Horizon – Are You Good or Evil?

(BBC2)

The word psychopath is – bizarrely – an emotive one.

The behaviour of a psychopath is characterised by a lack of empathy – yet the term brings out strong emotional responses in those who hear it.

As horrific as their crimes are, society has a morbid fascination with notorious psychopaths such as Harold Shipman, Ian Brady and Fred West, and what drives them to kill.

But what defines a psychopath? And is every psychopath destined to be a killer?

It appears not.

Last night Horizon gave compelling evidence it can just as easily be your boss, mother, father or even your husband or wife, and you may never realise.

The show attempted to go behind the headlines, to look at what the term means, and what makes a psychopath a killer.

Trainers set out to “calibrate their moral compass” by tapping into instincts to protect and defend, rather than to hate – an easier moral choice

It also looked at the training given to Marines in order to compel them to act against their nature to take a life.

Despite the mildly irritating way the show insisted on dumbing down while hamming up the narrative with questions such as “Are babies born evil?”, this was a fascinating documentary looking at a range of evidence from various studies.

Some of the “scientific” research did seem a little, erm, unscientific. Showing a puppet morality to babies then asking them to pick a favourite character?Hmm . . .

A massive 70 per cent made the “right” choice. Does that mean the other 30 per cent will become rampaging killers?

Or did they just prefer one cuddly puppet to another? Only time will tell.

What was much more interesting was the work of Professor Jim Fallon – a neuroscientist who discovered he could identify psychopaths from brain scans – and that all had a variant of a gene which predisposed them to violent behaviour, the warrior gene.

On testing his family he discovered that one person had both the brain pattern and the genetic make up of a psychopath and could be categorise as “high risk”. And yes – it was him.

However, what Fallon established from the fact that he was not a killer, was that nurture – a good upbringing – could override the “natural” predisposition to violence. And that many psychopathic killers had suffered horrendous abuse as children.

What was not so surprising was the news that we are surrounded by psychopaths in our working lives – and that successful psychopaths make good leaders, have a natural tendancy to be charming – and can intellectually understand emotion without the baggage of actually feeling someone’s pain.

The only criticism of the show is that it was condensed into an hour. You got the impression that a lot of the footage must have ended up on the cutting room floor.

One of the studies referenced looked at serial killers Jeffrey Dahmer and Ted Bundy – two of the most notorious murderers of the last century.

However, little or no comment was made on what was discovered through the research.

The only conclusion drawn – beyond promises of unprecedented changes to the legal system over the culpability of a psychopath – is that we essentially have no control over the way we behave at all.

A rather frightening thought.

By Sally Walmsley