Relentless Inquiry

…it’s not just your imagination.

Halfway through, and kinda blown away:

Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work,
Paul Babiak, PhD & Robert D Hare, PhD

“I always said that if I wasn’t studying psychopaths in prison, I’d do so at the stock exchange.” — RD Hare, during his landmark studies of (you guessed it) psychopaths in the US criminal justice system (only the ones behind bars).

“Hare, the author of ‘Without Conscience’, is a world-renowned expert on psychopathy, and Babiak is an industrial-organizational psychologist. … They found that … the modern, open, more flexible corporate world, in which high risks can equal high profits, that attracts psychopaths. They may enter as rising stars and corporate saviors, but all too soon they’re abusing the trust of colleagues, manipulating supervisors, and leaving the workplace in shambles.”

The book takes a nicely reassuring tone in places, letting the reader know that one is probably NOT a psychopath if one CARES whether or not one is a psychopath. They say that just as doctors in training start believing that they have all kinds of exotic diseases as they learn about disease, the reader may begin to worry. 😉

FWIW, one of the things that was disovered while studying psychopaths with MRI brain imaging is that, in general, their linguistic processing areas are used instead of emotional processing areas, even when using what should be highly loaded emotional terms or topics. Heh, I do that sometimes, it’s how some of my more outrageous utterances work. OTOH, I am Ms Emo Kid, so my odds of being a psychopath are low.