Category: Psychopathy

Research uncovers a disturbing link between affection and manipulation.

Not all hugs are harmless: some are designed to coerce and control, especially when the hugger has psychopathic tendencies. While hugs and other forms of intimate touch normally soothe the mind, reduce stress and release oxytocin, people with ‘dark triad’ personalities can use them to manipulate their partners into getting what they want. For example, touch is a way of signalling your power over a person, perhaps even ownership: dominant people tend to touch others when they feel more powerful and the weak allow themselves to be touched. Touch is also a way of gaining compliance: when touched, people are more likely to agree to requests. Professor Richard Mattson, the study’s first author, said:

“Not only are you not getting the benefits of touch in these relationships, but the flip side of that is that they are powerful, so they can actually be used in the service of oneself at the expense of the relationship partner.”

When touch turns toxic

The study included over 500 college students who were surveyed about how comfortable they were with being touched and how they used touch themselves with other people. These questions revealed that those with ‘dark triad’ personality traits — narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathy — were more likely to use touch to manipulate their partners. Professor Mattson said:

“An assumption is that what’s core to these traits is a ‘me, first, you, second’ orientation. And we were examining this as it manifests in something critically important to relationships, which is how individuals orient toward and exchange affection through touch. So we thought that that might be a key mechanism in explaining the problems individuals with dark triad traits have in relationships.”

From the perspective of being touched themselves, the results were different for men and women. Women with dark triad traits were more uncomfortable with being touched, while men who were uncomfortable with closeness did not like being touched. Professor Mattson said:

“Touch alone could be palliative for situations in which somebody needs support, and we know that has positive downstream effects on health, even if the person finds physical touch aversive. We can potentially leverage touch in these scenarios in order to have frontline, inexpensive interventions for those who haven’t learned to use touch in healthy, reciprocal ways and instead rely on it for control or self-protection.”

Related

• How Psychopaths Deceive And Dominate: 12 Essential Psychology Studies (P)

The study was published in the journal Current Psychology (Ives et al., 2025).

Workplace psychopaths lack empathy and are cool-headed and fearless.

Unlike everyone else in the workplace, psychopaths feel positive and engaged towards abusive bosses.

Bad bosses do things like invade privacy, gossip, break promises and display rudeness.

While normal people naturally find these behaviours in the workplace very stressful, psychopaths feel more positive and engaged with them.

What are known as ‘primary psychopaths’ benefit from bad bosses the most, the researchers found.

Dr Charlice Hurst, the study’s first author, explained the term:

“There are primary and secondary dimensions of psychopathy.

Both consist of high levels of antisocial behavior; however, people who score high in primary psychopathy lack empathy and are cool-headed and fearless.

They don’t react to things that cause other people to feel stressed, fearful or angry.

Secondary psychopaths are more hot-headed and impulsive.

We found that primary psychopaths benefit under abusive supervisors.

Relative to their peers low in primary psychopathy, they felt less anger and more engagement and positive emotions under abusive supervisors.”

Workplace psychopath research

Two studies were conducted involving 419 people.

In the first, each was asked to react to profiles of different types of workplace bosses.

In the second, they reported on their real-life bosses.

In some ways, psychopaths who didn’t mind their bad bosses were enablers, Dr Hurst said:

“It may reward and retain exactly the kind of people who are likely to perpetuate abusive cultures.

Psychopaths thriving under abusive supervisors would be better positioned to get ahead of their peers.”

Dr Hurst continued:

“If they have a problem of endemic abuse, like Wells Fargo — where former employees have reported that managers used tactics designed to induce fear and shame in order to achieve unrealistic sales goals — and upper-level managers are either unaware of it or are not taking action, they might notice increasing levels of engagement due to turnover among employees low in primary psychopathy and retention of those high in primary psychopathy.

At the extreme, they could end up with a highly engaged workforce of psychopaths.”

The study was published in the Journal of Business Ethics (Hurst et al., 2017).

The study is based on data from a personality survey conducted across the US.

Washington D.C. has by far the largest number of psychopaths compared with any US state.

The US capital — home to the federal government and many large global institutions — has the greatest percentage of people high on psychopathic traits like boldness, meanness and disinhibition.

Dr Ryan Murphy, the study’s author, write:

“The District of Columbia is measured to be far more psychopathic than any individual state in the country, a fact that can be readily explained either by its very high population density or by the type of person who may be drawn to a literal seat of power.

The presence of psychopaths in the District of Columbia is consistent with the conjecture that psychopaths are likely to be effective in the political sphere.”

Hot on D.C.’s psychopathic heels came Connecticut, as the most psychopathic state in the US (D.C. is not a state, but a district).

After this, the most psychopathic states are California, New Jersey, and in joint fourth, Wyoming and New York.

The least psychopathic states were West Virginia, Vermont, Tennessee, North Carolina and New Mexico.

The study is based on data from a personality survey conducted across the US.

Personality factors were converted into psychopathic scores, as Dr Murphy explains:

“Boldness corresponds to low neuroticism and high extraversion, meanness corresponds to low agreeableness, and disinhibition corresponds to low conscientiousness.”

Psychopaths are more likely to inhabit populous regions, writes Dr Murphy:

“Areas of the United States that are measured to be most psychopathic are those in the Northeast and other similarly populated regions.

The least psychopathic are predominantly rural areas.”

Here is the full list, in reverse order (least to most psychopathic):

48. West Virginia
47. Vermont
46. Tennessee
45. North Carolina
44. New Mexico
43. Oklahoma
42. Montana
41. Mississippi
40. Indiana
39. Oregon
38. New Hampshire
37. South Carolina
36. Nebraska
35. Kentucky
34. Washington
33. Missouri
32. Minnesota
31. Georgia
30. Kansas
29. Lousiana
28. Rhode Island
27. Pennsylvania
26. Alabama
25. Michigan
24. North Dakota
23. Idaho
22. Arkansas
21. Utah
20. Ohio
19. Texas
18. Colorado
17. Iowa
16. Florida
15. Arizona
14. Massachusetts
13. Delaware
12. South Dakota
11. Maryland
10. Virginia
9. Illinois
8. Nevada
7. Wisconsin
6. Maine
5. Wyoming
4. New York
3. New Jersey
2. California
1. Connecticut

The study was published in the journal Social Science Research Network (Murphy, 2018).

The research challenges stereotypes about psychopathic behaviour.

Psychopaths are not ‘aliens’, but people who make bad, short-sighted-decisions, argues a Harvard neuroscientist.

They are everyday human beings whose brains are wired differently to the rest of us.

The study found that psychopaths:

1. focus mostly on reward,
2. and don’t think much about the consequences of their actions.

This is quite different to most people whose natural response is to consider:

1. what they can lose above what they can gain,
2. and what the consequences will be of their actions.

Wired for risk

For the research, Dr Buckholtz and colleagues scanned the brains of 49 prison inmates.

Dr Josh Buckholtz, explained:

“For years, we have been focused on the idea that psychopaths are people who cannot generate emotion and that’s why they do all these terrible things.

But what what we care about with psychopaths is not the feelings they have or don’t have, it’s the choices they make.

Psychopaths commit an astonishing amount of crime, and this crime is both devastating to victims and astronomically costly to society as a whole.

And even though psychopaths are often portrayed as cold-blooded, almost alien predators, we have been showing that their emotional deficits may not actually be the primary driver of these bad choices.

Because it’s the choices of psychopaths that cause so much trouble, we’ve been trying to understand what goes on in their brains when the make decisions that involve trade-offs between the costs and benefits of action.

In this most recent paper…we are able to look at brain-based measures of reward and value and the communication between different brain regions that are involved in decision making.”

What the scans showed was that the brains of criminals were highly sensitive to rewards.

Dr Buckholtz said:

“So the more psychopathic a person is, the greater the magnitude of that striatal response.

That suggests that the way they are calculating the value rewards is dysregulated — they may over-represent the value of immediate reward.”

The ventral striatum is key in how we respond to rewards, Dr Buckholtz explained:

“We mapped the connections between the ventral striatum and other regions known to be involved in decision-making, specifically regions of the prefrontal cortex known to regulate striatal response.

When we did that, we found that connections between the striatum and the ventral medial prefrontal cortex were much weaker in people with psychopathy.”

Consequences ignored

What this means is that psychopaths don’t think very hard about the consequences of their actions: they are mostly focused on the rewards.

It turned out that the response in this area of the brain actually predicted the number of crimes the inmates had been convicted of.

Dr Buckholtz said:

“They’re not aliens, they’re people who make bad decisions.

The same kind of short-sighted, impulsive decision-making that we see in psychopathic individuals has also been noted in compulsive over-eaters and substance abusers.

If we can put this back into the domain of rigorous scientific analysis, we can see psychopaths aren’t inhuman, they’re exactly what you would expect from humans who have this particular kind of brain wiring dysfunction.”

The study was published in the journal Neuron (Buckholtz et al., 2017).