We’ve heard for years that CEOs are more likely to be psychopaths than the general public, but what does the science really say?
December 25, 2024
By Rachel Smith
Is your CEO a psychopath? If you read and listen to popular media, you’ve surely heard the claim that there’s a much higher likelihood of psychopathy among CEOs than within the general population. Some say one in five CEOs are psychopaths, similar to the percentage you find in prisons.
Once you look at the research, however, things don’t quite add up. If you start really digging into the data and considering things like mean and standard deviation, that one in five claim completely falls apart. But nobody is going to read an article titled, “Your Boss Is Slightly More Likely to Have Psychopathic Traits Like Fearlessness Than the Average Person.”
Before we get into the research, let’s talk about psychopathy in general. The term was coined by Hervey (not a typo) M. Cleckley. In his book, The Mask of Sanity (also the name of my upcoming memoir), he identifies psychopathic features and actions. He did not intend for this list to be used for diagnosis, but that’s what happened. Kind of like how the body mass index (BMI) was originally created in 1832 to determine the “average man” within a population and never meant to be applied to an individual, yet here we are.
Psychopathy is not a diagnostic category in the DSM-5 (the big book of “recognized” mental disorders). The currently recognized assessment tool for psychopathy in clinical and forensic practice is Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-R). Psychologist Robert D. Hare based his tool on Cleckley’s original list and meant for it to be used within the criminal justice system. It includes characteristics like superficial charm, lack of remorse or guilt, and impulsivity. It’s not a perfect tool, and different countries consider different scores to be of concern.
It should also be noted that the psychopathic traits within the checklist vary a great deal. For example, “need for stimulation/prone to boredom” doesn’t strike me as something I should have the same level of concern about as “parasitic lifestyle.”
So, we know that the definition of psychopathy is a little fuzzy, but what does the research actually say? A Journal of Applied Psychology report provides a meta-analysis of the research on corporate leadership and psychopathy. Even the authors of the meta-analysis conveyed that one of their limitations was not enough quality research, writing that, “Despite the prevalence of academic literature speculating on the association between psychopathic tendencies and leadership, a relatively limited number of empirical studies were available.”
After reviewing the available research, the meta-analysts reported that, “Psychopathic tendencies were weakly positively linked to leadership emergence and weakly negatively linked to leadership effectiveness.” Leaders have slightly more psychopathic tendencies than non-leaders, and it makes them slightly less effective. Further, they found that, “Moderate levels of psychopathy were associated with higher levels of effectiveness than either very low or very high levels.” A medium number of psychopathic tendencies was better than none or a lot.
Since this was a meta-analysis, the studies didn’t all use the same measurement tool. In order to dig into actual numbers, let’s look at another study published in Frontiers in Psychology. According to the researchers, “Our study provides the first published evidence that psychopathic traits, especially Fearless Dominance, which is similar to boldness, are tied to an elevated probability of occupying leadership and management positions…” They go on to admit that the magnitude of the relationship was “modest.”
This particular study used a common self-reporting assessment tool with a minimum score of 56 and a maximum of 224. The mean score for those in leadership positions was 136.54. For those not in leadership positions, it was 131.58. But how do we know what that means? Without going into too much detail, based on the standard deviation (~23), both of these scores fall well within the typical range. In other words, the leaders can’t be labeled as psychopaths. That would be like if two students got an A on an exam, but one student had a score five points higher, so we started calling the lower-scoring student a failure.
Looking at the typical questions and checklists used when assessing psychopathy, I noticed that most of them described the exact opposite of my own personality. It got me thinking about what the opposite of a psychopath would be. Researchers from the University of British Columbia set out to define it and came up with the following:
“The opposite of psychopathy was defined by a tendency to experience guilt following private transgressions, by a tendency to experience shame following publicly exposed transgressions, by honesty, humility, cooperativeness, agreeableness, consideration, restraint, and conscientiousness.”
If you ask Reddit for the opposite of psychopathy, you tend to get things like “social anxiety,” “anti-social personality disorder,” and “someone with extreme empathy who would just have to curl up and cry.” There is likely some truth in all of these descriptions. My point in bringing it up is that you want a leader who is fearless, who is bold, and who doesn’t have to curl up and cry after board meetings.
When you look at most of the numbers behind the “Your CEO is a Psychopath” mania, they show people who are in the typical range. I’m guessing their slightly higher scores mean they are more decisive, more fearless, and not as bothered by what others think. Isn’t that exactly what we need in a CEO?
These traits can be balanced by others on the team—the empaths who are honest to a fault except, of course, if it will hurt someone’s feelings. Perhaps a writing team could step up to fill this space. Perhaps they already are. Now, if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to go curl up in a ball.
Merry Christmas and Happy Chanukah from all of us at Maestro Group. Reach out to mastery@maestrogroup.co for questions about engagements in 2025.
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