Jackson MacKenzie's Psychopath Free and the Trust Facet (A1)

A hand held out in warm light, half open and half guarded

Psychopath Free, by Jackson MacKenzie, is a survivor's guide for people recovering from emotionally abusive relationships with manipulative partners, written for the victim rather than about the abuser. Its hard lesson is about learning to read whom you can safely believe. In an article for mindbodygreen MacKenzie advises, "If you notice behavioral inconsistencies, find that other people in this person's life describe them in entirely different terms, or even just sense insincerity in their behavior, honor and explore that feeling." How readily you extend good faith to others, and how well you calibrate it, is, in the Big Five, one facet.

How you calibrate good faith is the Trust facet

That facet is Trust (A1), under Agreeableness, how much you assume others are honest and well-intentioned versus how guarded and skeptical you are. A high scorer gives people the benefit of the doubt; a low scorer stays wary and watches for signs. MacKenzie's book speaks to what happens when high, generous trust meets someone who exploits it, and to the survivor's task of rebuilding a trust that is neither naive nor permanently shut down. It is worth being clear that psychopathy and narcissism are not personality facets, and this is not a substitute for treatment; the trait here is the reader's own trust, a dimension everyone sits on.

What Psychopath Free adds to the trait is that trust can be recalibrated rather than simply lost. MacKenzie does not tell readers to trust no one; he teaches them to honor the wary signal they learned to override, to notice inconsistency and insincerity instead of explaining them away. That is the healthy middle of A1, discernment rather than either blind faith or blanket suspicion, and it draws on the careful weighing of Cautiousness (C6) as well, though A1 is specifically about the good faith you extend to people. His deeper hope, taken up in his later work, is that a survivor can learn to let trust back in without losing that hard-won discernment.

For a reader placing themselves, your A1 is a fair read on how readily you believe in others' good intentions and how easily you are taken in or kept guarded. High on it and Psychopath Free is a caution, a case for pairing your generosity with discernment. Low on it, especially after being hurt, and the book is a map back toward a trust that is safe to feel again. Where you sit on Trust tells you how much good faith you extend, and we take the facet apart in Trust (A1).

Read the book: Psychopath Free: Recovering from Emotionally Abusive Relationships With Narcissists, Sociopaths, and Other Toxic People by Jackson MacKenzie.

See Where You Fall

Where do you actually fall? The 30-facet OCEAN personality test takes about 15 minutes and scores all five domains and the facets underneath them. Take the test

Research Citations

MacKenzie, J. (2015). Psychopath free: Recovering from emotionally abusive relationships with narcissists, sociopaths, and other toxic people (Expanded ed.). Berkley Books.

Rotter, J. B. (1980). Interpersonal trust, trustworthiness, and gullibility. American Psychologist, 35(1), 1-7.

Johnson, J. A. (2014). Measuring thirty facets of the Five Factor Model with a 120-item public domain inventory: Development of the IPIP-NEO-120. Journal of Research in Personality, 51, 78-89.

Costa, P. T., & McCrae, R. R. (1992). Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) professional manual. Psychological Assessment Resources.