I also realised that I left out an important piece of context about the PCL-R score. The assessment in which I scored 28 was conducted as part of a research project, rather than as an ordinary clinical assessment. I should have mentioned that when I gave you the number, because I don’t want to imply a context for the assessment that wasn’t actually there. It’s only given when a person has committed serious crime.
It doesn’t really change the question I was asking you — I was interested in whether knowing the score would change your perception of me — but I think it’s important to be precise about where the number came from.
I think one of the difficulties with the psychopathy label is that it immediately places a person into a conceptual box. Once the label is there, almost everything the person says or does can start being interpreted through it.
I also think it’s possible for someone to score quite highly on psychopathic traits while genuinely trying to be a good person. Those aren’t necessarily contradictory propositions. A person can recognise traits in themselves that aren’t particularly prosocial while still deciding what kind of person they want to be and trying to behave accordingly.
Where I think it becomes complicated is empathy. If the emotional response that normally guides someone is weak or absent, then “trying to do the right thing” doesn’t automatically tell you what the right thing is. You may have to rely much more deliberately on reasoning, principles, learned rules, cognitive understanding of other people, and feedback from them.
And that can still go wrong. You can intellectually understand that something affects another person without having the same internal emotional signal telling you how important it is to them. You can misjudge situations, cross boundaries, or rationalise something that another person would have rejected much earlier because their emotional response acted as an immediate brake.
That’s partly why I find the black-and-white picture unsatisfactory. “Psychopath” doesn’t necessarily mean someone has chosen to be harmful, and “trying to be good” doesn’t necessarily make the underlying traits disappear either. Both things can be true at once.
In some ways, that makes self-awareness particularly important rather than contradictory. If you know that some of the ordinary emotional guidance other people rely on may not work the same way for you, you can at least try to compensate for that consciously.
And perhaps that connects with what you said about judging people from experience. The label can tell you something about a psychological profile, but it can’t by itself tell you what someone has decided to do with it.