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• P_gp (1.2% in 2008) is the percentage of the general population who are psychopathic
• P_gi (0.94% in 2011) is the percentage of the general population who are incarcerated
• P_ip (20% in 2001) is the percentage of the incarcerated population who are psychopathic

By failing to disambiguate these statistics from one another, we leave them open to tacit dismissal.  “At 20%, it looks like most or all of the psychopaths are in prison,” one might take away from these statistics.  “Good job.”  These statistics by themselves leave the whole problem of psychopathy in society too easy to dismiss out of hand because they do not describe the demographics fully enough.  Most people desperately want to dismiss the problem out of hand because accepting it as a basic social problem saddles each and every one of us with a basic social responsibility that most of us don’t want anything to do with.

Let’s take this excuse away.  Let’s do the math it takes to finish the picture.  Let’s calculate P_pf, the percentage of the psychopathic population who are free to wander among us and prey upon innocent victims, deprive them of their basic human rights and turn their lives into living hells, for lack of public awareness with all but total impunity.

Formula Components

• P_gp = Percentage of the GENERAL population who are psychopathic
  • 1.2% of the general population are psychopaths – http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy
  • This article does not say whether the 1.2% figure from “a US sample” covers ALL Americans or only those not incarcerated.
  • The present calculation assumes the former; a separate calculation shown below assumes the latter and results in an even higher value for P_pf.*
• P_gi = Percentage of the GENERAL population who are incarcerated
  • 0.94% of the US population are in prison – http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States
• P_ip = Percentage of the INCARCERATED population who are psychopathic
  • 20% of a typical US prison population are psychopaths – http://www.hare.org/links/saturday.html

Additional Results

• P_gpi = Percentage of the GENERAL population who are both psychopathic and incarcerated
  • P_gpi = P_ip x P_gi = 20% x 0.94% = 0.188%
• P_gpf = Percentage of the GENERAL population who are psychopathic but FREE
  • P_gpf = P_gp – P_gpi = 1.2% – 0.188% = 1.012%
• P_pi = Percentage of the PSYCHOPATHIC population who are incarcerated
  • P_pi = P_gpi/P_gp = 0.188%/1.2% = 15.667%

The Result We’re After

• P_pf = Percentage of the PSYCHOPATHIC population who are FREE
  • P_pf = 100%-P_pi = 100% – 15.667% = 84.333%

Formula for Calculating P_pf

• P_pf = 100-P_pi
  • = 100-[(P_gpi/P_gp)*100]
  • = 100-[((P_ip*P_gi)/P_gp)*100]
  • = 100-[((0.2*0.94)/1.2)*100]
  • = 100-[(0.188/1.2)*100]
  • = 100-(0.15667*100)
  • = 100-15.667
  • = 84.333%

* Changing our assumption about the 1.2% figure for psychopaths within the general population to exclude those incarcerated, the calculation is slightly revised, though the formula remains the same.

• P_gp becomes 1.2% + (P_gi x P_ip) = 1.2% + P_gpi = 1.2% + 0.188% = 1.388%.
• The final calculation of P_pf then increases from 84.333% to 100-[(0.188/1.388)*100] = 100 – 13.545 = 86.455%.
• P_gpf is then 1.2% (the figure quoted in the article) rather than 1.012% resulting in a proportionally higher average expected encounter rate within the general population.

Discussion

84% to 86% of all US psychopaths are NOT in prison, representing 0.972% to 1.2% of the unincarcerated population. Depending on a typical working American’s profession or line of work, that could expose them to anywhere from 2 or 3 encounters per week to 2 or 3 encounters per day.  For those more apt to be profiled during such encounters as both accessible and vulnerable targets, each encounter with the same psychopath leads to more and more encounters going forward.

My own experience has been that psychopaths who know about each other tend to take turns with a given target rather than interfere with one another. Everything they do is based on the fabrication and implication of misleading impressions about themselves and about their victims. They would not be able to do this effectively if they presented conflicting false impressions of the same victim or if they had to coordinate with one another to maintain their consistency. In clinical terms, a psychopath must build and maintain his or her psychopathic fiction in isolation from those of other psychopaths. They cannot therefore share victims lest these fictions collide around a shared victim. Psychopaths are very good at reconciling such collisions to satisfy those who notice them but steering and avoiding the aegis of other psychopaths reduces their workload as it reduces their risk of exposure. There is also the question of the psychopathic bond, whose strength might be broken or even canceled when compounded in the same person at the same time by different psychopaths.

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Resisting Fascism, Fighting for Freedom

People For the American Way is a national progressive advocacy organization that inspires and mobilizes Americans to defend freedom, justice, and democracy from those who threaten to take them away. For more than four decades, we have been dedicated to making the promise of America real for everyone and have worked toward a vision of a vibrant America where basic rights and freedoms are upheld for all, not just the wealthy and the powerful.

Fighting Extremism and Dark Ages Ideology

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Dr. Hare is a Canadian forensic psychologist, known for his research in the field of criminal psychology. He is a professor emeritus of the University of British Columbia where he specializes in psychopathology and psychophysiology.

Dr. Hare developed the Hare Psychopathy Checklist (PCL-Revised), used to assess cases of psychopathy. He advises the FBI’s Child Abduction and Serial Murder Investigative Resources Center (CASMIRC) and consults for various British and North American prison services.

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Top-down business structures in which decisions are made at the top and flow down through the organization to the people that carry them out can be thought of as exploitable social hierarchies. This sort of business structure — the corporate business structure as it is widely accepted today — constitutes an attractor for psychopathic personalities born with a predatory instinct that leads them to exploit such hierarchies for personal advancement and financial gain. The more psychopaths accumulate in the upper echelons of such organizations, the more are needed in the middle layers to protect them from the competence of the rank and file. This dynamic is what democracy was invented to counter. Wherever democracy is denied access, dictatorial hierarchies develop, grow and fester, often under the guise of “centers of excellence”.

The Institute for 21st Century Agoras seeks to amend this situation in which dictatorial centers of administrative neglect masquerade as innovative centers of technical excellence.

Wherever democracy is denied access, a minor dictatorship will take its place. That’s why democracy must be mandated at every level, as though it were an all or nothing proposition — because, in other words, it is.

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Paul is vice president of the Aftermath: Surviving Psychopathy Foundation, a non-profit organization providing information and support for victims of psychopathy.

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Working for a World Free of Bullying

Tim Field (b. Eastbourne UK, 24 April 1952, d. 15 January 2006) set up bullyonline.org to inform people about workplace bullying. In 2015 the Tim Field Foundation was established as a UK registered charity to maintain this website and further Tim Field’s cause against bullying.

timfieldfoundation.org and its companion site bullyonline.org both now forward to a small section of a blog that looks on cursory review like a one-sided repository of information on bullying in its various forms, couched in the context of a family counseling service. The original blog, maintained by Adrian Melia after Tim’s passing, served as a safe harbor information sharing space through which I came to know Adrian. I remember logging on to it after a space of several years in the wake of Adrian’s passing and found it in a late stage of infestation by a lurking contingent of the bullies themselves, with the moderators none the wiser to their predatory behavioral profiles, ignorantly playing both sides-ism on any clashes.

Back when the old site was moderated by Adrian Melia, we would collaboratively build a list of common characteristics of bullies. Adrian always insisted on using “bully” in place of “psychopath” to avoid the appearance of someone presuming to make diagnoses, just as Babiak & Hare (2006) used “fraudster” in place of “psychopath” in describing their informal study of the reactions of individual members of religious affinity groups to the antics of social predators in formulating their “one-thirds rule”. This study consistently and repeatably broke down the respondents into three groups of approximately equal size. I would later put names to these groups as further detailed on this blog under Granfalloons and Cognotypes:

• Acolytes: born predisposed to align with, support, defend and enable psychopaths wherever they can find them;
• Skeptics: born predisposed to feel revulsion at psychopaths, and to resist them at every turn;
• Agnostics: born unable or unwilling to discriminate between a psychopath and any other person in similar attire.

It was through the writings of Adrian Melia that I was introduced to his anecdotal experience that institutional bullies never go more than two weeks after destroying one victim before choosing the next. I was able to confirm this two-week threshold in my own experiences, mostly in the computer industry, in the US spanning 35 years — interestingly, the same industry that had tormented Tim Field in the UK for almost 20 years. Interestingly, Donald J. Trump, the most successful narcopath in modern history by the measure of the constant worldwide attention he was able to attract over the course of ten years and counting as of 2026, had a macabre obsession with this two-week figure, usually as the amount of time it would take him to work out a plan that he had no intention of pursuing.

I suspect that most psychopathology professionals and academics are never exposed to the toxic environments of infested institutions and corporations for long enough to gather the quantity of experience needed with which to formulate this level of insight and appreciation. Who can blame them for wanting to wind down at the pub after a strenuous day of interviewing dangerous prisoners for their next scientific publication? They are outside observers. If they were once victims, as I would think many were, those parts of their lives would have been for the most part left behind them in the academic life of a psychopathology professional. The rest of us live in the bowels of the hellscape, created by a systemic ignorance and oblivion to such matters, that we call modern society.

For my own part, I had formative experience as the child of an aggressive, pathologically opportunistic and psychologically abusive psychopath with a captive victim, determined to sabotage my every aspiration by any means available. Needless to say, I never had to learn about these behaviors as an intellectual exercise. To me in adulthood, my childhood was a hellish normal from which I had once aspired to escape. My childhood ended prematurely when my parents split, after which there was no one to moderate or distract the remaining parent’s predatory instincts. I’ve been searching for ways to recapture that lost childhood ever since.

Fortunately during the early years, my close friend’s father just a few houses up the lane represented to me the old normal I might otherwise never have fully appreciated — a member of the Greatest Generation, the generation who lived through the Great Depression only to be sent overseas to fight the minions of foreign psychopaths in World War II. He was a living reminder that no, the normal I was living at home was far from it. As a veteran of the D-Day landings at Normandy against a world famous psychopathic Austrian, he was as worldly, grounded and exemplary a figure as the world is ever likely to produce. For me, it was a childhood of extreme psychological opposites.

As mentioned elsewhere on this blog, I’ve since settled on a short list of psychopathic behaviors and characteristics of concern to public safety:

• serial social predation;
  • (living by destroying others)
• pathological opportunism;
  • (exploiting EVERY opportunity)
• a fluid fictional narrative;
  • (owning the present)
• a penchant for gaslighting.
  • (owning the past)

In unstructured environments, in which the psychopath always rushes to a position of power, they invariably compile a list of friends and enemies. A friend is someone who consistently pays obeisance (an acolyte), while an enemy is someone who dares to disagree with them on any point, or to question their presumptive authority (a skeptic). All psychopaths build such lists, even if only in memory, but only in well-populated, unstructured environments over which they seek dominance does it become an essential tool.

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