Put differently, most psychopaths have learnt that open violence towards others is frowned upon and punished by society, and so instead they seek an outlet for their internal destructiveness by causing psychological and emotional harm to others in the outside world. In fact, most psychopaths have the same basic personality characteristics of these violent killers, but through a combination of education, punishment and self serving purposes, most psychopaths have learnt to curb and more cleverly conceal their destructive behavior, instead causing trouble in more sneaky, covert ways that we cannot so easily detect and punish by law. The serial killer psychopath is the exception rather than the rule for this personality type. Remember, not all psychopaths are violent serial killers – in fact most of them aren’t. See Robert Hare’s Without Conscience in our Books section for some examples of this.īut we don’t just want to make this a dry academic article – we want to try and bring the psychopathy checklist to life a bit more by giving some real world examples of how these traits can manifest in psychopaths you meet in the world every day.

Some of the most notorious serial killers in history have scored very high (39 or 40 out of 40) on the Psychopathy Checklist. Different countries use different thresholds, but an individual scoring past a score of either 25 or 30 out of 40 qualifies them to be diagnosed with a psychopathic personality. The Psychopathy Checklist was initially developed by Canadian psychopathy expert Dr Robert Hare How the Psychopathy Checklist WorksĪccording to the Hare PCL-R model, prison inmates are scored for each of these traits using a specific questionnaire, with a maximum potential score of 40/40. We will run through each of these individual traits in more detail further below, providing some specific examples of how each trait can manifest in the real world psychopaths. Here are the basic Psychopathy Checklist Traits:

You are looking for a clustering of these traits – in other words, most or all of them hanging together within one person, and not just or two, to diagnose psychopathy.

Let’s first list the traits that make up the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R), that define the psychopathic personality and distinguish it from other personality traits. There are actually several diagnostic criteria for psychopathy, but probably the most popular and long standing one is the Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R), developed several decades ago by psychopathy expert Dr Robert Hare.

Many of us still tend to be stuck in the stereotype of the psychopath as the violent serial killer, but psychopathy is actually most often measured in terms of a series of personality traits or characteristics that many more people than just murderers in prison possess.

Psychopathy checklist revised hare