When the average person hears the word “psychopath,” they might imagine Javier Bardem’s cold-blooded assassin from No Country For Old Men, or Heath Ledger’s portrayal of the Clown Prince of Gotham in The Dark Knight. The reality though, is far less insidious. The common consensus among experts is that psychopaths make up around 1% of the overall population, and large numbers effortlessly blend into and function in society. Your neighbor, your boss, or even your spouse could be entirely without empathy or conscience and you may never know it.
And while it’s true that those with anti-social personality disorders, like psychopathy, represent a disproportionate amount of those incarcerated in the U.S., simply being a psychopath is not an immediate indicator of criminality.
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