Read The Amazing Adventures of Phoenix Jones: And the Less Amazing Adventures of Some Other Real-Life Superheroes: An eSpecial From Riverhead Books for Free Online Page A

astonishment. The psychopaths would remain comparatively serene.
    Bob knew we tend to jump a lot higher when startled if we’re on the edge of our seats anyway. If we’re watching a scary movie and someone makes an unexpected noise, we leap in terror. But if we’re engrossed by something, a crossword puzzle, say, and someone startles us, our leap is less pronounced. From this Bob deduced that when psychopaths see grotesque images of blown-apart faces, they aren’t horrified. They’re absorbed .
    It seemed from Bob’s experiments that psychopaths see blown-apart faces the same way we journalists see mysterious packages sent in the mail, or the same way we see Broadmoor patients who might or might not have faked madness—as fascinating puzzles to be solved.
    Thrilled by his findings, Bob sent his readings to Science magazine.
    “The editor returned them unpublished,” he said. “He wrote me a letter. I’ll never forget it. He wrote: ‘Frankly we found some of the brain wave patterns depicted in your paper very odd. Those EEGs couldn’t have come from real people.’”
    Bob paused and chuckled.
    “Couldn’t have come from real people,” he repeated.
    My guess was that Science magazine behaved coolly toward Bob because they believed him to be yet another maverick psychopath researcher running rampant in a Canadian mental institution in the late 1960s. Those places were the Wild West of psychopath study back then, with lots of big ideas and practically no regulation. It was inevitable that civil rights groups would eventually force a reining in of the experiments. And sure enough, disastrously for Bob, electric shocks were outlawed in the early 1970s.
    “Even mild ones,” he told me. He seemed annoyed by the legislation even now, years later. “We could still startle them with loud noises but they couldn’t be anywhere near as loud,” he said.
    Bob was forced to change tack. How could psychopaths be rooted out in a more hands-off way? Were there patterns of behavior? Would they involuntarily use giveaway turns of phrase, imperceptible to unsuspecting civilians? He devoured Hervey Cleckley’s seminal 1941 book, The Mask of Sanity . Cleckley was a Georgia-based psychiatrist whose analysis of psychopathic behavior—how they bury their psychosis beneath a veneer of engaging normalness—had come to influence the field. Bob began quietly scrutinizing his own psychopaths, looking out for linguistic clues.
    In 1975 he organized a conference on the subject.
    “I invited the top people in the world who might have something to say about psychopaths,” he said. “We ended up with eighty-five people. We took over a hotel in a ski resort near Saint Moritz called Les Arcs.”
    It began disastrously, Bob said, with one psychiatrist standing up and dramatically announcing to the group his contention that Bob was himself a psychopath. A ripple of shock passed through the conference hall.
    Bob stood. “Why do you believe that?” he asked.
    “You’re clearly impulsive,” replied the psychiatrist. “You can’t plan ahead. You invited me to participate as a speaker in this conference only a month ago.”
    “I invited you only a month ago because the person I wanted to come couldn’t come,” Bob said.
    “Oh, you’re cold-blooded and callous,” the psychiatrist said.
    “Did he mean it?” I asked Bob now.
    “Yeah, he meant it,” said Bob. “He was a nasty man.”
    The purpose of the Les Arcs conference was for the experts to pool their observations on the minutiae of psychopaths’ behavior, the verbal and nonverbal tics. Were there patterns? Did they involuntarily use giveaway turns of phrase? Their conclusions became the basis for his now famous twenty-point Hare PCL-R Checklist. Which was this:
Item 1: Glibness/superficial charm
Item 2: Grandiose sense of self-worth
Item 3: Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
Item 4: Pathological lying
Item 5: Conning/manipulative
Item 6: Lack of remorse or