.

Mr Ronson reports: "Justice departments and parole boards all over the world have accepted Hare's contention that psychopaths are quite simply incurable and everyone should concentrate their energies instead on learning how to root them out."

But, far from being rooted out, they are still in place and often in positions of even greater power.
As Mr Boddy warns: "The very same corporate psychopaths, who probably caused the crisis by their self-seeking greed and avarice, are now advising governments on how to get out of the crisis. Further, if the corporate psychopaths theory of the global financial crisis is correct, then we are now far from the end of the crisis. Indeed, it is only the end of the beginning."

I became familiar with psychopaths early in life. They were the hard men who terrorised south-east London when I was growing up. People like "Mad" Frankie Fraser and the Richardson brothers. They were what we used to call "red haze" men, and they were frightening because they attacked with neither fear, mercy nor remorse.

Regarding Messrs Hare, Ronson, Boddy and others, I've realised that some psychopaths "forge careers in corporations. The group is called Corporate Psychopaths". They are polished and plausible, but that doesn't make them any less dangerous.

In attempting to understand the complexities of what went wrong in the years leading to 2008, I've developed a rule: "In an unregulated world, the least-principled people rise to the top." And there are none who are less principled than corporate psychopaths.

Brian Basham is a veteran City PR man, entrepreneur and journalist

The 1% are the very best destroyers of wealth the world has ever seen

Our common treasury in the last 30 years has been captured by industrial psychopaths. That's why we're nearly bankrupt

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 7 November 2011 20.30 GMT
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Illustration by Daniel Pudles

If wealth was the inevitable result of hard work and enterprise, every woman in Africa would be a millionaire. The claims that the ultra-rich 1% make for themselves – that they are possessed of unique intelligence or creativity or drive – are examples of the self-attribution fallacy. This means crediting yourself with outcomes for which you weren't responsible. Many of those who are rich today got there because they were able to capture certain jobs. This capture owes less to talent and intelligence than to a combination of the ruthless exploitation of others and accidents of birth, as such jobs are taken disproportionately by people born in certain places and into certain classes.

The findings of the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel economics prize, are devastating to the beliefs that financial high-fliers entertain about themselves. He discovered that their apparent success is a cognitive illusion. For example, he studied the results achieved by 25 wealth advisers across eight years. He found that the consistency of their performance was zero. "The results resembled what you would expect from a dice-rolling contest, not a game of skill." Those who received the biggest bonuses had simply got lucky.

Such results have been widely replicated. They show that traders and fund managers throughout Wall Street receive their massive remuneration for doing no better than would a chimpanzee flipping a coin. When Kahneman tried to point this out, they blanked him. "The illusion of skill … is deeply ingrained in their culture."

So much for the financial sector and its super-educated analysts. As for other kinds of business, you tell me. Is your boss possessed of judgment, vision and management skills superior to those of anyone else in the firm, or did he or she get there through bluff, bullshit and bullying?

In a study published by the journal Psychology, Crime and Law, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon tested 39 senior managers and chief executives from leading British businesses. They compared the results to the same tests on patients at Broadmoor special hospital, where people who have been convicted of serious crimes are incarcerated. On certain indicators of psychopathy, the bosses's scores either matched or exceeded those of the patients. In fact, on these criteria, they beat even the subset of patients who had been diagnosed with psychopathic personality disorders.

The psychopathic traits on which the bosses scored so highly, Board and Fritzon point out, closely resemble the characteristics that companies look for. Those who have these traits often possess great skill in flattering and manipulating powerful people. Egocentricity, a strong sense of entitlement, a readiness to exploit others and a lack of empathy and conscience are also unlikely to damage their prospects in many corporations.

In their book Snakes in Suits, Paul Babiak and Robert Hare point out that as the old corporate bureaucracies have been replaced by flexible, ever-changing structures, and as team players are deemed less valuable than competitive risk-takers, psychopathic traits are more likely to be selected and rewarded. Reading their work, it seems to me that if you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a poor family, you're likely to go to prison. If you have psychopathic tendencies and are born to a rich family, you're likely to go to business school.

This is not to suggest that all executives are psychopaths. It is to suggest that the economy has been rewarding the wrong skills. As the bosses have shaken off the trade unions and captured both regulators and tax authorities, the distinction between the productive and rentier upper classes has broken down. Chief executives now behave like dukes, extracting from their financial estates sums out of all proportion to the work they do or the value they generate, sums that sometimes exhaust the businesses they parasitise. They are no more deserving of the share of wealth they've captured than oil sheikhs.

The rest of us are invited, by governments and by fawning interviews in the press, to subscribe to their myth of election: the belief that they are possessed of superhuman talents. The very rich are often described as wealth creators. But they have preyed on the earth's natural wealth and their workers' labour and creativity, impoverishing both people and planet. Now they have almost bankrupted us. The wealth creators of neoliberal mythology are some of the most effective wealth destroyers the world has ever seen.

What has happened over the past 30 years is the capture of the world's common treasury by a handful of people, assisted by neoliberal policies which were first imposed on rich nations by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. I am now going to bombard you with figures. I'm sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattooed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But from 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80%, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%.

In the UK, the money earned by the poorest tenth fell by 12% between 1999 and 2009, while the money made by the richest 10th rose by 37%. The Gini coefficient, which measures income inequality, climbed in this country from 26 in 1979 to 40 in 2009.

In his book The Haves and the Have Nots, Branko Milanovic tries to discover who was the richest person who has ever lived. Beginning with the loaded Roman triumvir Marcus Crassus, he measures wealth according to the quantity of his compatriots' labour a rich man could buy. It appears that the richest man to have lived in the past 2,000 years is alive today. Carlos Slim could buy the labour of 440,000 average Mexicans. This makes him 14 times as rich as Crassus, nine times as rich as Carnegie and four times as rich as Rockefeller.

Until recently, we were mesmerised by the bosses' self-attribution. Their acolytes, in academia, the media, thinktanks and government, created an extensive infrastructure of junk economics and flattery to justify their seizure of other people's wealth. So immersed in this nonsense did we become that we seldom challenged its veracity.

This is now changing. On Sunday evening I witnessed a remarkable thing: a debate on the steps of St Paul's Cathedral between Stuart Fraser, chairman of the Corporation of the City of London, another official from the corporation, the turbulent priest Father William Taylor, John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network and the people of Occupy London. It had something of the flavour of the Putney debates of 1647. For the first time in decades – and all credit to the corporation officials for turning up – financial power was obliged to answer directly to the people.
It felt like history being made. The undeserving rich are now in the frame, and the rest of us want our money back.