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Owing to Hollywood and horrific headlines, the word psychopath conjures images of crime scenes, violent killers, and dead-eyed bros.
Anyone familiar with the name Patrick Bateman has an idea of what a psycho might be like.
However, a leading expert tells The Post that psychopaths are more likely to be armed with charm, making them a different kind of dangerous.
“People tend to assume that all people with psychopathy are violent,” Leanne ten Brinke, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, and author of “Poisonous People,” told The Post.
Brinke notes that while psychopathy is indeed a risk factor for violence, violence is not a defining quality of the condition.
“When we limit our conception of psychopathy to violent criminals, we overlook the manipulative, callous, impulsive, and antisocial behaviors that can also cause grave harm to our relationships,” she said.
According to Brinke, and contrary to cultural depiction, most psychopaths don’t carry knives; they carry charisma. “Psychopaths are charming, confident, and socially skilled,” she explained in a recent TikTok.
To mask that deficit, a psychopath develops a particular skill set, resorting to lies, superficial charm, and manipulation to present themselves as a perfect partner, leader, or candidate.
This serves to explain recent research that found psychopaths fare remarkably well on dating apps.
Psychopathy, along with sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism, makes up what experts call the “Dark Tetrad” of personality traits.
While each of these carries a distinct set of characteristics, they all share qualities of callousness and manipulation.
Brinke shared with The Post that psychopathy is revealed in patterns that persist over time and across contexts.
“Anyone can tell a lie or act selfishly on occasion, but people with psychopathic personalities do this consistently, without remorse, accountability, or efforts to change. Track the pattern,” she advised
While the expert emphasized that assessing and diagnosing mental disorders should be left to trained professionals, there are certain red flags to be on the lookout for:
“Track how they behave when your goals, needs, or well-being conflict with what they want. Do they manipulate, deceive, gaslight, deflect blame, and, pursue ‘winning’ at any cost?” she asked.
Brinke adds that psychopaths consistently engage in rule-breaking, “including laws, but also workplace rules, unwritten social norms, and pushing of boundaries in relationships.”
Eerie evenness might also be a cause for concern.
According to Brinke, emotional calm in an objectively distressing situation is the clearest biological indicator of psychopathy.
While most people reveal stress through indicators like voice changes, sweating, and an elevated heart rate, people with psychopathic traits do not have the same internal alarm.
As a result, their skin conductance and heart rate are not altered by fear or punishment, making them harder to startle.
Pupil dilation, or the lack thereof, when looking at harrowing images, is another biological tell.
Meanwhile, promiscuity, which is often associated with psychopathy, may serve to explain the evolutionary origin of the personality as “an alternative life strategy.”
“While most people are collaborative, honest, generous, and invest time and energy into long-term relationships, people with psychopathy take the opposite approach. They adopt a ‘fast life strategy’ that’s riskier, focused on immediate rewards, and short-term relationships,” said ten Brinke.
She explained that the efficacy lies in the anomaly of the strategy
“If it becomes too common, people would become cynical and difficult to dupe.”
And we can all breathe easy knowing just how uncommon the condition is: Brinke estimates that only a scant 1% of the general public has clinical levels of psychopathic personality traits.
However, psychopathy exists on a spectrum.
“Just like other personality traits that we know well, e.g., extraversion, openness, everyone scores somewhere from very low to very high, and a lot of people score somewhere in the middle,” she said.
“Only those at the extreme high end would be considered to have clinical levels of psychopathy.”
She emphasized that along that spectrum, those with elevated but subclinical levels of psychopathic traits may still cause considerable harm to others.
To discern a potentially poisonous personality, Brinke recommends employing the “transcript check.”
“Ignore how the interaction felt and focus on the actual words, claims, and promises. If you have a transcript from a recorded meeting, that’s even better. You might be surprised at how vague, incorrect, or nonsensical their statements are, even though you left the meeting feeling impressed,” she said.
If the transcript check leaves you with that disconnect, there’s a strong probability you’ve been served superficial charm by a poisonous person.
Ted Binnke shared that there’s strength in numbers as groups are more adept at detecting deception than individuals.
“Relying on the help of other people can often be an important tool for identifying and navigating relationships with ‘poisonous people’.”
