The most widely used instrument for identifying a psychopath was built from prison populations. Robert Hare’s 20-trait checklist, published in 1980, drew on a large sample of incarcerated people and the ability to check what they said in interviews against what the files said about them. It worked. It also described, by construction, the low-functioning end of the scale — the people who get caught. Hare knew it. In 1976 he wrote that he could not say how far his results generalised to non-incarcerated psychopaths, including women, and concluded that “research into the socially successful psychopath is badly needed.” Twenty-five years later, when he wanted to study psychopaths in politics, he still had to go to prison to find them: his subjects were Pinochet’s henchmen in Chilean jails.
The reason the research stalled is not mysterious. Psychopaths lie; as Zoe Williams puts it in a new Guardian feature, that is arguably their main thing. Self-report questionnaires, the workhorse of personality research, are worse than useless here.
Karen Mitchell came at the problem from business, not forensic psychology. She spent 30 years consulting on large-scale change in corporate culture, usually with organisations in crisis — “market alignment, or deaths or suicides in companies.” What she kept finding were specific individuals with predatory traits sitting at the centre of a lot of damage. When she went looking, the same pattern turned up elsewhere: child sexual abuse in religious institutions, coercive control in trafficking and domestic violence, terrorism. Her complaint is that the knowledge sits in unconnected silos. “When you look at all our global knowledge on human predators, there are so many fields and none of them interact.”
One phenomenon, eleven names
The vocabulary problem is the pattern problem. Mitchell lists the labels in circulation — malignant narcissist, dark triad, psychopath, coercive controller, grandiose narcissist, corporate psychopath, Machiavellian, dark tetrad, covert narcissist, toxic leader — and argues they are all names for the same thing: the Dark Personality, or the Persistent Predatory Personality.
Her 2024 PhD, five years of qualitative work, interviewed professionals who had encountered these people in the course of their jobs: HR, social work, family courts, the FBI and other law enforcement, church leaders, academics. The results contradict clinical definitions that lean heavily on impulsivity, and Mitchell’s explanation is that those definitions were derived from criminals. You cannot, she says, “overlay something so blunt, built from criminal offenders, on to sophisticated CEO-type behaviours.”
Out of the interviews she built 20 attributes in four clusters, plus 25 tactics. The clusters are a need for control (grandiosity, vengefulness, refusal to compromise); exploitation (sadism, low regard for laws or social codes, no boundaries); truth (a façade of normality, chameleon-like adaptability, dishonesty, unwillingness to accept responsibility); and interior life (emotions that are performed, no affinity or the joy that comes with it, no remorse, no empathy). The testimony that fills them out comes from professionals, not victims — an HR person who “constantly” worries he will ruin her career, a social worker who worries about revenge, a charity-sector practitioner “pretty sure there are no lengths to which this man would not go to, to see that I am destroyed.”
Why we do not see it coming
Essi Viding, professor of developmental psychopathology at UCL, describes the trait profile as having “an in-group of one.” Most people are group-living animals who cooperate and act altruistically; every society has also contained people who exploit that altruism and care only about themselves. What makes them hard to catch is a specific inversion of the usual signal. Most of us look uncomfortable when caught in a lie, because reputation matters and embarrassment is real. These individuals do not. Viding hypothesises that their apparent certainty — untruth delivered without a flicker of nerves — is exactly what makes them persuasive. She cites a 2019 paper in the Journal of Personality Disorders making the same point structurally: behaviours that do not normally co-occur in a population, such as absolute confidence and total untruth, tend to co-occur in Dark Personalities. Hence, as she says, they “can often do a lot of damage before anyone catches them.”
The damage is concentrated well outside prisons. Williams sketches the history of “pathocracy” — the idea of a democracy captured by psychopathic personalities, conceived by Polish psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski, whose work fell through the gap between psychology and politics publishers and remains taboo in a field governed by the Goldwater Rule. Viding treats the diagnostic question as a distraction. “You don’t need to diagnose them, there are a set of personality traits, and you can recognise individuals with those traits.” The reverse-attribution manoeuvre familiar from domestic abuse as DARVO — deny, attack, reverse victim and offender — appears in workplaces with an added audience: Mitchell describes an HR whistleblower’s case in which colleagues became convinced the predator was the victim, and the victim’s career was destroyed anyway.
Where the accounting stops
What is hardest to read is the section on death. Mitchell says workplace suicides were part of what pushed her into the research, a subject the mental-health field almost never attributes to another person’s behaviour. A 2019 French ruling did, finding that “torment” at France Télécom had created the conditions in which 19 employees died by suicide, 12 attempted it and eight developed serious depression between 2006 and 2009. Jane Monckton-Smith, professor of public protection at the University of Gloucestershire, has argued that counting provoked suicides could multiply domestic homicide statistics several times over.
Mitchell’s conclusion is that these are “completely boundary-less, dangerous people with very different brains — it’s like the difference between a domestic cat and a wild cat,” and that the only available defence is public recognition of the red flags. Viding, arriving from the research literature, lands in nearly the same place: the traits are unlikely to be bred out, so the useful question is how to inoculate people against being victimised. Neither researcher claims the harm can be eliminated. Both argue that not knowing what to look for is a choice a society makes.