Many people already had the intuition that in order to be a high official in an organization one has to be made of a special wood , but there are always investigations on the subject that can come to surprise us.

There is one very recent one in particular that is totally shocking, as it indicates that among CEOs the proportion of psychopaths is around 21%, almost the same as can be found among inmates in US prisons.

An investigation into psychopaths at the controls

The study, conducted by a team of researchers led by Bond University forensic psychologist Nathan Brooks, used a group of 261 senior U.S. executives working today in companies in different sectors for its analysis. These senior profiles included CEOs, presidents and managing directors, which gave them the opportunity to study the psychological characteristics of the people with high decision-making power in the organizations.

It is in this group of people that it has been estimated that 1 out of every 5 presents the characteristics that define psychopathy , something that is even more curious considering that, when we talk about the number of psychopaths in the general population, the proportion drops to approximately 1%.

When success and power are everything

The Telegraph takes up the statements of Nathan Brooks on how it is possible that such a proportion of people with psychopathic traits have been detected among senior officials. According to him, this is due to a defect in the style of selection of personnel: the members of Human Resources tend to value work and academic experience more than the data relating to the personality of the candidates, which means that successful psychopaths can gain access to positions of high responsibility by manipulating, harming possible competitors in the search for promotions and making the events that occur in the company play in their favour.

However, there is another possible explanation for this fact: that the activities to be done when occupying a high position of responsibility in a large company fit well with the way of being of people with psychopathic traits. In a competitive market where self-interest is paramount, the little or no capacity to empathise and the ability to manipulate psychopaths can be an advantage that helps to access good salaries and to stay in important positions.

In the end, psychopaths, unlike sociopaths, are able to hide their disinterest in the norms and feelings of others and make these characteristics useful to them without getting into trouble, or they directly comply with the most basic social norms so as not to conflict with the law and make their lives more harmless than the rest of their fellow citizens. This makes it possible for them to gain the sympathy of others and build a positive public image.

There are precedents

Of course, these results can be legitimately questioned; in the end, in psychology a single study does not serve to find a universal and unquestionable truth , and it is necessary to contrast this information with other research.

However, this study, which will soon be published in the European Journal of Psychology , is not the first to suggest that among the groups that manage medium and large companies, the relative number of psychopaths is much greater than that found in the general population. In a research carried out in 2010, for example, the results pointed out that the amount of psychopaths that can be found among corporate positions is 4%, that is, 4 times more than what is normal in the total population.