Here's a link to
the audio Podcast of the Interview with Scott Lilienfeld, broadcast April, 2014

This interview is broken into three parts.

Rob:Welcome
to the Rob Kall Bottom Up Radio Show, WNJC 1360 AM out of Washington Township
reaching Metro Philly and South Jersey, sponsored by opednews.com.

My guest tonight
is Scott Lilienfeld. He is a Professor of Psychology at Emory University. He's
the current President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy
and he's been doing research on psychopathy for over 20 years.

Welcome to the
show.

SL: Thanks
very much Rob. Great to be here.

Rob: So,
as I wrote to you, I discovered...became aware of things about psychopaths in
the last year really. Initially looking at sociopaths, I've learned that that's
probably not the right term to use. And where it's taken me is I've come to believe
that this is a huge problem and I use...I base that on an FBI report from a
couple of years ago that said that the cost of dealing with psychopaths is over
$500 billion dollars a year. And yet from what I understand, hardly anything is
spent on it....to understand it, to understand them, to understand what they do
to our culture, and how to deal with them. So am I right on those things that I
just mentioned so far?

SL: I
do think so. I think it's hard to quantify the cost...the estimates. I don't
know how valid they are -- I'll assume they're hard to quantify because
undoubtedly there are big economic costs, but there are also huge interpersonal
costs that probably can't be pinned down to numbers. These are people....often wreak
enormous havoc in relationships, friendships at work and so on, and I think
sometimes those costs are the more intangible costs or in some ways maybe even
more problematic than the financial costs although I don't want to minimize
those either. And you are right that the amount of federal money, at least,
that is poured into psychopathy research is typically much lower than it is for
other conditions like schizophrenia and autism, and depression, and of course
those are also very, very important conditions and I don't want to minimize
them -- we need to understand those -- but I very much agree with you that we
also want to understand and need to understand psychopathy very much. I suspect
that part of the reason why money does not go as...or flow as readily into
psychopathy research is two-fold: first, psychopaths tend not to be the most
sympathetic characters in the world. So there aren't many advocacy organizations
for psychopaths as one can imagine, whereas there are for people with other
disorders who often suffer. And also these are individuals that typically cause
problems for other people rather than for themselves. Of course they do wreak
havoc on their own lives eventually, but by and large what you typically see is
the problems are more inflicted on loved ones, on coworkers, on friends, and so
on. So therefore these are people who are...do not seem to be suffering, at
least overtly, from a mental illness as people with the other conditions I
mentioned are.

Rob: So
is there a budget...do you have an idea what the federal budget...
government...or whatever...spends on research on psychopaths in a given year?

SL: I
do not. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if they're good estimates so that
they're probably....it's certainly going to vary from year to year because
there's no specific money allotted to any particular disorder....that's going
to vary very much from year to year. So most of the grants that would be going
to psychopathy research would go through NIMH, National Institute of Mental
Health, and what I hear through the grapevine -- I've served on a few grant
committees for NIMH -- is that there are fewer grants approved for psychopathy
research through NIMH. And again, that's I think in part because the demand
from constituents and others for understanding this disorder are just not as
great as there for most other conditions.

Rob: Okay,
so let me just throw some numbers at you. Would you say it's $20 million a year
-- would that be high or low or unreasonable or...

SL: Yeah,
it's hard for me to guess. I would be...it's hard for me to say but that would
be on the high end, frankly from what I would guess. I could be wrong, but that
would below that.

Rob: That's
amazing. So, you know, as I wrote to you, I've actually...somebody said, 'What
are you on some kind of a mission?' And I decided I am. I'm on a mission to get
people to spend a lot more money to understand psychopaths. And it's not
because I'm so interested in curing psychopaths as it is I'm interested in
protecting people...just like...it's like you want to get people so they don't
have cancer, it's not like you want to understand cancer just for the sake of
understanding cancer. So that's where I am and that's where I've kind of gone
on this mission to understand it, and learn about it from all kinds of
different perspectives. So I've been very much looking forward to this
conversation. So I've got a batch of questions for you. We've got a limited
time...

SL: Sure,
sounds good.

Rob: Let
me start...I like to ask my guests...tell us a story based on your work, your
experience with psychopathy research and psychopaths.

SL: Yeah so, we...most
of our work actually is a bit different from some others in that we've done
some work with prisons and prisoners. Most of the work we do is a bit
unconventional in that most of our work actually looks at something called
'successful psychopathy.' So we probably don't have as many visits stories of
psychopaths behind bars because we're actually very interested in more the
intangibles -- looking at how psychopathy manifests itself in the real world
settings. So one interesting study we did, which is obviously not a personal
story but I think it may be of interest to some of your listeners, is some interesting
work we did which created a bit of a stir and also some controversy, which I
always think in science is good. We looked at psychopathic traits in the US
Presidents. We had historians rate the Presidents on a variety of different
personality measures and from those we were able to extract some pretty good
estimates of psychopathy scores. And what we found is that certain traits that
we believe -- there's some controversy about this so we can talk about that -- we
believe are relevant to psychopathy, that have been called 'fearless
dominance.' Fearless dominance consists of maybe the more adaptive traits of
psychopathy or at least in the short run may seem to be adaptive, like -- as you
can guess from the name -- being very socially dominant, being intimidating in
some cases. One extreme, being fearless, bold...in some cases, reckless...
Those kinds of traits actually seem to be a bit related to positive
functioning...among the US Presidents, seem to be related to better leadership.
In particularly in the case of some of the US Presidents, things like better
crisis management, better persuasiveness, better leadership skills, better
relationships with Congress. And that has made us wonder whether or not, at
least a sliver of those traits, could actually result in better functioning in
some case when they are by themselves.

What
interests us is, we don't know this yet -- something we're exploring -- is it
possible that those traits in isolation could actually...to better functioning?
But that when combined with some of the other traits of psychopathy, like
having poor impulse control, or being callous -- being unempathic, could
actually result in worse functioning, that it could actually be a bit of a
double edged sword in the domain of leadership and interpersonal behavior. So
that's one...not so much a story about a person, but's it's a story about a
research program and something we are continuing to follow up on. I have to
say, it's pretty controversial because we don't quite yet know the answers and
it's still really a largely unexplored area.

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