In the company of effective psychopaths

Science continues to validate long-held popular beliefs with reassuring regularity. Clearly, there is something to be said for human intuition. The most recent corroboration is for something often dismissed as an urban legend: company bosses are psychopaths. Recent research by Australian psychologists does not assert that all bosses are devils wearing Prada, but a good 20% — one in five — could well be. No wonder ‘successful psychopathy’ has become a prime area of study these days and how to spot a psycho CEO is probably the best bet for the next crop of self-help books. It needs to be clarified, of course, that all psychopaths are not cold-blooded killers — they are just cold-blooded.

That would explain why researchers reckon that high stakes occupations in particular see a higher-than-average incidence of psychopaths. It is also not surprising, therefore, that an Oxford university professor’s study of ‘successful’ psychopaths has ranked Donald Trump above Adolf Hitler but below Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein; Hillary Clinton is further down, between Napoleon and Nero. But a question that needs to be answered is, why companies recruit psychopaths in the first place. Could the old system of hiring ‘good chaps’ rather than merely highly skilled ones be another old truism validated by this new revelation?