How to Investigate Successful Predators

Insights from chapter 3 of Karen Mitchell's thesis

How can we effectively study “successful” psychopaths? It’s easy enough to study the unsuccessful ones: prisons provide a captive audience for researchers. But what about the elusive corporate psychopath? The corrupt but charismatic governor? The well-respected bank exec who is also a pedophile? Maybe we can gain access to one or a few for close study, but they’re hidden by their very nature. Try to imagine conducting a study on congressional or executive branch psychopathy. How would you gain access to such a sample, let alone get them to agree to be studied?

Lobaczewski found one such method purely by happenstance: in a pathocracy, all such types migrate to leadership positions. He didn’t have to go looking for them; they were all right there on the local committees of the communist party. But what about non-pathocratic countries or “mixed pathocracies” (i.e. pathocratically captured democracies)? The best way to get data on such people is relatively simple: talk to the individuals who have had to deal with them due to the nature of their work. This may not provide direct access, but has the advantage of utilizing the normal person’s insight gained from close proximity and years of experience. At the very least, it’s the place to start before better methods of detection become available.

Chapter 3 of Karen Mitchell’s thesis on the persistent predatory personality deals with the methodology of her research study, designed to solve this problem. I will not be summarizing all of it—if you want all the details, read the thesis here. Instead, I will give a very brief account of how she went about conducting her research, highlighting specific points of interest.

To recap, Mitchell identified several existing problems in our current understanding of psychopathy (and other “dark personality” concepts, like narcissism and Machiavellianism). These include “polarised researcher views, siloed fields of research, difficulty in accessing data on people of DP outside the justice system, and a focus on information from simulations in laboratories rather than practitioners and real victim survivors/targets in some fields of study.” When research and approaches are siloed, researchers and practitioners operating in those separate silos do not communicate and may develop inconsistent or contradictory models. This raises the possibility that different groups may lack important insights accepted by other groups, implying that no one silo has a full understanding of the subject at hand. In other words, it’s likely that no conceptualization captures all the core attributes of dark personalities. They are all lacking something.

Other challenges included that most assessment tools are designed to be self-administered by people of DP; many are built from populations that exhibit severe, overt, antisocial behaviours; gaps in the literature regarding core attributes may mean important vetting criteria could inadvertently be omitted; the behavioural research community had created extensive and excellent data that needed to be considered; and the existence of ‘factions’ in the international personality research field regarding assessment tools could lead to a rejection of the data if a favoured measure/assessment tool and/or attribute was not considered in developing the vetting process.

Mitchell’s solution to these problems is to use a research tool designed to establish consensus in a contentious field: the Delphi survey, which has the advantage of providing both qualitative (word-based) and quantitative (number-based) data for analysis and interpretation. I have complained in recent MindMatters interviews that psychology is increasingly over-focused on quantitative research at the expense of qualitative data, a case of left-brain analysis over right-brain synthesis. Numbers are useful, but without associating them with real people, I think their practical usefulness is limited. After all, the numbers begin with real people, real interpersonal interactions, real crimes.

Case studies—a classic qualitative method—are important. All the best psychology books highlight them. Read the classic text on psychopathy: Hervey Cleckley’s Mask of Sanity. The only reason we have a concept of psychopathy in the first case is because of specific cases, and the attempt to characterize what those cases have in common. Abstracting attributes serves a purpose, but if you’re not a researcher, you need to be able to see how those attributes play out in real life.

Another qualitative method is the “semistructured interview,” adopted by Mitchell. She places these interviews in the overall structure of the Delphi survey:

The Delphi survey technique is a research process designed to achieve a convergence of opinions from experts on a real-world issue through a group communication process that involves multiple iterations of surveys forwarded to selected ‘panel members’ … Results of each ‘round’ of research are assimilated into one document that is forwarded to panel members for further comment.

This approach to data collection is often used where there is incomplete knowledge about a problem or phenomenon … It forces new ideas to emerge about a topic while potentially capturing experiential knowledge gained by professionals in the course of their work that has not been published or verbalised …

The Delphi survey technique was chosen because it has been used successfully to gain consensus in areas where there is dissent, to extract experiential knowledge from practitioners who do not publish, and to elicit the emergence of new ideas while preventing the dominance of those who are more outspoken.

Prior to conducting the survey, Mitchell began by consolidating data from validated personality assessment tools, the totality of various DP conceptualizations (e.g. the dark triad), and behavioral research. This initial “vetting” process resulted in the following 13 DP characteristics as a starting point:

• desire for control, power, and dominance;

• compelling personas: a façade of genuineness; grooms others to believe they are caring, considerate, and ‘normal’; adoption of lifestyles and life choices as a cover for identity such as church-going and a ‘family man’; can change persona [i.e., the so-called mask of sanity];

• dishonesty, deception, and duplicitousness: minimises, denies, blames, and diminishes; lies with conviction and convincingly;

• manipulative, devious, exploitative, and calculating: gets others to believe the victim is the guilty one; engages others to unwittingly harm victims on their behalf; breaks laws, codes, agreements, rules, and contractual arrangements;

• intimidating, aggressive, and harmful: harm may be physical, emotional, psychological, financial, sexual, professional, social, and/or sense of self; use of intimidation, ‘reptilian stare,’ punishment, threats, coercive violence, bullying, sadism; joy in inflicting harm on others [Lobaczewski’s “controlled pathological egotism”];

• remorseless: never genuinely apologetic;

• lacks emotional depth and emotional insight: has shallow affect; learns how to respond to emotional situations from others; unsure how to react to emotive information; watches others’ body language to learn how to respond in emotional situations; exaggerated use of body language to try and indicate emotion;

• superiority and ego focus: back themselves; condescends; smug; likes to ‘play’ with others to show their superiority or to annoy them; their needs come first; punish those who challenge their approach or decisions; unresponsive to the needs of others if there is a conflict with their own needs, even with family members;

• sexual boundarilessness: sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated; infidelity, multiple casual relationships, sexual promiscuity, exploiting others in short-term social contexts, poaching those already in relationships, voyeurism, using sexuality as a manipulative weapon during gamesmanship and for goal attainment; coercive sex; paedophilia; incest; sexual sadism;

• callous, guarded, and uncaring: lacks empathy, harmfully neglectful, low consideration for others, disregard for the principle of reciprocity, suspicious of others;

• lacks fear and anxiety: unreservedly ‘game,’ without nervousness, unnaturally willing to engage in acts and actions that have risk attached;

• predatory: looks for vulnerability in individuals, communities, groups, and organisations; pursues vulnerable people with intensity and seeming positivity; maintains intensity of eye contact; lavishes positive feedback and flattery; and

• pursues goals in an extreme manner: continues where others would consider it unfeasible and may feel embarrassed to do so; engages unreasonable strategies relentlessly.

Mitchell also asked a small group of potential participants open-ended questions in an initial interview, getting them to list what they considered the core attributes or behaviors of DPs (without reference to existing models or tools), as well as to elaborate on at least eight of the above features. She used all this initial data to create the survey questionnaire to be sent to all Delphi participants. Responses to that survey were then analyzed, after which follow-up semistructured interviews were conducted on a smaller subset of the surveyed group. This data was then analyzed, the existing results updated and revised, finally resulting in the persistent predatory personality model.

For participants Mitchell chose not to include psychopaths or their close family members, friends, or associates “due to the ability of people of DP to manipulate the perceptions of others, even those close to them, so they are seen as ‘normal’ and well intentioned.” Rather, she focused on four groups of experts: researchers and practitioners in forensic and non-forensic settings, each of whom had at least five years of personal experience dealing with DPs. Fielding the thoughts of such divergent groups has the advantage of potentially exposing “similarities and differences of researcher and practitioner understanding.”

Potential participants were also identified from the academic literature and information in the public domain, including autobiographical accounts, media reports, television documentaries, professional organisation publications, biographies, social media posts, and books covering areas such as cults, institutionalised child sex abuse, intimate partner violence, long-term fraudulent activity, serial killings, corporate crime, coercive domestic violence, weaponisation of the justice system, and others.

For instance, “Practitioners who had long-term experience with Ms. Anne Hamilton-Byrne and/or her targets/victims, such as psychologists, other mental health professionals, social workers, and law enforcement, were considered appropriate people to approach for participation in this research.” Hamilton-Byrne was the founder of the Australian new age cult “The Family”—who had “illegally acquired or ‘adopted’ 28 children they raised as their own and who were subjected to beatings, dosed with a litany of drugs including LSD, put on starvation diets, and denied access to the outside world.” A detective who investigated the case called Hamilton-Byrne “the epitome of evil.”

Anne Hamilton-Byrne, doing her best impersonation of a Disney villainess.

The final group of participants (57 in number) included 7 personality researchers, 3 behavioral researchers, 11 forensic practitioners, and 36 non-forensic practitioners dealing with higher-functioning DPs. Around half of these had prior experience administering existing various assessment tools for DP. The last group (36) is under-represented in all the existing models and research, which is why Mitchell chose to give it more weight in her sample. It included 15 psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and lobbyists (dealing with cults, child sex abuse, intimate partner violence), 11 white-collar practitioners (e.g., executives, management, organizational psychologists), and 10 community practitioners (e.g., religion, justice system, medicine, education).

The responses confirmed that there were disagreements between groups, and “consensus on some attributes would be unlikely”—“those researching and practising in the field of people of DP varied considerably on some issues.” That was to be expected. A main goal, however, was to identify areas of contention, as well as potential insights lacking in the standard approaches. Those were found too.

Mitchell conducted initial analysis on the first survey data, from which emerged “three high-level themes”:

Some of the data groupings were clearly attributes. For the purposes of this study, an attribute was defined as ‘a quality or feature regarded as a characteristic or inherent part of someone’ based on information in the research. There were also data groupings that did not fit this definition. Some of these groupings appeared to represent strategies or tactics that were used by people of DP to harm, to attack, to avoid exposure, and to achieve other goals. Other data groupings represented contradictory behaviours and indicated research participants had experienced, observed, or heard reports of behaviours that were opposites, like ‘impulsive’ versus ‘considered and calculated.’

The second step of analysis grouped synonymous words and phrases to identify themes, again producing three high-level groupings. A draft model based on this reduction of terms was then developed and sent to the subset engaging in post-survey semistructured interviews. This group included an FBI profiler, a forensic mental health professional, a clinical psychologist, an intimate partner violence expert, a social worker, a research academic, a medical specialist, an exec overseeing Catholic child sex abuse claims, and a charity CEO. “Each research participant readily understood and supported this three-part structure.” Feedback from the interviews was then used to refine the model.

The actual findings are dealt with in chapter 4, so stay tuned. That one is coming next.