The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry

A best-selling journalist explores psychopaths and the medical, scientific, and academic communities that study them in this hilarious adventure.

The Psychopath Test is an intriguing voyage into the brains of the insane. Jon Ronson's exploration of a potential hoax being played on the world's top neurologists takes him, unexpectedly, into the heart of the madness industry. Ronson learns from a prominent psychologist—who believes that many powerful politicians and CEOs are really psychopaths—how to identify high-flyers by observing for subtle cues in both verbal and nonverbal cues. So, equipped with his newly acquired ability to identify psychopaths, Ronson moves into the halls of authority. He spends time with a renowned CEO whose psychopathy has been the subject of journalistic speculation, a death-squad commander institutionalised for mortgage fraud in Coxsackie, New York, and a prisoner in an institute for the criminally ill who maintains that he is sane and most definitely not a psychopath.

In addition to unravelling the riddle behind the hoax, Ronson unearths the unsettling fact that, with their own obsessions and impulses, the figures leading the lunacy business are sometimes just as insane as the people they investigate. Furthermore, even comparatively normal individuals are increasingly characterised by their wildest corners.