The Fear Factor Read online

  Ridgway lured his victims into trusting him by showing them pictures of his young son Matthew, or leaving Matthew’s toys across the seat of his truck. After kidnapping them, he assaulted and killed the women and girls in ways that were often gruesome or bizarre, even by the standards of a culture inured to the horrors of CSI and True Detective. Most of his victims were suffocated or strangled, and all of them showed signs of sexual assault. Their arms and hands bore bruises and other injuries. Oddly shaped stones were sometimes found in their vaginas. Several of their bodies were festooned with branches or loose brush. One victim, a twenty-one-year-old named Carol Christensen, was found lying in the woods with a paper bag over her head, twine wrapped around her neck, and a wine bottle lying on her stomach. A trout was draped across her neck, and another lay on her shoulder.

  People are hungry for details about psychopaths. I have learned that if I want to start an hour-long conversation with a stranger, I need only mention that I study psychopathy. (If I want to be left alone, I say I’m a psychology professor, which sends people running for the hills.) At least ten books have been written about Ridgway, including one by his defense attorney, Tony Savage, and another by Ann Rule, the queen of true crime. Why the fascination? I don’t fully understand it myself, but I think it is partly because psychopaths, especially the really ghastly ones like Ridgway, are simultaneously so terrifying and so hard to identify. Even psychopaths who commit strings of unimaginably awful serial murders are often shockingly normal on the surface. And not so-normal-they-seem-creepy normal. Actually normal. Wave-to-their-neighbors-on-the-way-to-work normal.

  Tony Savage emphasized this in a 2004 interview with Larry King. “Larry,” he said, “I keep telling people, you could sit down and talk with this guy at a tavern and have a beer with him, and twenty minutes later, I’d come up and say, ‘Hey, this is the Green River monster,’ and you would say, ‘No way!’” If you think about it, this has to be true. If psychopaths were obviously creepy or “off,” they couldn’t commit long series of crimes. They wouldn’t be able to convince their victims to trust them or to evade detection for long.

  Their seeming normalcy distinguishes psychopaths from murderers who are psychotic—a common confusion, but an important distinction. Psychosis is the inability to distinguish fantasy from reality. It is a common symptom of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and usually takes the form of delusional beliefs or hallucinations. People who are psychotic might believe that they are being followed by the CIA or sent secret messages through billboards or their televisions, and they might hear voices telling them to do terrible things, including, sometimes, to commit acts of violence. (Most people who are psychotic are not violent. But the results can be devastating when they are, sometimes because they are both psychotic and psychopathic—a truly awful combination.) Recent mass killers like Jared Loughner, who shot former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen others in a Tucson, Arizona, parking lot, and James Holmes, who shot eighty-two people in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater, were psychotic. People who knew them found them odd and alarming, and even in photographs it is easy to see how disturbed they were. But mass shooters like Loughner and Holmes don’t need to convince anyone to trust them or evade detection, because they commit their crimes all at once and out in the open and often intend to die anyhow, either by self-inflicted or police-inflicted wounds.

  As scary as mass killers are, serial killers are somehow scarier, perhaps because the most frightening kind of danger is the kind that cannot be predicted in advance. Not all serial killers are psychopaths, but a lot of them are. And if psychopaths genuinely come across as normal, there is no easy way to steer clear of them, making them that much more frightening. My guess is that the pervasive fascination with psychopathy in part reflects a desire for details that will somehow give psychopaths away—nonverbal “tells” like unusual patterns of eye contact, or signature biographical details like childhood bed-wetting or fire-setting. Maybe people think that if we can just find the clues that mark people as psychopaths, we can avoid them or round them up and lock them away. This could be why the myth that psychopaths result from abusive upbringings is so persistent. It seems plausible, it is sometimes true (Ted Bundy and Tommy Lynn Sells are two notorious psychopathic murderers who experienced terrible abuse as children), and it might be the kind of signature detail we could use to isolate the budding psychopaths among us.

  Some of Ridgway’s biographers have fallen prey to just this temptation—trying to link his gruesome career as a mass murderer to his parents’ fighting, or the way his mother bathed him. But it’s just not that simple. Thousands of children witness their parents fighting, sometimes violently, every year. Many thousands more, sadly, are abused or neglected, sometimes horribly so. But (thankfully) we don’t have thousands of serial murderers running around in the aftermath of this mistreatment. If childhood mistreatment alone caused people to become psychopathic killers on the scale of Gary Ridgway, our society would make a zombie apocalypse look like Disneyland.

  Without a doubt, the maltreatment of children is a terrible thing. Children who are abused or neglected or witness violence frequently experience all kinds of negative outcomes later in life. They often develop, not surprisingly, exaggerated sensitivity to potential threats or mistreatment, and they sometimes overreact aggressively to it. This is called reactive aggression—angry, hotheaded, impulsive aggression in response to being frustrated or provoked or threatened. If your significant other threatens to leave you and you throw your glass at him, this is reactive aggression. If someone bumps into you on the sidewalk and you turn around and shove him, this is reactive aggression. If a strange woman slaps you after you grab her ass and in response you haul back and punch her in the face—again, reactive aggression. This kind of aggression is relatively common, and it often crops up in people who are depressed or anxious or have experienced serious trauma.

  But this is not the primary problem with psychopaths. Psychopaths can be quite impulsive and do often engage in reactive aggression, but recall that what really sets them apart is proactive aggression—the cool-headed, goal-directed kind of aggression, the seeking-out-vulnerable-women-to-rape-and-murder kind. Child abuse and neglect don’t seem to promote this kind of aggression. There is almost no evidence of any direct, causal links between parental maltreatment and the proactive aggression that sets psychopaths apart. It’s not like people haven’t looked for evidence, but well-controlled studies just don’t find it.

  For example, one study conducted by psycopathy expert Adrian Raine and his colleagues at the University of Southern California looked at reactive and proactive aggression in more than 600 ethnically and socioeconomically diverse pairs of twins in the greater Los Angeles area. They tracked the twins over the course of their adolescence, which is the time when aggression tends to become most pronounced. The researchers found that genetic influences contributed about 50 percent to persistent reactive aggression across adolescence, with the rest resulting from environmental influences. But genes contributed a whopping 85 percent to persistent proactive aggression. And none of the remaining 15 percent was attributable to what are called shared environmental influences, which include any influences that affect children within a family similarly, like poverty, the type of house or neighborhood they live in, or having parents who fight or are neglectful. These shared influence variables—even all added together—don’t seem to predict the course of proactive aggression in adolescents.

  This of course leaves an urgent, open question: what does cause psychopathy? Through a series of very fortunate events, I got the opportunity to take part in seeking out the answers.

  In 2004, I was nearing the completion of my PhD and finishing up my doctoral dissertation. What I needed next was a job. I knew I wanted to continue in academic research, but at twenty-seven, I wasn’t ready to begin a professorship. I had managed to secure a tenure-track offer from a small, selective, rural college, but I couldn’t bring myself to accept it.
The school was too small and too rural, and I didn’t feel ready to face the slog that assistant professors face on their way to tenure. The obvious alternative was a postdoctoral fellowship, which is sort of the equivalent of a medical residency for PhDs. Postdoctoral fellowships provide doctoral graduates with a few extra years of training in the laboratory of an established investigator. Postdocs are a terrific way to acquire training in new research techniques and publish original research before tackling a professorship.

  I started looking for a postdoctoral position based mostly on geography. I was engaged to be married, and my fiancé, Jeremy, whom I had started dating at Dartmouth, was a US Marine who had nearly completed his four years of service. Of all the cities in the country, the one with the most and best professional opportunities for a former Marine with a Dartmouth degree in government is Washington, DC. So I started looking there. The Washington area contains several major research universities, and better yet, the National Institutes of Health is in Bethesda, Maryland, just a few miles outside the District.

  As an aside, of all American city names, “Bethesda” may be my favorite. It is named for Jerusalem’s Pool of Bethesda, the waters of which are described in the biblical Gospel of John as possessing extraordinary powers to heal. The Bethesda in Maryland may be less poetic, but it also possesses extraordinary healing powers. The NIH is far and away the biggest supporter of medical research in the world. The billions of dollars in grant funding it has awarded to researchers around the world over the last several decades have underwritten discoveries of treatments for diseases ranging from cancer to HIV to schizophrenia that have healed countless suffering people.

  The NIH also supports a smaller number of scientists—about 6,000—who conduct research on its Bethesda campus. The “intramural researchers,” they are called. The intramural resources at NIH are abundant, and its location right outside Washington, DC, made it a perfect spot for me geographically. But what were the odds that I could find a position there? Most NIH researchers do medical research and have degrees in medicine or biology or chemistry. Even at the institute where most psychology and neuroscience research is conducted, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the researchers are mostly psychiatrists and clinical psychologists. Was there any place there for a social psychologist casting around for a postdoc?

  I sought help from a former graduate school colleague, Thalia Wheatley, who was also a social psychologist and had recently started a postdoc at NIMH. Did she know of any researchers on campus who might have a postdoc position for me? She suggested a few names, the last of which was James Blair. “Oh, he’d be perfect for you!” she said. “You’re interested in empathy, and he studies psychopaths.”

  “James Blair?” I repeated. “Wait, that’s not R. J. R. Blair, is it?”

  R. J. R. Blair (alternately R. Blair, J. Blair, R. J. Blair, or J. R. Blair) was the researcher with the hard-to-pin-down initials who I knew to be among the world’s foremost researchers on the neural basis of psychopathy. I was very familiar with his work, having cited seven of his research papers in my dissertation, but the bylines on those papers said he was at University College London. His relocation to the NIMH was so recent that there was no scholarly record of it. Thalia laughed. “Yes, R. J. R. Blair is James Blair. And I think he is looking for a new postdoc. I have a meeting with him next week and I can find out.”

  I was ecstatic. Thalia was right, this was perfect. This was better than perfect.

  Although I was earning my degree in social psychology, where the focus is historically on how people as a whole respond to external influences, over the course of my graduate studies I’d been moving in the direction of studying differences among people. As I sought predictors of altruistic responding in my laboratory studies, I noticed that the individual differences were often more important than the laboratory manipulations that were my initial focus.

  For example, one of my dissertation studies aimed to replicate an altruism paradigm developed by Daniel Batson. Batson’s primary focus was on the relationship between empathy and altruism. I should note that Batson used the term empathy to mean what most researchers now refer to as empathic concern or compassion or sympathy—namely, caring about others’ welfare. The term empathy is more commonly used to mean simple apprehension of another’s emotional state, or sometimes sharing that state. If you look frightened and I correctly detect how you are feeling and show physiological changes like an increased heart rate or sweating hands, or if I report feeling upset myself, we can say I’ve experienced empathy. If I also express the desire to alleviate your distress, that’s empathic concern or compassion. The processes are related but distinct.

  Batson manipulated empathic concern by asking some volunteers to focus on the thoughts and feelings of a woman named Katie Banks, whose sad radio interview they were listening to. In it, Katie described the terrible hardships she was experiencing following the deaths of her parents, which had left her to care for her young siblings while trying to complete college. Other volunteers were asked to focus on the technical details of the broadcast. Batson reliably found that instructing volunteers to focus on Katie’s feelings caused them to offer more help to Katie afterward. I found this in my own research too. Volunteers listened to a similar radio interview and afterward were given the opportunity to pledge money or time volunteering to help Katie. (In my study, Katie was actually me putting my college theater training to good use while reading from the same transcript Batson had used.) The research assistants running the study gave the volunteers envelopes in which to seal their pledges so that their decisions would remain anonymous. Like Batson, we found that the volunteers instructed to focus on Katie’s feelings experienced more empathic concern and pledged more time volunteering to help her than did those asked to consider technical details of the broadcast.

  But this manipulation was not the only, or the best, predictor of how much time people pledged. After the volunteers had listened to the broadcast, we gave them other forms to fill out and tests to complete. One of them was a test of facial expression recognition. Volunteers viewed twenty-four standardized photos of young adults posing expressions of anger, fear, happiness, and sadness and tried to identify each expression using a multiple-choice format. Some of the expressions were obvious, but others were subtle. One dark-haired woman’s fearful expression was betrayed by only the faintest elevation of her upper eyelids and slightly parted lips.

  After the study, my research assistants and I tallied up the volunteers’ accuracy in recognizing each of the various emotions and plotted them against their donations to Katie. What we found surprised me a little. Volunteers’ ability to recognize happy expressions was actually a negative predictor of donations: the volunteers who pledged the most time to help Katie were worse than average at recognizing happiness. But the most generous volunteers were better than average at recognizing fearful facial expressions. Even more surprisingly, the power of fear recognition to predict pledges was statistically stronger than the effect of the empathy manipulation. When it came to predicting pledges of money to help Katie, the empathy manipulation didn’t predict anything. Instead, the most powerful predictor of donations of money to Katie, by a mile, was individual variation in the ability to recognize others’ fear.

  I followed up this puzzling finding with more studies, which kept showing the same thing: the most reliable predictor of altruism, across different tests and groups of participants, was how well people could recognize fearful facial expressions. This was a better predictor than the ability to recognize any other facial expression, and it was a better predictor than other traits that are sometimes touted as promoting altruism, like gender, mood, and how empathic people report themselves to be. It was a weird result. I knew it at the time. It later went on to be selected by the psychologists Simon Moss and Samuel Wilson as one of the “most unintuitive” psychology findings of 2007. It wasn’t an anomaly, though. Subsequent research has also linked sensitivity to fearful expression
s to altruism and compassion in both adults and children across different cultures.

  There was one set of data out there that could make sense of these findings. But it wasn’t data collected by a social psychologist—it had been published by none other than James Blair. And, lucky me, he did offer me that postdoc position. That meant I’d soon be working alongside him in his new NIMH lab, digging deeper into the brain basis of the capacity to care for others by conducting the first-ever brain imaging research on psychopathic teenagers.

  3

  THE PSYCHOPATHIC BRAIN

  ON THE THIRTIETH of March, 2004, Jeremy and I drove away from Somerville, Massachusetts, bound for Washington, DC, with my cat and a U-Haul full of rickety furniture. Two days later, on April 1, I arrived at the NIH to start my new job.

  Upon arrival, my initial impression was—April Fool!—that a colossal prank had been played on me and I actually didn’t have a job there. Coming through the gates for the first time, I tried to locate my building on the campus map. The NIH campus holds, depending on how you count, a jumble of about eighty haphazardly numbered buildings—8 is across from 50, which abuts 12. After several minutes of scanning the map, I was forced to concede that my building number wasn’t on it. I asked the security guards for help, but none of them had ever heard of it. “Fifteen Kay? What is that? Is that an NIH building?”

  In desperation, I started wandering through the vast, rolling campus, and miraculously I finally stumbled upon my destination—a sweet Tudor-style cottage not at all befitting the sterile designation “15K,” sitting tucked away on a daffodil-strewn hillside in a remote corner of the campus. It was so small that NIH maps rarely bothered labeling it. No one inside seemed to know who I was or why I had come. A secretary asked me for any paperwork that could confirm I had been hired, and I realized that no one had ever sent me any. I tried to locate James, but none of the office doors had names or numbers on them. When I finally found his office, it was dark and shuttered. “What the hell is going on? What kind of place is this?!” I wondered in a fury.