How a Psychopath Choose his Victims

Some years ago, a fleeting incident happened when I was walking along a crowded Boston avenue. I was feeling exhausted and exaggerated the feeling in my actions. I must've appeared vulnerable. My eyes caught the stare of a person standing in a door appraising me, not as a pretty woman, it was a new type of look. It appeared as if he was assessing whether he could get something from me.

Of late my journalistic job brought me in touch with a man who, when I first met him, appeared to be the very personification of an enthralling and well-heeled gentleman. He is a native conversationalist , handsome, strong, mentally curious, financially successful, and wittily self-deprecating. What few people learn about him is that he has left behind a path of emotional destruction, having spent decades abusing vulnerable persons for his own twisted purposes.

Psychopaths, or sociopaths as some prefer to call them, are well known figures in our culture. We're fascinated by their predatory relationship with the rest of humanity. Their chilling alien-ness makes them convenient villains in books, film, and television. When we encounter them in real life, we think: There really are monsters roaming the world. But as my own recent experience has taught me, the crimes of the psychopath are not merely a function of the perpetrator. We are not all equally likely to fall prey. Just as psychopaths are a special breed, so too are their victims.

Psychologists have long been known that the more psychopathic a person is, the more easily they can identify potential victims. Indeed, they can do so just by watching the way a person moves. In one study, test subjects watched videos of twelve individuals walking, shot from behind, and rated how easily they could be mugged. As it happened, some of the people in the videotapes really had been mugged and the most psychopathic of the subjects were able to tell which was which. Writes Mauro:

The completed the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale: Version III, which measures interpersonal and affective traits associated with psychopathy as well as intra-personal instability and antisocial traits. Overall results confirmed a strong positive correlation between psychopathy scores and accuracy of victim identification. This means that individuals that score higher for psychopathy are better at selecting victims.

And what was it about these people that made them seem vulnerable? A later study found that the men were picking up on whole suite of nonverbal cues, including the length of their stride, how they shifted their weight, and how high they lifted their feet. Taken together, these cues gave the psychopathic men a rough gauge of how confident their potential victims were. Body language that implies a lack of confidence read: socially submissive includes lack of eye contact, fidgeting of the hands and feet, and the avoidance of large gestures when shifting posture.

The researchers' findings confirmed my own suspicions regarding the dubious fellow I mentioned above. The women who wound up on the receiving end of his attentions were individuals who, in their own description, were not very worldly, experienced, or outgoing. They were psychologically vulnerable and hence ill-equipped to either resist this fellow's predations or to deal with them emotionally after they had occurred. In the aftermath, they are so traumatized that even speaking about their experiences is extremely painful. And so the psychopath continues on his way.

The fairly depressing result of all this is that, as much we may dislike the thought of "blaming the victim," people who are on the receiving end of crime often do mark themselves out, if only subliminally. I presume that we might look on the brilliant side and recognize we now have things we could do to make us less vulnerable. But unluckily there always going to weaker and more vulnerable people of society, the lambs on whom the wolves will focus their concentration.

I think it's a deep part of our mammalian heritage to claim ascendancy wherever we can. When we're young, we're still learning to do this in a nuanced, actual way, and our lack of skill can often manifest as bullying. Certainly, taken to extremes this cruelty could be pathological.