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There are some things we take for granted in our social interactions with people. We assume that we see the world in much the same way, that we all know certain basic facts, that words mean the same to you as they mean to me. We assume that we have very similar ideas of right and wrong.

But for a small - but not so small - segment of the population, the story is very different. These people lack remorse and empathy and feel emotions only on the surface. In extreme cases, they may not care if you live or die. These people are called psychopaths. Some of them were violent criminals, murderers. But by no means all.

Professor Robert Hale is a criminal psychologist and founder of the PCL-R, a psychological test used to determine whether someone has a mental illness. For decades he studied and worked with the mentally ill in prisons and elsewhere. "It strikes me, as it did when I started 40 years ago, that there are likely to be people who are so emotionally disconnected that they can be manipulated and destroyed with as little fear as anyone else," he said.

Our understanding of the brain is still in its infancy, and mental disorders have only been recognized as character defects for decades. We are slowly learning to see mental illnesses like kidney disease or liver failure and developmental disabilities like autism as diseases in a similar way. Psychopathy challenges this view. "High-scoring psychopaths see the world very differently," Hale said. "It's like a color-blind person trying to understand red, but in this case 'red' is someone else's emotion."

In essence, the Hare test is simple: a list of 20 criteria, each scored as 0 (if it does not apply to the person), 1 (if it partially applies) or 2 (if it applies at all). The full list is: slick and shallow charm, inflated self-esteem, pathological lying, cunning/manipulative, lack of remorse, emotional shallowness, cruelty and lack of empathy, unwillingness to take responsibility for actions, prone to boredom, parasitic lifestyle, lack of realistic long-term goals, impulsivity, irresponsibility, lack of behavioral control, conduct problems in early life, juvenile delinquency, multi-pronged delinquency, history of "parole revocation" (ie parole violation), polygamy, and sex. A pure typical psychopath scores 40 points. A score of 30 or higher qualifies for a psychiatric diagnosis. "A psychiatrist friend once said, 'Bob, when I meet people who score 35 or 36, I know they're really different,'" Hale says.

But is psychosis a disorder - or a different way of being?

Continued at length with multiple videos;

https://kerris-pics.randvatar.com/article/psychopaths-how-do-you-recognize-one

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Fox.