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The Wisdom of Psychopaths
- Author: Kevin Dutton
- Category: Non-fiction Psychology Science
- Publisher: William Heinemann (UK), FSG (US)
- Pub date: 20 September 2012
- Length: 320 pages
About The Wisdom of Psychopaths
Dutton tackles an elusive, important and much neglected aspect of the mind; our personalty. He presents some highly original insights and does so in a provocative and humorous style - offering practical tips along the way for both “normals “ and sociopaths.
- V S Ramachandran
Psychopath. No sooner is the word out than images of serial killers, rapists, suicide bombers and gangsters come scything across our minds. But what if I were to paint you a different picture? What if I were to tell you that the psychopathic arsonist who sets fire to your house might also, in a parallel universe, be the person most likely to pluck you from the flames?
A claim like that is hard to believe. But it’s true. Unlike their box-office counterparts, not all psychopaths are violent. Far from it. In fact, they have a lot of good things going for them. Psychopaths are fearless, confident, charismatic, ruthless and focused – qualities tailor-made for success in 21st century society.
The Wisdom of Psychopaths is an intellectual rollercoaster ride that combines lightning hot niche science with unprecedented access to secret monasteries, Special Forces training camps, and rarefied psychopath wings of high security hospitals. We meet serial killers, war heroes, financiers, movie stars and attorneys - and discover something amazing. Beneath the hype and the popular characterization, psychopaths have something to teach us.
Just like the knobs on a mixing deck – the ‘soundtrack’ of psychopathy is graded. And that the right combination of psychopathic traits, sampled and mixed at carefully calibrated volumes, can put us ahead of the game.
About the Author
Kevin Dutton was born in London in 1967. He has a Ph.D in psychology, and is an expert on the science of social influence. He is a research fellow at the Faraday Institute, St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge, and at the University of Western Australia, in Perth.
FLIPNOSIS: The Art of Split Second Persuasion, published in the UK by William Heinemann, is his first book. In it, Kevin documents his time spent with some of the world’s top con artists, in his quest to find out whether these evil black-belts of mind control know more about persuasion than he does.
He is currently working on his second book, THE WISDOM OF PSYCHOPATHS, in which he explores the positive side of being a psychopath, and discovers, first hand, in a groundbreaking ‘How to make a psychopath’ experiment, what it is like to be one.
Kevin is a fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, and also of the Society for the Scientific Study of Psychopathy.