Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test: Two Facet Extremes

Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test follows him into the strange world of the Hare checklist, the twenty-item scale clinicians use to score psychopathy. He gets trained to spot it and comes away rattled by how common the low end is. As he says in his TED talk, "One in a hundred regular people is a psychopath." The checklist reads like an inventory of a person's worst traits, but each item is really the far edge of something the rest of us carry in smaller doses. In the Big Five, two of those edges have names.

The checklist's core is two facet extremes

The affective items, the lack of empathy, the coldness toward other people, describe the floor of Sympathy (A6), the Agreeableness facet for being moved by another person's pain. Most people sit somewhere in the warm middle; the psychopath profile is A6 near zero. The second piece is the famous fearlessness, and that is very low Anxiety (N1), the Neuroticism facet for how readily you feel threat. Where most people flush with nerves before a real risk, this profile stays flat. Research on the five-factor model lands in the same spot: psychopathy shows up best as extreme low Agreeableness, with the low-fear signature of Neuroticism attached.

What keeps Ronson's book honest, and what our model agrees with, is that these are dial positions and not a separate species of human. He spends the second half worried that the checklist turns people into monsters and stops anyone looking closer. His line about a semi-psychopath he meets is the one that lasts: "But the gray areas are where you find the complexity, it's where you find the humanity and it's where you find the truth." A trait sitting at its extreme is still a trait on the same scale you are on, which is why a score is a description and never a verdict on a whole person.

We map the colder end of personality across the model in the Dark Triad through OCEAN. The useful thing Ronson stumbles into is the dimensional view: there is no bright line where normal ends and psychopath begins, only a long slope of falling Sympathy and thinning fear, with almost everyone bunched up near the warm, wary top of it.

Read the book: The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson.

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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

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