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The researchers found that psychopaths scored lower on intelligence tests. A surprising result, according to Boutwell. 

The researchers hope that their finding will contribute to our understanding psychopathy, currently an untreatable condition. 

Further research might also change how psychopaths are treated by the criminal justice system. 

during this same period, students' self-reported narcissism levels have shot through the roof. "Many people see the current group of college students, sometimes called 'Generation Me,' " Konrath continues, "as one of the most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident, and individualistic in recent history."

Reading a book carves brand-new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world—makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay, "The Dreams of Readers," "more alert to the inner lives of others." We become vampires without being bitten—in other words, more empathic. Books make us see in a way that casual immersion in the Internet, and the quicksilver virtual world it offers, doesn't.

if society really is becoming more psychopathic, it's not all doom and gloom. In the right context, certain psychopathic characteristics can actually be very constructive. A neurosurgeon I spoke with (who rated high on the psychopathic spectrum) described the mind-set he enters before taking on a difficult operation as "an intoxication that sharpens rather than dulls the senses." In fact, in any kind of crisis, the most effective individuals are often those who stay calm—who are able to respond to the exigencies of the moment while at the same time maintaining the requisite degree of detachment.

mental toughness isn't the only characteristic that Special Forces soldiers have in common with psychopaths. There's also fearlessness.

I ask Andy whether he ever felt any regret over anything he'd done. Over the lives he'd taken on his numerous secret missions around the world. "No," he replies matter-of-factly, his arctic-blue eyes showing not the slightest trace of emotion. "You seriously don't think twice about it. When you're in a hostile situation, the primary objective is to pull the trigger before the other guy pulls the trigger. And when you pull it, you move on. Simple as that. Why stand there, dwelling on what you've done? Go down that route and chances are the last thing that goes through your head will be a bullet from an M16. "The regiment's motto is 'Who Dares Wins.' But sometimes it can be shortened to 'F--- It.' "

one of the things that we know about psychopaths is that the light switches of their brains aren't wired up in quite the same way as the rest of ours are—and that one area particularly affected is the amygdala, a peanut-size structure located right at the center of the circuit board. The amygdala is the brain's emotion-control tower. It polices our emotional airspace and is responsible for the way we feel about things. But in psychopaths, a section of this airspace, the part that corresponds to fear, is empty.

Turn down the signals to the amygdala, of course, and you're well on the way to giving someone a psychopath makeover. Indeed, Liane Young and her team in Boston have since kicked things up a notch and demonstrated that applying TMS to the right temporoparietal junction—a neural ZIP code within that neighborhood—has significant effects not just on lying ability but also on moral-reasoning ability: in particular, ascribing intentionality to others' actions.

at an undisclosed moment sometime within the next 60 seconds, the image you see at the present time will change, and images of a different nature will appear on the screen. These images will be violent. And nauseating. And of a graphic and disturbing nature. "As you view these images, changes in your heart rate, skin conductance, and EEG activity will be monitored and compared with the resting levels that are currently being recorded

"OK," says Nick. "Let's get the show on the road." He disappears behind us, leaving Andy and me merrily soaking up the incontinence ad. Results reveal later that, at this point, as we wait for something to happen, our physiological output readings are actually pretty similar. Our pulse rates are significantly higher than our normal resting levels, in anticipation of what's to come. But with the change of scene, an override switch flips somewhere in Andy's brain. And the ice-cold Special Forces soldier suddenly swings into action. As vivid, florid images of dismemberment, mutilation, torture, and execution flash up on the screen in front of us (so vivid, in fact, that Andy later confesses to actually being able to "smell" the blood: a "kind of sickly-sweet smell that you never, ever forget"), accompanied not by the ambient spa music of before but by blaring sirens and hissing white noise, his physiological readings start slipping into reverse. His pulse rate begins to slow. His GSR begins to drop, his EEG to quickly and dramatically attenuate. In fact, by the time the show is over, all three of Andy's physiological output measures are pooling below his baseline.

Nick has seen nothing like it. "It's almost as if he was gearing himself up for the challenge," he says. "And then, when the challenge eventually presented itself, his brain suddenly responded by injecting liquid nitrogen into his veins. Suddenly implemented a blanket neural cull of all surplus feral emotion. Suddenly locked down into a hypnotically deep code red of extreme and ruthless focus." He shakes his head, nonplused. "If I hadn't recorded those readings myself, I'm not sure I would have believed them," he continues. "OK, I've never tested Special Forces before. And maybe you'd expect a slight attenuation in response. But this guy was in total and utter control of the situation. So tuned in, it looked like he'd completely tuned out."

My physiological output readings, in contrast, went through the roof. Exactly like Andy's, they were well above baseline as I'd waited for the carnage to commence. But that's where the similarity ended. Rather than go down in the heat of battle, in the midst of the blood and guts, mine had appreciated exponentially. "At least it shows that the equipment is working properly," comments Nick. "And that you're a normal human being."

TMS can't penetrate far enough into the brain to reach the emotion and moral-reasoning precincts directly. But by damping down or turning up the regions of the cerebral cortex that have links with such areas, it can simulate the effects of deeper, more incursive influence.

Before the experiment, I'd been curious about the time scale: how long it would take me to begin to feel the rush. Now I had the answer: about 10 to 15 minutes. The same amount of time, I guess, that it would take most people to get a buzz out of a beer or a glass of wine.

The effects aren't entirely dissimilar. An easy, airy confidence. A transcendental loosening of inhibition. The inchoate stirrings of a subjective moral swagger: the encroaching, and somehow strangely spiritual, realization that hell, who gives a s---, anyway? There is, however, one notable exception. One glaring, unmistakable difference between this and the effects of alcohol. That's the lack of attendant sluggishness. The enhancement of attentional acuity and sharpness. An insuperable feeling of heightened, polished awareness. Sure, my conscience certainly feels like it's on ice, and my anxieties drowned with a half-dozen shots of transcranial magnetic Jack Daniel's. But, at the same time, my whole way of being feels as if it's been sumptuously spring-cleaned with light. My soul, or whatever you want to call it, immersed in a spiritual dishwasher.

So this, I think to myself, is how it feels to be a psychopath. To cruise through life knowing that no matter what you say or do, guilt, remorse, shame, pity, fear—all those familiar, everyday warning signals that might normally light up on your psychological dashboard—no longer trouble you.

I suddenly get a flash of insight. We talk about gender. We talk about class. We talk about color. And intelligence. And creed. But the most fundamental difference between one individual and another must surely be that of the presence, or absence, of conscience. Conscience is what hurts when everything else feels good. But what if it's as tough as old boots? What if one's conscience has an infinite, unlimited pain threshold and doesn't bat an eye when others are screaming in agony?

One of the most obvious mistakes in Fallon’s reasoning is called the fallacy of reverse inference.

areas of the brain called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and orbitofrontal cortex are important for empathy and moral reasoning. At the same time, empathy and moral reasoning are lost or impaired in many psychopaths.

The flaw with this argument – as Fallon himself must know – is that there is no one-to-one mapping between activity in a given brain region and complex abilities such as empathy. There is no empathy region and there is no psychopath switch.

these parts of the brain aren’t like hammers or screwdrivers that perform only one task. They’re more like Swiss army knives that have evolved to support a range of different abilities.

just because two things are associated with each other doesn’t mean one of them caused the other.

In neuroscience, confusing correlation with causation is close to unforgivable.

“The human understanding when it has once adopted an opinion…draws all things else to support and agree with it.” If we only seek to confirm rather than falsify our beliefs then we will find that we are always right – or at least it will seem that way.

This confirmation bias is one of the most powerful traps in reasoning because we all like to be right, and we prefer to be consistent.

By consistently interpreting weak evidence in favour of his beliefs, Fallon’s investigation is a case study in bias.

real advances require a self-critical mindset and a strict adherence to the scientific method.

it can be tempting to forget these rules and exploit logical fallacies that we think others won’t notice.

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool”.

People with manipulative tendencies did tend to rise to leadership positions, but they weren’t the highest earners

“Individuals high in narcissism have good impression management, so they can convince their colleagues or supervisors that they are worth special advantages,

If that’s not enough to persuade you, there is now an abundance of evidence showing that kindness may not make you money but it pays in other ways: more generous and honest individuals tend to be happier in life, and even have better physical health.

Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.

“the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail

Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned

many argued that we could never be justified in depriving someone of his free will, no matter how gruesome the violence that would thereby be prevented. No doubt any proposal to develop a morality pill would encounter the same objection.

If so, would people choose to take it? Could criminals be given the option, as an alternative to prison, of a drug-releasing implant that would make them less likely to harm others?

But if our brain’s chemistry does affect our moral behavior, the question of whether that balance is set in a natural way or by medical intervention will make no difference in how freely we act. If there are already biochemical differences between us that can be used to predict how ethically we will act, then either such differences are compatible with free will, or they are evidence that at least as far as some of our ethical actions are concerned, none of us have ever had free will anyway.

Unsurprisingly, people who consistently make others feel good are more central to their social networks—in Elfenbein’s study, more of their classmates considered them to be friends. They also got more romantic interest from others in a separate speed-dating study.

It seems that “our own way of being has an emotional signature,”

affective presence is an effect one has regardless of one’s own feelings—those with positive affective presence make other people feel good, even if they personally are anxious or sad, and the opposite is true for those with negative affective presence.

“To use common, everyday words, some people are just annoying. It doesn’t mean they’re annoyed all the time,”

“They may be content because they’re always getting their way.

Some people bring out great things in others while they’re themselves quite depressed.”

The researchers found that a significant portion of group members’ emotions could be accounted for by the affective presence of their peers

leaders who make other people feel good by their very presence have teams that are better at sharing information, which leads to more innovation. Subordinates are more likely to voice their ideas, too, to a leader with positive affective presence.

xactly what people are doing that sets others at ease or puts them off hasn’t yet been studied. It may have to do with body language, or tone of voice, or being a good listener

a big part of affective presence may be how people regulate emotions—those of others and their own.

Throughout the day, one experiences emotional “blips” as Elfenbein puts it—blips of annoyance or excitement or sadness. The question is, “Can you regulate yourself so those blips don’t infect other people?” she asks. “Can you smooth over the noise in your life so other people aren’t affected by it?”

This “smoothing over”—or emotional regulation—could take the form of finding the positive in a bad situation, which can be healthy.

it could also take the form of suppressing one’s own emotions just to keep other people comfortable, which is less so.

Elfenbein notes that positive affective presence isn’t inherently good, either for the person themselves, or for their relationships with others. Psychopaths are notoriously charming

Neither is negative affective presence necessarily always a bad thing in a leader—think of a football coach yelling at the team at halftime, motivating them to make a comeback.

Anglin is an ideological descendant of men such as George Lincoln Rockwell, who created the American Nazi Party in the late 1950s, and William Luther Pierce, who founded the National Alliance, a powerful white-nationalist group, in the 1970s. Anglin admires these predecessors, who saw themselves as revolutionaries at the vanguard of a movement to take back the country. He dreams of a violent insurrection.

Anglin has the internet. His reach is exponentially greater, his ability to connect with like-minded young men unprecedented.

Anglin and his ilk like to talk about the Overton Window, a term that describes the range of acceptable discourse in society.

They’d been tugging at that window for years only to watch, with surprise and delight, as it flew wide open during Donald Trump’s candidacy. Suddenly it was okay to talk about banning Muslims or to cast Mexican immigrants as criminals and parasites—which meant Anglin’s even-more-extreme views weren’t as far outside the mainstream as they once had been

Until the Roof massacre, Burkholder hadn’t thought about the “adorable,” “happy-go-lucky” boy in her class who loved dinosaurs. Anglin was a normal kid back then, whose only remarkable quality was his extraordinarily nasal voice—it was so bad that Burkholder thought he might have a sinus problem, and raised the issue with his mother, Katie, at a parent–teacher conference.

y all outward appearances, Andrew Anglin had an ordinary, comfortable childhood, at least until adolescence. He grew up in a big house in Worthington Hills, an upper-middle-class neighborhood, where he collected X-Men comics, played computer games, ate burgers at the original Wendy’s restaurant, and got into music with his best friend, West Emerson. And he loved to read. One book that left a deep impression on him was Weasel, which tells the story of a boy in frontier Ohio seeking revenge against a psychopath who, having run out of American Indians to murder, takes to slaughtering white homesteaders.

A declared atheist, he styled his reddish hair in dreadlocks and favored jeans with 50-inch leg openings. He often wore a hoodie with a large fuck racism patch on the back.

Anglin was one of only two vegans at Linworth

But people who knew Anglin in high school told me that, for reasons that were unclear, his behavior became erratic and frightening sometime around the beginning of his sophomore year at Linworth

Haunting von Neumann’s thought experiment is the specter of a construct that, in its very internal perfection, lacks the element that would account for itself as a construct. “If someone succeeded in creating a formal system of axioms that was free of all internal paradoxes and contradictions,” another of von Neumann’s interlocutors, the logician Kurt Gödel, explains, “it would always be incomplete, because it would contain truths and statements that — while being undeniably true — could never be proven within the laws of that system.”

its deeper (and, for me, more compelling) theme: the relation between reason and madness.

Almost all the scientists populating the book are mad, their desire “to understand, to grasp the core of things” invariably wedded to “an uncontrollable mania”; even their scrupulously observed reason, their mode of logic elevated to religion, is framed as a form of madness. Von Neumann’s response to the detonation of the Trinity bomb, the world’s first nuclear explosion, is “so utterly rational that it bordered on the psychopathic,” his second wife, Klara Dan, muses

fanaticism, in the 1930s, “was the norm … even among us mathematicians.”

Pondering Gödel’s own descent into mania, the physicist Eugene Wigner claims that “paranoia is logic run amok.” If you’ve convinced yourself that there’s a reason for everything, “it’s a small step to begin to see hidden machinations and agents operating to manipulate the most common, everyday occurrences.”

the game theory-derived system of mutually assured destruction he devises in its wake is “perfectly rational insanity,” according to its co-founder Oskar Morgenstern.

Labatut has Morgenstern end his MAD deliberations by pointing out that humans are not perfect poker players. They are irrational, a fact that, while instigating “the ungovernable chaos that we see all around us,” is also the “mercy” that saves us, “a strange angel that protects us from the mad dreams of reason.”

But does von Neumann really deserve the title “Father of Computers,” granted him here by his first wife, Mariette Kovesi? Doesn’t Ada Lovelace have a prior claim as their mother? Feynman’s description of the Trinity bomb as “a little Frankenstein monster” should remind us that it was Mary Shelley, not von Neumann and his coterie, who first grasped the monumental stakes of modeling the total code of life, its own instructions for self-replication, and that it was Rosalind Franklin — working alongside, not under, Maurice Wilkins — who first carried out this modeling.

he at least grants his women broader, more incisive wisdom. Ehrenfest’s lover Nelly Posthumus Meyjes delivers a persuasive lecture on the Pythagorean myth of the irrational, suggesting that while scientists would never accept the fact that “nature cannot be cognized as a whole,” artists, by contrast, “had already fully embraced it.”