Psychopaths: Why They’ve Thrived Through Evolutionary History – And How That May Change

When you start to notice them, psychopaths seem to be everywhere. This is especially true of people in powerful places. By one estimate, as many as 20 percent of business leaders have “clinically relevant levels” of psychopathic tendencies – despite the fact as little as 1 percent of the general population are considered psychopaths. Psychopaths are characterised by shallow emotions, a lack of empathy, immorality, anti-social behaviour and, importantly, deceptiveness.

From an evolutionary point of view, psychopathy is puzzling. Given that psychopathic traits are so negative, why do they remain in successive generations? Psychopathy seems to be, in the words of biologists, “maladaptive”, or disadvantageous. Assuming there’s a genetic component to this family of disorders, we’d expect it to decrease over time.

But that’s not what we see — and there’s evidence that the tendencies are, at least in some contexts, an evolutionary benefit. According to my own research, the reason for this may be down to the ability to fake desirable qualities through deception.

The power of cheating

Trust and trustworthiness are important elements in the story of human social evolution. The most successful people, evolutionarily speaking, are the ones regarded as trustworthy or reliable.

Trust further encourages cooperation, which has helped us to develop tools, build cities and spread across the world — even to the most inhospitable environments. No single other species has achieved this, making human cooperation a wonder of the natural world.

Yet once our cultural groups became too large to know everyone individually, we needed to find ways to ensure the people we met were likely to be cooperative. It’s easier to trust a parent or sibling when hunting in the wild than to trust a stranger — the stranger might attack you or refuse to share any meat with you.

To cooperate with a stranger takes trust – they have to convince you they’ll do no harm. But they could, of course, cheat by pretending to be trustworthy and thereafter killing you or stealing your meat.

Cheaters who pull this off will be at an advantage: they’ll have more food and probably be thought of as good hunters by other, unsuspecting people. So cheating posed a problem for non-cheaters.

Therefore it is thought that cultural groups developed powerful tools, such as punishment, to dissuade cheating in cooperative partnerships. Evolutionary psychologists also argue that people evolved what’s called a cheater detection ability to tell when someone is likely to be a cheater. This put cheaters at a disadvantage, especially in groups where punishment was strict.

This approach relied on the ability to trust others when it is safe to do so. Some people argue that trust is just a kind of cognitive shortcut: rather than making slow and deliberative decisions about whether someone is trustworthy, we look for a few signals, probably subconsciously, and decide.

We do this every day. When we walk by a restaurant and decide whether to stop in for lunch, we choose whether to trust that the people running it are selling what they advertise, whether their business is hygienic and whether the cost of a meal is fair. Trust is a part of daily life, at every level.

Yet this presents us with a problem. As I suggest in my research, the more complex society is, the easier it is for people to fake a proclivity for cooperation — whether that’s charging too much at a store or running a multi-national social media company ethically. And cheating while avoiding punishment is, evolutionarily speaking, still the best strategy a person can have.