Free Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work by Robert D. Hare, Paul Babiak Page A

goals. But unlike psychopaths, cynical, facile lying is not an integral, systemic part of their personality, and it does not coexist with the other features that define psychopathy.
    Another characteristic of psychopaths is an ability to avoid taking responsibility for things that go wrong; instead, they blame others, 52
    S N A K E S I N S U I T S
    circumstances, fate, and so forth. They have an impressive supply of excuses for why they are not to blame for anything that they have said or done to hurt someone else. Pointing the finger at others serves the dual purposes of reinforcing their own positive image while spreading disparaging information about rivals and detractors. They do this by positioning their blame of others as a display of loyalty to the listener. That is, psychopaths appear to be helping or protecting the individual from harm by passing the blame onto a third party. Blaming the system, the company, or society as a whole for their own behavior is also a common response. In many organizations, coworkers can always be found who distrust the company or are angry about something that happened to them. Psychopaths can use these genuine feelings to generate support for their own position.
    Even if those with a psychopathic personality admit to involve-ment in a crime, they will minimize their role, as well as the negative impact on the victims. Psychopaths may even blame the victims for their own misfortune, offering convincing reasons why they got what they deserved!
    As it does in the assessment phase, lack of empathy, guilt, or remorse plays an important role during the manipulation phase—by facilitating behavior that is callous and insensitive to the rights and feeling of others. This can lead to the psychological and physical abuse of family, friends, and innocent strangers. Later we will discuss in detail the impact of psychopathic abuse on the victim. The level and intensity of psychopathic intimidation often keeps those who have been abused from coming forward. In psychopathic crimes, abuse can extend far beyond property damage or assault, sometimes intensifying into sadistic attacks on victims.
    Hit Them When They’re Down
    A particularly nasty scenario involves scanning the media for accounts of elderly people who have been victimized by fraudulent scams or schemes, and then approaching them with an offer to help What You See May Not Be What You See 53
    get their money back. In one such incident, a newspaper reported that an eighty-year-old woman had lost her life savings in a venture promoted by a middle-aged woman who had offered to care for her.
    Following the report, another scamster, posing as a lawyer who specialized in helping victims of fraud, convinced the devastated woman he could get her money back. She borrowed his up-front
    “recovery fee” of $5,000 from a close friend. You know the rest.
    ABANDONMENT PHASE
    Once psychopaths have drained all the value from a victim—that is, when the victim is no longer useful—they abandon that victim and move on to someone else. Abandonment is most often abrupt—the psychopath just disappears one day—and it can occur without the current victim even realizing the psychopath has been looking for someone new to use. In crimes such as identity theft, credit card fraud, and construction swindles, the psychopath effectively disappears, typically reappearing with a new identity in another geographic location. The arrival of the Internet has made the psychopathic criminal’s life easier, as running and hiding are easily carried out, and targets are plentiful and readily accessible.
    Most people feel at least a twinge of guilt or regret, and will want to apologize if they have hurt someone. Psychopaths have only a vague appreciation of these concepts, and sometimes find the idea of guilt or remorse an amusing weakness the rest of us possess—
    something that they can, of course, take advantage of. Certainly, they are not influenced by the possibility