I am a prosocial psychopath. And no, that isn't the oxymoron you think it is.

Ethics without empathy, morality without conscience.

Are you really a psychopath?

Yes. I have what is called Primary Psychopathy, which means I was born with a brain that’s a little different, to say the least. Let me explain what that really means, why I’m seemingly unwisely labeling myself with such a heavily stigmatized term, and how I could possibly be a prosocial violent serial killing maniac. Spoiler alert: I’m not.

So, first a little psychology history lesson for you. And then my history. Then we get to how, by applying game theory to social interactions, such a supposedly deplorable creature can be prosocial or even gasp ethical! And lastly, why that is so deeply important, and not only to me, but for all of society. Yes, all of society. So hold on to your nipple-clamps kids, you are in for a moderately wild ride!

The History

When you think “psychopath,” I guarantee you are thinking “violent criminal.” This is due to renowned Canadian psychologist Dr. Robert Hare and something he published in 1991 called the Psychopathy Checklist Revised (PCL-R). The PCL- R is a tool used to predict recidivism in male inmates, and honestly it is pretty damn effective at that one very specific task. This tool breaks down criminal psychopathy into Factor 1 or interpersonal/affective (who the person is) traits and Factor 2 or lifestyle/antisocial (what the person does) traits. Hare stole cough modelled Factor 1 and Factor 2, albeit imprecisely from a pre-existing concept of Primary Psychopathy and Secondary Psychopathy. Primary became Factor 1 (F1) in the PCL-R, and Secondary became Factor 2 (F2). Still with me, fellow nerds? In order to be classified as having a high probability of committing more crimes if/when released from prison, individuals need a high combined score of both F1 and F2 traits. Part of the criteria of the Psychopathy Checklist is also that the individual has committed crimes. High-scoring individuals are labeled criminal psychopaths, which informs parole boards and correctional institutes to be more cautious with those specific individuals.

Do you see any problems with this yet? If a tool were designed to be administered to veterans with PTSD in VA hospitals to predict likelihood of aggression to hospital staff, and one of the criteria was that they had to have previously been violent to hospital staff, we wouldn’t start using that tool to judge all veterans, and certainly not all people. Unfortunately with psychopathy, the measure became the meaning. We reversed engineered a tool created for male prison populations, and in the process disfigured the social construct of a concept that has existed in every culture and throughout recorded history. Yikes!

You may be surprised to learn that before Hare, psychopathy was not synonymous with criminality. Psychiatrist Dr. Hervey Cleckley’s 1941 book, “The Mask of Sanity” is the most important pre-Hare work to detail psychopathy. Cleckley defined a list of 16 traits such as superficial charm, unreliability, and lack of remorse, after having observed these traits in the patients in the book’s case studies. We’ll get into all of those traits later. Again Cleckley’s patients were not criminals, they were sane-seeming psychiatric patients, businessman, scientists, physicians. These people burned relationships, squandered opportunities, and baffled everyone around them, especially mental health practitioners. Why? Because these people appeared otherwise completely sane. Cleckley's work laid the groundwork for a distinction that modern research has sharpened considerably. Fun fact! Psychopathy was once called “moral insanity,” which honestly I quite like.

What we now understand about psychopathy is, broadly speaking: primary psychopaths are born, and secondary psychopaths are made. Primary Psychopathy is understood to be primarily neurobiological in nature, not unlike ADHD or Autism Spectrum Disorder. It is characterized by several neurological differences, but most importantly, an under-active lazy amygdala. These differences mean that primary psychopaths have blunted fear responses, limited emotional depth, and also have low to no emotional resonance - what most people call empathy. Metaphorically, this is not unlike being born without sight.

Secondary Psychopathy, which is also sometimes colloquially called sociopathy, is much more closely aligned with the DSM-5’s Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD). Secondary Psychopathy is understood to be caused primarily by chronic childhood stress or trauma rather than amygdala under-activity. Secondary psychopaths, and those with ASPD are not born, they are made. Though in practice, biology and environment always interact. Adverse upbringings create dysregulated stress response systems. This causes issues with executive function, impulsivity, and emotional regulation. This means unpredictable emotional reactions and behaviours, often with selective defensive emotional suppression (this translates to feeling lots of something sometimes, and lots of nothing other times). This is like losing sight at a young age due to parental abuse or neglect.

Both Primary and Secondary Psychopathy would be labelled as blindness in the context of this somewhat imperfect metaphor, but what I am getting at is that the causes of the blindness are not the same. This matters because treatment is different for people who never developed the wiring to see, versus people who lost their vision as a child. The lived experience of a person who never had sight would also presumably be quite different than someone who lost their vision later in life, especially if due to parental abuse or neglect and all the other sociological obstacles those imply. There are treatments which exist that can restore sight in some who have lost it (Secondary), but no treatment yet exists to give sight to those who have never had it (Primary). Switching us back to psychology and I do apologize for the whiplash, an especially clean differentiator is that Primary Psychopathy is characterized by low anxiety, whereas Secondary Psychopathy is characterized by high anxiety. You aren’t going to treat a high anxiety patient the same as a low anxiety patient and expect the same result.

Apparently no one thought it might be problematic later if they used the same name for two distinct presentations with different causes and different treatment needs. I wonder if those dead psychologists are all shocked-Pikachu-face in their graves right now.

My History

It took me a couple of decades of adulthood and many 2-3 year cycles of starting over after blowing up my life and blaming others for it, before I finally reached my mid-30s, looked inwards, and realized that this was a pattern and that I was the common denominator. Hold up. Where is my gold star? Self-aware psychopaths aren’t exactly a dime a dozen.

This realization launched me down a long and winding rabbit hole of learning about psychology, personality disorders, and you guessed it my cheeky little psychics: psychopathy. Narcissistic Personality Disorder was my first stab in the dark but didn’t fit, as I am very secure, with a strong sense of self, and I am not sure if I am even capable of feeling shame. I then learned about Antisocial Personality Disorder, and while some of the criteria such as lack of remorse, deceitfulness, and disregard for the safety of self/others fit - the rest really didn’t. This is because ASPD is based on Hare’s criminal psychopathy measure (PCL-R), which blends Factor 1 (interpersonal/affective) with Factor 2 (lifestyle/antisocial) traits, with a heavier focus on behavior (F2) rather than on deficits in emotional processing and the cluster of personality traits that are the natural consequences of that deficit (F1). Can you tell how warm and fuzzy I feel about Dr. Robert Hare yet? So fuzzy!

Next I learned that before Hare’s work culturally redefined the concept of psychopathy, there was Dr. Hervey Cleckley’s foundational work which included a list of 16 traits, and that these traits aren’t tied to criminality whatsoever! When I first read Cleckley’s list I couldn’t believe it. I read it, re-read it, and read it again. I was genuinely shocked to discover that I was a walking fucking caricature of a non-criminal psychopath. Man, did I ever find myself in those pages. Although admittedly, I have done some crime. But that’s beside the point! Plus, they said “be gay do crime” so I did half of one, and one of the other.

Anyway, enough about my gay crimes. I have bolded what applies to me.

1. Superficial charm and good intelligence

2. Absence of delusions and other signs of irrational thinking

3. Absence of nervousness or psychoneurotic manifestations

4. Unreliability (I am actually pretty reliable! When I want to be…)

5. Untruthfulness and insincerity

6. Lack of remorse and shame

7. Inadequately motivated antisocial behavior (Rude, my antisocial behaviour is always ADEQUATELY motivated)

8. Poor judgment and failure to learn by experience

9. Pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love

10. General poverty in major affective reactions

11. Specific loss of insight

12. Unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations

13. Fantastic and uninviting behavior with drink and sometimes without

14. Suicide threats rarely carried out

15. Sex life impersonal, trivial, and poorly integrated

16. Failure to follow any life plan.

Thankfully, I am well aware that I am not qualified to diagnose anyone with anything, least of all myself. So, it was at this point, for the purpose of self-optimization, that I reached out to a seasoned private practice psychologist who specializes in personality disorders and has worked in forensic settings to figure out what was really going on and how to improve. Together over many sessions over many months, we explored; personality disorders, autism, alexithymia (difficulty with recognizing and articulating emotions), anhedonia (reduced ability to feel pleasurable emotions), as well as trauma related disorders such as PTSD, C-PTSD, and various dissociative disorders, among other things. I had also previously been screened for Autism Spectrum Disorder as part of an ADHD assessment; autism was a firm no, ADHD a firm yes. My psychologist agreed that Autism Spectrum Disorder was unfitting. Oh man, would this whole ordeal have ever been easier if I was just fucking autistic. And at least I would be able to talk openly about ASD and its challenges to those close to me.

Was I formally diagnosed with psychopathy? No. Psychopathy isn’t a formal diagnosis, as it does not exist in the DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders Part V Electric Kangaroo). No one can be formally diagnosed with psychopathy, and anyone who claims to be is fucking lying. Certain prison inmates can be categorized as meeting the criteria for criminal psychopathy based on how they score on the PCL-R but that isn’t a formal psychiatric diagnosis, again it is a label for risk assessment and not a formal disorder. However, that doesn’t mean that outside of prisons psychopathy isn’t also a well respected decades-old research construct.

Psychopathy has been studied extensively for decades in clinical, neuroimaging, and personality research. Instruments like the Psychopathic Personality Inventory (PPI), the Triarchic Psychopathy Measure, and the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy Scale are used to assess psychopathic traits in the general population. These tools measure the underlying personality dimensions such as boldness, meanness, disinhibition, affective deficits, interpersonal style. Researchers concluded that there are consistently measurable differences in the neurological structure of people with this grouping of qualities. And guess what, just like ADHD and Autism, Primary Psychopathy is highly genetic! Yes, Primary Psychopathy's heritability ranges from roughly 40-60%. Thanks, dad!

The psychologist, after extensive evaluation, explained what I already suspected, that while I do not meet the criteria for ASPD, I do show strong indication of what the DSM calls “psychopathic features,” which he believed to be congenital. Typically this “with psychopathic features” qualifier is tacked onto an ASPD diagnosis: “ASPD with psychopathic features,” to explain that an individual is extra spicy bad, like my dear darling friend Clyde. There is no just “With Psychopathic Features” diagnosis, so instead he informally confirmed that my traits align with the well defined research construct of Primary Psychopathy. No seriously it was really informal, the man was wearing a kilt.

His assessment was based on a thorough clinical history, self-report measures, and detailed exploration of my affective experiences, or rather, the absence of them. What emerged was a consistent pattern: blunted emotional responses, low baseline anxiety, shallow affect, and lack of emotional resonance with others, all present as far back as I can remember. And no, these qualities are not well explained solely by the dynamic duo of trauma and dissociation. If these traits could be fully explained by severe emotional dissociation, I would also be experiencing other severe dissociative symptoms, and thankfully for me, this is not the case. I will admit that I have been through more than my fair share of trauma, which we did of course work on. In this process I realized that I am genuinely grateful to be a psychopath, as without an inborn resilience, all that trauma would probably have made me into a crack whore instead of a ketamine blog-poster.

Prosocial Psychopath

Imagine my surprise when I learned throughout the process of therapy, research, and introspection, that people generally weren’t simply choosing to be over-dramatic when faced with various levels of life’s hardships. That people don’t just get over things pretty much immediately like I do. And that people - this one blew my mind - actually involuntarily catch each other’s emotions! When I learned about emotional resonance I truly felt like an alien. I had heard people say that their loved one’s sadness made them sad, I had seen people cry when other people were crying and been curious. However, I also had enough insight to know that a bad time to ask why someone is crying is definitely while they are in the middle of crying. Which coincidentally is always exactly when that question internally bubbled up.

I came to recognize that while I do experience emotion, I experience probably about 5% of the intensity and duration of the emotions of an average person. I also learned that I had never experienced affective (emotional) empathy, remorse, or guilt. I thought I had, but this misconception was corrected when I learned that these are genuine feelings, as in, they are felt physically and that there is apparently a sort of weight associated with them as well as recurring thoughts that can border on intrusive. I had only ever been temporarily unhappy with having been caught, actually doing the harmful things to others has never actually negatively affected me emotionally during or after.

Up until this point I had spent my life with the assumption that most people were like me, but that unlike me, most people had a penchant for the dramatic. I always felt this constant over-acting was wildly inefficient, but since pretty much everyone was doing it, there wasn’t much I could do except wait it out whenever it happened. Finally learning that my affective deficits create a very different internal experience than everyone else explained so much. For instance, my social interactions never really carried emotional weight, they have always been nearly entirely math for me:

“If I do this for that person then my chances of getting this thing I want increases, is it worth the effort?”

“I can probably get that person to do this thing if I make them feel bad about this other thing before I ask.”

“This lie presents no risk to me, only reward. Proceed.”

I simply don’t have the built-in neurobiological braking system that genuinely costs people when they lie or do something bad. I was born without the ability to feel bad about doing bad things. As I hope you can understand, when all there is, is social math, psychopaths naturally get very fucking good at that math (superficial charm and manipulation). If the math checked out I did it, if it didn’t then I refrained. Simple as that. But this doesn’t mean I couldn’t choose to be better, to both optimize and do good things even when it means more effort.

Learning that my operating system was that vastly different than everyone else’s felt like finding out I had been colorblind my entire life, but, with emotions. Emotionally fucking colorblind, how poetic is that? Anyway, I had a choice to make. And because I do not have emotions to guide me or stop me, I made that choice using logic. I chose to be better, to be a prosocial little psychopath. And once I made that choice, I needed a framework to help me learn how and when to brake.

This is where game theory saves the fucking day. Most people don’t need to use game theory to be a moral person. Your emotional systems do the work, empathy makes others’ suffering uncomfortable, guilt discourages cheating, the warm glow of lasting connection rewards kindness. Morality feels right.

I don’t have that built-in feelings-based system, so game theory offered a framework for the brake-work. Hah. Life, isn’t a zero-sum game. Your gain isn’t usually my loss and vice versa. In fact, most interactions are actually positive-sum games! Wowza! This means that most of the time we can both win. When two people both give, this can actually create more value rather than just redistributing the value that already exists. The limit does not exist!

I also recognized that my experience of loss generally is not equal to yours, because I don’t have the same level of emotional drag from my losses as you do. It typically takes me seconds or minutes to get back to baseline after a crisis, for most people it can take hours, days, weeks, sometimes even years. This means that any action I take that results in your loss tends to have a much higher cost to you than I had previously factored in to my equations. Whoops. My bad. Forgot to carry the 2, and broke up with you via text.

In repeated games AKA life, cooperation beats selfishness and beats defection. Not because it’s nice, but because it’s a winning strategy. The person who exploits might win individual rounds initially, but they’re also quickly making their own future wins less likely, in my case by burning bridges. “I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.” An individual who cooperates, builds trust, and plays fair, is accumulating compound interest on social capital!

So my moral code isn’t built on feeling the wrongness of harm to others, it’s built on understanding that harm is just a downright bad strategy. I don’t refrain from exploiting people because it would make me feel guilty. I refrain because exploitation is usually a losing move. The outcome looks similar to conventional morality, but the reasoning behind it is different because my operating system is different… So there you have it folks, a prosocial psychopath does indeed exist!

I just envisioned myself graciously bowing to your applause, but wait, the show is not over! The most important part of all of this is…

Why it Matters

Stigma is preventing people like me from learning to adopt prosocial frameworks to support their neurological deficits. It is not my fault that I was born without the wiring that naturally drives moral decisions, but it did become my problem to solve once I realized what was missing and what that truly meant.

However. I had to do an unreasonable amount of personal research (altogether hundreds of non-fiction books, research papers, university textbooks, treatment guides/handbooks) as well as a cost-prohibitive amount of therapy with a particularly open-minded psychologist with a very specific skillset, to reach the realization that I have a lazy amygdala and had been emotionally colorblind for 30+ years - and that this colorblindness was not only setting me back, it was greatly and unnecessarily setting others back way more than I could have anticipated. Give me a moment to catch my breath after that epic run-on sentence, more like a run-on marathon amiright.

I want to be very clear that I am NOT trying to excuse actual criminal psychopaths. Call the violent ones violent. Call the criminals criminals. But stop using "psychopath" as a synonym for "irredeemable," because that is doing real damage to real people who could, with the right support, even become net positives for everyone around them.

What would have helped 25-year-old me? Awareness of this type of neurodivergence without it being tied to criminality and violence would have been a great start. I would have also appreciated something in the literature that said, “If you have these traits, you are likely having a different lived experience than everyone else. Here is how to build a good life anyway.” Having at least one example of someone like me who made the world a better place would be beyond my wildest dreams. What I learned slowly, expensively, and with a lot of collateral damage along the way was that there is no message to guide us, only protection from us. And that stigma doesn’t make us less dangerous, it makes us less likely to learn the frameworks we need to not be dangerous.

Here’s where this stops being just my story.

Researchers estimate that roughly 1-2% of the general population has significant psychopathic traits. That’s not 1-2% of prisons. That’s 1-2% of your coworkers, neighbors, family members. Most of them are not violent. Most will never be diagnosed with anything, because the only widely known framework for psychopathy is one built and used inside prison walls. So they stumble through life the way I did; burning relationships, baffling therapists, and never quite understanding why the math ain’t mathing. Some of them do real damage along the way. Not because they’re evil, but because no one ever handed them a different equation.

Now multiply that by every partner they hurt, every friendship they detonate, every workplace they destabilize, every child they raise without understanding why their kid’s tears don’t move them. The collateral damage of one unaware psychopath ripples outward for decades. Scale that across millions of people worldwide, and you start to see the societal cost of a stigma that offers no path forward.

Every psychopath who never learns what they are is a psychopath still running the old social math: “Does this benefit me? Then proceed.” Every psychopath who does learn, who gets access to the right frameworks, the right language, the right support, is someone who can choose the better equation. Not because they suddenly feel empathy, but because they finally understand the game they’re actually playing.

My intention with this publication is to help reduce the stigma associated with Primary Psychopathy, so others like me don’t have to stumble around in the dark, stubbing their toes on autism, NPD, ASPD, and a plethora of other psychological red herrings like I did. It’s a positive-sum game after all, to have more ethical psychopaths running around. Better than unethical ones, right?

I’ll leave you with this:

I think of all the harm to my future, and to the futures of others, that won’t come to pass because of what I have painstakingly learned… and I feel called to spread this fucking message.

And who else is going to call for a little empathy for psychopaths, than a psychopath.

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Stay tuned for more of a prosocial psychopath’s musings on ethics, relationships, and self-discovery.

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