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Cucumber sandwich?”
    Daniel Bartels at Columbia University and David Pizarro at Cornell couldn’t agree more—and they’ve got documentary evidence to prove it. Studies have shown that approximately 90 percent of people would refuse to push the stranger off the bridge, even though they know that if they could just overcome their natural moral squeamishness, the body count would be one-fifth as high. That, of course, leaves 10 percent unaccounted for: a less morally hygienic minority who, when push quite literally comes to shove, have little or no compunction about holding another person’s life in the balance. But who is this unscrupulous minority? Who is this 10 percent?
    To find out, Bartels and Pizarro presented the trolley problem to more than two hundred students, and got them to indicate on a four-point scale how much they were in favor of shoving the fat guy over the side—how “utilitarian” they were. Then, alongside the trolleyological question, the students also responded to a series of personalityitems specifically designed to measure resting psychopathy levels. These included statements such as “I like to see fistfights” and “The best way to handle people is to tell them what they want to hear” (agree/disagree on a scale of one to ten).
    Could the two constructs—psychopathy and utilitarianism—possibly be linked? Bartels and Pizarro wondered. The answer was a resounding yes. Their analysis revealed a significant correlation between a utilitarian approach to the trolley problem (push the fat guy off the bridge) and a predominantly psychopathic personality style. Which, as far as Robin Dunbar’s prediction goes, is pretty much on the money. But which, as far as the traditional take on utilitarianism goes, is somewhat problematic. In the grand scheme of things, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, the two nineteenth-century British philosophers credited with formalizing the theory of utilitarianism, are generally thought of as good guys.
    “The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation,” Bentham once famously articulated.
    Yet dig a little deeper and a trickier, quirkier, murkier picture emerges—one of ruthless selectivity and treacherous moral riptides. Crafting that legislation, for example, excavating those morals, will inevitably necessitate riding roughshod over someone else’s interests. Some group or cause, through the simple lottery of numbers, has to bite the bullet for the sake of the “greater good.” But who has got the balls to pull the trigger? Bartels and Pizarro may well have found a pattern in the lab. But what about in everyday life? Is this where the psychopath really comes into his own?
Dark Side of the Moon Landing
    The question of what it takes to succeed in a given profession, to deliver the goods and get the job done, is not all that difficult when it comes down to it. Alongside the dedicated skill set necessary to perform one’s specific duties, there exists, in law, in business, in whatever fieldof endeavor you care to mention, a selection of traits that code for high achievement.
    In 2005, Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon of the University of Surrey conducted a survey to find out precisely what it was that made business leaders tick. What, they wanted to know, were the key facets of personality that separated those who turn left when boarding an airplane from those who turn right?
    Board and Fritzon took three groups—business managers, psychiatric patients, and hospitalized criminals (both those who were psychopathic and those suffering from other psychiatric illnesses)—and compared how they fared on a psychological profiling test.
    Their analysis revealed that a number of psychopathic attributes were actually more common in business leaders than in so-called disturbed criminals—attributes such as superficial charm, egocentricity, persuasiveness, lack of empathy, independence, and focus—and that the main