Paul Rand: Few concepts have captured the public imagination quite like psychopaths.

Tape: It’s Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer and cannibal, whose saga of evil has been given new life in the hit Netflix series, Monster.

Paul Rand: There’s a seemingly endless number of TV shows, podcasts, movies, and even books about the crimes and inner workings on people with psychopathy. But the most popular media about psychopaths is, of course, courtroom dramas. Law and Order, NCIS, Criminal Minds, if these shows are to be believed, the problem of psychopathy is rampant across our society. But the research is showing a different story. In fact, science is uncovering that everything we thought we knew about psychopaths might actually be wrong.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Psychopathy research has always been dealing with this baggage where there’s a lot of non-scientific literature on this.

Paul Rand: That’s Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen, an assistant professor of forensic epistemology at the University of Toronto and the author of a new book, Psychopathy Unmasked.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: And of course, through that literature and also through popular media and so on, the term psychopath has... It’s a common word. Everybody knows or have some idea of some connotations associated with that word. So it’s kind of part of our cultural lingo now which, of course, is unfortunate when you’re trying to do science on it because those connotations people usually have with those terms, it’s just not what we do in the sciences.

Paul Rand: Encouraged by this media, most of us have a set of common assumptions about psychopaths, that they’re more dangerous than others, that they’re untreatable, and that their disorder is biological.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Part of the reason why I wrote this book is to get people’s attention and try to carefully and meticulously lay out why this is not holding up.

Paul Rand: And the research of Larsen and others isn’t just proving many of these assumptions, but it’s starting to question whether psychopathy is actually real at all.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: So this is the complicated question that has been reduced down to a diagnosis in psychopathy research, as if there’s just this one magical fix-all kind of explanation for what they would say. Often you hear things, they are responsible for 50% of the violent crime, which it’s just not reality. It’s like a dictum that just doesn’t hold up.

Paul Rand: This matters beyond what is portrayed in procedural dramas. When people in real-life courtrooms get this label, it can change how they’re treated in the criminal justice system.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Well, whoever is going to make decisions about you downstream in the legal system, whether it starts with the judge or the probation officer or whoever it is, is going to look through your record and say, “What do we do here? What information do we have about Paul?” And they will look at that label, diagnosis, or whatever you want to call it, and they will make all sorts of inferences about you. And those inferences is going to be largely constrictive or restrictive.

Paul Rand: So if our justice system is discriminating against individuals based on a diagnosis that the research is starting to show may not be real, well, that’s going to be a big problem.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: And I do think there’s also something to be said about the scale of this problem. The scale, I think this has gone completely under the radar, I mentioned earlier hundreds of thousands of people. But it’s almost hard to find specific clinical practices in our legal system that is affecting that many people. I’m not saying it’s unprecedented scale, because we have plenty of discrimination in our legal systems at massive scales, but this one here has gone completely almost unrecognized, which I think is kind of eye-popping. Once you start to see it, you can’t unsee it.

Paul Rand: From the University of Chicago Podcast Network, welcome to Big Brains, where we explore the groundbreaking research and discoveries that are transforming our world. I’m your host, Paul Rand. Join me as we meet the minds behind the breakthroughs. On today’s episode, the real science of psychopathy and what it tells us about the changes we may need to make in our criminal justice system.

Everybody listening thinks they understand what a psychopath is, and they may or may not be right. But let’s start with the basics and have you explain to us, what is psychopathy, and where did this term come from, and how has it always been understood?

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Yeah, sure. Well, thanks for having me, Paul. Psychopathy or psychopath, as is still the more derogatory term, it’s an idea that dates far back in mental health, the history of mental health research, if you will. It actually goes as far back to the 1700s where we see the first iteration of the idea by a scientist. Of course, there are claims that they find signs of psychopathy or this idea in much earlier literature, but the first scientific iteration of it was from Benjamin Rush, an American, it seems to me, having studied the history, and that’s from 1786.

The idea that is expressed here is this notion that human beings can be diseased or disordered in a way where they kind of lose the capacity, if you will, to kind of distinguish between what is morally right and wrong. And this, of course, leads to all sorts of social problems and so on.

Now, if you fast-forward to present day, that idea has matured more into something that people refer to as a clinical construct or a personality disorder.

Paul Rand: All right, well, then you talk about... We’ve gone from this period, you just said, from the 1700s, but then we get up to the 1990s and this becomes a real turning point in the study of psychopathy because it starts becoming ingrained with how the criminal justice system starts looking at people and their behaviors.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Yeah. So it’s a funny thing, Paul. It’s kind of a forgotten fact about psychopathy research that all the way up until the 1980s probably as late, and maybe even the early 1990s, psychopathy was this idea that not a lot of people in the clinical world and in the behavioral science world took seriously. It was an idea that had a very few number of very loud, if you will, or very prolific advocates, but nobody was buying it. You see people referring to psychopathy as a wastebasket diagnosis, kind of like the idea that, yeah, there’s nothing wrong with these people you were describing. You just want to put a label on them, but there’s nothing.

And even a person like Hervey Cleckley is in the fifth edition, the preface to his fifth edition magnus opus, his Mask of Sanity. He refers to himself as a voice crying in the wilderness. He has this idea, he has this work that he wants to sell, but nobody’s buying what he’s dishing out.

Paul Rand: So what changed in the ‘90s when it started getting noticed in the criminal justice system?

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Yeah, this is such an interesting question, and honestly, I’ve been grappling with this for a long time. I’m not sure I have a perfect answer to it. But there is a get-tough-on-crime movement. We are in the middle of the get-tough-on-crime movement. So you have from the legal system a, what can you say, a demand to try to figure out who are the truly problematic, prolific, criminal individuals. You have terms like super predator and you have all that stuff happening in the 1990s. So there’s a demand for instruments that can speak to that. I think that is one thing. With that demand, there comes a supply opportunity to get grant money and start to do research on this concept that seems to just be ready-made for the times. So that’s one thing that I think seems to be uncontroversial to suggest that, at least.

And another uncontroversial thing to suggest is that there’s just this big uptick in cultural productions of movies and novels in the 1980s and 1990s where you see this fascination with this idea of psychopaths, if you will. It probably is correlated a little bit with the televised trial of Ted Bundy in 1979. He’s actually the first person to be nationally trialed on national television. And of course-

Paul Rand: Was he called a psychopath during-

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Yeah, absolutely.

Paul Rand: He was. Okay.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: There’s a fun story behind that.

Paul Rand: Most people don’t a link a fun story with Ted Bundy, but go ahead.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: No, so Ted Bundy’s defense attorneys tried to go for the insanity defense, so there was a pre-trial hearing. And the person who actually is the main expert that throws a wrench into that defense is Hervey Cleckley. Yeah. So he’s probably the reason why you got, or one of the main reasons-

Paul Rand: Mr. Mask of Sanity.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Yeah. But he goes in and says, “No, Ted Bundy, well, he’s actually a psychopath. He might look insane, but no, he’s just a psychopath. He’s all there. So don’t be fooled by that.” And then the rest is history.

Paul Rand: Well, there was also... You mentioned in your book there’s something called the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which actually just started giving people a, “Well, look here, check these boxes. If you meet these, congratulations, you’re a psychopath.”

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Yes. So it’s the Hare Psychopathy Checklist was developed in 1980, and then it gets revised and it gets turned into this clinical tool that was not just research-based, but also was eventually, quote-unquote, approved or green-stamped for clinical settings. So that, of course, plays a role.

But what you also see, and this is probably just a coincidence, you see a lot of researchers rallying behind this tool and say, “This is the best tool. This is a tool that has high reliability and validity.” And then it makes it easier to research because now you’re sampling in the same way across research groups and you can compare data, and then you initiate a research paradigm that is much more cohesive.

The research is all fine. As scientists, we have academic freedom. We should do research on whatever we want as long as it lives up to the ethical requirements of our institutions and so forth. Now, the big change is that there’s a huge advocacy for taking this evidence base and kind of ingesting it into the legal system to inform decision-making. So this is what is literally happening.

So the PCLR, the Psychopathy Checklist Revised, is being pushed as an instrument that we can use in forensic settings. So when a person scores sufficiently high on that tool and deserves the label, quote-unquote, as having psychopathy, we can now make all sorts of evidence-based inferences about that person. And we can talk about what those exact inferences are, but generally speaking, to your question, it has largely and probably exclusively negative consequences on a person. There’s, what you would say, a dramatic increase in the probability of having extra restrictive and constructive decisions made about that person. So this could increase probability of getting prison sentence over community sentence, so generally is seen as aggravating information during sentencing. It can impact correctional placement, should you go on high-risk or low-risk institution, capital punishment, loss of evidence has been used there, dangerous offender status, treatment and rehabilitation program placements, parole probation and so on. There’s all sorts of things this affects downstream.

Paul Rand: So all these people will get a label, and give me a sense of the scope of people... I don’t know if you can break it down by the US or Canada, where you are, but what prevalence are we talking of people that get for... In the criminal justice, is it considered that they are diagnosed with this condition? Is that the right... And if so, what prevalence is there?

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: We know from survey data of people who, for example, conduct assessments like these, we know that the PCLR is among the most utilized tools. In my book, I try to do some estimates based on all this information to stitch the numbers together, well knowing that it’s far from perfect, and it seems like there were some experts in the early 2000s that said that we were probably looking at somewhere near 50,000, 80,000 assessments every year in our legal system in North America, the two legal systems, primarily Canada and United States. And that was in the early 2000s. And since then, we have seen an explosion in this practice. Some studies suggest that we might have close to a tenfold explosion.

So you’re probably looking at the vast majority who are undergoing, who has been convicted of a crime, especially if it’s a violent crime, you will undergo a forensic assessment, and there’s a very high probability that you will have received the PCLR assessment, probably. So we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of individuals-

Paul Rand: That’s remarkable. Okay.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: ... in our legal system already with this label that is walking around-

Paul Rand: So if indeed people are being mislabeled, that has some pretty profound implications, and we’ll talk more about how do we get to this point, but I think you’re setting up the thrust of your book here about why this was particularly troubling to you. If I can, I want to move into a little bit more of a definition of what are considered, really for lack of a better word, four claims about psychopathy that people look at and say, “These...” You talk about it in five different buckets, and there were three in particular that you really kind of hone in on. Can you summarize those real quick and just help us understand what those in the PCLR system are the primary focuses of a definition of psychopathy?

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: So there are five claims that are framed as evidence-based claims, and they are that people who have high psychopathy, they are extraordinarily dangerous, so they are the worst of the worst. That’s the first one. The second one is that they are untreatable, incorrigible. There’s nothing you can do. They will remain extraordinarily dangerous for the rest of their lives, which is very different from ordinary, average, justice-involved individuals where age is highly correlated with crime, for example. The third one is that they have some sort of moral-psychological deficit, whether it’s a lack of empathy on inability to perceive moral values and so on and so forth. So there’s this idea that we’re dealing with this extreme type of psychology that we have evidence to say that.

The other two is that psychopathy has a biological foundation, that it’s a brain-based disorder that leads to these traits and behaviors. And the second one is that they claim that we have a fairly good understanding of what is going on. In other words, to use a scientific word, we have a good theory, or just to use the layperson, is that we have a good explanation for what is actually going on. Those are the five major claims that are made about psychopathy.

But it’s important to emphasize that they were early on in the 1990s presented as evidence-based claims so that there were empirical evidence to support these claims, these inferences that we make. And it should be fairly uncontroversial today as a scientist to look at that evidence base and say that is just no longer the case. It is not the case that people who score high on the PCLR are extraordinarily dangerous, that they’re untreatable, and that they have some sort of mysterious moral incapacity and so on and so forth. It’s just simply not there in the literature. It’s not some fringe view. This is the main message that you take from all meta-analysis, systematic reviews that’s been published in the past basically two decades, if you will. It’s kind of always been the message as soon as the research started proliferate. This is the odd tension there is between what’s being claimed and the empirical evidence at the end of the day, right?

Paul Rand: Well, where it also gets a little troubling is that even after the work is done to explain that discrepancy, the earlier studies are still getting referenced, and nobody’s coming in and saying, “This is wrong.” The labeling is still happening. Why is that the case if there’s a better understanding?

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Yeah, it’s something that I truly struggle with understanding myself. And I think it is quite rare to find this sort of behavior among scientists, in the sciences in general. Science is supposed to correct itself. And scientists usually, I know this is the fairytale story, but we usually are pretty good at looking at the evidence to say, “Huh, I was wrong, and now I’m going to change...” And that correction is not happening here.

The evidence base is clearly suggesting... Let’s just take a claim like that people with a psychopathy diagnosis extraordinarily dangerous. It’s just not there. If you look at risk prediction studies, when we take individuals, we often do it in a controlled setting where we take individuals with a high PCLR score and people with a lower. Usually the threshold is 30 out of a 40 score. So that’s the diagnostic threshold. When we compare these two groups and their future recidivism rates, they’re not identical, but they’re very close to being identical. The difference is so small that you can actually only really measure it reliably by actually doing the math.

Let’s say we took a group of psychopathic persons in group A, and non-psychopathic persons group B, and that they had been sent out in society, and then five years later, we call them back into our office and then we say, “Hey, everybody, put on a red if you did something criminal in the past five years,” and then both groups would put on red t-shirts, you would not be able to look at these two groups with your naked eye and say, “Clearly this group to the left or right has more red t-shirts on.” That’s how small the difference is.

Paul Rand: Wow. Okay.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Which puts it in a little bit in context, right? Yeah.

Paul Rand: So the question about this happens, I’m assuming that some number of the people that have come in and are going through the PCLR have committed some type of a crime, and there is now a search for an explanation for why they created this crime. And then other ones may or may not be, but the question starts coming up of how they get treated when they’re in the criminal justice system if they are diagnosed with psychopathy, then how they are treated and, as you mentioned, managed through the system takes an entirely different track. Whereas they may have conducted the crime and they’re not not being punished for the crime, but how they get managed in the system based on this diagnosis is actually where the real rub is.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: That is where, as you put it, where the real rub is. There’s a little caveat to all this, because I don’t want to make it sound like as soon as you add this label, everything is like... It’s all going to be about that label and nothing else. But we know from all sorts of studies that we kind of find evidence when we, for example, interview judges or parole board, people on the parole board, we kind of get a lot of good evidence to suggest that this label here has a very heavy weight on their decision-making relative to other lines of information. For example, let me just give you a quick example.

Paul Rand: Please.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: My colleague just published a recent study. It’s my colleague, Thoma Deo, here from 2025 where they have interviewed dozens of judges and they ask them, “What are you looking for when you have to make decisions about sentencing or probation,” and things like that. And what they look a lot for, and this was a common theme across judges, is they look for whether a person can change, whether they will benefit from rehabilitation. So that’s a general theme. Okay, so here comes Paul with his psychopathy diagnosis, and that is an inference that you are not going to change. That’s what we infer from that. So you see here, it’s not true. It’s simply just not true that you cannot change, that you cannot benefit from rehabilitation program. All evidence suggests we benefit in exactly the same ways everybody else does, right? But the judge is now being told by an expert that since you have this label, that thing that he or she’s evaluating whether you can change, that’s not going to happen.

Paul Rand: They’re unfixable.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Yeah. That’s the message.

Paul Rand: Now, in addition to the PCLR, I think that we’ve also gotten to believe that psychopathy is a brain-based disorder, and that if we did an MRI or an fMRI scan, that there is going to be something visible that we’re seeing that’s wrong inside the brain. But that’s actually also not holding water, is it?

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: No. And it’s not for the lack of trying. We actually have a good number of all sorts of neurological studies. What we usually go for today is MRI technology, so magnetic resonance imaging, and we can do imaging with the structure of a person’s brain. We can also do functional-based studies where we get data from how different areas of the brains are activated during certain tasks. So we have done dozens and dozens of studies of these, probably a little bit above a hundred studies counting right now. And results has just been all over the place. There’s no consistent patterns that has been found.

Early on, there was a lot of enthusiasm for this idea that the... People have probably heard this who are listening... That there was this idea that psychopathic person had this deform or deficit or impairment in the amygdala, which is heavily involved in emotional processing. Amygdala’s involved in many things, but also in emotions. And that evidence was all reviewed a couple of years ago in a very, very systematic way by my colleague, Philip Deming, and the conclusion just, no, there’s just no consistent evidence. Most of the times when we do this, what we get is null findings, in other words that there’s no differences between psychopathic persons and non-psychopathic person.

Paul Rand: So we’ve talked a lot about what psychopathy isn’t, but presumably this test is measuring something, right? So what do we know about what psychopathy actually is?

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: I’m glad you asked that question because I think this is... My background philosophy as well, I think this is a super interesting question. In a trivial way, you can design any assessment tool you want and call it whatever you want, and you will be selecting people. The scoring on a scale, like the PCLR, excuse me, or any other scale for that matter, is not by definition measuring anything. It is, first of all, just selecting people, and they’re selecting people based on the traits that we have put into this tool, and they’re selecting people based on the impression by the clinician to rating these things. So before we can say that it measures anything, we need to have good empirical evidence that there’s something discreetly different about these people we’re selecting out, asides from the fact that they have been selected.

And this is exactly what the research is telling us. There’s just no actual differences when we do moral-psychological research, there’s just full null findings. There’s just no difference between groups. When we do empathy studies, all nulls. Completely just like... There’s no difference, right? When we do treatment studies, no differences. So it just goes on in neuroscience and so on, and the theoretical work that is also being done, which is largely on measuring emotions and impulse control. No group differences. So you are not measuring anything when you’re selecting people with PCLR. You are doing something, but it’s not a measure. It’s kind of like a bad habit that we call it a measure because we’re not really measuring anything like a thermometer is measuring things.

But I like your second part of your question a little bit better. What is there? So we have a term, we have an assessment tool. What is there? What is this thing? Are we just wrong? What is going on here? And this is the final question in the book I take up, and I think this is the truly fascinating part of it. Aside from all the harm that is being done in the legal system, all that, I think this is going to... My prediction is this is going to be one of the more fascinating questions to look at eventually. So my proposal is that what is going on here is that there’s no such thing as psychopathy. There’s no bonafide kind in the world that is psychopathy. When they introduce this idea to people in my field, some of them laugh at me, some of them shake their head, some of them get a little bit aroused and mad, but once you start digging into this idea, it very quickly gains traction to you.

So just to lay it out, this has happened several times in mental health research before. There was a time when we thought something was called multiple personality disorder. Okay? So we had the famous book, The Many Faces of Eve, and all that, which by the way was co-authored by Hervey Cleckley. Okay? Hervey Cleckley invented partially-

Paul Rand: Hervey was a busy guy.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Yeah. He was an innovator. He was good at marketing stuff. So he invented together with other people this idea of multiple personality disorder. And we today know that they were completely misled by individuals in their care. This person who was their prime example when they wrote this book, The Many Face of Eve, she wrote a book afterwards and demystified what was happening. She was kind of just acting out in her life, and there was kind a complicated affair. So they were just misled into believing that there was this diagnosis. And this diagnosis caught foothold. And in the ‘80s, it was in our diagnostic vocabulary. Today it’s called something different, and it’s described different. It has changed name, dissociative disorder and so on, and it’s a completely different thing. But it goes to saying that we were wrong. We were completely wrong about the phenomenon we were trying to explain.

So this is what science does, right? We measure facts and we have some phenomenon, and then we want to explain it. That’s the theoretical work that we do and we do with testing scientific method and yada-yada. So we try to come up with good explanations for what accounts for this. And sometimes we’re just wrong. Sometimes there’s just not anything going on, really, and that’s what I think might actually be going on here. I’m not saying that clinicians are not seeing anything, that they’re just making things up and are being completely bewildered by these. I’m saying that they’re seeing things where we have much better and more trivial, perhaps, and more common-sense explanations.

And as I do in the book, sorry this is a little bit long, but in the book I go over the historical examples that researchers have been relying on, for example, the 15, to circle back to Hervey Cleckley’s 15 clinical examples. And I would bet if you go back and read those 15 patient vignettes, you will be dumbfounded on how these examples has nothing to do with how we portray psychopathy. These are people clearly with PTSD from World War I, veterans coming back with PTSD. They are people who are addicts, long history of substance misuse. They are people who are just completely normal, but does not necessarily comply to the social norms of the southern state of Georgia in the ‘50s, such as women who are lesbian who are getting divorced collectively just thinks there’s something wrong with them. It’s like you cannot read that as a modern reader and be compelled by anything. That’s what I would venture. You could pick up the book and try to see for yourself, but I lay out the evidence, of course, in my own book.

So this is what I think happens. It started with an idea that just proliferated into essentially a fantasy story about things, just like multiple personality disorder, just like hysteria, just like many other things that has happened that generally just happens in science. The technical term in the sciences is that it’s a zombie idea; it’s an idea that is dead, but still walks around and infects people in the sciences, right? Very rare phenomena. Very, very rare, by the way, in the science. It’s very common in the general public, but in the science, it’s very rare. And I think this is one of them. I think there’s at least reasons to believe that this could be one of them.

Paul Rand: So let me pull on that one a little bit. You’re now challenging a pretty entrenched idea. Tell me the pushback you’re getting and the criticism you’re getting.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: That is a funny one because I have been asked this many times since this book was published in late June this year. Honestly, I haven’t received any negative feedback from colleagues. I’ve mostly feedback from colleagues in forensic psychology who is doing mostly research. And this is kind of the paradox. Most people, most experts in the field think this is completely trivial, what I’m saying, because they have known this for a long time. Let me explain this a little more carefully. All the review literature in most of the subfields in psychopathy research have been telling the same story for the past two decades. I’ve had many people say to me, say, “I’m so glad you wrote it. I would never have been able to find the time to sit down and actually write it myself, but I’ve been wanting to for many years. So now there is a resource like this out there.”

What seems to be the problem is that we have a few people who are doing the heavy legwork here, and those are probably the people we have to get to, right? So we often see this, and people are not aware of this, but for example, if you have an expert witness in a court case, for example... I mean the court system is just a small part of our legal system, but let’s just say we say the court is a little bit easier to understand. An expert witness that goes into court and says something about psychopathy, that is likely going to be the same expert witness again next time because it’s the public prosecutor who is deciding his or her experts, and they’re going to go with the same people.

So we see this in our study. We have recently published a study with the Canadian legal system that it’s a very few number of expert witnesses in the Canadian court system, and they’re saying the same thing over and over again. So we have examples of people who have been saying this since the early 2000s in the Canadian court system, and they still go into court today and say exactly the same thing, as if the research hasn’t changed. So the task is not overwhelming. We just have to get this message to the decision-makers, who I suspect are actually a few who are just very noisy.

Paul Rand: Well, what you call for in your book is a moratorium on the clinical and legal use of psychopathy assessments. And so if that was actually taken seriously, what would be involved in doing that, and what would replace it?

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Yeah, so what I’m saying is that we should just stop using these, this is what we call a moratorium, that whoever are the decision-makers in the legal system, we should stop using, that’s the message, we should stop using psychopathy assessments. There are many reasons why I think that’s the case, but the predominant one is that they don’t give you the information that you think it’s giving you. You’re using these instruments. You’re paying a forensic psychologist to come in, conduct a psychopathy assessment, a PCL assessment. It takes hours and hours. You have to sit down, you have to plan, sit down with the subject, and then they have to... It’s a very costly affair. The information you get out of that assessment is just not of any value to you. And right now we know for a fact it’s actually misleading you in your decision-making, so you are not... And this is a disaster, right? You don’t want misleasion and bias in your decision-maker as a legal decision-maker, because what you’re making decisions about is a very high-stake thing sometimes. So that’s one thing. We just have much better tools if you really want to pinpoint who is of risk and so on, we have much better tools. We should focus our resources there.

Paul Rand: Can you give me an example of those types of tools you’re referring to?

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Any mainstream risk assessment tool, for example, the level of service. There’s so many. There’s a joke in forensic psychology that every person involved in risk assessment, they have their own tool. There are many, many tools out there. But there are some that are well-integrated in the legal system and they outperform the PCLR all the time.

But then I also think there is a separate ethical dimension to this, and I’ve written about this in separate journal articles, but also in the book, that I think we have kind of overlooked in all the enthusiasm about this concept and this tool, Psychopathy Checklist, we have kind of overlooked that what we’re doing is actually super problematic ethically in terms of our own professional ethics. So for example, as a clinician is typically a clinician that is going to be in charge of conducting this assessment, you’re not supposed to do anything that can harm a person. This assessment can only really harm the person. There’s no-

Paul Rand: Yes, I understand.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: ... other way this can go. You’re also supposed to only work with people if they actually benefit from your services. And again, there’s just no way this person’s going to benefit from a psychopathy assessment. There’s no practically conceivable scenario where this assessment is going to help them. People have tried to argue, “Well, it’s going to give them better treatment strategies,” but the point is that, no, that it’s just not reality.

Paul Rand: And on a very practical takeaway level, you mentioned that if people are ever in a position of being asked to take this PCLR, they should refuse, and perhaps if somebody had taken that and they’re now incarcerated and they really were affirmed to have this condition, that it’s something that they ought to go back and take another look at because it may really impact how they are treated inside the system, their rehabilitation, and possibly even an ability for parole or otherwise.

Rasmus Rosenberg Larsen: Yes, that would be my recommendation, but I’m giving this recommendation well aware that that is way harder to do than I’m making sound like. Going in and having things deleted from your forensic record is probably next to impossible. Second of all, the people who are going to be subjected to these assessments are people with very few resources. They’re probably not going to listen to this podcast. They’re probably not going to listen to or read my book. They’re going to be in a system that is designed for them not to actually access this information. So saying it might sound easy, but it’s going to be hell of an effort to actually realize these things.

And also, second of all, people cannot just refuse things. It’s kind of like this double-edged sword where if you refuse, the refusal itself is going to show up on your record. So people will question, why did they refuse, right? So there’s all sorts of complexities here. It’s like this perfect beast that we have created that is hard to reel in now.