Is psychopathy born or bred? This is a trickier question than people might assume. Not least because, for many years, psychopathy was thought to be very mysterious – and in a lot of ways, it still is.
There are lots of mental, neurological and personality disorders that people fear. For the most part, this is due to ignorance and flawed assumptions.
While this is also true for psychopathy – a personality disorder – the negative reactions it causes are somewhat more understandable. After all, psychopathy is regularly linked with callousness and emotional detachment, as well as deviant behaviour, manipulation and criminality.
Less than one per cent of the general population show indicators of psychopathy, but this rises to 25 per cent (that’s one in four) of the prison population.
So, what causes psychopathy? Are psychopaths born this way, or are they created by (presumably very negative) life experiences? As the cliché goes, is it due to nature or nurture?
Despite science’s best efforts, personality itself is hard to pin down and define, so personality disorders remain similarly nebulous and tricky to define.
This applies as much to psychopathy as any other disorder, as demonstrated in Jon Ronson’s book The Psychopath Test, which explores how even tried and tested methods for identifying psychopathy can be – to put it diplomatically – hit-and-miss.
However, while it may be more difficult to identify than many realise, few would argue that psychopathy isn’t a genuine condition. And recent advances have shed some light on the matter.
The use of brain scanning technology, like fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), has provided evidence that psychopathy corresponds to fundamental differences in brain structure.
The scans revealed that psychopathy is linked to anatomical differences in the brain systems that connect structures in the prefrontal lobes, the posterior cingulate cortex and key parts of the temporal lobe.
The functions of these regions are incredibly varied, but this particular combination is heavily linked to emotional processing. These differences may be disrupting the brain’s typical ability to recognise, encode and understand emotional information.
As emotion is such a vital aspect of human cognition, an inability to process it could help to explain a few of the classic traits of psychopathy.
For example, not being able to grasp how emotions affect other people could lead to the signature loss of empathy, as well as placing a higher value on purely rational thinking and having a reduced awareness of the consequences of their actions.
How or why certain people’s brains end up this way is hard to say. But there are also genetic factors that seem to play a role in the development of psychopathy.
While a person’s environment and life experiences may contribute to or intensify psychopathy or psychopathic tendencies – as well as certainly leading to distorted emotional processing and related issues – such things aren’t known to be able to shape both brain structure and genetics to such a consistent degree.
All of the evidence, therefore, suggests that psychopathy is born, more than bred.
Why such a mental disorder would even evolve in the first place, though, is a different question entirely.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Elliot Owens, St Albans) 'Is psychopathy born or bred?'
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