Psychopathy Isn't Real, But a "Zombie Idea"

The popular idea of a psychopath is a person with a personality disorder making them incapable of distinguishing right from wrong or feeling empathy. The idea has been around for hundreds of years, and was extensively studied in the 20th century. But the studies and experiments on psychopathy mostly produce null results, meaning that whatever factor you were measuring (empathy, emotion, or impulse control), there was no significant difference between people identified as psychopaths and those who were not. Those considered psychopaths had emotions, they could recognize emotions in others, and they were capable of empathy. It began to look like psychopathy was a label that arose because we no longer wanted to classify people as evil or demon possessed. Or maybe it was a handy diagnosis for psychological conditions we just couldn't figure out.

Despite the research, psychopathy roared back into popular culture in the 1990s with movies like Natural Born Killers, Silence of the Lambs, and American Psycho. In the real world, we want to make sense of the senselessly evil things people do. But the research doesn't make that easy. Read about the science behind psychopathy and what it tells us at Aeon. -via Damn Interesting