M.O.: But if you're talking about people who are minding their own business, sitting in their living room, and maybe they score reasonably high on the PCLR, but they're minding their own business, I wouldn't want to be married to that person and I don't think I'd want them as a parent, but if they're minding their own business, really, what are you going to do about that?
R.K.: Yeah, it's really, exist with them, I guess. You wouldn't want to be married to one. Would you want to know if you were working with someone like that?
M.O.: I would want to know, and I would know, if I was working with someone who was cheating the company, who was doing stuff to me professionally, my reputation behind my back, who was taking away promotional opportunities for me, but how do you diagnose that person to do that?
Are they all psychopaths? Or some people just jerks? And they never rise to the level of that kind of a diagnosis, does that make it, are you going to go to your little cubicle at the end of the day and say well, boy, they're walking all over me and, boy, they're stabbing me in the back and, boy, they're doing this to me but, thank goodness, I can't call them a psychopath. Really? Do you see what I'm saying. Look at the behavior. Suspend the label.
R.K.: Have you ever been in a job situation where you had somebody you were dealing with who manifested psychopathic behavior?
M.O.: You mean who was a coworker?
R.K.: Yes.
M.O.: I don't think so and I've certainly given it a lot of thought because we talk about psychopaths being pulled in to a, or being attracted to, I should say, careers like law enforcement where it's risk and excitement and that sort of thing. Are they, do we have psychopathic individuals who are drawn to the law enforcement career?
I believe that that's certainly a possibility because you cannot draw lines in the sand and say a psychopath would never be a cop, or an FBI agent. I think that it certainly is a possibility and I teach that, but from a professional point of view I have not. But do I think it's possible that we have psychopaths that go to every profession? Yes, I do.
R.K.: How would... this is a fascinating and scary concept and they make movies about it sometimes and sometimes recently they show things on TV that you have to wonder how could a police man do something like that, but what would it look like if somebody in law enforcement was a psychopath? How could somebody in that position operate? What would be some signs, perhaps?
M.O.: Well it certainly could vary, but, again, you're going to hear me say the same thing. You can have a police officer, or law enforcement person, who is corrupt, takes money on the side, abuses their authority with the general public. We've had cases where a law enforcement person has been, we've had people that are in law enforcement careers that have been rapists and murderers. Does it happen a lot? Not a lot. But does it happen?
But are those people also, they certainly are corrupt law enforcement people, but are they necessarily psychopathic? Does that make the fact that they raped five people any less dangerous. If they were, they were not psychopathic? So, again, that's the issue.
The important thing is the behavior and I think when people hear this we don't want people to think in order to be a really violent criminal, or a recidivist, you have to be psychopathic. There are plenty of people out there who are scary, frightening criminals and scary, frightening people. If I were to give them the PCLR, would they necessarily score high on psychopathy? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not, but there behavior is enough for me to say these are scary people. They're violent people. They're hurtful people.
Psychopathy doesn't have to be a part of that. It can be, it doesn't have to be.
R.K.: Got it. So, I've also heard that there are related personality types that are problematic. There's a category of them that includes a narcissist and borderline. Any comment on them and where they fit in?
M.O.: Well, there's... when you're talking about someone who is... narcissism is one of the, is really one of the traits, the twenty traits of psychopathy. In the research, the term that's used is grandiosity, but there are a number of distinct personality disorders and there may appear to be some overlap just in terms of the resulting symptomology, or behaviors.
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