Plausible, but I'm skeptical... Psychopaths in prison are *literally* a captive population to study; psychopaths outside of prison are incentivized to stay out of psychopathy studies. If there's a sampling problem, it's going to skew results up on traits common in prison popshttps://twitter.com/sapinker/status/822504016731131906 …
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Seems like a pretty strange suggestion on his part. Most people couldn't be psychopaths even if they really wanted to. It takes a lot of knowledge to be able to understand and manipulate people like they do. Surely that takes (lots of) intelligence?
Psychopathy is remarkably common in prison populations for this reason. The big question: how common are socially functional psychopaths? And it's a tough one to answer, because it's very unwise for a psychopath to let the mask slip, even with a researcher.
