The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Jon Ronson:
Psychopath Test
Is it possible to spot a psychopath at 50 paces? Before he started work on his book The Psychopath Test, author and broadcaster Jon Ronson would most likely have thought not. But through his research he soon held a different view.
“If you’re with somebody who might be a psychopath and you have a certain arcane knowledge which both myself and my readers now have, you can actually identify one. Even when they’re trying to be normal, they really do give themselves away through linguistics. I think it’s extraordinary that the human brain can be that predictable.”
His book came out in 2011, but such is our fascination with those who appear to display psychopathic tendencies (from carnage-causing serial killers to powermad political leaders) that Ronson is back on the event circuit with this project.
He’ll be joined on the Dundee Rep stage by Mary Turner Thomson and Eleanor Longden, neither of whom appear in Ronson’s book but both have typical tales to tell from different aspects of the psychopathy world.
Ronson’s trigger for The Psychopath Test was his discovery of the Psychopathy Checklist, a 20-point assessment tool developed in the 1970s by Canadian psychologist Robert D Hare. Ronson used this checklist to assess the likes of notorious businessman Al Dunlap (nicknamed Chainsaw Al), ex-MI5 agent turned grand conspiracy theorist David Shayler, and Toto Constant, the founder of a Haitian death squad.
Naturally enough, the Hare analysis has been through the critical wringer and Ronson too can see its flaws. “It’s factually right, by and large, but there are a couple of caveats. One is that Hare is way too pejorative about psychopaths and that he portrays them as a separate species, almost not human.”
The Psychopath Test continued Ronson’s run of highly addictive, sometimes scary and often funny books about a variety of topics: he’s tackled the world of extremists in Them, explored psychic warfare within the US military in The Men Who Stare At Goats, and most recently dipped a toe into the mob mentality of social media in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. But The Psychopath Test is one of Ronson’s own particular favourites and the tome he keeps coming back to.
“I get emails from people when they get about halfway through the book saying that they think their boss or sister or wife is a psychopath.
“So this journey I take where I get drunk with power spotting psychopaths everywhere is a journey that the reader goes through. I also learned the seductive dangers of becoming a psychopath-spotter: it turned me a bit hard and callous.”