The Wisdom of Psychopaths: What Saints, Spies, and Serial Killers can Teach Us About Success Chapter One

This chapter opens up with a story about a frog and a scorpion. The scorpion asks the frog for a ride across the river, but the frog at first refuses, claiming that it is in the nature of the scorpion to sting the frog (or anything for that matter). However, the scorpion promises to not sting the frog, but then halfway across the river, he does sting the frog, causing them to both die in the water. From this story, the author jumps to a serial killer named John Wayne Gacy who had murdered and raped 33 men all around the age of 18. Gacy was executed by lethal injection in 1994. Dr. Morrison, who is an expert on serial killers, took Gacy's brain to assist an autopsy to see if there was anything unusual about his brain to cause him to perform such crimes. The autopsy revealed nothing unusual in his brain.
A study was conducted where the EEG responses of psychopaths and non-psychopaths were recorded when they were shown strings of letters and had to identify if they could be put into a word. Normal people were able to identify words easily, but with psychopaths, their EEG readings were so abnormal. Hare, who conducted this experiment, stated that "language, for psychopaths, is only word deep. There's no emotional contouring behind it. A psychopath may something like 'I love you,' but in reality, it means about as much to him as if he said 'I'll have a cup of coffee," (Page 6). This statement is actually very scary, and makes me really wonder how people like this relates to business. Rossi, a man who used to be a window cleaner but now a killer, speaks about how psychopaths are on one hand normal, but at the same time are beyond crazy.
As the chapter continues, Kevin Dutton gives more and more examples about psychopaths and experiments conducted. Later on in the chapter, a question comes up that I have seen numerous times- the trolley question... Would you flip the switch and save the five people stuck on the track, but kill another person? Or would you not do anything at all and have the train kill the five people. There are also many different variations of this question, but that is just the basic one. It is about your morals. For the most part, many people will say that they would flip the switch, saving five people but killing one, and it is stated that most psychopaths would choose the same option. The only difference is that psychopaths would commit the crime without even thinking or caring for that matter. For non-psychopaths, much time is put into thinking what the best decision is to be made.
What I am getting from this chapter is that psychopaths are very cold people filled with empty and meaningless words. And that may be what is a good quality to have in becoming successful. I feel as though you can't really care about everyone very much and are quick to make decisions (whatever you feel is right). Hopefully Dutton will discuss more about how this all relates to business in future chapters.