Thursday, November 18, 2010

Psychopath or businessman?

Psychopathy: Socially challenging | The Economist:
WHAT makes people psychopaths is not an idle question. Prisons are packed with them. So, according to some, are boardrooms. The combination of a propensity for impulsive risk-taking with a lack of guilt and shame (the two main characteristics of psychopathy) may lead, according to circumstances, to a criminal career or a business one. That has provoked a debate about whether the phenomenon is an aberration, or whether natural selection favours it, at least when it is rare in a population. The boardroom, after all, is a desirable place to be—and before the invention of prisons, even crime might often have paid.
Is the difference that psychopaths put themselves at risk while CEOpaths (I think I just made that up) just have no guilt or shame about risking other people's money?
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