People with persistent predatory personalities cause an inordinate amount of pain. Recently, our shared understanding of them has grown – and it could help protect us
The classic checklist for psychopathy was developed in 1980 by Prof Robert Hare, who is still the recognised giant of the territory. The 20 traits, which ranged from pathological lying to a lack of empathy, were based entirely on prison populations. This worked because not only did Hare have the benefit of a large sample, with pronounced psychopathic behaviours, but he was able to compare interviews and self-reporting with data collected about the individuals – so inconsistencies could be identified.
However, Hare knew this approach was limited. In 1976, he said that he simply didn’t know to what extent his results could be generalised to non-incarcerated psychopaths, including female ones. “Research into the socially successful psychopath is badly needed,” he concluded. Even decades later in the early 2000s, when Hare wanted to look into psychopaths in politics, he still needed to go to prison to find them (Pinochet’s henchmen in Chilean jails). Research into the higher-functioning psychopath – who doesn’t get caught, or maybe doesn’t even resort to crime – has proved elusive, not least because self-reporting questionnaires don’t work. Psychopaths lie; arguably, that’s their main thing.
It wasn’t from a forensic psychology but a business studies background that Dr Karen Mitchell arrived in the territory of high-functioning psychopathy. By the late 2010s, she’d spent 30 years working as a consultant on large-scale change in corporate culture. Her work tended to be with organisations in crisis: “So it might be market alignment, or deaths or suicides in companies,” she tells me from her home in Australia. Observing the sheer number of problems at work that stemmed from specific individuals with predatory traits, she started to research those same “dark personality” behaviours in other precincts. “Child sex abuse in religion, coercive control in human trafficking and domestic violence and terrorism,” she says. “When you look at all our global knowledge on human predators, there are so many fields and none of them interact.”
This matters because predatory personalities cause an astronomical amount of harm. We’re bad at recognising them interpersonally, for reasons to be discussed, but we’re also bad at pattern finding in aggregate – mainly because different disciplines have so many different names for these kinds of people. Mitchell lists some of the terms: “Malignant narcissist, dark triad, psychopath, coercive controller, primary psychopath, grandiose narcissist, corporate psychopath, Machiavellian, dark tetrad, covert narcissist, toxic leader.” These are all traits that she argues are part of the same phenomenon, the Dark Personality, or the Persistent Predatory Personality.
Mitchell embarked on a PhD, published in 2024, in which she interviewed people who had met persistent predatory personalities professionally – some clinical, but others not, from fields as wide as HR, social work, family courts, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies, church leaders, and academics from different fields.
Her method, she says, was unorthodox, being qualitative, not quantitative. And some of her conclusions directly contradict clinical definitions of psychopathy, which rely heavily on impulsivity. Mitchell says this is because other definitions such as Hare’s are derived from the prison population, which is the low-functioning end of the scale. “People try and put Hare’s stuff into workplaces and domestic violence spheres, but there’s no way you can overlay something so blunt, built from criminal offenders, on to sophisticated CEO-type behaviours.”
Mitchell’s interviews are remarkable. People from very different fields say alarmingly similar things: there’s one question about whether the interviewee had themselves ever been frightened of a persistent predatory personality (bear in mind that these weren’t victims, they were seasoned professionals) and the answers came back: “I constantly worry that he will ruin my career” (from an HR person); “I worry that they will … want to seek revenge” (from a social worker); “I am pretty sure there are no lengths to which this man would not go to, to see that I am destroyed” (expert practitioner from the charity sector). These and arguably every statement from the interviews are so extreme that you can’t imagine saying them socially because you would sound mad – which some testimonies explicitly address. “People can’t get it. People who don’t work in our fields … often don’t hear about or see the kind of evilness perpetrated on others, and just can’t believe it. Whereas, unfortunately, it’s commonplace in my work.” (That’s from one forensic expert practitioner).
From this research, which took her five years, Mitchell built a template of 20 attributes, divided into four clusters, and 25 tactics that would identify a high-functioning persistent predatory personality type. Cluster one includes a need for control; a grandiose sense of self; pathological inner response to challenge; vengefulness; refusal to compromise. Cluster two includes being predatory or exploitative; sadistic and cruel; having a low regard for laws, agreements, social and moral codes; no boundaries in sexual relationships; unreasonable expectations of others. Cluster three relates to the truth: Dark Personalities cultivate a façade of normality; they are chameleon-like; dishonest; devious and manipulative; and unwilling to accept responsibility for the negative impacts they cause. Finally, cluster four is around the Dark Personality’s own interior life: their emotions are acted and they do not experience affinity or the joy that comes with it; they are callous and devoid of empathy; unremorseful; self-interested; and brazen.
Essi Viding, a professor of developmental psychopathology at UCL, is a leading figure from the classic research sphere, co-director of the Developmental Risk and Resilience Unit and Hare’s natural successor in many ways. “I often think of these individuals as having an in-group of one,” she says. “In social psychology, we talk about people that we care about, and most of us, because we’re group-living animals, collaborate, do altruistic acts, we’ll behave in ways that across the ages have increased our survival. But across the ages, we’ve had people who exploit other people’s altruism, and when the chips come down, only care about themselves.”
Viding fixes on the traits that leave society extremely bad at protecting itself against predatory behaviour. We all know that people lie, but think instinctively that we know when we’re being lied to. “These individuals almost short-circuit us in our ability to detect the danger signals until it’s too late,” Viding says. “The majority of us, if we get caught lying, look deeply uncomfortable. It’s not nice to get caught lying, we worry about our reputation, it’s embarrassing. But these individuals are not embarrassed when they’re caught lying. This has not been formally tested, but one might hypothesise that they take people in much more readily, precisely because they display these characteristics of extreme confidence and do not seem nervous.” She cites a 2019 paper in the Journal of Personality Disorders which developed the idea that behaviours which don’t normally go together in the human population – for example, absolute confidence and total untruth – tend to go together in Dark Personalities. This, Viding says, is why these people “can often do a lot of damage before anyone catches them”.
This causes much more havoc outside prisons than it does in them. While Mitchell says she stays out of politics, her tactics, once you see them assembled, are strikingly visible on the world stage. Indeed, the first time I read the phrase “dark triad” was when Donald Trump got elected the first time around.
The idea of a “pathocracy”, a democracy of normal people taken over by psychopaths, was conceived by an obscure Polish psychologist, Andrew Lobaczewski, who had lived under both the Nazis and then Soviet-era communists. His ideas never landed, because “the psychology publishers thought it was too political, and the political publishers thought it was too psychological,” according to editor and blogger Harrison Koehli. It’s unfashionable to the point of being taboo in psychiatry and psychology now to ascribe personality disorders to public figures. “One of the perils of bringing psychology into politics is that it’s very easy for anyone with any given political perspective to look at their political enemies or rivals and say: ‘OK, well, they’re all psychopaths,’” says Koehli. There’s also the Goldwater Rule, which established as a psychiatric principle that professionals are not allowed to diagnose public figures they haven’t had clinical contact with or met (this was after 1,189 psychiatrists declared Barry Goldwater unfit to be president in the 1964 election). Viding, however, finds the fixation with diagnosis perhaps irrelevant in this context. “I always find the obsession with diagnosing these people interesting. You don’t need to diagnose them, there are a set of personality traits, and you can recognise individuals with those traits. If someone’s in political power, you can see those exemplified in behaviour, and most people are perfectly capable of making an assessment of what that signifies.”
Brazen lying in public life is a tactic Lobaczewski recognised – he called it the “reversive blockade”. Koehli describes it as: “When you tell a lie convincingly and it’s such an absurd lie, most people’s automatic reaction is that they can’t comprehend a lie told on that scale, so they try to find the ‘golden mean’ between the statement and the reality. But that, Lobaczewski says, is the intention of the big lie. They know it will sow confusion.” The impact on the population over which a dark personality presides is huge: some will try and find that golden mean; others will remain steadfast in calling it a lie and fall out with the first lot; others will try to adjust their own reality to make the lie true; while others will become inured to the new normal – that we just all lie now.
On an interpersonal level, this brazenness is even more head-spinning. Often both predator and victim know it’s a lie, or the predator is accusing the victim of exactly the thing he or she just did, or the lie has been expressed using the victim’s own language. Reverse attribution is so familiar in the domestic-abuse sphere that it has its own acronym – Darvo, for deny, attack, reverse victim and offender – yet it still absolutely fogs the victims, who feel their credibility is permanently in doubt. In the workplace, the effects are also devastating, because there tend to be spectators who themselves have a decisive impact on the outcome. As Mitchell says about one of her interviewees who worked in HR: “People were genuinely convinced the dark personality was the victim and the victim was the dark personality. It destroyed the life of the victim, even though they had an excellent professional track record.”
