Psychopaths and the Game Theory of Psychology

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There can be pretty wild cultural differences from place to place. I asked lots of the psychopath experts who saidsit is a chinese psychopath different from a american psychopath? And like, we don't have en enough data on this. There's some initial studies that are being conducted this way, but a lot of the focus is on western psychopaths. It's crucial, i think, to understand this, because it disentangles the aspects of what's actually happening on the nerological level from the cultural level. If you apply the wrong tool to a certain problem, you can actually make it worse.

All societies grant more power to some citizens, and there is always a temptation to use that power for the benefit of themselves rather than for the greater good. Power corrupts, we are told — but to what extent is that true? Would any of us, upon receiving great power, be tempted by corruption? Or are corruptible people drawn to accrue power? Brian Klaas has investigated these questions by looking at historical examples and by interviewing hundreds of people who have been in this position. He concludes that power can corrupt, but it doesn’t necessarily do so — we can construct safeguards to keep corruption to a minimum.

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Brian Klaas received his D.Phil. in Politics from the University of Oxford. He is currently Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London and a columnist for The Washington Post. His new book is Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us. He is host of the Power Corrupts podcast.