In my continuing series on psychopaths, I'm going to explain how they control other individuals. In this article, I'll cover where and how psychopaths hunt. There is a fair bit of sex and violence in this text, plus lots of informed speculation, so if you don't like that sort of stuff, please skip it. This material comes from forums and websites, from psychopaths themselves, and from my own experience.
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The goal of controlling a target is to get "voluntarily" surrender of whatever resource the psychopath is after, be it time, money, knowledge, sex, or power. It's not only psychopaths that use such techniques. They crop up in businesses, institutions, cults, even in guides on seduction. Many people use some of these techniques some of the time. Psychopaths don't own a monopoly on being jerks. However such a move is always hostile, and to be defended against.
Controlling other people is easy, when you care nothing for them. If you're a psychopath, you already use these techniques as often and easily as breathing. For the rest of you, my goal is to explain how to recognize and defend against these techniques.
FoldUnfold
Table of Contents
Psychodar
The Blue Egg Principle
Opening Moves
Female-to-Male
Male-to-Female
Male-to-Male
Female-to-Female
Cutting the Family Ties
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
Defensive Moves
Men in Black
Conclusion
Psychodar
Given the intensity we feel in the psychopath's embrace, it's ironic how casually the psychopath scans dozens, hundreds of people in the time it takes a social human to focus properly on a single individual. It's a skill that Buddhist monks can develop after years of training. Forbes writes, "it appears that psychopaths don't need that meditative practice to be inordinately observant… of weaknesses in others."
Like a hacker scanning the Internet for vulnerable computers, or a lion scanning a herd of wildebeest for the young or sick, the psychopath scans crowds for vulnerable people. Two things above all show us as more vulnerable than average. One, is to be alone. Two, is to show fear and insecurity.
Many people believe that abuse victims often go on to become abusers. This perhaps comes from the powerful (and false) stories that psychopaths tell social workers of their own past. In reality, abuse victims are mostly silent witnesses to their own life of one trauma after another. Past abuse is a prime predictor of future abuse. Being raised in an abusive family, or having had an abusive employer, or having an abusive partner: these stamp us with fear and insecurity that flashes like a neon "Eat Me!" sign to passing psychopaths.
Fear of others shows in our body language, simple non-verbal cues such as lifting feet higher while walking, talking longer or shorter strides than average, twitching the hands and feet, and avoiding eye contact. This shows as submissive, nervous behaviour. Studies of criminal psychopaths show how psychopaths pick-up on such cues.
While criminally violent psychopaths are rare compared to the bulk of stealthier predators, the predator-prey model holds. Whether it's choosing who to mug for their wallet, who to con out of their life savings, or who to hit on in the bar, psychopaths are gifted at selecting victims rapidly and accurately.
The Blue Egg Principle
When a psychopath makes a move on someone, they are exploiting their target's instinctive responses. Every attack depends on triggering an instinctive response, usually to an extreme point. I call this the Blue Egg principle, and I'll explain how this works, and where that name comes from.
The triggers for instinctive responses are usually simple caricatures. For example, a spider that triggers screaming fear in some people is encoded in our genes as a dark dot with many legs, that moves in a specific way.
A spider cartoon that depicts the pneumatic spider walk correctly will trigger the same response as a real spider. Change the walk to something else, and the spider looks harmless. Exaggerate the walk, and the spider is scarier than before.
If you can isolate and amplify the trigger, you can amplify the response. There is no ceiling to this. Take sugar, the trigger that makes us instinctively like fruit. We respond instinctively to fructose, found naturally in low doses in fruit. The sweetness hits the same areas of the brain as a drug like cocaine, and is potentially as addictive. In nature, this drives us to eat as much fruit as we can find. In modern times, it drives us to eat hundreds of pounds of sugar a year, to the point of self-destruction.
This almost unlimited response to concentrated triggering has a name. Biologists call this a supernormal stimulus. Wikipedia says, "the idea is that the elicited behaviours evolved for the "normal" stimuli of the ancestor's natural environment, but the behaviours are now hijacked by the supernormal stimulus."
Supernormal stimuli are exploited in particular by predators and parasites, who use the trigger to force hosts into self-penalizing behaviour. For example, parasitic birds hijack the triggers that young chicks use to beg for food, such as open red mouths, exaggerating them so the parent bird feeds the parasitic chick before its own offspring. Deep-sea angler fish dangle a luminescent bait that shines in the dark, triggering prey to swim towards its toothy trap of a mouth.
Or, take the eggs of a songbird, naturally pale blue with dark-grey dots. This particular colour scheme triggers the songbird to sit on the eggs, as compared to sitting on random stones, or eggs of a different species. The parasitic cuckoo will lay eggs that are larger, and bluer, with darker dots. This causes the songbird to prefer the cuckoo's eggs over its own.
The arms race between parasite and host creates a natural balance. Overusing the trigger turns it against the parasite. If the cuckoo makes its eggs too attractive, vulnerable songbirds won't reproduce at all. Songbirds that respond poorly or even negatively to the trigger will get an advantage, and dominate. Killing your host is a losing strategy for a parasite, as it means only resistant hosts will reproduce.
Scientists, lacking the natural ethics of the parasite, can push the trigger as far as they like, with no evolutionary consequences. Give a songbird a ridiculously large fluorescent blue egg with dark black spots, and the bird will persistently and insanely try to sit on the egg. A supernormal stimulus can produce what looks like insane behaviour out of entirely logical evolved instincts.
Keep the songbird and its obsession with blue in mind as we explore how psychopaths manipulate their targets.
Opening Moves
Around 60-70% of men will accept a direct offer of sex from an attractive woman in the street, no matter how implausible and indeed dangerous such an offer might be. You might say, the risk to men from casual sex is low, and yet that is not true. Apart from disease and getting caught in a long relationship with the wrong person, there is the much higher risk that the whole thing is a set-up for one or other form of mugging.
And yet most of the men say "sure!" How can a woman's charm be such an effective bait? Are men just horny and foolish? Are women smarter? Well, perhaps, yet the answer is more subtle than that. It also turns out that women are no more resistant than men. It is just a matter of using different bait.
As we answer these questions, it emerges that gender plays a key role in the psychopath's opening moves. That is, there are four distinct patterns: female-to-male, male-to-female, male-to-male, and female-to-female. Many of our social instincts tend towards masculine and feminine poles, like our bodies. Sex differentiation in body and mind is driven by bursts of testosterone during development, be it as foetus, child, or young adult. When I say "male", this includes women with male-typical instincts, and when I say "female", it includes men with female-typical instincts.
Female-to-Male
Psychopaths prefer to hunt in very specific contexts. It must be a place or event with a fresh supply of strangers whom nonetheless have some reason to be there, to exploit. There must be potential benefits for the hunter. There needs to be cover so victims won't talk. Ideally, the context tolerates significant imbalances of power, so that the psychopath can influence and control, over the long term.
The dating scene is the obvious opportunity. Bars, night clubs, and dating websites are ideal for psychopaths of both genders. The pop culture of dating has dealt with psychopaths for a while, under the euphemism "narcissist". On one website Susan Walsh discusses female narcissism and lists the traits of such a person.
First, physical appearance:
Dresses provocatively, flaunting sexually suggestive body parts; focuses attention on make-up and hair, even for the most mundane tasks or events; overly confident about her looks; places high value on brand names, and feels entitled to wear “the best”; frequently purchases new clothing, and does not distinguish between wants and needs; is more likely to have plastic surgery, most commonly breast augmentation; enjoys being photographed, and often asks others to snap her picture; enthusiastically shares the best pics of herself on social media sites.
Then, personality and character:
Insists on being the centre of attention, often the most charming person in the room; often seeks favourable treatment, and automatic compliance; believes she is special; is highly materialistic; is prone to envy, though she presents as supremely confident; seeks opportunities to undermine others; is convinced that others are envious and jealous of her; lacks empathy, and even common courtesy at times; puts others down, including you; does not hesitate to exploit others; is very competitive; believes that she is intellectually superior; blames others for problems; displays a haughty attitude when she lets her guard down or is confronted; is dishonest and often lies to get what she wants; is "psycho" engages in risky behaviours, has an addictive personality, and is prone to aggressive behaviour when rejected; is unpredictable in her moods and actions.
This is a 95% accurate description of the various female psychopaths I know or have known. Interestingly the author says, "Based on the women of all ages I have known in my life, I think 10% is an accurate estimate of the number of narcissists in the female population."
The physical appearance is aimed directly at the male biology, and can be shockingly effective. If success in the street is around 60-70%, then in a dating setting, with men actively seeking casual sex, the figure will rapidly approach 100%.
Humans respond like any lifeforms to triggers and supernormal stimuli. Women looking to attract men invest in amplifying the relevant triggers. Female psychopaths spend significantly more effort, and are able to fake triggers that social-minded women cannot. Here is the list of triggers, based on about four decades of personal research:
The waist-to-hip ratio, which has an ideal that swings between 0.6 and 0.8 depending on the culture. Narrow waist signals youth, and wide hips signal fertility. The WHR is immediately visible and difficult to fake, at least before the invention of corsets and padding. With surgery, a woman can have buttock implants, and stomach reduction. Both correlate with psychopathy, I would guess.
The shape and size of breasts. There is much debate about the evolutionary purpose of female breasts. My own belief is that they signal youth and availability, both of which are attractive to men. Before modern times, babies were often breastfed for two to three years. The flow of milk and stretching that happens during breast feeding affects the fat deposits and connective tissue. So the breasts show, immediately, whether a woman has already had babies or not.
The appearance of youth, which primarily means smooth facial skin and long hair. The smoother the skin, the more strongly the female features — eyes, eyebrows, lips — shine through. So, women can hide blemishes with make-up, and exaggerate the shape of the eyes, the lips, and the eyebrows. Striking features on a smooth, unblemished skin are a trigger.
The appearance of sexual availability and desire, that is, telling a man, "I desired you, and I am willing to have sex with you". There are at least two triggers here. One is cosmetic, colouring the lips and cheeks red to mimic the signs of female orgasm (flushed lips and glowing face). The other is body language: sustained eye contact, moving closer to the man, wearing revealing clothing, arm touching, hair play, opening the lips, and generally moving one's body as if the two are in bed. This is impossible for social women to do, except as a game, in very safe circumstances. The fear of rejection is just too high. Psychopaths have no such fear, so can and do take this act to extremes.
The appearance of novelty, aka the Coolidge effect. This phenomenon drives males to respond more strongly to new receptive sexual partners than existing ones. Coolidge and cocaine, the two reasons the porn industry is always looking for "fresh" young starlets. How does a female psychopath, with no fear of ridicule, look different every few weeks? She changes her hair. New hair means a new face, and stronger responses in men who already know the woman.
And by default, males respond to such supernormal stimuli as the songbird does, sitting on top of a football-sized super-blue egg. That is, they stubbornly and self-destructively try to initiate sexual relations with the woman, no matter how poorly she acts towards them or others. Hence also the general male fascination with pornography, with its endless parade of sexually tractable females, ideally yet not necessarily on the young side. Porn site statistics show that the most popular categories globally are "teen" and "milf", and equivalents.
I say "by default" because all parasites walk a fine line when they use supernormal stimuli. Take it too far, and the act becomes a self-defeating red flag. When too many women in a group exhibit the same triggers, and men go numb and stop responding to individual women, who then seem relatively plain. This is known as the "Cheerleader Effect". However, once a psychopath can fake sincerity, they've got it made.
Obviously, not every woman who seduces a man is a psychopath. Most of the time, it is sincere attraction and entirely healthy. Female psychopaths however use their sexuality to control the narrative. That is, they provoke the off-the-charts response on the one hand, and they hold back on the other. The promise is, "I am the ultimate woman and I am yours", and the reality is, "you will suffer and pay and never get that first thrill, ever again." If this sounds like drug addiction, that is because it is the same mechanism. A sexual relationship with a psychopath is as awesome and healthy as life on cocaine or alcohol.
As you would expect, psychopaths depend most on triggers they can fake or exaggerate with focussed effort. Thus female psychopaths may be quite plain, and yet extraordinarily attractive when they do their dance of veils. One could argue, and I am prepared to, that the evolution of authentic female-to-male triggers (full breasts, wide hips, long hair, smooth skin) is driven by competition with cheats. In other words, psychopaths invented the Internet. Or at least, were indirectly responsible for porn.
Male-to-Female
Women are of course entirely different. When approached in the street and offered sex by decent-looking strangers, precisely 0% of women accepted. 34% slapped the man, and 20% had to stop their boyfriends beating the man up. Yet it's really only a question of context. Given the right triggers, the majority of women will respond, and if the triggers are amplified, they will respond dramatically and self-destructively, just like the songbirds and men.
If full breasts, a fractional WHR, and a flagrant display of willing availability are female-to-male triggers, what are the corresponding male-to-female triggers? It is somewhat of an age-old mystery, though I believe the answer is obvious once you see it.
Biology and empirical research rule out a number of obvious possibilities. Availability and willingness are not triggers. Trust me, I've checked that exhaustively, like every other heterosexual male. "Are you sure?" "Yes, I am sure". Youth is not a trigger. Appearance is a significant criteria, yet only when combined with other traits such as confidence. Alone, male appearance is not a trigger to females. Social women do not find pretty yet insecure men to be attractive, though female psychopaths love playing with such men.
If we look at the traits that women say they prefer in men, then top of the list is "is not a psychopath," expressed in various ways like, "has a sense of humour", "is kind to babies and strangers," and "is empathic." These are still not triggers, though. Again, the experience of the 96% of men who are not psychopaths can vouch for this.
if we keep asking, women start to talk about "ambition" and "confidence" and then silly things like "has nice socks", "is a good listener", "has a nice ass", "has nice hair", and so on. These may be sincere, yet they are still not triggers. Otherwise, shops would sell padded jeans for men. And how many wig shops have you seen lately? I'll come back to hair in a moment.
The answer is hidden in plain sight. The triggers that drive woman wild are the same ones men spend their lives fighting to accumulate or hold on to. Only a quirky minority of men seek youthful looks, padded jeans, or false hair. The vast majority seek power and its transient proxy, money. Convincing displays of above-average power by men will drive most women to respond, compulsively. The evolutionary rationale is simple: the wives of powerful men have more grandchildren than the wives of weaker men. 1% of the planet are direct descendants of Genghis Khan, and of his wife.
If a visibly powerful man stopped random women in the street and asked, if not for sex, then for a phone number and a discrete date, he'd get the same 60-70% success rate as the pretty woman offering herself to passing men. And if he was in a night club, his success rate would rise much higher.
Powerful men have more sexual partners than average, historically and still today. The economics of polygamy are simple for women too: it's better (in terms of grandchildren, if not companionship) to be the Nth wife of a powerful and wealthy man than the first and only wife of a poor man.
How does a man project the "I am powerful" trigger to a woman, and how do psychopaths exaggerate these triggers? Power is always relative, so a male displays power in his own body language and behaviour towards others. That could be the observing female, it could be one or more other men, or it could be another woman.
We know that human males self-organize into hierarchies, and that in any group of men, there will be a dominant alpha male. Dominant body language is well studied. It is partly about appearing physically larger, which stems from our ape ancestry, where dominance was primarily a matter of being the largest and strongest male in the group. And it is partly about acting superior to others:
To appear larger, a man stands straight, lifts his chin, stands with feet further apart. He takes more space than necessary, using hand gestures, elbows out.
To act superior, a man controls the conversation, maintains eye contact or ignores others entirely, smiles and moves his head less, and generally treats social cues as unimportant.
If you look at the traits of a male narcissist, they add up to, "acts much more important than he really is." In other words, the male psychopath fakes the triggers of dominance.
Do women look for and respond to all these different triggers? It's possible, though I suspect much of this behaviour comes across simply as "insensitive," which is code for "potential psychopath."
What we've seen from other triggers is that they are usually simple and minimalistic. Women need to know that a man's display of dominance is authentic. I see two specific triggers that prove male power to a watching woman. First, that there are other men who accept the dominance, and act submissively towards the man in question. Most simply, they are quiet while he talks. Second, that when his dominance is challenged, he can assert himself. The "winner gets the girl" story is a classic trope.
So male power does not flow from a single individual, no matter how large or strong or rich. Rather, it flows from groups of men. I've written before about the different ways women and men communicate, the two major human protocols. The male protocol is essentially for building power structures, while the female protocol is for building knowledge networks.
Male psychopaths excel in the male protocol, and can dominate groups of men with their mix of lies, promises, and confidence. The top profession for male psychopaths, topping even lawyer and priest, is CEO. A large predatory business is indistinguishable from a cult. While women tend to distrust solitary males, men do not, especially when a solitary male approaches a group. So male psychopaths will often work their magic first on other men, and then project the accumulated power onto women.
This can be a blindingly fast process. Women assume that relationships take time to build, and are based on cynical accounting of past facts. The male protocol however, allows for instant relationships based only on future possibilities. "Follow me! I promise you gold!" So women will typically over-value the relationships they see between men, just as men will discount and dismiss women's relationships.
Which gives us a classic hunting pattern for male psychopaths. First, conquer a group of males with a smile, utter confidence, and implied promises of future profit. This can take just a few minutes. Second, present this temporary ersatz structure to women, show dominance over the assembled men, and watch as the women respond instinctively by offering their sexuality, just as the men would respond to inflated female bosoms and welcoming smiles.
Male-to-Male
Humans seem to organize in two specific, and contrasting ways. One is the power pyramid, and other is the living system. In a power pyramid, decisions and planning move down, and profits move up. It is a clear hierarchy where your position is defined by, and defines, your socio-economic status. In a living system the pieces trade knowledge, resources, or work, which flow through the system. Living systems have no power structure, no identifiable owners or central authority, and no central decision making or planning.
In the software industry, we see this dichotomy of power pyramids versus living systems all the time. We are learning, slowly and painfully, that living systems are the way to make really large-scale systems. In the meantime, the rapid experimentation and many failures of software teams and projects teaches us a lot about real world systems.
Power pyramids seem good at one thing: getting clients, suppliers, and workers to give more for less. Indeed, they act like parasites. If you turn a power pyramid upside down, it looks like a feeding funnel, with the executives and shareholders at the bottom, sucking the life out of the rest of the pyramid.
It takes coercion to keep people sitting still while you feed off them. Power pyramids do this using a mix of force (such as demanding physical presence), bribes (such as monthly salary and bonuses) and threats (conform, or else). As well as this constant, low-level internal violence, power pyramids project violence against external threats. Their use of force to remove competitors and achieve their goals is pragmatic, and remorseless.
I've never seen a business apologize for beating a competitor, nor a country apologize for winning a war.
We see power pyramids most often in business, in government, and religion. When the three mix together, and this happens when society is too weak to resist, we get fascism and genocides. Usually power pyramids are less destructive, and simply negligent. When power pyramids produce goods for sale, what they make is generally poor quality and over-priced, if not actually toxic. They don't listen to the market. Instead they try to force people to accept these goods, with heavy advertising. You could say power pyramids lack the capacity for empathy.
Ironically, power pyramids are constantly marketing themselves, as "ethical", "positive", "good", "fun", and so on. They spend billions on branding and image, developing narratives to sell their products. Coke. Microsoft. Kraft. Heinz, USA! Look closer, and you see that they communicate in lies, and their core values are profits and survival, no more or less.
Despite this focus on survival, power pyramids are terrible at learning and adapting to change. Over time they depend more and more on lies and force, as the world changes around them. They become fragile, and prone to rapid, catastrophic collapse. Nokia, Blackberry, the USSR.
Contrast this to living systems. These are unobtrusive, almost invisible. They have no marketing departments, no boards, no CEOs. They consist of thousands, even millions, of independent actors who self-organize in the most interesting areas. Overall, living systems are much more profitable than power pyramids. Those profits are, however, widely distributed and hard to measure.
Living systems are powerful and we depend on them utterly. They feed our cities and keep our shops filled with goods. Indeed, a city is a living system, or it is a prison. An economy is a living system, or it is a failure. Every exchange in a living system depends on pre-agreed contracts. Living systems continuously detect and punish cheats and liars, using the simple mechanism of free choice.
Living systems are inherently ethical, that is, they tend to treat discrimination and cheating as problems to solve. As Living Systems are constantly experimenting, promoting successes, and eliminating failures, they are resilient and can survive indefinitely, until broken by a catastrophic external event. Cities survive empires, unless razed to the ground.
There is a long, and constant fight between power pyramids and living systems. It has echoes of the arms race between psychopathic and eusocial humans, and indeed I believe these two models of organization represent the same dichotomy. Once you start to see large businesses, religions, and certain flavours of government as psychopathic, much becomes clear.
A friend with decades of work experience, interviewing for a job with a large firm, was puzzled by the humiliation of having to prove herself by doing simple things. Surely, she said, they can just look at my work. It is all on-line. We reflected on this, and I postulated: humiliation is a key goal of such interviews. If you accept that, you will accept much worse, in return for that juicy pay check. Conformity is a test.
I said that male psychopaths wield the illusion of power just as female psychopaths wield the illusion of sexuality. Power is much more rewarding than money. Power gets favours that money can never buy. The road to power is paved with crushed souls. So power pyramids are natural homes for, and are often the creation of, male psychopaths.
While power pyramids express a particular male perspective, living systems express the duality of human gender. One of the tricks that propelled humans to success half a million years ago was our division of labour, allowing us to specialize and trade within the family and village. Obviously we're not the only animal to have evolved this. However, previous versions of humanity appear to be generalists. Neanderthal skeletons show hunting injuries, for instance, in both males and females.
Specialization and trade isn't just a successful pattern within a family or village. It is the core mechanism for a living system. As humans developed the necessary social instincts, we were also able to build larger and larger living systems, and thus spread risks and benefits wider and wider. This mutual insurance is the key to long-term human survival.
I believe the male mind is more vulnerable to being convinced to join power pyramids than is the female mind. As with all out instincts we have to look to history. Human men formed groups to hunt, a high-risk high-benefit activity in which older men share their knowledge, and younger men share their physical abilities and time. For this to work, younger men must accept the statement "follow me!" coming from an older man.
The bigger the promise, the bigger the response. It does not have to be logical or sane. Indeed, insane propositions can be more attractive than sane ones. If I say, "follow me, if we open a bakery and work 12 hours a day, we could make a modest income," that creates less response than, "follow me, I know some VCs and they'll invest millions in your idea".
Here are the "follow me!" triggers that an outsider can use to control a group of men:
Making a solitary approach. This proves confidence, and defuses the group's natural defence reaction.
Showing dominant body language, particularly towards the existing dominant male.
Appearing to be older and wiser, which triggers the "wise old man" response in younger males.
Making promises of potential wins, as large and unlikely as possible. The crazier, the better.
Invoking a common enemy, which gives the group focus and energy that the outsider can direct.
Demanding action and proposing a plan, which now puts the outsider in charge.
Just as not every pretty, flirtatious woman is a psychopath, not every man who uses these techniques is a psychopath. It really depends on whether the outcome is beneficial for the group, or not. Some men really are natural leaders and can rally groups around a necessary goal or outcome. Men respond instantly to these triggers, if they respond at all. In evolutionary terms, it makes no sense to respond slowly. If the triggers work at all, the biological imperative is to be the first to respond.
And once the response kicks in, it grows without limit as the triggers are amplified. It is like the male response to available female sexuality. The effect calms down after a while, yet that supernormal stimulus shock leaves an imprint that lasts for years.
Psychopaths inevitably take the group towards self-destruction, while emptying the coffers. Used by a psychopath, "follow me!" can hook a young man into an organization he has no control over, and feels he cannot abandon without betraying his mates. I've seen this used hundreds of times, often with catastrophic costs to the young men involved. It causes a form of burnout — utter exhaustion, disgust and depression — that today we can recognize as the classic PTSD of a psychopathic relationship.
Let's make some corollaries to the theories I explained in this section:
Women are under-represented in power pyramids for reasons that correlate with, yet aren't caused by, sexism. Women do not generally respond to the "follow me!" triggers at all. Or, put another way, women do not generally speak the male protocols. Women tend to demand more accounting in relationships, and punish cheats faster.
Female psychopaths in general disdain power in the male sense, and they lack the dark talents for building and succeeding in power pyramids. They will however target powerful men, and most men who succeed in power pyramids are not psychopaths.
Most people fear and distrust power pyramids for good reasons, as they make billions of people miserable. However that does not mean all organizations are toxic, nor that free market economics are to blame. In fact free market economics underlie living systems, and are the enemy of power pyramids.
Male age mimicry is thing. The benefits of blue-egging other males are real and persistent, and express themselves in male appearance and behaviour. Most visibly, some younger men mimic the triggers of maturity (grey hair) and old age (baldness). I'd assume it only works when combined with above average intelligence.
Female-to-Female
To be clear, this is not a porn category. Female psychopaths hunt and control other women, and the question is "how", not "whether". Like the male-to-male pattern, it can be hard to see, almost cryptic. Our blindness to gender-biased specialities makes this research harder than it should be.
I've asserted that the archetypical male structure is a power pyramid, while the archetypical female structure is a knowledge network. Knowledge networks are living systems, unmapped and often unseen, yet hugely important. We may see an economy as a set of large businesses, which are visible and loud and male-dominated, and politically powerful. Yet inside, and around, and between these male structures there exist huge, invisible networks of female relationships.
Some may dismiss female relationships as "social", or "personal", and yet they carry vital knowledge about people and events, and they above all form a robust defence against both male and female psychopaths that I'll explain in a moment. I think that in order to understand how female psychopaths hunt other women, we have to decode these female protocols, and see how to cheat them.
The female protocol is visible (to the observer) as an exchange between exactly two women who already met at least once. Contrast that to the male "follow me!" protocol that I described, which is between one man and a group of men that he mostly does not already know. The two women trade information about the world: about people, current events, and stories. The exchange lasts long enough for both women to get the information they're looking for, and then it ends.
It is quite easy to see. Two women who know each other and have been apart for some time will sit apart, and chat. They will talk to and fro, with neither woman dominant nor submissive. After a period of talking, they will end, and defocus from each other, and switch attention back to the rest of the world. It is tempting to call this a "gossip protocol" yet it would be more accurate to call it a "grooming protocol". It is intimate, yet non-sexual, and as far as I can see, it is the human version of the grooming behaviour that other primates engage in.
Men also use a grooming protocol to deepen their relationships. However it is thin compared to the female version. As the producers of day time soaps know, it is the female mind that obsessively follows stories of social intrigue. The male grooming protocol is not much more than, "hi, everything good?" followed by hanging out in some neutral setting.
The female grooming protocol is central to a woman's identity and power. A powerful woman has many relationships with other women and gets important and secret knowledge early. A weak woman is isolated, has few relationships, and her knowledge of the social world is inaccurate, out of date, widely known, or incomplete.
The grooming protocol has two main functions, which work at the same time. One is to spread knowledge accurately through human society. Most of the content of a discussion is disposable, yet it serves to prove the credentials of the parties. Grooming, in any animal, is about establishing trust through the mutual exchange of small favours over time.
The other function is to detect and punish cheats, that is, psychopaths of both genders. When a woman reports that her partner cheated on her, this information moves rapidly through the network. Since women are unlikely to boast of their own affairs to other women, the main way to collect such data is from men. Thus platonic friendships with men can be valuable to a woman.
A female psychopath will systematically lie and exaggerate when grooming, to ensure she is always dominant in that relationship. This need to always control the narrative is a red flag, more visible than the low quality of the data she is providing. She will be the victim, hurt and needing affection. She will report the latest horrendous acts of her male partner. She will beg for help and support. She will flatter and charm.
These appear to be the key triggers:
Playing the victim, typically of a male partner. The crimes are typically infidelity, violence, and theft. "He beat me and the kids, took the family money, and spent it on whores," is a classic story.
Flattering the listener with compliments, attention to birthdays and personal events, and excessive amounts of grooming. Female psychopaths are always talking to someone, often other women.
Providing juicy secrets about others. These are always negative, intimate, and usually invented.
Utter, palpable sincerity that contradicts the lies. All psychopaths seem to do this: create and project fake realities with full conviction and zero stress response.
The combination of lies and fake sincerity is an interesting one. We're mostly not stupid, and we usually know when something is unlikely. However, when the speaker shows no stress response, and projects total sincerity, we weigh the two possibilities, and usually come to the conclusion "It's weird, yet I believe her/him." And the effect is to make the story feel more true than before.
In other words, the lie is half of the trigger, and this is why psychopaths lie all the time, even about things that do not matter, and even when it gets them into trouble. The bigger the lie, the stronger the response in the listener (if the trigger kicks in at all, as always).
How do other women respond to such triggers? They open up, provide all their secrets, and treat the psychopath as if she was an absolutely reliable best-friend-forever. They introduce her to other friends, and engage her in social activities. Only many years later, when they have gotten enough contradictory information from other sources, do they start to question things. Then they cut the relationship and often, from shame, simply never speak of that person ever again.
Cutting the Family Ties
Adults are most likely to meet psychopaths when dating, and in work. There are two other significant areas where people are at risk. One is young people who are separated from their family by distance or conflict. The second is aged people, also separated from their family.
A young person who is alone and far from home presents an easy, almost inevitable target. It's not just runaways, it's also young people from poorer regions promised lucrative work, then pushed into crypto-slavery, prostitution, or crime.
The young person desperately wants to get back to their parents. So, the psychopath starts by mimicking a parent, providing food and shelter, a room, clothes, possessions. Once the target has settled in, the pressure starts to mount. It can happen slowly, or in a single day. The outcome is the same: full control over the young person, trapped by their own fear, mistrust of the outside world, and ignorance.
If the psychopath doesn't want to hang around bus stations, they can go into the import business. Let me explain how to get a real fake passport. You find someone with the desired citizenship, and roughly the same ethnic background. You provide a photo of the real package, and a request for a new passport is made, providing all the necessary details, and the fake photo. You'd think this was easy to check, yet no. The passport arrives, and is good for travel.
In 2006, a BBC reporter used 20 fake and stolen passports to travel around Europe, and even enter the UK, twice. The cost? From a few hundred to a few thousand Euro, depending on the country of origin.
Of course in most cases it isn't BBC reporters getting past border security. It's young men and women leaving their families and homes behind, often forever, for the promise of a better future.
Like younger people far from family, aged people who live alone in their homes, or in retirement homes, are easy targets for psychopaths. Hospital nursing is generally not an attractive career for psychopaths, as it involves caring for people, hard work for low pay. However, private nursing is extremely attractive. The scenario is simple and obvious, if you have no compassion for others.
First you get a nurses degree, spending the least time and effort possible to pass. Then you specialize in retirement homes to build up your work experience. Then you network your way into private health care for the aged, looking after older people in their homes. The elegance of this scheme is that private care at home is a great filter. If you are poor, your family must look after you. If you are middle class, you will pay for collective care in a home. If you are wealthy, you will stay at home and a nursing staff will come to you.
The great thing about old people is how they love to talk. The psychopath offers themselves as substitute children, loyal and caring. They promise to always be there, in stark contrast to the ungrateful offspring. The psychopath takes the triggers — submission and presence — and amplifies them until their patient loses all sense of self-control.
Once hooked, the target of such affection will literally do anything to avoid losing it. If that means dispossessing their children, changing their will, making large gifts, or replacing the entire nursing staff with friends of the psychopath, so be it.
I'm not suggesting psychopaths go around murdering their aged patients for fun. However, there are most obviously massive economic incentives to ending peoples' lives, in some cases. And a trained nurse knows many invisible ways to deal death to a perhaps elderly person without leaving any trace.
I'm not sure what the answer is for these two problem areas. Ignoring the issues and hoping they will solve themselves is not the right approach. The State intervenes only when there is evidence of criminal activity. I think, given the vulnerability of these two groups, that cheap preventative measures such as education campaigns would be worthwhile.
Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?
There is a final context where psychopaths are most active, and that is within the family itself. While family life does not bring frequent strangers, it makes up for that with cover. Families tolerate significant imbalances of power, and a psychopath can do extraordinary damage to a family from the inside, and still be invisible to outsiders.
We can break this into two main cases. In the minority case, the psychopath is already in control of the family and works to keep and extend that power. In the majority case, the family is not… infected… and a psychopath is trying to enter and gain control. The first case is about stealing any newcomer's resources. The second is about stealing the resources of a whole group.
I've witnessed the damage that a psychopath can do to a family, and it is extreme. There is the personal damage, in terms of trauma and loss of power. And there is the collective damage, as the psychopath sets about diverting the family's resources — property and money — towards their own pockets. When you see families fractured by dispute, sometimes down generations, you can reasonably conclude there was a psychopath at work.
A psychopath that is not born into a family can enter either through the front door, or via the back window. Let's take union first. The reaction of parents to a new boyfriend or girlfriend is often so extreme that it forms the basis for popular caricature. Yet given the risk that a newcomer is a psychopath, suspicion and hostility are normal. Anything else would be negligent. It is not about being controlling, though it may look like that.
Since it is hard for men to understand women's real motivations and character, and vice versa, new boyfriends have to win the father's approval, and new girlfriends must be accepted by the mother. The classic pattern starts with an interrogation and checking of credentials, then either conditional approval or rejection, followed by a period of probation typically lasting about a year, followed by celebration.
This drama plays out over and over, in real life and in popular culture. On the one hand we have the parents and their desire to see their daughter or son happy, balanced against their distrust of the newcomer. On the other hand we have youth and its demands for independence and self-definition. These allow for a wide range of characters and plot points.
Take for example the much-maligned mother-in-law, the butt of jokes in every human society. Few married men like their mother-in-laws. It is hard to forgive someone who starts a relationship by asking more or less openly, "why are you here and how can you prove you're not a psychopath?" Ironically, it's the parent who does not show such concern that should worry the young man or woman approaching a family.
When a family is divided by divorce, it presents a much easier target for predators. Specifically, if the father is absent, it is easier for male psychopaths. And where the mother is absent, it is easier for female psychopaths. In some cases, divorce spreads the power and assets, so while post-divorce families are easier targets for psychopaths, they are often also less attractive.
And on the opposite end of the spectrum, very strong families in countries with weak states present lucrative targets for psychopaths. Strong families develop a culture of arranged marriages, with paranoid vetting of candidates, typically handled by the mothers. One bad choice can destroy generations of accumulated family wealth.
Here are some corollaries to this thesis. One, the rate of arranged marriages in any given society will correlate to the amount of gold held by private individuals. This is because stronger families emerge in weaker states, which means less trustworthy banks and monetary systems, which usually means gold. Two, the rate of arranged marriages will correlate with the social status of the marriage. The higher the status, the more likely the marriage will be arranged.
After union, the next way into a family's coffers is by seduction. Unlike most of the psychopath's dealings, such affairs make the headlines, and therefore are common knowledge. Whether it is a young man dining with a widow, or a young woman dating a man twice her age, we immediately ask, "how much money is on the table?" and if the answer is "a lot", we conclude the worst. Only if there is no money at risk, do we consider that maybe it's love.
A female psychopath is capable of seducing a married man for gifts and money, while convincing his wife that she is her best friend. As I explained, the use of sexual triggers by a female psychopath can create an overwhelming and all-consuming dependency in a man. It is especially potent when the man is married in a relationship where the romance is long gone.
Defensive Moves
Having looked at a range of opening attacks, let's look at defensive moves.
The default reaction when we are hurt by some encounter is avoidance. If I get mugged in some city area, I'll avoid going back there. If I meet a difficult person in a particular bar, I'll find a safer place to go, or stop going out. The trouble with being burnt by a psychopath is that it often does not feel like being mugged. Rather, it feels like a drug trip, and the common response is to search obsessively for another hit of the same.
Even when we realize that something was fundamentally wrong, and we develop a strong avoidance reaction, that may be counter-productive. First of all, it leaves us with our original problem —such as loneliness — unsolved. We socialize to meet people. Developing a fear of strangers is not healthy. Second, unless we shut ourselves off from social life entirely, we'll cross paths with psychopaths sooner or later. And then our fear will pull them in like flies to manure.
The most powerful defence is awareness, of yourself and of others. This is not simple. However you don't need to achieve the full meditative state of a Buddhist monk. Like two hunters running from a hungry bear, you just need to be more aware than others around you.
I've said that psychopaths are con artists, using your own insecurities against you. So the first step is to fix these. You cannot hide your fears, or fake confidence in the way you dress, or present yourself. That very effort makes you more vulnerable. You must address your inner weaknesses and turn them into strengths.
We start by grounding our emotions. This means, to identify and name our negative emotions — self-pity, jealousy, anger, fear, sadness, shame, guilt, and loneliness — as they happen, in real time. Emotions trigger in chains, so we can work backwards from the emotions we feel on the surface to a root idea or belief. We can address that belief, and we can then switch off the emotion.
For example, we enter a room full of strangers and we feel fear. It's palpable in our heartbeat, our stomach tightening, our hands clasping, our face sweating. What are we afraid of? There is usually no physical threat, no ravenous zombies. Perhaps we're afraid of meeting a specific person? No, it's more general. Ah, we're afraid of being ignored, or actively rejected. Fear of rejection is very common and natural. Yet these are strangers. Do we care if they accept or reject us? No, it makes no difference. Whatever happens is fine. If we don't find anyone fun to talk with, we'll go somewhere else. Shrug. The fear dries up, we relax, and have a great time.
Grounding our emotions is absolutely essential for surviving and taking control of a psychopathic relationship, as it lets you resist direct emotional attacks. I'll come back to grounding many times, it is a core discipline. Grounded, we can talk and interact with anyone without playing emotional games.
Once we escape the constraints of our own emotions, we can tackle the problem of need. Why are we in this place at all? What are we looking for? Most of the time, we disguise our own motivations, for ourselves first, and for others thereafter. There is a social process, and putting our needs on the table is like putting our feet on the table before dinner. One does not meet a woman and ask, "are you single?" nor does one meet a man and ask, "how much do you earn?"
However, hiding our needs from other social humans does not hide them from psychopaths. Indeed, pushing our motivations out of sight is a form of denial, which makes the triggering so much stronger, when someone pushes that button.
So instead, we look for our motivations, honestly, and then we resolve them. It is exactly like resolving our emotions. There are not a huge number of motivations, indeed it's quite a small set, depending on our age, gender, and circumstances:
We look for people to trade our knowledge and skills with, to learn from, and work with.
We look for people to play with, be it mutually fun, or more sinister bullying.
We look for partners for casual exploratory sex, and/or long term relationships.
We look for people to look after us, with advice, resources, affection, shelter.
We look for people to invest in, with our knowledge, resources, and affection.
We look for people to share experiences with, to make us feel safe and meaningful.
We look for people to like us, follow us, and listen to us, so we feel more important.
I think that's it. It comes down to sharing knowledge, power, money, sex, security, attention, love, and care. We can not stop ourselves wanting these things. However our response to triggers changes dramatically when we move from hiding and denying our base desires, to accepting them and embracing them.
Normally, hiding our base desires, we see a crowd and feel, "most of these people are uninteresting." We narrow our vision and become passive, waiting for others to provoke a response in us. We appear bland, uninterested, perhaps shy and quiet. Every encounter feels risky, and if someone does break through our shields, we treat this as a special event.
When we understand, and accept our motivations, we can shift our perspective to "everyone here is interesting in some way." We broaden our vision and become active, trying to provoke a response in everyone we meet. We become playful, and outgoing. We have no shields to break. We're like a song bird sitting happily on every round object it sees, blue or not.
You may be thinking that this sounds suspiciously how psychopaths work a crowd. However it's not the same. Let me illustrate, with the example of a homosexual man dealing with his sexual attraction to other men:
He may deny it, to conform to social expectations. This makes him vulnerable to predators, as he will ignore weak cues, and respond only to the exaggerated cues that psychopaths are good at projecting.
He may accept and embrace it. This lets him recognize weak cues, and project them in turn, and when someone projects exaggerated cues, he can correctly see this as a red flag.
Whereas a psychopath specifically looks for the first category of person, to flip into a super-stimulus response. When you have secret dreams and desires, you are vulnerable to anyone who recognizes those dreams and promises to fulfil them. Yet if you embrace your desires and carry them openly, then you will find small, real comforts in most of the people you meet every day, adding up to much more than any dream.
What I enjoy about this strategy is that it deals effectively with psychopaths out on the hunt, while also allowing richer relationships with other people. It is a humanistic and optimistic perspective, to switch from "I'm looking for the person of my dreams," to "I find every person to be interesting."
Finally, for this all to work, you must remain alert and awake. I've been pick-pocketed a few times in my life, and it's always when I'm tired and distracted. When we are tired, we process less of reality, and more slowly. That makes us revert to weaker habits, and be easier to manipulate. So getting enough sleep, and controlling your alcohol consumption are good habits for your social and mental health, as well as your physical health.
Men in Black
There is a persistent trope in the popular culture of vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures, in which a "normal" human becomes a monster and gains special powers. That means power over "normal" humans, and immunity from the monsters. To switch from hunted to hunter is the fantasy of many an insecure teenager.
So can acting like a psychopath can be a defence against hunting predators? Is there benefit in teaching people to act dominant, maintain strong eye contact, dress well, seek luxury and the company of important people, be somewhat rude and arrogant, and feel afraid of nothing and no-one?
There are actually courses that teach people to act like this. However the goal is inevitably to churn out wannabe predators, rather than nice people with better defences. We have speed dating courses, sales seminars, and arguably management schools. Further, I suspect the only people who benefit from such training are psychopaths who missed out when they were growing up.
Let's tackle the question of whether acting like a psychopath could conceivably protect you from such. A diagnosed psychopath (with "ASPD" or anti-social personality disorder) once wrote to me:
The moment I recognize someone else with ASPD in the wild, I test how far I can flex them. Where their strengths and weaknesses are and what value they might be to me. I feign interest in them to feed their ego and appear unaware. Then, if they're of no use to me I drop all interaction with them the second I see them try to play their game. Once they start running their shit on you it's futile to even bother with them.
Here's the thing: predators are territorial. When an animal wants to claim a territory from another, there are two ways things can go. Either there is a clear, visible difference in strength, in which case the more powerful animal takes, or keeps, the territory, without a fight. Or, there two are closely matched, and they fight. The loser leaves before being too damaged, and the winner takes the territory.
Humans do have territory, obviously. However the "territory" that psychopaths aim to control is other people, not land, except insofar as land represents people. No psychopath ever surveyed a fertile valley and thought, "I could plant tons of apple trees here!" Show a bored psychopath a new city, however, and they start to salivate.
So when a psychopath crosses paths with another psychopath, they do what two adult male lions do when they cross paths. They size each other up for relative strengths and weaknesses. They check whether the other has territory worth taking, or is a threat to one's own territory. And then either one slinks away silently, or they fight.
Psychopaths have a third option, that I'll explore later, which is to work together to control a larger territory.
So smelling and looking like a psychopath attracts the attention of real psychopaths. The outcome may be, they leave you alone, or it may be, they see you as a threat and attack you. That attack won't be frontal, it'll be an attack on colleagues, friends, or family. At a certain point the psychopath will realize they're not encountering resistance, yet by then there will be irreparable damage.
Having said that, mimicking some psychopath traits will definitely ward off at least a slice of the hunting psychopath population. The stronger the traits, the better the general defence, yet the more risk from extreme cases. So there's going to be a cost-benefit sweet spot for psychopath mimicry.
So is psychopath mimicry a thing? There are several reasons to believe that it is. First, Walsh's figure of 10% for female narcissists is so much higher than the estimates of psychopathy (1% conventionally, 4% by other counts). Either Susan Walsh is attracting a lot of unwelcome attention, or she is very bad at counting, or about half of female narcissists are psychopath mimics.
I've already argued that psychopathy is carried by genes and shaped by culture. This means most people have some of the genes, and opportunities to develop those traits at one point or another in their lives. At the very least, the children of a psychopath will have at least half the genes, and are well-equipped to put on the black leather, so to speak.
The moral of this tale is that, despite the fear and hate that narcissists provoke (Walsh writes, "Please don’t date one. I beg you not to fall in love with one. And never, ever marry one"), at least half are probably not as bad as that, once you get to know them.
Conclusion
In this long article I've presented a series of stories about how psychopaths hunt. They choose the context, and scan groups for vulnerable people. They cold-read their targets to guess that person's secret desires and dreams. They then present a package that looks utterly convincing, and draws their target in.
The best defence seems to be to want nothing, and accept anything. Rather than developing fear of strangers, to develop love of humanity, including its most difficult individuals. Most of us, however, respond to the psychopath's gaze rather like a drug user. What happens next, I'll cover in the next article in this series.
by pieterh