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Is Your Boss a Psychopath?
Dogers writes "Robert Hare, creator of the Psychopathy Checklist, has recently been applying his test 'Is your boss a psychopath' to businessmen and has found some disturbing results. From the article: 'Why wouldn't we want to screen them? We screen police officers, teachers. Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?'. Citing Enron and Worldcom management as an example, it seems a reasonable argument. The same source also has a quiz (magazine produced it seems) which allows you to test your own boss, too!"
to basically earn your way through life by exploiting and berating underlings, some of which are inevitably of equal or even superior skill and/or intellect to you.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
God, it's one of those magazine quizzes that are entitled "Are you a homosexual? Find out" and the questions range from "Do you like women?" to "Do you like men?". I hate obvious quizzes.
Is he a con artist or master manipulator? Who would have guessed!
Send email from the afterlife! Write your e-will at Dead Man's Switch.
> Surely in ancient times psycopathy would not
> have got you far. You'd likely be expelled
> from a society or likely killed.
I'd think the psychopaths would probably be the ones doing the killing.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
[1] Is he glib and superficially charming?
[2] Does he have a grandiose sense of self-worth?
[3] Is he a pathological liar?
[4] Is he a con artist or master manipulator?
[5] When he harms other people, does he feel a lack of remorse or guilt?
[6] Does he have a shallow affect?
[7] Is he callous and lacking in empathy?
[8] Does he fail to accept responsibility for his own actions?
Now RTFM, and see what they scored. Honestly, I feel that any "good" businessman will tell you that without all of these traits, you cannot succeed in this world we call America. I'm not saying that I agree with the attitude, but really look at it, it seems obvious that a lot of bosses have this attitude. It's almost a "must".
Time is comparison of movement to other movement.
The reason is quite simple.
Much of our history has been dominated by violence, and our ancestors are those who survived violent episodes. Either by being very smart, very cute, or very evil.
Psychopaths are overwhelmingly male and psychopathic behaviour is generally evidenced by the ability to hurt and harm others without the usual remorse and empathic pain that most people feel.
The reason why only a small fraction of people show this behaviour is because (a) it's quite counterproductive in stable societies, so quickly gets pushed into marginal genepools (the bad boys of any village), and (b) it has a large component of environmental triggering, meaning that many people (mainly men, again) can exhibit psychopathic behavour given the right circumstances.
Why are psychopaths so charming? Partly because it works well in conflict situations. Partly because it acts to deflect attention. Selection works at the gene level, and the charming psychopathic genes have survived civilisation much better than the pure violence ones.
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Capitalism and psychopathy go hand in hand. That's why it has survived today.
Definitely. No other ideology in history has produced so many psychopaths.
All movements for social change begin as missions, evolve into businesses, and end up as rackets.
It's practically a pre-requisite. You're being modded "Funny" because there's no "Damn, he's right".
If Psycopathy has a genetic component, then has it survived natural selection. Surely in ancient times psycopathy would not have got you far. You'd likely be expelled from a society or likely killed.
To me, it seems like an extension of the "survival of the fittest" meme. People who can manipulate others and use influence to benefit their own ends usually wind up getting more wealth, beautiful women attracted to such, etc etc. Think of the elite hunter-gatherers, who had a ton of food and was attractive to mates due to their cunning and ability to provide, thusly spreading their genes further.
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
Who cares if your boss is a psycho, when we work out why people who do all the work (manual labour etc.) get 10 times less money then the people who point and go "Get it done by next week" (managers). I think we'll be about ready to ask pointless questions like these..
I like muppets.
Read The Corporation and a different view might emerge.
The most dominant social system of our time is, by definition, psychotic. It is hardly surprising that individuals "become psychotic" as they work for these organizations. Indeed, if they did not, their jobs would quickly end: if sanity were to prevail when weighing social responsibility against profit, the decision--by corporate by-law a bad one--would damage shareholder value, and be grounds for immediate dismissal. The system guarantees that the inmates will run the asylum (and be praised all the way to the bank for doing so.)
All that is exceptional about Enron and Worldcomm is their excesses were exposed, not that their excesses occured.
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
Capitalism rewards psychopathic behavior inherently. All of the people you just smugly linked to were psychopaths in -spite- of their ideology.
or does that occupation render them immune?
The problem is that most folks have a natural inclination to disbelieving that sort of thing, especially if it involves their own fearless leader.
The unbeleivability factor of it is perfect camoflage.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Funny that all of but one of them suscribed to totalitarianism and not true communism.
Dictators are psychopaths, go figure. As for Che, revolutionnairies are usually psychopaths as well.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
I would laugh and agree with you, but I can't. See, I have taken the time to meet and actually discuss the real issues with these folks.
Yes, they come off to casual observers as being glib and superficially charming. But that is because when they are campaigning they are meeting literally hundreds and thousands of people a day. Try doing that and not acting glib. I saw an example of this last night. One of the people in our group complained about a recent decision by the city council. How many times have they heard this? I am guessing at least 10, maybe 20 times a day. Anyway, the one gal gives the canned, practiced response. How many times had she given this? At least as many times as she heard the complaint. It was a reasonable response, but you had to think about it for a while to understand the real issues. But to the casual observer, it was glib, superficially charming, and meaningless.
Politicians aren't generally liars or grandiose. Those are the ones you see on TV and read about in the paper. The vast majority of politicians only show up when it's election time, and they have to attempt to manipulate you to vote for them. All of them must make this rite of passage. The only ones that don't are those who are in appointed positions.
As far as callous and shallow, this is again a trait that the minority has. The vast majority, on both sides of the aisle, really care about what they doing and are pouring their heart and soul into their work. They can't care about everything, though. They can't even know about everything. So while you may see one at a funeral who isn't touched, remember that this is probably the third funeral of the week, and that they probably don't know the guy personally or at least to the point where they have become emotionally attached. After all, it's only politics, and if you become emotionally attached to people prepare for serious heartbreak when they endorse your opponent or turn on you after a bad decision.
Lack of remorse or guilt, and a failure to accept responsibility... I think you have to really get to know them and see the problems from their perspective. Sometimes, they knew there would be fallout, and they are prepared to accept the bad parts because they want the good part. So when those who are affected by the fallout come to complain, they are going to seem callous. Or would you rather have them say, "I knew this was going to happen, and you would be affected this way, and I made the decision regardless. It was a tough decision, but it was the best damn decision I could've made. And basically you weren't here to show us a better decision and it's water under the bridge now. I know you won't care about what I have to say because you can't see past your own problems, so I won't bother explaining. Just get it out of your system and let us move on to more important things."
But another thing you will see is that politicians, at the end of the day, are used and abused by their constituents. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people support a candidate only to turn on them moments later, only to support them moments later. It's a roller coaster ride, and the only way politicians can cope is to stay emotionally detached in their work. If there's crying to be done, it's done very privately on the shoulder of their spouse or very. very close and trusted friends. Otherwise, emotion can't enter into it. If it does, they will quickly become psychopathic.
I want to emphasize that there are a few psychopaths in politics, on both sides of the aisle. They probably aren't who you think they are and a few of the ones who you think aren't probably are. You will find them somewhat equally distributed throughout all levels of politics. Use the criteria, but apply it individually. And you must take the time to get to know the candidate personally. I tell you from experience that the local newspaper is abou as trustworthy as the pious gossip at your local church. If you base any of your opinions on what you see or read second- or third-hand, prepare to be misinformed.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
She seems to think most politicians are APD. She claims that it's what makes them good politicians. She cites Jimmy Carter as someone who's not enough of a sociopath.
If you think about it, that explains an awful lot.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
Anthropologically speaking, before about 6,000 years ago, ultimate authority resided in the nuclear family. Mom, and Dad, could independently decide what to do. Other people in the tribe, likely to be part of your extended family, could offer advice, and even beat on you if things really got hairy, but ulimately, they couldn't force you to do something that you really didn't want to. In some remote places this is still the case -- I recommend reading Napoleon Chagnon's work with the Yanomamo if you want to get a good idea about life with no ultimate authority to execute justice.
Then, once you have agriculture and food you can store and transport, you have people submitting to a stranger as an authority, pledging their life to them, and accepting their judgement as ultimate justice -- because if you don't, off with your head. These priest kings thought they were divinity on Earth, and the fact that they ruled over people was just the natural course of things, as surely as the sun moves across the sky. For reference, see the decription of any god-king. God-Kings got their place through the military, either rising to rulership, or usurping some family member in the throne. The person who would do best in this role is a psychopath.
Fast forward to modern democracies. Government isn't the domain of military leaders anymore, but supposedly more enlightened speakers who rule with the consent of the masses. Those psychopathic people now see their opportunity in business, where they can bully people in the privacy of offices and meeting rooms, and underlings live as undignified yesmen. Again, the people who do best as bosses are psychopaths.
Now, I'm not saying that all bosses are bad, or that all jobs suck. There are good bosses and enlightened companies, but the best bosses are psychopaths, and the companies that do the best are headed by people who can get their underlings to knuckle and do whatever they're told.
I've had two bad bosses in my short (15 years) time in the workplace -- after several fuckups and yelling matches, I've found out that these two bosses both believed that the rules didn't apply to them. One would berate us employees for not doing a good enough job following up on delinquent accounts, complaining about customers who refused to pay us, while he had creditors calling us constantly for his *own* delinquent accounts. As the company was running out of money, and we confronted him about late and bouncing checks, he told us it wasn't our place to call him on it. He believed on some deep level that it was very wrong for other people to owe him money -- but if he owed other people money, he should be allowed to slide. The rules just didn't apply to him.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I am just amazed at the number of people posting "That's what you want in an exec." or "That is how companies need to run to return value." Are we really that misguided as a society? Do the 71% of Americans who claim to go to church actually listen? (Or maybe they do not really attend). Not that church is a requirement for morality, but at least it should be a standard we can claim a measure against.
The problem is becoming more clear as I read the replies and see what is happening daily. We want ethical treatment but if the other person is acting unethical then heck, I should too. To those who would claim I am misguided, I would say they are. That it is just the way things work in the real world is because of people who go quietly into the dark, seeking nothing but protection for themselves at the expense of others.
That is what some of the executive who went to prison missed. They made a lot of people a lot of money, and most of them were probably not asking about the details. (For example, most of the get tough laws promised and passed by Congress were never enacted.) However, ethics is not something you do, it is something you are and it is binary choice. You cannot be "sort of" unethical or immoral. That is not to say you cannot make mistakes, humans do. However, to excuse behavior as a long series of mistakes makes you an accessory, not an observer. Part of the problem.
I know you were trying to be sarcastic, but aren't most of your examples are not of ideologies creating psychopaths, they're of "psychopaths" emerging from cultures very like our own and then moulding the culture to their own ideology? The thing that makes these people so historically significant is that they changed their culture so dramatically.
As a matter of fact, none of those individuals you described match the "psychopath" profile described in the article as far as I can see. They are more reminicent of the "Productive Narcissist" described in the later portions of the article, in that, regardless of the actual effect, their motivation was to improve the lot of the people in their society by creating a new system of living. They didn't just go in and selfishly plunder what was there for their own ends and skip out without paying the cheque, they invested their whole lives in the systems they created and derived their self-worth from them. Ruthless but selfless.
None of which is to say that they weren't evil or sadistic. But it sure seems to me that they were a bit too attached to something outside of themselves to meet the definition of psychopath as I understand it.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
I was always under the naive impression that anyone in office was a sociopath who cared about power or money or whatever, and had therefore concocted a detailed plot to use the government and people for their own benefit.
Then I actually job shadowed a state senator for a day, sat in on a couple meetings and the general assembly... and I realize that they aren't (for the most part) psychopathic or plotting...
They're just... average.
And then I realized that the horrible state of legislation was not the result of malice, but of the pure incompetent that infects the entire society. These were the C students in high school who had the right connections, or just the right interests. They were the masses that I have spent my entire life trying not to disdain because they do not comprehend most complex issues as quickly as my "gifted" friends.
Heinlein once said (paraphrased) than an elected official, ideally, represents a slightly above average member of his electorate. I realized that day that when I consider my opinion of most people I meet, I am not surprised at all at what comes out of the capital. It is no hand-picked best of the best representatives, nor a oligarchy of vile schemers, but simply a vaguely representative group of the more affluent members of our society.
Unfortunately, I think that this realization made me expect even less out of government. An intelligent psychopath at least acts intelligently in his own interest, as opposed to blindly herding in whatever direction is popular today.
"Why do so many bosses suck?"
.... by each other. The people doing the hiring LIKE people with this psychopathic profile, because they want people just like them. Its no accident sales and marketing people are the ones most like to make the jump in to senior management because aggressive salesman with no morales are the one this good ole boy network promotes. Its also why R&D is cratering in the U.S. and most U.S. companies are fixated on making their quarterly sales numbers instead of making companies that are built to last, that and the stock market totally incentivizes companies to nail quarters and cannibalize the future.
The key problem is bosses ARE screened
Worst problem with American CEO's is they are hired by boards that are basically a good ole boy crony network. They all golf together, are members of the same country clubs, go to the same parties, and were in the same partying fraternities in college. They tend to not evaluate CEO's with a critical eye they are just hiring their friends, with the understanding that the people hire will in turn do favors for them and serve on their boards.
Then the problem extends downward. The CEO in turn hires good ole boys as President and VP's who in turn hire good ole boys in training to be middle management.
@de_machina
No one else has a problem with this?
Are you the same group of people posting links to the EFF, and complaining about violations of privacy?
This might be surprising to some of you, but being a sociopath is not illegal. Nor should it be grounds for not getting hired into a job. Being a sociopath does not mean you will become a serial killer either, despite what hollywood tells you. 3% of all men, and 1% of women are sociopaths. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociopath/
If someone has the intellegence and ability to do the job, who cares if they won't cry when someone else gets burned? As long as they are a law abiding citizen, they should be able to live a normal life.
(Unless anyone with "mental disease" should be locked away)
Capitalism rewards psychopathic behavior inherently.
It depends on your read of capitalism. The psychopaths the articles describe thrive in large organizations that have a strongly top-down power structure.
To me, capitalism is about empowering individuals and small groups to make their own decisions about what's best for them through free trade and free association. Many large corporations are capitalists only on the outside; on the inside they're feudal monarchies. And externally they strive for the same sort of utter dominance that they have inside.
Corporations like that internally quash and externally seek to subvert the driving engine of capitalism, the open marketplace. I don't see them as real capitalists at all, whatever their PR departments say.
Or, more likely yet, you'd become the alpha of the group.
Because people are not machines and if you fail to understand how people really work, you will invariably be a bad manager. You really think that the guys at Enron did a good job? Billions of dollars were stolen from investors.
I've known a few of these people. I knew one manager who emotionally tortured a twenty-year old woman he was attracted to, as part of his plan to seduce her. This is the kind of guy you want to hand billions of dollars to?
Handling billions of dollars requires someone who has higher principles, not no principles. Enron is a perfect example. If you never feel remorse, why not steal? If you have no compassion for those you will hurt, there is no reason why you shouldn't operate in a purely selfish manner.
Corporate officers have to act on behalf of other people, the stock holders. They also have a responsibility to the people who work for the company, because, contrary to what seems to be taught at most business schools, in todays economy, the talent and dedication of your employees is worth as much or more as the capital you have to work with. If you hire people who are incapable of relating to other human beings and who are completely self-involved, they will invariably destroy the company.
It isn't being soft or wishy-washy to want sane and rational people working in top management, it's just good sense.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
1) Most of your answers are exceptionally narrow and don't fully answer the question.
2) You can take nearly any previous president: ask the same questions, and get similar responses. Clinton is an easy target, but even revered leaders (Washington, Lincoln, and certianly presidents of the last century) can be vilified using the same techniques you are using to vilify President Bush.
Your claim that Bush is a psychopath is unconvincing. He may be to a certian extent, the question of how severe a psychopath he is remains unanswered. Were that question answered it wouldn't necessarily cast light on his suitability for presidency.
Nice propoganda, though. You should be in PR - a good place for psychopaths.
-Adam
Breaking the law, lying, acting on impulse, starting fights, putting oneself in danger, slacking off and not caring.
Does this remind anybody else of high school, or is it just me?
Dare to Hope. Prepare to be Disappointed.
I expect people to save up for themselves. Why do we feel entitled to retire at age 65 whether we have the means to survive or not? Social security was started at a time when most people didn't live to be 65 and very few lived much longer than that. I had a friend who's grandfather was still farming at age 80. He did it because he enjoyed it as well as that he needed the money because he refused to let the government pay for something that is his responsibility. I would rather keep my money and use it the way I feel I should. And that way is not social security, especially not its current design.
expect the government to spend itself into debt,
If you want the government to pay for all your expectations (and by the sound of it, you do) how do you want them to pay for it? To make up money out of thin air? To tax us all out the roof? I think a lot of programs need to be cut, and the budget needs to be balanced and the debt needs to be payed off. But we do that by reducing government, not spending more.
expect the cost of healthcare go continue to go up forever until you cannot afford it,
Insane. If we can't afford it, then who will pay for it? The upperclass? Fine I suppose. And then eventually healthcare providers will realise that there is a lot of money to be made by selling it to the middle class. And the trend will continue. But then, maybe you just read the news that is all doom and gloom. I see a lot of people in the medical field doing things for the poor. I believe in humanity, not the news-worlds view of it. At my University there was a group that just back from somewhere in South America which performed free dental services for thousands of people for free. Where was that in the news? It was in our daily campus newspaper, but didn't even make it into the local newspaper. It happens. I volunteer on occasion. Do you? If so, great. If not, shut up!
expect the poor to be tossed in ghettos and left to die, all around the world.
I'm looking at the poor here in the US and thinking, wow. I am technically considered poor by the standards here. I don't feel that way. I have food on my table and a roof over my head. When the rich get richer, the poor do NOT get poorer. There is no finite pie in economics. When the rich pay for things, who are they paying? The middle class. When they pay for things, who do they pay? The poor. So where does the money of the rich go? To the poor. Eventually. And as I aluded to before, some people donate their money and their time. This trend is seen in the US a lot. There are truly poor people here in the US, yes. There are much poorer people in other countries. I spent a month in the jungles of Vietnam back in May. Those people are very poor by US standards. They don't act like it though. they work. Hard. They have food on their tables and a roof over their heads, and it is NOT their communist (read socialist) governments fault that they have this. Quite the contrary. It is the governments fault they are hindered and held back.
Again, if you are actually doing something to reverse the trend, then I applaud you. If you are just sitting back and ranting then get off your high horse and shut up. The world is in a much better state than some may let on. There is a lot, and I mean a vast amount of a lot, of things we can improve upon. But rants like yours make it sound like we are in worse shape than any time on earth. Some things are bad. Let's improve it. Not just rant and complain.
Stop Global Warming!
Just say no to irreversible processes!