Kevin Dutton: Do Athletes Have Psychopathic Tendencies?

If we remove the definition of psychopath away from the kind of more clinical settings to an everyday life kind of scenario, psychopaths tend to have quite a few positive characteristics going for them. They tend to be assertive; they don’t procrastinate. They focus on the positives of situations. They don’t take things personally. They don’t beat themselves up when things go wrong. And they’re very cool under pressure.

I’ll give you an example, if you like: the Nike slogan “Just do it!” There’s a psychopathic slogan for you, if ever there was one. Psychopaths do not procrastinate. Psychopaths, if they want something, they go for it and they go for it now.

Now actually, I write in the book that actually top sportsmen are very high in certain psychopathic characteristics. Now let me just go through them. You’ve got ruthlessness. You’ve got fearlessness. You’ve got mental toughness. You’ve got coolness under pressure. You’ve got the ability to focus remorselessly on a goal. I mean, these things are straight out of the sports psychology text books in many ways. So anyone from top golfers, to top cyclists, to top boxers, to top athletes, they are gonna be high on the psychopathic characteristics.

Now where we start getting into the realms of criminal psychopaths is when we look at natural aggression levels and perhaps natural levels of intelligence. If you’ve got those characteristics right there that I’ve told you about and you happen to be naturally violent, and you also happen to be naturally stupid – not a very politically correct word there, but you happen to be low in intelligence - then your prospects, to be perfectly honest with you, are not gonna be that great. Okay?

You’re gonna wind up smacking a bottle over someone’s head in a bar and you are gonna wind up in prison pretty quickly. Okay? However, if you’ve got those traits I’ve just mentioned to you and you are not naturally violent, and you are also intelligent, then it’s a different story altogether. Then, as the famous Reuters headline once mentioned, you are more likely gonna make a killing in the market than anywhere else.