(Mis)understanding Psychopathy: Consequences for Policy and Practice with Offenders

Abstract

What is psychopathy? It is a term that is used casually, to refer to everyone from improbably skilled super-criminals to businessmen who succeed in making astronomical profits by staying more-or-less on the right side of the law, but on the wrong side of morality or ethics. It is a construct both complex and prosaic, about which there is significant scientific debate and confusion. This article gives an overview of the key definitional issues for psychopathy, and introduces a framework – the triarchic model – for organizing some the main components of psychopathy and for evaluating what psychopathy is, and what it is not. The second section outlines the measurement of psychopathy, noting in particular the strengths and limitations of The Hare Psychopathy Checklist and Hare Psychopathy Checklist–Revised, and their dominance of the measurement domain, before moving on to unpack the relationship between these scales and crime itself. Third, research is reviewed on whether psychopaths and psychopathy can change, before reaching several conclusions about the consequences of diagnostic confusion and misunderstanding for psychopathic people and those who work with them.