What to read this week: Toxic People by Leanne ten Brinke

Poisonous people
Leanne the Brink
Simon & Schuster

It seems fitting that a book about dark personalities opens with a case study of a psychopath. But the author’s choice is not what you might have expected. Instead of a criminal whose misdeeds are on trial, his case turns out to be heard by a highly respected judge.

US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas is remembered as the pinnacle of liberal theory in the mid-20th century, but psychologist Leanne ten Brinke says in her new book Poisonous people that he would likely meet “modern definitions of psychopathy”. While his misconduct never rose to the level of a prosecutable offense, he left a trail of personal and professional wreckage that darkened every life he touched, Brinke writes.

The formal diagnosis of psychopathy was discontinued in 1952, largely due to the perceived stigma, replaced by more nuanced diagnoses such as antisocial personality disorder. But in the 1980s, the term was reintroduced into a criminal context with criteria called the Psychopathy Checklist Revised used to evaluate the most dangerous criminals whose brutal crimes and lack of empathy or remorse required a way to determine how likely they were to reoffend or be rehabilitated. People whose scores on this test identify them as psychopaths make up about 1 percent of the population, but according to some estimates, they are responsible for half of all serious crimes, writes Brinke.

But Ten Brinke, who directs the Truth and Trust Lab at the University of British Columbia in Canada, argues that just because you don’t kill someone doesn’t mean you don’t have elevated levels of the same dark personality traits. “When we broaden our view of psychopathy to include a larger portion of the population—perhaps 10 to 20 percent—who would score high on some trait associated with psychopathy but not high enough to be considered “psychopath” by clinical standards, we find that these people everywhere,” he writes.

IN Poisonous peoplecalculates the cost these “aggressive, predatory individuals” impose on society and compiles a guide to minimizing their impact on your life. But there is a catch.

Over the past two decades, personality researchers have developed a framework known as the dark tetrad. It describes the intersection of four personality traits: psychopathy (total imperviousness to the feelings of others), Machiavellianism (ice strategies and manipulation), narcissism and sadism.

While pop culture feeds the idea that psychopathy is a binary diagnosis in that you either have it or you don’t, Brinke explains that it’s more of a sliding scale. We all fall somewhere on a spectrum, and our scores on any single trait are independent of others. The 10 to 20 percent of us who score high in these psychopathy-related traits have a unique affinity for “undermining ethical standards and sowing fear and distrust,” he writes.

That’s the bad news, but the certainly good news is that 80 percent of us don’t achieve these high scores. Right? Not so fast again, says Brinke. In addition to being on the spectrum, traits are malleable. This means our environment will easily dial them up and down.

In painstaking case studies, he illustrates how “cultures of rot” can turn 80 percent into what he calls “situational psychopaths.” “Kind and empathetic people are susceptible to being infected by dark personalities,” he writes. Everything from excessive fatigue and extreme heat to sports fan-driven group dynamics can lead people to find verbal and physical abuse of other people enjoyable.

The book provides lots of helpful advice on how to protect yourself from the “poisonous people” among us, such as setting clear rules (because they love defining and then exploiting unwritten rules). But the greater part of the book is devoted to a stark call for self-reflection. How can we resist losing our own moral attitudes? And how can we stop supporting malicious people? After all, we’re the ones who promote them to positions where they can wreak such havoc at above-average speed, as shown by ten Brinks. Why do we choose people with these qualities? Why do we hire them to run businesses?

You may respond that dark traits make effective leaders, but Ten Brinke debunks this myth in an illuminating section of the book. She describes how her research into dark traits in investment bankers revealed an unexpected correlation between psychopathy and financial performance.

It turns out that “the meanest and most cunning managers generated 30 percent less returns than the average manager over a decade.” And the cooperative managers beat them all. “If you want to do less money as an investor,” he concludes, “you would do well to find the meanest, most ruthless predator to manage your wealth.”

So where do we take our pop-sci fantasy of an ultra-competent psychopath? A lot of it comes from them. He writes that dark tetrad types tell far more lies, especially of the big, self-aggrandizing variety. Not only do they get a reward called “duping pleasure” for doing so, but it supports specific goals. As Brinke writes, “In the workplace, your employee may claim to be a highly effective leader, a clear communicator, or the strongest team player. This may be true—or it may be narcissistic illusions and outright lies.”

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In investment banking, the returns of the most vicious and cunning managers were 30 percent below the average
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The problem is that we are all too happy to trust them, he writes, and in doing so we become complicit in their harm. We could make it at least a little harder for them, he argues, by dialing up a small fraction of our own dark traits—namely, the Machiavellian ability to engage in critical thinking. This would help us detect when someone is lying to us.

Ten Brinke does not promise low-effort approaches to rooting out liars. “If lying was so easy and straightforward to detect, there would be no point in doing it,” he reminds us.

But it can be done if you pay attention. If a minority of “bad apples,” as she calls them, spoil the barrel, the rest of us have a choice whether to let it rot or not. Indeed, ten of Brinke’s advice that there may be personality types among the 80 percent that can not only stop but reverse the rot. These people combine dark traits with qualities we don’t normally associate with them, such as empathy and conscientiousness.

Their mere existence explodes another uncritically accepted axiom among the 80 percent that “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” In fact, it only applies to the worst of us, says the Brinke. Taking responsibility for your barrel of apples may require being more disciplined and honest about your own nature. But there are rewards. Performance is actually value neutral. It makes us more of what we already are.

So we have to figure out as a society how to cultivate what I will call “moral Machiavellis” among us. It would be a big improvement in a world that currently seems to be an assembly line for psychopaths.

Three more great books on bad behavior

Born Liars: Why We Can’t Live Without Death
Ian Leslie
Psychopaths may be inveterate liars, but it doesn’t make the rest of us look so squeamish either. This book examines what makes lying so irresistible to so many of us. Remember that this is also one of the developmental milestones of childhood.

Snakes in Suits: Understanding and Surviving the Psychopaths in Your Office
Paul Babiak and Robert D. Hare
This follows on from a very influential book by Robert Hare Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of Psychopaths Among Us. This time written with fellow psychologist Paul Babiak, Snakes in suits focuses far more on non-criminal psychopaths who probably work in an office.

Prince
Niccolo Machiavelli (translated by NH Thompson)

The original treatise on unscrupulous politics was written by Niccolò Machiavelli, an Italian diplomat and scholar, in 1513. For many centuries it was interpreted as promoting manipulation and became synonymous with deviousness. However, in recent years it has been rehabilitated as a self-defense manual against these black magics.

Sally Adee is a science writer based in London

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