Hare found school easy but had no clue what he wanted to do with his life. He grew up in a close-knit family in a working-class suburb of Calgary, Alberta. Hare’s path into psychopathy research happened by chance and circumstance. Hare pictured early in his career when he worked as the psychologist at the maximum-security British Columbia Penitentiary. This DSM classification endures today, yet while most psychopaths are diagnostically antisocial, the majority of people with antisocial personality disorder are not psychopaths. By the late ’60s, the bible of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), had replaced “psychopathic personality” with “antisocial personality disorder,” which still didn’t include hallmark psychopathic traits such as lack of empathy and callousness. Unfortunately, Cleckley’s rally call was largely ignored by the medical community. But that would start to change in the mid-20th century, when psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley published The Mask of Sanity, providing character portraits of psychopaths in his care at Georgia’s University Hospital.Ĭleckley called psychopaths “the forgotten man of psychiatry.” He understood that many were violent criminals, but even repeat offenders tended to do only short prison stints, or they were released from psychiatric hospitals because they were diagnostically sane, displaying “a perfect mask of genuine sanity, a flawless surface indicative in every respect of robust mental health.” The term was coined in the mid- to late 1800s from its Greek roots psykhe and pathos, meaning “sick mind” or “suffering soul.” In that era, the condition was typically considered a type of moral insanity. What makes these people tick? How can we safeguard society against them? Perhaps most importantly, how are these predators spawned? Hare, known as “Beagle Bob” among his inner circle for his tendency to follow a scent, has devoted more than 50 years to wrestling with these questions, starting at a time when we didn’t even have a succinct definition for psychopath. Finding that up to 4 percent of corporate staffers are psychopaths, he’s validating a research tool that HR departments and corporate staffers could eventually use to screen prospective and current employees, from mailroom to corner office. He’s also turned his gaze on corporations. Since his so-called retirement, Hare has spawned variations of the PCL-R to assess youth and children exhibiting early signs of psychopathy. But Hare remains an active researcher, developing new assessment tools, giving keynote addresses at conferences around the globe and holding workshops for forensic clinicians, prison staff and FBI profilers. Ostensibly, he retired in 2000, when he closed his renowned psychopathy research lab at the University of British Columbia (UBC). With his leather jacket, silver goatee and circumspect gaze, Hare looks more like a retired detective than an emeritus academic. It’s now the gold standard used by researchers, forensic clinicians and the justice system to identify the hallmark traits and behaviors that make psychopaths chillingly unique. We know so much about psychopaths because of The Hare - officially the Psychopathy Check List-Revised (PCL-R) - the test that Hare developed for researchers in 1980 and released publicly in 1991. With the advent of neuroscience, we know the brains of psychopaths are atypical, leading some experts to call psychopathy a neurodevelopmental disorder, akin to autism, and one that’s diagnosable even in small children. Yet they’re three times more likely to be released - and they get paroled almost three times faster - than their non-psychopathic counterparts. We know they’re difficult to treat using conventional methods, partly because they rarely seek out treatment. We know psychopaths make up 15 to 20 percent of the prison population, at least 70 percent of repeat violent offenders and the significant majority of serial killers and sex offenders. Hare’s oblique wariness of a reporter brandishing a voice recorder in a busy taphouse is perhaps no surprise, given his expertise with the subject and the research that suggests 1 in 100 people are psychopaths who tend to blend in, like cold-blooded chameleons.
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