Behaving like a psychopath is good for business, for your career and for your love life. That is the blunt claim of Kevin Dutton, an Oxford psychology professor who has spent his whole life studying psychopaths and the author of The Good Psychopath’s Guide to Success.
The Telegraph has published an article titled “Why psychopaths are more successful”, which neatly sets out some of the arguments we are going to dissect here.
According to Dutton, it is not true that all psychopaths are criminals. In fact, he says, being a psychopath is not black and white; it is a spectrum, like height and weight. Many of the signs that point to degrees of psychopathy are present in highly successful people, such as hedge fund managers, top surgeons and people in positions of great responsibility.
Ruthlessness, boldness, impulsiveness, lack of empathy, overconfidence and lack of remorse are traits that characterise psychopaths, but they are also traits that business requires. Here is how acting like a psychopath helps you, both in business and in other areas of life, including love.
1. Focus
Dutton says that if he were on trial and fighting to stay out of prison, he would want his lawyer to be a psychopath, because such a lawyer would be capable of crushing witnesses, whether they were elderly people or children, and would know how to win the jury’s trust through the manipulation techniques psychopaths use.
Such a lawyer, Dutton says, could defend him even knowing he was guilty of a crime, and then go home to his family without the slightest remorse. That is bad for a lot of people, but very good for whoever has a psychopath as an ally.
2. Fearlessness
Psychopaths have no fear, so they tend to be very bold in situations where other people are afraid. What would you do if you had no fear in life? That is a psychopath’s natural environment.
Because they have no fears, they tend to get the conditions they want in their careers and are promoted faster. They have no qualms about asking their boss for a raise, or calling a tough client to negotiate and coming out on top. They are so focused that they do not care whom they have to sink to get their way.
According to Dutton, many people go in with good intentions, thinking that if they behave well, others will recognise and appreciate it.
The problem is that in a world of cats, the tiger always wins. And in a world of tigers, a cat never wins.
3. Lack of empathy
Empathy is one of the qualities great leaders need to manage teams, but when it comes to business, success lies in lacking empathy.
If you work in sales and you have qualms about whether the other person can afford what they are buying, or because you have deceived your customer by offering a lower-quality product at a higher price, you will not really sell anything.
If I asked you to choose between Gandhi and a psychopath, you would choose Gandhi. But if you have a large company and you need a highly competitive manager, as a good businessperson you would choose the one with psychopathic traits.
If you want to succeed in a negotiation, do not send Gandhi, because he will give the product away to poor children. Send a good psychopath, and he will destroy the competition and bring back the closed sale.
And how do psychopathic traits help in relationships?
4. No fear of rejection
You have probably heard that in love, the one who falls harder usually suffers more. So the psychopath usually suffers somewhat less.
A psychopath also takes it for granted that rejection does not hurt. In fact, he is not afraid to approach a large number of women who may turn him down one by one, and far from losing his self-confidence, he gradually learns how to minimise those rejections by perfecting his technique and his lies.
Once he loses the fear of rejection, his success rate at picking people up starts to rise.
5. Coldness
Most of the love problems couples suffer are because, when love fades, couples do not break up because of the affection they have built up. Many people would be better off alone than with their current partner.
The psychopath has no qualms about leaving his partner, no matter how long they have been together. He will not consider whether it is the right moment to leave her, nor will he take the suffering into account. What looks like a flaw could be a virtue, since his mind is not biased towards commitment. And is that selfishness that defines him really selfishness, if it means breaking up with someone he does not want to be with?
6. Self-confidence
It is common knowledge that women are attracted to men with great self-confidence.
If we asked a woman what kind of man she would like, I imagine the typical answer would be: “a man who loves me, who is romantic, who makes me laugh, a good person, and so on.”
The sad reality is that they often end up falling for the exact opposite. In this area, psychopathic traits give an advantage over everyone else in a high percentage of cases. It is not that women are attracted to men who make them suffer (or maybe they are); rather, people with excessive self-confidence tend to have that trait which ends up making those who fall in love with them suffer.
Here are 9 questions that will tell you whether you could become a good psychopath.
Further reading
- The personality trait that best predicts success
- 7 things the world’s most successful people have in common
Featured image: Rito1987, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
